tion. Throughout his life Wittgenstein succeeded in finding groups of this sort
and making whatever iconoclastic move would bring him into the center of
attention.
Back in Vienna, Wittgenstein soon was playing his favorites, coyly making
himself available to those who paid sufficient deference while blackballing
others from his presence (Coffa, 1991: 241, 404–405). The split in the Vienna
Circle dates from Wittgenstein’s meetings with it. Structurally, the Vienna
Circle was responsible for Wittgenstein’s later philosophical position. As Car-
nap, Wittgenstein’s major local rival for attention, explored the problem space
of formalist semantic systems, Wittgenstein now threw himself into showing
the impossibility of any such system.
The Wittgenstein personality cult is the structural counterpart to the way
his reputation was formed, and to his style of expression. His whole published
output during his lifetime consisted in the Tractatus (together with a 1929
paper which he soon repudiated); all other knowledge of his work came from
word of mouth, a mode of transmission which made those who had privileged
access to him into charisma-bearing disciples. His style of delivery is uncon-
strained by the canons of academic publishing: peremptorily assertive, typically
without supporting arguments, but with an aphoristic flair and a literary polish
that make his manuscripts the philosophical equivalent of poetry. Wittgenstein
played his advantages into an unsurpassed level of intellectual independence.
Independently wealthy (like Russell and Moore) and socially well connected,
from a family which belonged to the cultivated elite within the Viennese upper
class, he moved where he wanted and did whatever he was interested in; he
was easily accepted among his counterparts in England, and just as easily could
throw them off to seek escape in the mountains of Norway or a monastery in
the Alps.^34 His cultural and social credentials gained him rapid entrée, while
his tone of passionate dedication—giving himself over to the emotional energy
of making maximal impact on the attention space—lent his arrogance and
bad manners the recognizable excuse of being interpreted as unique genius.
Wittgenstein’s personality was his network position. He was the one individual
who had been in all the analytical camps; and his creative shifts to new
philosophies, which came at the moments when he changed physical location,
came across as his extreme individualism. He was not merely personally
idiosyncratic and egocentric; he had found the slot available for the boundary
breaker, for the rearranger of factions, and there is room for only one such
person to be successful in the attention space.
Wittgenstein became great because the network cores on which he fed were
structurally deep and in the midst of realignment. Several generations of
debates within the mathematical network had raised the reflexive recognition
of meta-levels and the creative role of formal symbolism. When these issues
736 •^ Intellectual Communities: Western Paths