Ludwig Wittgenstein 維根斯坦 · Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein

🔊He was trained as an engineer, and went to Manchester in 1908 to work on aircraft engines and propellers. The mathematics of propellers led him to the foundations of mathematics, and those led him to the logician Frege, who told him to go to Cambridge and study with Bertrand Russell. He arrived in 1911. Within a year Russell was saying that he had nothing left to teach him. In 1913 his father died and he inherited a fortune. When war came the following summer he enlisted in the Austrian army as a private.

他受的是工程師的訓練；1908 年到曼徹斯特，研究飛機引擎與螺旋槳。螺旋槳的數學把他引向了數學的基礎；而數學的基礎把他引向了邏輯學家弗雷格。弗雷格要他去劍橋，跟伯特蘭・羅素學。他在 1911 年抵達。不到一年，羅素就說自己沒有什麼可以再教他的了。1913 年他父親去世，他繼承了一大筆財產。隔年夏天戰爭爆發，他以二等兵的身分加入了奧地利軍隊。

🔊He served for the whole war, asked for the most dangerous posts, and was decorated several times for courage. In his pack he carried notebooks, and in them he wrote the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. He finished it in 1918 and was a prisoner of war in Italy when he sent it to Russell. The book is seventy-five pages of numbered propositions. It argues that language pictures the facts of the world, that the limits of what can be pictured are the limits of what can be said, and that ethics, religion, and the meaning of life lie outside those limits. Its last sentence is: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” He believed that he had solved the problems of philosophy, and he acted on the belief by leaving the subject.

他服役了整場戰爭，主動要求最危險的崗位，並且因為勇敢好幾次獲得勳章。他的背包裡帶著筆記本；他在上面寫下了《邏輯哲學論》。他在 1918 年完成它；把它寄給羅素的時候，他是義大利的戰俘。這本書是七十五頁編了號的命題。它主張：語言描繪世界裡的事實；能被描繪的東西的界限，就是能被說出來的東西的界限；而倫理、宗教與人生的意義，都在那些界限之外。它的最後一句是：「凡是不可說的，就必須保持沉默。」他相信自己已經解決了哲學的問題；而他照著這個信念行事，離開了這門學問。

🔊He gave his entire inheritance to his brother and sisters, trained as a teacher, and from 1920 taught in poor mountain villages south of Vienna. His sister said that it was like using a precision instrument to open crates. He was a demanding and impatient teacher who took the brightest children far beyond the syllabus and struck the slow ones. In 1926, after a boy he had hit collapsed, he resigned. He worked for a time as a gardener in a monastery and then spent two years designing a house for one of his sisters, with every door handle and radiator made to his own measurements.

他把全部的遺產給了他的哥哥與姐姐們，受了師範訓練，從 1920 年起在維也納以南貧窮的山村裡教書。他的姐姐說，這就像用一件精密儀器來開木箱。他是一位要求很高、沒有耐心的老師：他把最聰明的孩子帶到遠遠超出課綱的地方，並且打學得慢的孩子。1926 年，一個被他打的男孩昏倒了；他辭了職。他在一座修道院當了一陣子園丁，然後花了兩年為他的一位姐姐設計一棟房子；每一個門把、每一個暖氣片，都照他自己的尺寸訂做。

🔊Conversations with philosophers in Vienna persuaded him that his book had left things unsettled, and in 1929 he went back to Cambridge. He needed a degree in order to teach, so he submitted the Tractatus as a doctoral thesis. Russell and G. E. Moore examined him. The story goes that he ended the examination by clapping them on the shoulder and saying, “Don’t worry, I know you’ll never understand it.” For the next eighteen years he taught in his rooms, without notes, thinking aloud before a small group and often falling silent or cursing his own stupidity. He came to reject the central idea of his first book, that language has one essential function. He published nothing. During the Second World War he left his chair to work as a hospital porter in London.

與維也納的哲學家們的談話，使他相信他的書還有沒解決的東西；1929 年，他回到了劍橋。要教書，他需要一個學位；於是他把《邏輯哲學論》當作博士論文交了上去。考他的是羅素與摩爾。傳說口試結束時，他拍了拍兩人的肩膀說：「別擔心，我知道你們永遠不會懂的。」接下來的十八年，他在自己的房間裡教書，不用講稿，在一小群人面前把思考說出聲來；常常陷入沉默，或者咒罵自己愚蠢。他後來拒絕了第一本書的核心觀念，也就是「語言有一個本質的功能」。他什麼也沒出版。第二次世界大戰期間，他離開教席，到倫敦的一家醫院當搬運工。

🔊He resigned his professorship in 1947 to write, and lived for a while alone in a cottage on the west coast of Ireland. Cancer was diagnosed in 1949. He spent his last weeks in the house of his doctor in Cambridge, working until two days before the end. When the doctor’s wife told him that his friends would arrive the next day, he said: “Tell them I’ve had a wonderful life.” The Philosophical Investigations, on which he had worked for sixteen years, appeared two years after his death.

1947 年，他為了寫作辭去教授職位，在愛爾蘭西海岸的一間小屋裡獨自住了一陣子。1949 年，他被診斷出癌症。他最後的幾個星期，是在劍橋他的醫生家裡度過的；他一直工作到臨終的前兩天。醫生的妻子告訴他，他的朋友們第二天會到；他說：「告訴他們，我度過了美好的一生。」他寫了十六年的《哲學研究》，在他死後兩年問世。