> Now, for the first time in his life, he was living and working side by side with a bunch of illiterate peasants and proletarians, and he found it hard to keep his disgust in check.
It's easy to see how Witgenstein could fit into midcentury British academia. This attitude is echoed by Eric Blair.
He's famous as a writer (under the name George Orwell) focused on the suffering of the lower classes, yet he explicitly despised the choices of the unfortunate. His writing on his time in Burma is correctly recognised as fundamentally anti-colonialist, yet his contempt for the colonized is just as clear (but not discussed). In Wigan Pier it's not just the workers but the socialists he scorns (sure, I agree the Fabians were useless, but he sneeringly refers to them as 'sandal-wearing vegetarians.') And his most famous book, 1984, he despairs the placidity and fecklessness of the proletariat.
Where are the nice people who are also influential?
I did mandatory military service in Germany and from my own - much milder, of course - personal experience I can emphasise with Wittgenstein.
Military service can really force you out of your bubble: All my friends chose to do civil service instead or were unfit for duty. The other conscripts were very different from me and I never before or after in my life felt so alienated from the people around me.
Just one example: From the environment I grew up in, I though that it was natural that women could be leaders, until then I thought that sexism would be a subtle thing, mostly of implicit, hidden biases. I was shocked to hear how my fellow soldiers talked about the one female sergeant. They made fun of her behind her back (even though she was a hypercompetent badass, for example sneaking through the forest mock killing all the guards during a training exercise), talked about how they could never respect her, because she was a woman, fantasised together about going up to her room to have rough sex with her….
I really did not like them as persons, I did not want to be friends with any of them and I generally hated spending time with them (playing football together was still fun though). Maybe I was arrogant, too?
I don’t know, it’s kinda fun to accuse Wittgenstein of arrogance from the comfort of ones chair, surrounded by ones bubble of similar-minded people, while imagining how one would be friends with the proletariat one never meets - but I kinda believe Wittgenstein, when he called his fellow soldiers bigoted. I can feel with him, trying to do his best in a horrible, scary situation, praying to be brave, while being surrounded by people he really does not like and there are worse things than complaining a bit in your diary in a situation like this.
As far as I know, LW was no fan of the upper class either, famously declaring that GE Moore had "no intelligence" and asserting that Bertrand Russell would "never understand" his Tractatus.
> Where are the nice people who are also influential?
I wouldn't recommend taking this article, and specifically this quote, as a suitable basis for saying Wittgenstein wasn't a good or nice person. He was a tremendously complicated person. The biography by Ray Monk paints a much fuller, more nuanced portrait.
Reminds me of an excerpt from Cioran's The Temptation to Exist: "Only the illiterate have given me that frisson of being which indicates the presence of truth. Carpathian shepherds have made a much deeper impression upon me than the professors of Germany, the wits of Paris. I have seen Spanish beggars, and I should like to have been their hagiographer."
It's easy to see how Witgenstein could fit into midcentury British academia. This attitude is echoed by Eric Blair.
He's famous as a writer (under the name George Orwell) focused on the suffering of the lower classes, yet he explicitly despised the choices of the unfortunate. His writing on his time in Burma is correctly recognised as fundamentally anti-colonialist, yet his contempt for the colonized is just as clear (but not discussed). In Wigan Pier it's not just the workers but the socialists he scorns (sure, I agree the Fabians were useless, but he sneeringly refers to them as 'sandal-wearing vegetarians.') And his most famous book, 1984, he despairs the placidity and fecklessness of the proletariat.
Where are the nice people who are also influential?