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Genius and Talent: Schopenhauer's Influence on Wittgenstein's Early Philosophy (review)

Weiner contends that "Wittgenstein's first philosophy was Schopenhauerian" (lo-11), and that though the Schopenhauerian link has been acknowledged (9, 15, 16, etc.), the "prevalent trend" (9, 17) is to ignore it. (Weiner nowhere mentions Pears's recent discussion of the Schopenhauerian link to Wittgenstein in Vol. 1 of The False Prison.) This may not be entirely the commentators' fault since Wittgenstein himself"misled a whole generation of readers" (18) by "conceal[ing] his connection to Sch.openhauer." (2 l, 25). Weiner's aim is to "reconstruct the conceptual steps that lead from Schopenhauer's philosophy to Wittgenstein's" and to "offer textual evidence that Wittgenstein actually took these steps en route to the Tractatus (TLP for short)" (lo). Weiner quotes Griffiths, who holds that "one might regard parts of the Tractatus as a dialogue with [Schopenhauer]," and Weiner represents parts of the Notebooks and Tractatus in precisely this way. He does not claim that there is always similarity between Wittgenstein's and Schopenhauer's philosophies, but that sometimes the former adopts Schopenhauer's view, sometimes he reacts against it, and sometimes he falls between these two extremes (lO). The claim that TLP is a dialogue with Schopenhauer is a very strong claim, and may even be true. But Weiner would have been on safer ground had he claimed only that it had been influenced by Schopenhauer. The book is divided into three parts. In Chapter l, Weiner claims that Wittgenstein and Schopenhauer were similar in their disdain for metaphysical language, and that both develop a theory of language to combat groundless metaphysical pretensions (11, ~7, 34). In Chapter ~ he argues that, roughly, Wittgenstein accepts Schopenhauer's world-as-representation, but rejects the world-as-will (l l). In Chapter 3, he relates the final sections of the Tractatus to Schopenhauer's theories of virtue, beauty, etc. One might expect that Weiner's case is strongest with regard to the "ethical point" of TLP (18), and this is the case. But he also claims that the Schopenhauerian influence improves our understanding of Wittgenstein's first philosophy "as a whole" (17), including TLP views on language, science, metaphysics, and epistemology. He acknowledges that "it is easy to point to vague parallels" (1 o), but some of the parallels emphasized by Weiner do appear to be too vague to shed great illumination on TLP.