ABSTRACT

This chapter explores the imaginative work of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and the roots of his monumental Tractatus. Wittgenstein would need help from the spring weather and the rural ambience, for inspiration. The Lutheran, farmer-craft culture in Norway, combined with the dramatic, beautiful landscape, seemed to have had a strong effect on him. He was in Brand country. The eponymous hero, Daniel Deronda, is a ward, without any knowledge of his biological ancestry, reared as a perfect gentleman in a titled English family. Before his discovery of his Jewish ancestry, Deronda attended Eton, and then Cambridge where he applied himself vigorously to the study of higher mathematics. David must have become aware of the strange personal coincidence about George Eliot's Daniel Deronda and aware of Ludwig's Jewish background. Some of the ideas were worked out when Ludwig was staying with the Pinsents in Birmingham.