A selection of the best from recent issues of the Philosopher

The Wittgensteins were gifted, flawed, seriously disturbed, tortured. Altogether there were eight children who survived infancy, three of the five boys committed suicide. It is perhaps unfair to complain about the distant account that Waugh gives of their deaths. 

There may be no way of getting closer to the sequence of tragedies, given the passage of time and the efforts made by the family, starting with Karl, to suppress the events and discourage discussion about them. The father was domineering, the mother submissive, that's about as close as we get to understanding the suicidal tendencies that rampaged through the male side of the family.

Waugh, whose primary interests are musical, focuses mainly on Paul. He devotes a good deal of space to his career as a performer and to his uncomfortable relations with the composers from whom he commissioned works. The strongest part of the book is the account of Paul's injuries and his imprisonment by the Russians in the First World War. His ordeal was appalling and his determination to continue his musical career as a concert pianist, despite losing an arm, was truly amazing. There is an equally detailed account of the intricate attempts made, particularly by Paul and Gretl, to survive the Nazi regime and to maintain the family wealth. Despite their difficult characters, they were burdened with fastidious moral consciences; but the persecutions forced them to behave deviously and set them against each other.

As Waugh acknowledges, Ray Monk has written a 'comprehensive biography' of Ludwig. The existence of this book may be part of the reason for the relatively little space allocated to Ludwig - there is no way of telling because Waugh does not describe his own research nor does he explain the reasons for his selection of material. It would, of course, be unfair to complain that Waugh's family biography fails to go into the detail of Monk's much longer book. 

However, if one compares their respective versions of a particular event in the philosopher's life, there is a fear that Waugh's account is not just more condensed, but misleading. Perhaps this is inevitable, but it can also be mischievous. An example is the extraordinary episode in 1937 when Ludwig wrote a confession which he insisted on reading to a number of his friends. Waugh reports the occasion in a single sentence 'When Nazi anti-Semitism became a talking point in England, Ludwig filled with remorse, went about arousing his friends at inconvenient hours to make a formal confession to them' (p.. 219). Monk devotes five pages to the same drama. He does not overlook its comical aspects. 

He gives an amusing account of Rowland Hutt's 'embarrassment at having to sit in a Lyons café while opposite him Wittgenstein recites his sins in a clear loud voice (p. 368). However, Monk also attempts to understand the peculiar nature of a personality tested almost to destruction by a sense of sin, guilt, and the need to confess. It is not just that Waugh seems unable to take seriously Ludwig's anguished state or show any interest in the psychological complexities of his character; he implies that Ludwig was trimming his sails to match a change in the wind of public opinion. 

Waugh seems to have little affection for the other notable members of the family, Paul and Gretl. There is a detachment in the writing that sits uncomfortably with the events described and that betrays a damaging divergence of temperament between the biographer and his subjects. He has limited sympathy for these suffering creatures. This is particularly marked in relation to Ludwig. 

Sophisticated aestheticism meets soul-wrenching intensity. The result is incomprehension which emerges in flippancy bordering on contempt. Alexander Waugh is himself a member of a distinguished family full of strong and difficult characters. Imagine the Waughs entertaining the Wittgensteins to dinner - there's a project for Alan Ayckbourn.

Waugh makes no pretence of understanding Wittgenstein's philosophical thought. His opinions, in so far as they emerge at all, hardly get beyond comments such as 'Thousands of books have since been written to explain the meaning of the Tractatus, each different from the last'. He quite correctly stresses the mystical orientation of the work, but he does not even hint at what makes the book philosophically significant - that it is a rigorous examination of the idea that language and thought are essentially engines of representation. The Tractarian Picture (or representation) Theory of language which Wittgenstein rejects later in the Philosophical Investigations is still assumed by some to be obviously true (for example, in the cognitive sciences). But, perhaps for the goodish reason that the Investigations was compiled by others and published posthumously, none of this is discussed here. 

Instead, Waugh juxtaposes its opening sentences with the beginning of Tolstoy's Gospel in Brief (p. 104) - fair enough -but he shows no awareness of the fact that those opening sentences are the flip side of remarks, that appear later in the text, about the structure that any possible language must have. Ludwig's claim in the Notebooks (2.8.16) 'my work has stretched out from the foundations of logic to the essence of the world' would probably strike Waugh as nothing more than another example of his comical egomania. 

Ludwig is the one member of the clan who has a serious claim to having made a lasting contribution to our culture. Even those who think that he has had a baleful influence on the direction that philosophy took in the second half of the 20th century must admit as much. The author's insensitivity to what drove Ludwig in his life and work seriously weakens the book that purports to tell the story of the family. 

However, not everyone will be disappointed that there isn't more philosophical substance in the book. The book is aimed not at philosophers but at the general reader, especially one who has an interest in early 20th century music. Certainly, Waugh writes very well. With energy and elegance he tells the story of a family of gifted individuals in desperate times. The illustrations are interesting. On the dustcover there are two particularly appealing photographs of Paul and Ludwig together, one as boys, the other as young men. If we read the book along with Ray Monk's biography, Wittgenstein, the Duty of Genius, perhaps we end up with as complete a picture of Ludwig and his family as we can hope to get.