Patrick Comerford
Today marks the 75th anniversary of the death of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century, who died in Cambridge 75 years ago, on 29 April 1951.
Wittgenstein was a Viennese-born Cambridge philosopher who had been influenced at an early stage by Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. He taught at the University of Cambridge from 1929 to 1947 and worked primarily in the fields of logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language.
During his lifetime, he published just one small, 75-page book, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), one article, one book review and a children’s dictionary. His major work, Philosophical Investigations, was not published until two years after his death, yet it has become an important modern classic.
Bertrand Russell said he was ‘the most perfect example I have ever known of genius as traditionally conceived; passionate, profound, intense, and dominating.’
Ludwig Wittgenstein was born in Vienna in 1889. A family tree shows his paternal great-great-grandfather was Moses Meier, a Jewish land agent who lived with his wife Brendel Simon in Bad Laasphe in the Principality of Wittgenstein, Westphalia. Napoleon decreed in 1808 that everyone, including Jews, must adopt an inheritable family surname. Moses Meier’s son, also Moses, became Moses Meier Wittgenstein.
His son, Hermann Christian Wittgenstein (1802-1878), took the middle name Christian to distance himself from his Jewish background. He married Franziska (Fanny) Figdor (1814-1890), who was also Jewish and a first cousin of the violinist Joseph Joachim (1831-1907), who worked closely with Brahms. They both became Protestants before they married, and the couple began a successful wool trading business trading in Leipzig.
Their 11 children included the philosopher’s father, Karl Otto Clemens Wittgenstein (1847-1913), who became an industrial tycoon. By the late 1880s, he had an effective monopoly on Austria’s steel cartel and was one of the richest men in Europe. The Wittgensteins became one of the wealthiest families in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, second only to the Rothschilds.
Karl Wittgenstein married Leopoldine ‘Poldie’ Maria Josefa Kalmus in 1873. Her father, Jakob Maximilian Kalmus (1814-1870) was a Bohemian Jew from Prague; her mother, Marie Stallner (1825-1921) was a German-speaking Catholic born in Sevnica in present-day Slovenia, and was Ludwig Wittgenstein’s only non-Jewish grandparent.
Ludwig Wittgenstein was born on 26 April 1889 in the ‘Wittgenstein Palace’ at Alleegasse 16, now the Argentinierstrasse, near the Karlskirche in Vienna. He was one of nine children who were all baptised as Catholics and received formal Catholic teaching. Gustav Klimt painted Ludwig’s sister for her wedding portrait, and Johannes Brahms and Gustav Mahler gave regular concerts in the family’s many music rooms.
In an interview, his sister Gretl Stonborough-Wittgenstein said their grandfather's ‘strong, severe, partly ascetic Christianity’ was a strong influence on all the Wittgenstein children.
While Ludwig Wittgenstein was at school at the Realschule, he decided he had lost his faith in God and became an atheist. But his religious faith and his relationship with Christianity and religion in general would change over time. He resisted formal religion, saying it was hard for him to ‘bend the knee,’ although he once said, ‘I cannot help seeing every problem from a religious point of view.
With age, his personal spirituality deepened, and he wrestled with language problems in religion. At a time when he was finding it difficult to work, he wrote in 1947, ‘I have had a letter from an old friend in Austria, a priest. In it he says that he hopes my work will go well, if it should be God’s will. Now that is all I want: if it should be God’s will.’
In Culture and Value, Wittgenstein asks, ‘Is what I am doing really worth the effort? Yes, but only if a light shines on it from above.’ His close friend Norman Malcolm later wrote, ‘Wittgenstein’s mature life was strongly marked by religious thought and feeling. I am inclined to think that he was more deeply religious than are many people who correctly regard themselves as religious believers.’
Wittgenstein visited his Irish friend, the psychiatrist Dr Maurice O’Connor (‘Con’) Drury (1907-1976) in Dublin in August 1947. They first met in the chapel Westcott House, Cambridge, when Drury had been an Anglican ordinand.
When Wittgenstein returned to Cambridge he resigned his professorship, planning to move to Dublin. From December 1947 to April 1948, Wittgenstein lived at Kilpatrick House, the home of the Kingston family near Redcross, Co Wicklow, where he worked on one of his major treatises, Philosophical Investigations, now accepted as a classic of 20th century philosophy.
By April 1948, he had moved from Kilpatrick House to Dr Con Drury’s holiday home in the west of Ireland, Rosro Cottage in Renvyle, Co Galway, and stayed there until the following October. This is now the Killary Harbour Youth Hostel.
From Co Galway, Wittgenstein moved to Dublin and to Ross’s Hotel, now the Ashling Hotel in Parkgate Street. A plaque by steps in the Great Palm House in the National Botanic Gardens in Glasnevin recalls how Wittgenstein liked to sit and write there in the late 1940s.
He remained in Dublin until June 1949. In all he spent 18 months in Ireland before returning to Cambridge.
Back in Cambridge, Wittgenstein became very ill on the evening of 27 April 1951. When his doctor told him he might live only a few days, he reportedly replied, ‘Good!’
Four of his former students arrived at his bedside – Ben Richards, the Limerick-born philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe, Yorick Smythies, and Con Drury, once an Anglican ordinand at Westcott House, Cambridge, and later a regular communicant at Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin.
Anscombe and Smythies were both Roman Catholics. At their request, the Dominican friar and philosopher, Father Conrad Pepler (1908-1993), also attended; he was the founding warden of the Dominican retreat centre at Spode House near Rugeley, Stafforshire, which I revisited in a posing last week (22 April 2026). Wittgenstein had asked for a ‘priest who was not a philosopher’ and had met Father Conrad several times before his death.
His friends were unsure at first what Wittgenstein would have wanted. But they remembered he had said he hoped his Catholic friends would pray for him, and so they did. He was pronounced dead shortly afterwards, 75 years ago, on 29 April 1951, and was given a Catholic burial in Cambridge.
Wittgenstein’s influence reaches almost every discipline in the humanities and social sciences, and he has influenced many current Anglican theologians, including Andrew Davison and Alison Milbank.
On his religious views, Wittgenstein was said to be greatly interested in Catholicism and was sympathetic to it. However, he did not consider himself a Catholic. According to Norman Malcolm, Wittgenstein saw Catholicism as a way of life rather than as a set of beliefs he personally held.
So, did Wittgenstein see himself as Jewish?
Wittgenstein wrote repeatedly about Jews and Judaism in the 1930s, and many biographical studies present that his writings about Jewishness as a way in which he thought about the kind of person he was and the nature of his philosophical work.
On the other hand, as David Stern points out, many philosophers regard Wittgenstein’s thoughts about Jews as relatively unimportant, and many studies of his philosophy do not even mention the topic.
Yet, some writers have referred to Wittgenstein as a ‘rabbinical thinker’ and a far-sighted critic of anti-Semitism.
There is much debate about the extent to which Wittgenstein and his siblings, who were of three-quarters Jewish descent, saw themselves as Jews. The 1935 Nuremberg laws in 1935 defined as Jewish someone with three or four Jewish grandparents.
In a diary entry shortly after the German-Austrian Anschluss, he described the prospect of holding a German Judenpass or Jewish identity papers as an ‘extraordinarily difficult situation’ and compared it to hot iron that would burn his pocket.
In his writings, Wittgenstein frequently referred to himself as Jewish, at times as part of an apparent self-flagellation. For example, while berating himself for being a ‘reproductive’ as opposed to ‘productive’ thinker, he attributed this to his own Jewish sense of identity.
He wrote, ‘The saint is the only Jewish genius. Even the greatest Jewish thinker is no more than talented. (Myself for instance).’
While Wittgenstein would later claim that ‘my thoughts are 100% Hebraic,’ as Professor Hans Sluga has argued, if so, ‘His was a self-doubting Judaism, which had always the possibility of collapsing into a destructive self-hatred (as it did in [Otto] Weinberger’s case) but which also held an immense promise of innovation and genius.’
Wittgenstein once wrote, ‘Bach wrote on the title page of his Orgelbüchlein, “To the glory of the most high God, and that my neighbour may be benefited thereby.” That is what I would have liked to say about my work.’
In a letter to Bertrand Russell in 1912, he said Mozart and Beethoven were the actual sons of God – both composers died in Vienna.
