Review of Bruce Duffy's The World As I Found It.
The title of Bruce Duffy's book suggests the path Duffy will take to illustrate the life and times of the intellectually curious Ludwig Wittgenstein. The title suggests a pre-existing world community into which Wittgenstein enters, and this is indeed how Duffy chooses to introduce and explore the temporal characteristics and intellectual attributes of the world in which Wittgenstein lived and on which he left his mark.
Ludwig Wittgenstein was born in 1889 in Vienna, Austria. His father, Karl Wittgenstein was a wealthy steel magnate who also patronized the arts. He fathered seven children with his wife, Poldy, of whom Ludwig was the youngest. Although the family's heritage was Jewish, the Wittgensteins had been baptized Protestant and Catholic. The children were baptized in to Catholicism. Duffy finds it significant on Ludwig's development that he became assimilated into an anti-semitic community such as Catholic Vienna, especially after the out-break of anti-semitism in Nazi Germany during the 1940s:
For Wittgenstein, it was not the sheer extent of the catastrophe that he felt, or the daily news of it, so much as the sheer antediluvian depth of it. It had been so long in coming. For this, whole ages of hatred had been stored up like explosives. For this, whole ages of culture had been in a long and steady decline. . . . Philosophically, he found himself returning to the same questions in the way the painter returns to earlier subjects. As a young man he had wondered if there was a prior order to the world and, if so, where its value might be found. But now he wondered not only where value might be found, but how it was transmitted . . .. (p. 531-32).
Duffy cleverly chooses to narrate the story of a community's search for meaning using the tools of rational intellectualism in a world dominated by the chaos and irrationality of two wars and the particular horror...