When surveying the landscape of modern Western philosophy, two names often tend to stand out: Martin Heidegger and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Both were German-speaking thinkers, though they emerged from different cultural and historical contexts—Heidegger from the German Empire (later associated with what some scholars call “intellectual antisemitism”) and Wittgenstein from the Austro-Hungarian Empire (with a family background that included Jewish ancestry on his father’s side).

Wittgenstein’s importance is further highlighted by the fact that his works have been included by brother Daniel Haqiqatjou in his Muslim Skeptic “reading list.”

Heidegger’s philosophy has often been interpreted as a reflection of a European intellectual crisis following World War I, a Europe that had once celebrated its industrial triumphs, only then made to confront the devastating consequences of that very same rationalization: the mechanization of war and the mass-scale slaughter that it enabled. The trenches of WWI symbolized a world in which death had become industrialized through new technologies like chemical weapons, machine guns, and armored vehicles.

Within this historical context, figures like Major-General J.F.C. Fuller (a British military theorist and early advocate of armored warfare) represent a shift in thinking regarding technology and violence. Quite controversially, Fuller was also an admirer of Aleister Crowley, the occultist known for his esoteric and “Satanist” associations. While the connection between Fuller’s military ideas and his occult interests remains a matter of debate, it does nonetheless highlight how modern warfare and modern irrationalism could uncomfortably coexist in the same minds.

Considering this, Heidegger’s existentialist thought—with its preoccupation with death, finitude, and authenticity—can be read as a philosophical mirror of trench warfare, where life is reduced to survival and death becomes a more immediate and palpable reality than life, meaning, or progress, all celebrated dogmas of an absolutist European modernity.

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The End of the Empire of Reason

Similarly, Ludwig Wittgenstein (born in 1889, the same year that Heidegger was born) was shaped profoundly by the historical events of his era, particularly World War I. Like Heidegger, he had been impacted deeply by the war. He even volunteered enthusiastically as a soldier, having served on the Eastern Front, where he not only earned military honors but also spent time later in Italy on as a prisoner of war. Remarkably, he volunteered despite the fact that he could have been exempted for medical reasons.

During his time as a soldier and PoW, Wittgenstein developed a fascination with Russian literature, immersing himself in the works of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. Tolstoy’s novels, with their sweeping narratives and vast array of characters, evoke a sense of totality, a symbolic mapping of Russia’s extensive geography. Meanwhile, Dostoyevsky’s focus on the inner spiritual life of individuals presents an existential minimalism, i.e., the religious life of Russian-Orthodoxy. Through these authors, Wittgenstein encountered two polarities of existence: the grand, encompassing totality of Tolstoy’s world; and the deeply personal, spiritual inwardness of Dostoyevsky.

This literary engagement mirrored the geopolitical shifts of his time: World War I marked the collapse of several empires, particularly the Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, German, and Russian Empires, all of which dissolved in the wake of the war, primarily between 1917 and 1922. The imperial idea, with its ambition to unite diverse and often conflicting local identities, symbolized Enlightenment reason and rational bureaucratic organization. As these empires fractured, so did the vision of Enlightenment universalism, replaced by nationalist movements and the rise of parochial identity politics.

This shift from imperial unity to fragmented nation-states signaled the end of a certain kind of modernity—one built on rationalism and certainty—and the emergence of a more fractured modernity. In fewer words, the world of Wittgenstein was slowly morphing from a triumphant Tolstoyan totality to a timid Dostoyevskian individuality.

By the time Wittgenstein was philosophizing, totalitarian ideologies such as communism, fascism, and various forms of liberalism were competing against each other for dominance, each offering up their own proposed answers to the existential crisis of civilization. These ideologies, though often seen as opposing forces, shared a common goal: to build absolute systems. Wittgenstein’s work, in part, reflects his critique of this totalizing ambition, which he viewed as hidden relativism in disguise.

Wittgenstein’s early work, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (published in 1921 but completed in 1918 during a period of military leave), can be read as an intellectual response to this crisis. Its style, inspired by Spinoza, consists of terse, declarative statements, many of which seem elliptical or even mystical in nature. The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus presents a vision of the world where language and logic are central but also deeply limited in their ability to capture the fullness of existence.

In the 1920s and 1930s, a group of philosophers and scientists known as the Vienna Circle (including figures like Moritz Schlick and Rudolf Carnap) proposed the philosophy of logical empiricism, inspired by David Hume. According to this school of thought, the only meaningful statements were those that were logically or empirically verifiable. A.J. Ayer later popularized these ideas through his book, Language, Truth, and Logic (1936), while Karl Popper, a famous epistemologist, went on to develop an alternative approach. Unlike the Vienna Circle’s emphasis on verification based on empirical proof, Popper advanced a more rigorous and open-ended approach in the idea of falsifiability, where scientific hypotheses could be tested by their capacity to be falsified. Popper famously rejected Freudian psychoanalysis on the grounds that it was not falsifiable, therefore rendering it unscientific.

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Wittgenstein’s early work, with its focus on the limits of language and logic, was sometimes associated with the Vienna Circle’s approach, but Wittgenstein’s own philosophy was not aligned with their empiricist agenda, which not only rejected the metaphysical (or the religious) but also ethics and aesthetics. For Wittgenstein, the Vienna Circle’s verificationist approach was too rigid and missed the point of his philosophy. He did not intend to create a system or a theory. Instead, he viewed his work as a kind of “language therapy” aimed at dissolving philosophical problems rather than solving them.

This is evident in the last sentence of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which sounds strikingly similar to ideas found in Taoism, particularly the Tao Te Ching:

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

Many Wittgenstein scholars debate the extent to which his thought had evolved between the earlier and later works, particularly the Philosophical Investigations (1953). While some argue that a common thread runs through both sets of works, others point to a fundamental shift in his approach. What is clear is that Wittgenstein became increasingly disillusioned with the “system-building” tendencies of modern Western philosophy, from Descartes to Kant. He rejected the idea of philosophy as an academic discipline focused on theoretical systems and instead emphasized that philosophical problems were primarily issues of language (in academic nomenclature, Wittgenstein’s thought is called “ordinary language philosophy”).

Wittgenstein—who witnessed the demise of the “imperial idea” in the name of local identities mostly centered around language and the different “system-building” competing modernist ideologies—thus considered the seemingly endless potentialities of language itself, i.e., the notion that the limits of language are the limits of the world, as resonating with Eastern thought, where language is viewed as simultaneously being both a builder and destroyer of reality.

His criticism of philosophy as an analytical vampire extends beyond Schopenhauer’s criticism of Hegel as “academism” or other similar criticisms. It is a complete and total refusal of philosophy understood in a Western context as being a rationalist theoretical totalitarianism. Unlike other comparable critics, such as Nietzsche, Bergson, or Ludwig Klages, it doesn’t end up as a sort of “vitalism” either, via an emphasis of the body over the reason which is just a reversal of an identical rationalist epistemological error.

The notion of philosophy as more than just a dry academic discipline but, rather, as a lived, experiential therapy, has gained increasing support in recent decades. This shift is largely due to the work of Pierre Hadot in France, particularly his studies of neo-Platonism; and Peter Kingsley in the United Kingdom, who focused on pre-Socratic Greek thought.

Wittgenstein’s later philosophy certainly carries with it a somewhat “religious tone.” While it isn’t “theistic” in the traditional sense, it’s not surprising that Norman Malcolm, one of his most influential students, ultimately became a prominent Christian theologian and played a key role in reviving scholastic arguments for the existence of God.

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