The magazine publisher is the copyright holder of this article and it is reproduced with permission. Further reproduction of this article in violation of the copyright is prohibited.

    WITTGENSTEIN IN IRELAND
    Richard Wall, translated by Martin Chalmers
    Reaktion Books, 202pp, £14.95
    £11.96 at www.newstatesman.co.uk (+£ p&p)
    The rigour and discipline of analytic thought is something few aspire to, fewer are capable of, and hardly any achieve. Even to skirt tentatively its periphery, let alone approach its core, is appallingly hard. For this reason, most of us turn away in apathy and prejudice; and then swathe ourselves in the posturings of the truly impotent. Ludwig Wittgenstein was brave enough, serious enough, to take it on. To this end, in 1947, he left his chair of philosophy at Cambridge and moved to perfect isolation on the west coast of Ireland. No vanity, no university obligation, could distract him from the magnificent sense of purpose and duty that was his privilege.
    The sort of mind that is capable of producing such work, of trying to extend our understanding of the world and to ascribe meaning to it, must be both selfless and sincere. These are necessary qualities of the ascetic. When Wittgenstein was in Ireland, he was, in the words of his biographer Ray Monk, "philosophising for all he was worth". His work was important, not his person. He enjoyed minimal comfort because, as any ascetic will tell you, such comforts are a distraction and corruption of one's ultimate goal, be it contemplation of the world or of the infinite. We have the legacy of his three years in Ireland, the Philosophical Investigations, a work that will exhaust most of our minds for a lifetime. Do we need an account of his person as well? Could any such account possibly instruct the reader? When Wittgenstein took himself off to Ireland, surely he would have been bewildered to find biographers chasing him across the sea.
    His latest biographer is Richard Wall, a painter, designer and photographer who lives in Austria. Sixty photographs, mainly of the Irish landscape, illustrate Wall's slim book. Apart from a couple of disquisitions on the visual arts, the book is taken up with the sort of detail so beloved of biographers: that Wittgenstein enjoyed thick brown sandwiches from Woolworths; lived on porridge for breakfast, vegetables for lunch, and an extraordinary amount of canned food; thought about studying medicine in Dublin; gave away much of his inheritance; enjoyed detective stories and the poetry of John Cowper Powys and William Blake. That's about it.
    There are countless apocryphal stories about Wittgenstein. How many of them are accurate and not misleading is impossible to say (it seems everyone had a walk with him by the river in Cambridge). One might imagine him reading a biography of his life and saying: "I'm sorry, I cannot understand why anyone has taken such trouble to write this. Would it not have been better to write a tale of the unexpected?"
    The problems inherent in biography aside, Wall's book does have serious failings: it lacks the philosophical clarity of Monk's biography, and suffers from an overt romanticisation of the Irish landscape and the ascetic life. Wall indulges his knowledge of Irish place names, consistently remarking on how poeticised they sound compared to their English counterparts. This may or may not be so. The landscape of the west coast may be dramatic, may prompt the imagination, but it is sparse, wet and very harsh.
    And the life of the ascetic is harsh, too. Perhaps only an ascetic can appreciate this. To write what he did on those scraps of paper, those remarkable aphorisms of the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein must have put himself through it. They are the result of courage, resolve and hard work. If there is to be an instructive element to a biography of such a man, this is surely it. Time, then, to reach for the canned food and Brussels sprouts -- and emulate his diet if nothing else.
ADDED MATERIAL
    Henry Sheen is a writer and ascetic
    PHOTO AIT BY STEVE MARTIN FROM LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN RAY MONK/VINTAGE