Wittgenstein in Cambridge
One of two posts themed around my alma mater, Cambridge University. The following post will be on Chaucer’s Reeve’s Tale.
Ludwig Wittgenstein spent much of his adult life in Cambridge, arriving in October 1911 to study logic and mathematics under Bertrand Russell, who was at the time separated from his wife and living in Neville’s Court in Trinity College (McGuiness, Wittgenstein A Life 88). On 1 February 1912 Wittgenstein was admitted as a member of Trinity College (94) and in June Russell was appointed his tutor (96). Initially, Wittgenstein lived at No. 4 Rose Crescent near Trinity College Great Gate (96), then in October 1912 he took up residence in rooms at K.10 Whewell’s Court formerly occupied by the philosopher G.E. Moore (1873-1958).
K.10 in Whewell’s Court—they were situated at the top of a Victorian gothic tower at the furthest end from the main college of a complex of buildings (two narrow quadrangles, they seem, connected lengthwise) across Trinity Street from the main college. Here at the quiet limit of the college, in it but not completely of it, Wittgenstein could live privately and impersonally looking out away from the college over the streets of small shops and lodging houses towards the river landscape. (McGuiness, Wittgenstein A Life 131)
From September 1913 to July 1914, Wittgenstein spent most of his time in Norway, although he met Russell in Cambridge in October 1913 to explain his ideas on logic, published posthumously as Notebooks 1914-1916 (McGuiness, Wittgenstein in Cambridge 47). In July 1914, Wittgenstein visited his family in Vienna and at the family estate Hohenberg-Hochreit in Lower Austria.
On 28 July Austria declared war on Serbia and Wittgenstein enlisted on 7 August in the Austro-Hungarian army. He served in the Galician campaign against Russia, including the Brusilov offensive in June 1916, and the Kerensky offensive in July 1917. He received decorations for bravery and was promoted to Leutnant on 1 February 1918. In March 1918 he was transferred to the Italian front where he was captured on 3 November 1918 and held as a prisoner-of-war in Como and then Cassino until his release in August 1919 (Flowers 93-101).
In December 1919, Wittgenstein met Russell in the Hague where Russell agreed to write the introduction to Tractatus Logico-Philosphicus, published in 1922 by Kegan Paul in a parallel English and German text with the English translation by Frank P. Ramsey (1903-1930) and Charles Kay Ogden (1889-1957). It had previously been published in German in 1921 in the Annalen der Naturphilosophie as Logisch-Philosophsche Abhandlung.
It was not until 1929 that Wittgenstein returned to Cambridge on a professional basis, having spent the intervening years working as a gardener’s assistant at the monastery of Klosterneuburg near Vienna (1920) and Volkschullehrer in various elementary schools in Austria (1920-1926).
From 1926-1928, Wittgenstein, together with the architect Paul Engelmann (1881-1965), a former student of Adolf Loos whom Wittgenstein had met in Olmütz in the Winter of 1916, designed the modernist Haus Wittgenstein on Kundmanngasse in Vienna commissioned by his sister Margaret Stonborough-Wittgenstein.
In January 1929 Wittgenstein was readmitted to Trinity College and awarded his PhD degree on 18 June 1929, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus being accepted as his thesis. In October 1930, he was appointed a faculty lecturer and elected a Fellow of Trinity College on 5 December 1930 (McGuinness, Wittgenstein in Cambridge 6-7,10). In 1930 Wittgenstein moved into college lodgings in Bishop’s Hostel, then a set of rooms (H4) in Great Court, and in 1933 returned to his former rooms in Whewell’s Court. His teaching posts at Cambridge University ended in August 1936 and until December 1937 Wittgenstein returned to the hut in Skyjolden in Norway he had built during his stay from 1913 to 1914.
The German annexation of Austria on 12 March 1938 imperilled Ludwig Wittgenstein and his family due to their Jewish ancestry. To escape the Nazi requirement to exchange his Austrian citizenship for German, Wittgenstein applied for British citizenship and was issued with a certificate of naturalisation on 5 April 1939. In October 1939, Wittgenstein succeeded G.E Moore (1873-1958) as Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge University.
During the Second World War, Wittgenstein worked from 1941 as an orderly at Guy’s hospital in London and from 1943 to 1944 as a laboratory assistant in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. He resigned as Professor of Philosophy in October 1947 with effect from December 31 1947. He subsequently moved to Ireland from December 1947 until July 1948, first to Red Cross in Wicklow and then to Rosro Cottage near Renyvale in Galway.
On his visits to Cambridge after his return from Ireland, Wittgenstein stayed with friends, principally his successor as Professor of Philosophy Georg Henrik von Wright (1916-2003). Diagnosed with prostate cancer in October 1949, Wittgenstein stayed with his physician Dr. Bevan in Cambridge where he died on 29 April 1951.
Works Cited
Flowers III, F.A. “Soldier and Prisoner of War.” Portraits of Wittgenstein. Edited by F.A. Flowers III and Ian Ground, abridged edition, Bloomsbury Academic, 2018, pp. 93-101.
McGuiness, Brian. Wittgenstein a Life: Young Ludwig (1889-1921). Penguin Books, 1988.
---, editor. Wittgenstein in Cambridge: Letters and Documents 1911-1951. Blackwell Publishing, 2012.