Excellent biography brings Wittgenstein to life - Rated 
The positivist, analytical tradition in philosophy is what most people would associate Wittgenstein with in the first instance, provided they had heard of him in the first place. Because of his, and because of his philosophical attacks on the meaningfulness of the concepts of metaphysics, theology, spirituality and even most of logic, he is often depicted as some sort of cold, unfeeling Grand Master sitting on a pinnacle of Genius of Philosophy. But as Ray Monk's biography shows with much vigour, he was in reality a very troubled, confused, unhappy, spiritual, and above all very human person.
Making use of all the manuscripts available as well as the many correspondences of Wittgenstein, Ray Monk, a philosopher at the U of Southampton, is able to show the Wittgenstein we know as a person that one could not only sympathize with, but even pity. Because as it appears from the biography, Wittgenstein was a deeply unhappy man. His relationships were, from early life on, troubled - not as often supposed because of their bisexual nature, but rather because of his general revulsion to what he calls "sensuality" on the whole, and his tendency to flee from the people he loved. His friendships fared no better, since Wittgenstein was both fickle and dominating, unable to deal with disagreement and very strong in his views even on very minor things of daily life - which leads to repeated diary notes and comments by everyone, from Keynes to Russell, on how talking to Wittgenstein was simply too exhausting. Add to this a constant wrestling with the fact that Wittgenstein was very religious, yet thought all religious theory meaningless babble, and you have a recipe for depression.
Monk of course also pays attention to the content of his philosophical views, and makes sure that these are, in broad outlines, accessible and useful to a general public. For specialists and professional philosophers this will rather be a tantalizing overview than a sufficient working out of Wittgenstein's philosophical views, but fortunately Monk has also written several works of secondary literature on the subject, so that people can read those if they enjoy this biography (which I would certainly read first): How to Read Wittgenstein. What Monk does best is to integrate these philosophical viewpoints into the larger narrative of his life, precisely as a good biography of a philosopher requires. The only thing I found somewhat unsatisfying was why Wittgenstein changed his views so strongly after the Tractatus, more or less rejecting the entire foundation this work was based on. One would have expected something personal to reflect as radically the change in philosophy, but either it isn't there, or Monk doesn't bring it out.
The style of writing Monk uses is very pleasant, and he avoids being opinionated either way (though he seems to sympathize with Wittgenstein's spiritual problematic a lot more than I would). An appendix to the book also deals with the (in)famous Bartley's commentaries on Wittgenstein (Wittgenstein (Open Court Paperbacks)), in particular those parts dealing with his sex life. Ray Monk very sensibly here chooses the middle road - it is quite beyond any doubt that Wittgenstein had homosexual relations, but the idea of him prowling the Prater in search for rentboys belongs firmly in the domain of fantasy.
I devoured the 600-page biography of this neurotic genius in one weekend, owing to the fascinating nature of the subject as well as Monk's effective and lively portrayal of him. Very much recommended to a wide public.
Gripping biography - Rated
Ray Monk's biography about Wittgenstein is so gripping and well written I could hardly put it down. It gives such interesting insights into a strange intellectual life at the elite level in 20th century Europe. It also gives a not-too-hard-to-grasp insight into the philosophical problems W was so determined to solve. The reader doesn't have to be a student of analytical philosophy to understand at least what it was all about. A complementary, but lighter, read is "Wittgensteins Poker" by Edmonds and Eidinow, which focuses the differences between Wittgenstein and Carl Popper.
Strongly recommended!
The denial of the necessity for reasons for religious belief - Rated
Ray Monk's biography of Wittgenstein is both very detailed and very revealing. He shows us perfectly Wittgenstein's apparent evolution from the logical-philosophical themes of the Tractatus over language-games to the philosophy of psychology. At first sight, the later Wittgenstein denied completely his Tractatus work and cursed 'the wretched effect that the worship of science and the scientific method had upon our whole culture'.
But that is only apparently so, because the famous last sentence of the Tractatus - 'Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent' - means that nothing can be said about the realm that was more important for him than logical theory: ethics.
The Tractatus is only a theory to preserve the purity of language.
Wittgenstein didn't sink into the morass of language. He was immediately drowned in it.
At the end of his life, Freud's work became his obsession and his comments on that work constituted an attempt to say something about what cannot be said.
The members of the 'Wiener Kreis' were completely astonished to discover that Wittgenstein was in no way a positivist like themselves. Ray Monk gives us also a clear picture of Wittgenstein's complex and difficult character: his egotism, extreme possessiveness of his friends, fear of becoming loveless, difficulty to communicate, irascibility, mental instability ('see the madman in yourself'), his ambivalence about sexuality (a continuous battle between shame, sex and love) and his culpability. He was continuously seeking redemption for his sins, especially his pride and vanity. This monumental biography is a very deep digging and extremely clear portrait of a controversial philosopher. I also recommend Derek Jarman's feature film 'Wittgenstein'
Ramdas Pananthattil review - Rated 
For all those people who are interested in the life and works of Wittgenstein this book by Ray Monk is a good initial read.The intricate philosophy of Wittgenstein is woven through the mesh of his life [which itself was very complex and controversial]in a very delicate and beautiful manner.This book also testifies that Wittgenstein wouldn't die so easily as he will live on ever,one of the fondest subject of future generations of authours.
Brilliant biography and exposition - Rated
Wittgenstein's philosophical writings are very difficult, not only in content but also in presentation. He was always unhappy about committing his ideas to paper, and when he did so, he would set them down in a highly compressed form as numbered notes, sometimes in the form of aphorisms. When he sent the manuscript of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus to Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell, neither of these considerable intellects could understand it (which didn't stop Russell from writing a foreword when it was eventually published.)
The 650 pages of Monk's magnificent biography are of course anything but compressed, and allow us to understand how Wittgenstein arrived at his conclusions. Monk writes beautifully, and he sets out the intellectual processes with the utmost clarity; but an additional and very special merit of this book is the skilful interweaving of Wittgenstein's thought and his personality.
Wittgenstein was a tortured and difficult man: intense, introspective, uncompromising, ruthlessly honest with himself and with others. He was torn between his need for solitude and his need for philosophical discussion. There was within him an immense tension between logic and mysticism. He feared madness and was frequently uncertain about the value of philosophy: he gave it up altogether for a few years after the First World War and taught for six years at elementary schools in backward rural areas of Austria. In later life he was a practising but ashamed homosexual, and for this and other reasons often felt "indecent" and suicidal. He found friendship and even elementary courtesies difficult unless there was a total identity of philosophical ideals. But his charisma was such that a number of people were devoted to him, forgave his often savage moods and harsh outbursts, and helped him: transcribing his ideas; securing him a Fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1930 and a Professorship in 1939; giving him a home in his last illness.
Monk handles with particular skill the transition between Wittgenstein's two philosophies. The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus laid down the foundations of what would become Logical Positivism, though Wittgenstein felt, from his first contact with the Vienna Logical Positivists, that his concerns were different from theirs. They were primarily concerned with the verification of propositions; but in the Tractatus Wittgenstein held that the only task for which philosophy was equipped was that of clarifying what we say by analyzing the language we use. This means examining the logical structure of language; but at the end of the process we have not said anything about the validity of the propositions that have been clarified. Whether a proposition is true or false is not ascertained by logical deductions but by whether it pictures the world as it actually is. Religious, ethical or aesthetic propositions cannot, said Wittgenstein, picture the world as it is, and it is therefore not possible for such topics to be meaningfully discussed. Therefore, in the famous last sentence of the Tractatus: "What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence."
The Vienna School and the Logical Positivists were perfectly happy to have the realm of philosophy thus circumscribed; they felt no regret about the exclusion of religion and ethics from meaningful philosophical discourse. But Wittgenstein did suffer from this loss, and felt that the Vienna School had misunderstood him. He had already told his publishers that what the Tractatus did not contain was more important than what it did contain. He had to say more about those areas which he had felt forced to pass over in silence. Religious utterance could contain a truth and a meaning which did not depend on words having a very precise meaning, but on an understanding of how religious language is used; and this understanding is gained from the experience of living a religious life.
Indeed, in the posthumously published Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein shifted his attention from the relationship between meaning and truth to that between meaning and use. Language, in other words, is not a picture, but a tool; and it is the way we use it that shows the meaning we ascribe to it. "Don't ask for the meaning; ask for the use", Wittgenstein now proclaimed; that, he thought, would at last "showing the fly a way out of the fly-bottle." Though it is still descriptive rather than deductive, the task of philosophy is now to clarify the way words are used in different situations rather than to pin down the absolute meaning of a word to some unchanging fact in reality. To my mind it is a much richer and less arid philosophy than his earlier one; and Wittgenstein worked out all kinds of fascinating implications of his new insight: it enabled him to see how, for example, music or humour or body language can be meaningful discourse which can be understood once you know how those particular languages are being used. The second philosophy is also much easier to understand than his first - so much so, in fact, that Russell accused him of having "grown tired of serious thinking". It certainly resulted in building a bridge between the perceptions of the philosopher and the "common sense" perceptions of the ordinary man; and if in his earlier years it was the sheer abstruseness of his philosophy which made him doubt the value of what he was doing, he now worried about what at the end of the day might be the difference between philosophy and common sense. But in the end he did find a humble use for philosophy. He writes, "'What we find out in philosophy is trivial; it does not teach us new facts, only science does that. But the proper synopsis of these trivialities is enormously difficult, and has immense importance. Philosophy is in fact the synopsis of trivialities.' In philosophy we are not, like the scientist, building a house. Nor are we even laying the foundations of a house. We are merely 'tidying up a room'". (Monk, pp.298/299.)
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