I found this to be a really fine documentary. Haven't I seen it before? Some scenes seem quite familiar, and yet as a whole, I didn't recognize it.
Over on Facebook, I'm taking this opportunity to meditate on my own mortality. I'm but a year younger than when Wittgenstein passed, plus I've been watching lots about Walt Disney and Jim Henson, both of whom went rather suddenly.
They say our culture is in denial about death, doesn't handle it well. That's a cliche in a way. Why not turn the Halloween season into a time for embracing mortality. To say it "sugar coats" death is an obvious truism. What better excuse then, to add a dimension?
Regarding Wittgenstein's biography (above), I'm sure it seems dreary to many, given is ongoing depression, loneliness and suicidal proclivities. On the other hand, he lived through two world wars. The world itself was objectively a dreary one. He worked hard to make a serious contribution.
His story has finally come together in my mind. The fact that he became a recluse in Norway before the outbreak of WW1, is a detail I've always needed to pin down.
I've gone back to my Princeton days in some ways, when I focused on his later philosophy and wrote a senior thesis about it. I dashed out a kind of recapitulation of my thinking on Medium this afternoon.
