Submit a Poem Get Your Premium Membership  Wittgensteins Ladder
Written by: David Lehman | Biography  | Quotes (4) |  "My
propositions serve as elucidations in the following way:
anyone who understands them eventually recognizes them as
nonsensical, when he has used them -- as steps -- to climb
after he has climbed up it.)" -- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus
The first time I met Wittgenstein, I was  late. "The traffic was
murder," I explained.  He spent the next forty-five minutes
analyzing this sentence. Then he was silent.  I wondered why he
had chosen a water tower for our meeting. I also wondered how I
would leave, since the ladder I had used  to climb up here had
fallen to the ground.    Wittgenstein served as a machine-gunner
in the Austrian Army in World War I.  Before the war he studied
logic in Cambridge  with Bertrand Russell. Having inherited  his
father's fortune (iron and steel), he  gave away his money, not
to the poor, whom  it would corrupt, but to relations so rich
it would not th