But he never forgot two of the statements contained in the Tractatus. One even wonders whether he was afraid of the world and tried to follow the ancient dictum: láthe biosas, live hidden! At any event, he abandoned the main doctrines of the Tractatus and became more and more interested in what we are now going to deal with: Therapeutic Philosophy. Wittgenstein did not seek for popularity. I have heard Professor Paul Schrecker say that Wittgenstein was a “mystery man.” It is true. I do not know whether Wittgenstein himself was aware of this or not, although I suspect that he was. It was improbable that anybody could maintain that Wittgenstein was something more than an acute analyst of philosophical puzzles. As a consequence: those who know what the words “troubled times” mean, do not know Wittgenstein those who know Wittgenstein do not know what the words “troubled times” mean. Those who studied it were a handful of logicians or positivists, exclusively interested in the fields of Logic and Epistemology.
Continental European philosophers, on the other hand, hardly have taken any notice of Wittgenstein’s work. The average Continental European knows more about it than the cleverest of the English-speaking philosophers. You begin to catch a glimpse of it only when you nose into the world. English-speaking philosophers, who know very well Wittgenstein’s deeds, pay almost no attention to such expressions as “troubled times.” It is not easy to understand its meaning when you devote the best hours of your life to teaching philosophy in beautiful university campuses. If this has been acknowledged neither by English-speaking philosophers nor by Continental European philosophers, it is due to a sad circumstance. He was, in fact, a genius of our age, a symbol of troubled times. It means that he was more than a philosophical genius. But my contention that Wittgenstein was a genius has a wider scope. It is also well known that the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus had a tremendous influence on the epistemological issues of the Vienna Circle and of the Logico-Positivistic School. Metaphysicians, on the other hand, will admit that all of Wittgenstein’s sentences quoted as meaningless by Carnap in the latter’s Logical Syntax of Language deserve close attention.
Logicians will recognize that he was most successful in profound logical insights. This contention will hardly be denied by professional philosophers.
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