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Parenting fuck-up example:
Ludwig Wittgenstein's father, Karl, a friend of Johannes Brahms, was the most acute industrialist in the Austrian steel industry; he made the family the Austrian equivalent of the Carnegies or Rothschilds. He had five sons and three daughters by a Roman Catholic wife, and baptized all of them into the Catholic faith. He set out to educate the sons in a very severe regime which would turn them into captains of industry. He did not succeed. Three of the sons committed suicide; the fourth, Paul, became (despite the loss of an arm in World War I) a concert pianist; the fifth, the youngest child, born in Vienna in 1889, was a philosopher.
Fuck-up continues in school:
Wittgenstein attended the Realschule in Linz, where he was a contemporary of Adolf Hitler. He was a poor scholar, teased by his peers. At school he also lost his faith. The major intellectual influences on him in his youth, apart from the philosophical works of Schopenhauer, were the physicist Ludwig Boltzmann (suicide 1906) and the psychologist Otto Weininger (suicide 1903). |