David Pinsent

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David Hume Pinsent (born May 24, 1891 in Edgbaston ( Birmingham ), † May 8, 1918 in Farnborough , England ) was a friend, lover and collaborator of the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein . Wittgenstein described him as his first and only friend.

biography

As the eldest of three children of the lawyer Hume Chancellor Pinsent and his wife Ellen Frances, b. Parker received Pinsent, like his two brothers, an education at Edinburgh Academy and at Amersham Hall in Reading , a prestigious - albeit nonconformist - college that prepared for entry to university. Pinsent's maternal great-grandfather was a nephew of the philosopher David Hume . Pinsent's maternal ancestors included one of the "Lancashire witches" from the woods of Bowland , and the maternal grandfather was a Protestant minister in Claxby , Lincolnshire with thirteen children. The parents met at the Men and Women's Club of Karl Pearson, famous for his unorthodox views, in Claxby, and married in 1888. In addition to his work as a lawyer, the father was a councilor and treasurer of the University of Birmingham . Pinsent's mother published four novels in the early years of her marriage. She campaigned against abuses in the education of the mentally disabled and served in the secretariat of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children . On behalf of the Royal Commission on the Care and Control of the Feeble-Minded , she visited the United States to visit mental hospitals and housing estates for the mentally handicapped. The reformulation of the Mental Deficiency Act 1913 was the result of her work, and in 1911 Ellen Pinsent was elected to the Birmingham City Council.

David Pinsent received a wide range of training: in addition to tennis, skiing and sailing lessons, piano lessons and numerous excursions and trips to France, Germany and Switzerland enriched the teenager's knowledge. Pinsent studied mathematics at Cambridge University with an excellent scholarship ( Senior Wrangler degree ) , where his friend, the physicist and later Nobel Prize winner George Paget Thomson, described him as "the brightest head of my class" :

Not only was David the most brilliant young man in my class, he was also one of the most brilliant minds I have ever met. Rather strange in his appearance, of graceful stature and with his very large head, he exuded a remarkable charm and quickly made friends with everyone, not just intellectuals. He was my closest friend at the Trinity and we went for walks together. In essence, he was a pure mathematician with a penchant for philosophy, and he was friends with Wittgenstein. During the long holidays they went on a trip to Iceland and on another trip to Norway. He opened my eyes to the possibilities of philosophy, of which I had only naive ideas until then. He was averse to what he called plumbing, by which he meant any kind of practical manual work that did not interest him. But since he was open to everything new, the realm of plumbing soon lost its horrors

During his studies he was a member of the University Musical Club and the Union Society , the Society for Eugenics and, for a short time, the Fabian Society and developed a weakness for philosophy - so u. a. during visits weekly squashes of Bertrand Russell and meetings of Cambridge Heretics Society and the association he co-founded the Sophists . In contrast to Wittgenstein, who reluctantly became "Apostle" of the Apostle Society ( Coversazione Society ), Pinsent did not succeed in becoming the so-called embryo or candidate of this society.

Pinsent remained interested in music during his studies and regularly attended concerts in London, with a particular passion for Beethoven . Pinsent's brother Richard died in a trench in France in 1915; a cousin was shot down in an air battle over the front a few weeks later. David Pinsent also studied law in Birmingham for a year, after which he first worked for his uncle, the Supreme Court judge, to take legal exams. He later worked in the Ministry of Supplies and Armaments, which was supposed to increase the production of machine guns for the front. After the death of his brother and cousin, Pinsent tried again but unsuccessfully to be admitted to the military as a volunteer. He then tried his hand at a machine operator in a Birmingham ammunition factory, from where he was relocated to the Royal Air Forces Factory in Farnborough (Hampshire) in 1916 to manufacture fork universal joints under difficult conditions . After his friend George Thomson had convinced him to take part in his aerodynamic research as a mathematician, he had found a more grateful task. During his first flight, he became engaged to the daughter of a frigate captain from Oxford, a relationship that lasted only a short time. His short stature proved to be an advantage in the small aircraft with which aerodynamic experiments - u. a. to improve the compass - were undertaken. The circle of acquaintances at this time also included the later Nobel Prize winners Francis William Aston , Geoffrey Ingram Taylor , FA Lindemann and ED Adrian . On May 8, 1918, David Pinsent had a fatal crash in Farnborough.

In Cambridge, Pinsent Wittgenstein (2 years older) made himself available as a test subject for his psychological experiments on the rhythm of language and music. The collaboration led to holidays together in Iceland and Norway and an intense homoerotic relationship.

Wittgenstein dedicated his first work Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus to his memory.

Pinsent's diary (1912–1914) mentions the travels and the time together with Wittgenstein.

Individual evidence

  1. a b c Loners: The Life Path of Unusual Children ("loner: The life path of unusual children"), Sula Wolff, 1995, page 161 of 192, Google Books Weblink: Books-Google-161 .
  2. Laurence Goldstein: Clear and Queer Thinking . Rowman & Littlefield, 1999, ISBN 0847695468 , p. 179.
  3. Max Kölbel: Wittgenstein's Lasting Significance . Routledge, 2004, ISBN 0415305179 , p. 150.
  4. ^ A b David Hume Pinsent: Journey with Wittgenstein to the north. Diary excerpts, letters. , folio-Verlag, Vienna, Bozen, in German 1994, quoted in the foreword by Anne Pinsent Keynes with the permission of Sir John Thomson, GCMG
  5. Axel Schock and Karen-Susan Fessel: OUT! - 800 famous lesbians, gays and bisexuals , Querverlag, Berlin 2004, ISBN 3-89656-111-1
  6. ^ Peter Louis Galison, Roland, Alex: Atmospheric Flight in the Twentieth Century . Springer, 2000, ISBN 0792360370 , p. 360

literature

  • Justus Noll: Ludwig Wittgenstein and David Pinsent. The other love of the philosophers . Rowohlt, Berlin 1998. ISBN 3871343234 .

Web links