WITTGENSTEIN’S TRACTATUS AS A MEANS OF UNDERSTANDING SOME SYMPTOMS OF ONTOLOGICAL ANXIETY

During the cultural upheaval of the 1960s it was R.D.Laing’s The Divided Self (Penguin, London 1960) which set psychiatry in the context of ontology, that is, the study of being.

Laing was preceded by others pursuing the link between philosophy and psychotherapy. In Ludwig Wittgenstein we have a 20th century equivalent of a Socrates whose military courage and philosophical work was outstanding and insightful. Wittgenstein’s remarkable Tractatus Logico- Philosophicus(1921 /1922) and his lectures at Trinity College, Cambridge may have earned him the admiration of fellow dons but in nick- naming him “God”, they played some part in pushing him into remote exile in a house built for him on the banks of Norwegian fjords and on an island off the coast of Ireland where he could see a realisation of the logic which he hoped would be experienced as ethics.

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