What aspects of Wittgenstein’s life contributed to his intellectual acumen and success? Give me the child until he is 7 and I will give you the man’, is a well-known quote that’s attributed to both Aristotle and St. Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Jesuit order. The kind of Catholic doctrine and dogma practiced by the church under the pontificates of Pope Leo Xlll and Pope Pius X was austere and strict and demanded a strongly traditionalist, anti-modernist, and pastoral Catholic doctrine focused on restoring all things in Christ (their motto was: Instaurare in Omnia Christo). These Popes aggressively combated modernist thinking which they called a combination of all heresies the Church has ever known. It was into this conformist religious atmosphere that Wittgenstein was born and raised.

An inner conflict on matters of faith, religion and religious experience haunted Wittgenstein throughout his life. He was of Jewish ancestry, but his family’s conversion to Catholicism a generation earlier, allowed a more acceptable fit into the aristocracy of Viennese society.

He was home schooled until the age of 14. His formative years were by all accounts tightly controlled, and the suppression of his childhood truths laid the foundations for violence, authoritarianism, mental illness, and a pattern of systematic cruelty both intellectually and physically when he became an adult. In 1926 Wittgenstein brutally struck an 11-year-old student, Josef Haidbauer, while working as an elementary schoolteacher in Otterthal, Austria. The boy collapsed unconscious after being hit on the head multiple times. Some 20 years later, while debating Karl Popper at Cambridge University, a loud aggressive confrontation ensued culminating with Wittgenstein waving a red hot poker in the face of Popper.

 As a child, Wittgenstein deferred to the unquestionable authority of his father’s traditions of religion and compulsory morality. It is not surprising to read of the tragedies in Wittgenstein’s’ family – three of his four brothers committed suicide: Hans (the eldest) disappeared from a boat in Chesapeake Bay in 1902 after running away from home. Rudolf died by suicide in a Berlin bar in 1904, and Kurt took his own life at the end of World War I in 1918.

Like his brother Rudolf, Ludwig Wittgenstein was a homosexual. This was considered an affliction and a mental illness at the time. He struggled with his psychological health and mental well-being. This would lead to severe depression, and a mental breakdown. Wittgenstein shared this personality trait with other great thinkers of the day, including Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Foucault, and Feyerabend. They all suffered from depression, anxiety and a sense of personal insecurity, and sought to alleviate their suffering through an almost obsessive investigation into life and its meaning using logical determinism.

Bertrand Russell’s opinion of him, was “perhaps the most perfect example I have ever known of genius as traditionally conceived; passionate, profound, intense, and dominating”. There’s no doubt that Wittgenstein’s formative years, and early adolescence laid the foundations for his intellectual ability, and for his passionate, and tempestuous contempt for others.

Wittgenstein’s contribution to understanding language as a primary source of communication remains unopposed; but, his theories are contested. They continue to generate vast amounts of research and academic enquiry not only on the structural foundations of language, but also on the nature of being and existence.

Wittgenstein held contradictory views. At first arguing that language acts as a logical pictorial representation of reality, and later changing his opinion to the idea that language and its meanings are derived from a social and cultural context. He dismissed sensory experience, perception, and the historical ideas of religion and religious experience. This is not surprising, given the brutality of his formative years.

Wittgenstein’s understanding of the nature of being and existence was contrived through his use of axioms. He subscribed to a kind of deterministic logic in an attempt to discover, or uncover some of the mysteries surrounding life. For example he claimed that all life has a rational and logical basis from which we derive meaning. Propositions, he claimed are logical pictures of possible facts in the world. Moreover, he asserted that the world is simply a collection of facts, not things, and to suggest otherwise was a gross fallacy akin to delusional illness. Wittgenstein also claimed that the limits of our language limit our world experience, and that logic sets the limits of what can be meaningful described. Obviously, he hadn’t time to ruminate or reflect on a sun rise or sunset. Such an experience is beyond the measure of logic; yet it is a valid human experience.

Wittgenstein changed his ideas on language several times. His idea that any word’s meaning is defined by how it is used in communication rather then what it represents is problematic. For example, an apple is a fruit; fruit being representative of an apple, and apple being representative of fruit. To say I had fruit for lunch is as equally as valid as clarifying that the fruit I had for lunch was an apple. Representations do convey meaning. Further, while formal language is rule governed, it is possible for a language to operate within an exclusive group according to its own devised rules outside of the general rule governing its acceptable and understood practices. For example bedtime or bedtime story is often used by persons planning a murder, or cake may be used to refer to illegal drugs. Polari, for example is a derivative of the English language known only to the marginalized and minorities Bona to vada your dolly eek translates into it’s good to see your pretty face. These examples could fit more into Wittgenstein’s idea of language games, although they are by definition outside of his accepted norm of rule governed practices.

I often wonder what Wittgenstein would have made of the Australian Leahy brother’s first encounters with the Papua New Guineans of the Central Highlands in the early 1930s and the way their facial representations communicated a kind of language to the strange white men. Or what would he make of the exclusivity of language within groups and sub groups in the social media digital age.

Wittgenstein argued that a language that refers solely to one’s private experience is impossible because it lacks shared public rules. He doesn’t delineate the difference say between a baby and early infant child’s gibberish before it acquires its first word expressing a familiar and common understanding. The unintelligible gabble of a small infant’s experience, while not understood linguistically, conveys just as much meaning for the child as it does to its delighted parents.

Wittgenstein attempted to limit the discipline of philosophy into a kind of restrictive practice of logical determinism. He wanted it to only describe the workings of language, not explain or theorize about language. An odd manifestation of authoritarian intellectualism, reflecting more on his character and mental state, rather than any genuine intellectual enquiry. His insistence on philosophy as rule governed discipline to clarify conceptual confusion was an attempt to silence his critics and a rejection of the philosophical enquiries of Aristotle, William of Ockham and Epicurus, to name a few. Yet, he would have been aware and knowledgeable of Shakespeare too, and his quote from Hamlet: “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

Notwithstanding all of his significant contributions to language and philosophy, Wittgenstein was not able to see beyond the limits of the human imagination, and it nearly drove him into madness.