Wittgenstein: Biography and Philosophy (review)

James C. Klagge, editor. Wittgenstein: Biography and Philosophy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. xv + 272. Cloth, $54.95. Paper, $19.95.

Collected in this volume are papers from the 1999 conference "Wittgenstein: Biography and Philosophy," along with a few other relevant papers.

Ray Monk's and James Conant's papers frame the others and provide terms of criticism appropriate to them. Both authors investigate the relationship between philosophy and biography. (When I say "biography," I mean both biography and autobiography.) Each finds in Wittgenstein an elucidation of a variety of understanding needful for appreciating the variety of understanding at which biography aims. Monk argues that the variety of understanding that consists in seeing connections (between the life and work of the biographized person) is the variety of understanding at which generally biography aims. Conant argues that it is the variety of understanding that consists in a changing of aspect (of the philosophical work of the philosopher biographized) at which specifically philosophical biography aims. Each of these Philosophical Investigations varieties of understanding is among the conceptual inheritors of the Tractatus notion of showing. (That notion does not die conceptually intestate in the Tractatus.) Much might be said about the filaments of relation that run among Tractatus showing and the two Philosophical Investigations varieties of understanding, but I'll not say it here. I will say that the arguments of Monk and Conant are convincing. Wittgenstein is a fitting subject for biography and philosophical biography, and his philosophical work is needful for the subjects of biography and philosophical biography. So this volume is justified; it is not concessive to the cult of personality that has formed around Wittgenstein.

The distinction between biography and philosophical biography emerges in Monk's paper. But the notion of philosophical biography develops fully in Conant's: philosophical biography is "a mode of representation of the life of an individual philosopher that aspires to facilitate the understanding of that individual qua philosopher" (16). It depicts a philosopher's life in order to confer "a sort of understanding that itself has a claim to being termed philosophical" (16). Conant distinguishes two responses to philosophical biography, the reductivist's and the compartmentalist's. The reductivist favors philosophical biography, but believes that philosophical biography aims at finding the secret of the philosopher's work. The secret, for the reductivist, is external to the philosopher's work: some fact about the philosopher's upbringing (e.g., Schopenhauer's troubled relationship with his mother) or physical or psychological limitations (e.g., Wittgenstein's putative dyslexia) or sexuality or class (e.g., Foucault's homosexuality). Although the reductivist treats such facts as the near end of an Ariadne's thread running through the philosopher's work, such facts look too external to be a proper guide. So it is easy to reject reductivism for compartmentalism—for treating all external facts about the philosopher as irrelevant to the philosopher's work. ("Philosopher X lived and wrote. Now look at her argument.") The result is a "deadlock": either we think that the understanding of the philosopher's work lies "wholly outside" the work or "wholly inside" it (19). To break the deadlock, we have to reject its nisus formativus—the idea that the question of the possibility of philosophical biography requires a general answer. We should instead work philosopher-by-philosopher, conceding that there is no obvious relationship between the philosopher's work and life (as there arguably was in ancient philosophy), and considering what type of intimacy, if any, there might be between the two for a particular philosopher.

I rehearse Conant's details because they provide a useful way of responding to other papers in the volume. Monk's paper is a paper by a working philosophical biographer. Monk's concern with the understanding sought in biography leads him to be concerned with the limitations of philosophical biography and his own limitations as a philosophical biographer. Kelly Hamilton's paper minutely investigates...