No love lost

It has been famously written, and often observed, that every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Never was this truer than in the case of the Wittgensteins, who were also, some of them, crazy. I take notes in books for review and in this one I wrote ‘nuts’ 23 times. Ludwig, the famous philosopher, was merely the craziest. Three of his brothers killed themselves, and he often considered suicide — insofar as anything he said can be taken seriously. Almost everything he wrote, about which there have been countless decryptions, defies normal understanding. Take the epigraph of Alexander Waugh’s family biography, drawn from Ludwig’s On Certainty: ‘There are an enormous number of general empirical propositions that count as certainty for us. One such is that if someone’s arm is cut off it will not grow again.’ When I read that my heart sank. What does this mean? What is it doing as an epigraph?

Surrounded by the fortune assembled by their none-too-scrupulous father and their well-to-do mother, the brothers and sisters lived in a monstrous Viennese palace.