Like the gentle Anton Bruckner, who counted leaves on trees to while away a Sunday afternoon, Ludwig Wittgenstein in odd moments calculated the height of trees by pacing off from the trunk the base of a right triangle, wheeling around and sighting along his walking stick (up the hypotenuse) to the tree’s top, invoking then the majestic theorem of Pythagoras. Together with inventing a sewing machine (in his teens), designing a house in Vienna (still standing) that elicited the admiration of Frank Lloyd Wright, and following assiduously the films of the Misses Betty Hutton and Carmen Miranda, this is one of the few acts of the philosopher that was at all transparent.
No mystery, however, surrounds either his life or his thought. If he was not the greatest philosopher of our age, he was the most significant. He founded (inadvertently) and disowned (with glaring, insulted eyes) two major philosophies. He was “get-
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