Ludwig Wittgenstein - 1947–1951: Final Years

1947–1951: Final Years

He resigned the professorship at Cambridge in 1947 to concentrate on his writing, and in 1947 and 1948 travelled to Ireland, staying at Ross's Hotel in Dublin and at a farmhouse in Red Cross, County Wicklow, where he began the manuscript volume MS 137, Band R. Seeking solitude he moved to "Rosro", a holiday cottage in Connemara owned by Maurice O'Connor-Drury.

He also accepted an invitation from Norman Malcolm, then professor at Cornell University, to stay with him and his wife for several months at Ithaca, New York. He made the trip in April 1949, although he told Malcolm he was too unwell to do philosophical work: "I haven't done any work since the beginning of March & I haven't had the strength of even trying to do any." A doctor in Dublin had diagnosed anaemia and prescribed iron and liver pills. The details of Wittgenstein's stay in America are recounted in Norman Malcolm's Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir. During his summer in America, Wittgenstein began his epistemological discussions, in particular his engagement with philosophical skepticism, that would eventually become the final fragments On Certainty.

He returned to London, where he was diagnosed with an inoperable cancer of the prostate, which had spread to his bone marrow. He spent the next two months in Vienna, where his sister Hermine died on 11 February 1950; he went to see her every day, but she was hardly able to speak or recognize him. "Great loss for me and all of us", he wrote. "Greater than I would have thought." He moved around a lot after Hermine's death staying with various friends: to Cambridge in April 1950, where he stayed with G. H. von Wright; to London to stay with Rush Rhees; then to Oxford to see Elizabeth Anscombe, writing to Norman Malcolm that he was hardly doing any philosophy. He went to Norway in August with Ben Richards, then returned to Cambridge, where on 27 November he moved into "Storey's End", at 76 Storey's Way, the home of his doctor, Edward Bevan, and his wife Joan; he had told them he did not want to die in a hospital, so they said he could spend his last days in their home instead. Joan was at first afraid of Wittgenstein, but they soon became good friends.

By the beginning of 1951 it was clear that he had little time left. He wrote a new will in Oxford on 29 January, naming Rhees as his executor, and Anscombe and von Wright his literary administrators, and wrote to Norman Malcolm that month to say, "My mind's completely dead. This isn't a complaint, for I don't really suffer from it. I know that life must have an end once and that mental life can cease before the rest does." In February he returned to the Bevans' home to work on MS 175 and MS 176. These and other manuscripts were later published as Remarks on Colour and On Certainty. He wrote to Malcolm on 16 April 13 days before his death: "An extraordinary thing happened to me. About a month ago I suddenly found myself in the right frame of mind for doing philosophy. I had been absolutely certain that I'd never again be able to do it. It's the first time after more than 2 years that the curtain in my brain has gone up.—Of course, so far I've only worked for about 5 weeks & it may be all over by tomorrow; but it bucks me up a lot now."

He began work on his final manuscript, MS 177, on 25 April 1951. It was his 62nd birthday on 26 April. He went for a walk the next afternoon, and wrote his last entry that day, 27 April. That evening, he became very ill; when his doctor told him he might live only a few days, he reportedly replied, "Good!". Joan stayed with him throughout that night, and just before losing consciousness for the last time on 28 April, he told her: "Tell them I've had a wonderful life." Norman Malcolm describes this as a "strangely moving utterance". Four of his former students arrived at his bedside—Ben Richards, Elizabeth Anscombe, Yorick Smythies, and Maurice O'Connor Drury. Anscombe and Smythies were Catholics, and at the latter's request, a Dominican friar, Father Conrad Pepler, also attended. They were at first unsure what Wittgenstein would have wanted, but then remembered he had said he hoped his Catholic friends would pray for him, so they did, and he was pronounced dead shortly afterwards. He was given a Catholic burial at Parish of the Ascension Burial Ground in Cambridge. Drury later said he had been troubled ever since about whether that was the right thing to do. On his religious views, Wittgenstein was said to be greatly interested in Catholicism and was sympathetic to it. However, he did not consider himself to be a Catholic. According to Norman Malcolm, Wittgenstein saw Catholicism to be more as a way of life rather than as a set of beliefs which he personally held, considering that he did not accept any religious faith. He was said to be agnostic, in a qualified sense, in the last years of his life.