The Personal Is Philosophical
Kieran Setiya,
Boston Review,
Apr 04, 2022
The book being reviewed here is the translation of the coded part of his notebooks Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote during the years of the first world war. Ideally they would be displayed, as reviewer Kieran Setiya suggests, alongside the unencoded parts of the same notebooks. These, the rather less personal parts of the notebooks, were published long ago, edited by philosophers who believed the analytical writings should be kept apart from the personal. Those of us who have read Ray Monk's biography of Wittgenstein will understand how wrongheaded that was, and if there were any lingering doubt, this review should put it to rest. This is a great review that gets, I think, to some of the really important nuances in the work. Writes Wittgenstein, "The older I grow, the more I realize how terribly difficult it is for people to understand each other, and I think that what misleads one is the fact that they all look so much like each other. If some people looked like elephants and others like cats, or fish, one wouldn't expect them to understand each other and things would look much more like what they really are."
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