Number of Legal Go Positions.
Matt Noonan
and his friend for the idea!), I've written a C
program which finds an accurate estimate for the
number of legal go positions.
First, an array c is created which holds the
number of possible positions that can be created
from N stones. This is equal to
_
/ N
\_ * 2
361 N
(if the formatting on that is strange, try a fixed
font)
or
(361!/((361-N)!*(N!))*(2^N)
Then, x samples are made for each case. For
example, if x=100 and N=25, 100 boards are created
with 25 randomly placed stones on each. These
boards are evaluated, and the average number of
legal boards/stone count is placed into another
array p (probability that a position with n stones
is legal).
The number of legal go positions is thus the sum
of [(p sub N) * (c sub N)], with N from 0 to 361.
A sample size of 100 gave the following estimate:
1.822209 x 10^170 legal positions
In other words, approximately 1.0467% of all 3^361
possible positions are legal in go.
If anybody wants the source code, I'd be glad to
post it. Maybe somebody with more processing
power can get a better estimate.. a sample of 100
took about ten minutes on my 166Mhz Pentium.
Peace,
Matt
Matt Noonan
arbitrary size.
Board Size | Samples | Legal
Positions | Legal/Total Percent
--------------+-----------+--------------------------+----------------------
9x9 | 1000 | 1.0784 x
10^38 | 24.32%
13x13 | 500 | 3.6219 x
10^79 | 8.42%
19x19 | 100 | 1.8222 x
10^170 | 1.05%
Peace,
Matt
Eric Osman
To check your program, how about running
it on some very small boards, such as 1x4 or 2x2,
so you can manually COUNT how many legal
positions there are and hence check whether your
program gets the right answer.
/Eric
Matt Noonan
C:\WINDOWS\DESKTOP>pest 1000 2
[1] 8.00e+00 of 8.00e+00 (100.00%)
[2] 2.40e+01 of 2.40e+01 (100.00%)
[3] 2.08e+01 of 3.20e+01 (65.00%)
[4] 0.00e+00 of 1.60e+01 (0.00%)
estimated number of 2x2 go positions:
5.380000e+01 legal positions
8.100000e+01 total positions
(66.4198% legal)
run time: 0 seconds
C:\WINDOWS\DESKTOP>
All 0 stone, 1 stone and 2 stone positions are indeed legal on a 2x2 board, and
no 4 stone positions are legal. As for three stone positions.. according to
pest, there should be 32:
XX X0 OX OO XX XO OX OO
X. X. X. X. O. O. O. O.
Here are eight positions. Multiply by four for rotations gives 32, as
predicted. Two sets of four (the third and the sixth) are illegal, so there are
eight illegal positions and 24 legal positions (compared to pest's estimate of
21). There are a total of 24 illegal positions on a 2x2 board, so the actual
percent of legal positions is about 70%.
I ran pest a few more times, and it tended to hover between 66% and 71%, even
with samples sizes as small as one hundred. I also checked the output to see
that all illegal positions were being counted as such.. they are.
Peace,
Matt
Matt Noonan
>
> Eric Osman wrote:
> >
> > To check your program, how about running
> > it on some very small boards, such as 1x4 or 2x2,
> > so you can manually COUNT how many legal
> > positions there are and hence check whether your
> > program gets the right answer.
>
> with samples sizes as small as one hundred. I also checked the output to see
> that all illegal positions were being counted as such.. they are.
You should have checked more closely, self!
The fact that pest was getting so close to 1/3 for the number of illegal 2x2
3-stone positions tipped me off.. seems that I accidentally forgot to change the
bit of the program that alternates between white and black into randomly picking
between white and black, as it should. Oops. New run on a 2x2 board gets a
very good answer, even with a small sample size:
C:\WINDOWS\DESKTOP>pest 100 2
[1] 8.00e+00 of 8.00e+00 (100.00%)
[2] 2.40e+01 of 2.40e+01 (100.00%)
[3] 2.59e+01 of 3.20e+01 (81.00%)
[4] 0.00e+00 of 1.60e+01 (0.00%)
estimated number of 2x2 go positions:
5.892000e+01 legal positions
8.100000e+01 total positions
(72.7407% legal)
run time: 0 seconds
A sample size of 1024 gets it down to within 1% of the correct answer..
I'll re-run on 9x9, 13x13 and 19x19 spaces and see what comes of it..
Peace,
Matt
John Tromp
>Matt Noonan wrote:
>>
>> Eric Osman wrote:
>> >
>> > To check your program, how about running
>> > it on some very small boards, such as 1x4 or 2x2,
>> > so you can manually COUNT how many legal
>> > positions there are and hence check whether your
>> > program gets the right answer.
my program gives the following counts:
1x1: 1 legal, 2 illegal, prob 0.333333
2x2: 57 legal, 24 illegal, prob 0.703704
3x3: 12675 legal, 7008 illegal, prob 0.643957
4x4: 24318165 legal, 18728556 illegal, prob 0.564925
4x5: 1840058693 legal, 1646725708 illegal, prob 0.527724
anything larger requires approximation:
9x9: prob 0.235
13x13: prob 0.087
19x19: prob 0.012
I'm sure the last digit is off by at most 1...
regards,
%!PS % -John Tromp (http://www.cwi.nl/~tromp/)
42 42 scale 7 9 translate .07 setlinewidth .5 setgray/c{arc clip fill
setgray}def 1 0 0 42 1 0 c 0 1 1{0 3 3 90 270 arc 0 0 6 0 -3 3 90 270
arcn 270 90 c -2 2 4{-6 moveto 0 12 rlineto}for -5 2 5{-3 exch moveto
9 0 rlineto}for stroke 0 0 3 1 1 0 c 180 rotate initclip}for showpage
Matt Noonan
>
> Matt Noonan <me...@hampshire.edu> writes:
>
> >Matt Noonan wrote:
> >>
> >> Eric Osman wrote:
> >> >
> >> > To check your program, how about running
> >> > it on some very small boards, such as 1x4 or 2x2,
> >> > so you can manually COUNT how many legal
> >> > positions there are and hence check whether your
> >> > program gets the right answer.
>
> my program gives the following counts:
> 1x1: 1 legal, 2 illegal, prob 0.333333
> 2x2: 57 legal, 24 illegal, prob 0.703704
> 3x3: 12675 legal, 7008 illegal, prob 0.643957
> 4x4: 24318165 legal, 18728556 illegal, prob 0.564925
> 4x5: 1840058693 legal, 1646725708 illegal, prob 0.527724
>
> anything larger requires approximation:
> 9x9: prob 0.235
> 13x13: prob 0.087
> 19x19: prob 0.012
Yeah, these are the same figures I was geting, to two significant digits..
Peace,
Matt
jum...@my-deja.com
Source: The New Republic, May 19, 1986 v194 p37(5).
Title: Wittgenstein._(book reviews)
Author: David Pears
People: Ayer, A.J.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig - Criticism, interpretation, etc.
Full Text COPYRIGHT The New Republic Inc. 1986
THE MYSTERIES OF MEANING Philosophers are always explaining
Wittgenstein to one another and, they hope, to the world at large. In
fact, Wittgenstein enjoys a vogue among people who do not count
philosophy among their accomplishments. No doubt this is because he
develops his ideas without the stiffening of technical terminology.
But there is also another, underlying reason: his philosophy is
profoundly antitheoretical. His vivid, homely style is the natural
expression of its revolutionary spirit. Its enemies are philosophical
theorists who imitate the language of science but build their systems
in the air. Wittgenstein's strategy is always to bring that kind of
thinking down to earth by putting it into plain language and then
asking how the plain language is used in real life.
This method can be disappointing at first. As Wittgenstein himself
observed, "It seems only to destroy everything that is interesting.
(As it were, all the buildings, leaving behind only stones and
rubble.)" But the means are justified by the end, which is
intellectual liberation. Wittgenstein goes on to say that "what we
are destroying is nothing but houses of cards and we are clearing the
ground of language on which they stand." The language is ordinary, and
the high constructions put on it by philosophers are tested against
its actual use. The touch-stone is human life and the vocalizations
that help it on its way.
The widespread interest in Wittgenstein's philosophy has another,
connected cause: the special source of his opposition to philosophical
theorizing. What he is really against is the dominance of science.
Science gives us a technology that alienates us from the real world
and then, leaving nothing to chance, perverts our understanding of the
working of our own minds. Freud's theory, for example, was far too
mechanistic, and the prevailing superstition of our age is belief in
neat, isolated, deterministic systems. Or so Wittgenstein maintained.
In spite of his wide appeal, however, Wittgenstein is really a
philosopher's philosopher. This does not mean that his
nonphilosophical readers get him wrong. The aspects of his work that
attrack them are neither illusory nor superficial, but they are not
enough to explain what is really going on.
What I have described so far is Wittgenstein's later philosophy, the
final position into which he worked his way only gradually. His first
book, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, was quite different in
character. It offered a theory of language that was impressively
simple and ruthlessly uncompromising in its restriction of literal
meaning to ordinary factual statements and the propositions of
science. Everything else, including the theory itself, was relegated
to a limbo. The style, too, was very different--oracular but
curiously strangled, as if to suit ideas that could not really be
expressed in the dominant language.
There is something very strange about conceding literal meaning only
to factual discourse. (Nowadays the idea excites passionate interest
only in a few scientists working on its advancing frontiers.) Is it
really possible to consign everything that gives most of our lives
their significance to literal meaninglessness? True, Wittgenstein was
not totally rejecting the denizens of the limbo, but only pointing out
that they suffered from a semantic impediment. Homer's ghosts could
not speak without first drinking blood, whereas Wittgenstein's idea
was that while we can call up the disqualified messages from the limbo
without any special preparation, we cannot, whatever we do, give them
literal meaning.
A theory of language that dismissed so many things that mean so much
to us could not be a stable position. It is, of course, not so far
out as positivism, but still too close to it for comfort. The
positivists of the Vienna Circle felt enough affinity with the
Tractatus to adopt it as the text of their school. So when
Wittgenstein moved into his second position--when he abjured all
philosophical theorizing--he was not merely reacting in a general way
against traditional philosophy. He was also reacting against his own
earlier theory of meaning, because it was too narrow and
discriminating. It would be better, he had come to think, to take
language as it is and to respect all its different ways of achieving
meaning. His later philosophy was a great leveler.
A.J. Ayer and J.N. Findlay tell this story in different ways. Ayer's
book is an instructive guided tour that can be enjoyed in a day
without much previous knowledge of philosophy. The tone is brisk and
often dismissive. Points are picked out of Wittgenstein's writings,
developed briefly, and usually rejected. There are occasional stops
to assess the more important ideas, but the average pace is impressive
and hardly leaves us time to get any sense of the difficulty of
Wittgenstein's problems or his reasons for tackling them in the way
that he did. And as we listen, the list of Wittgenstein's failures
gets longer and longer. Still, we are told at the end that what we
have seen is the work of a philosopher second only to Russell in this
century.
Findlay's book is a more leisurely progress through the same
territory. His style is elaborate and well suited to the
phenomenological standpoint from which he evaluates Wittgenstein's
work. Husserl sets the standard; what we are given is an elegant
juxtaposition of two very different ways of doing philosophy. But it
is not so easy as Findlay supposes to tell whether Wittgenstein should
be measured against Husserl or Husserl against Wittgenstein. Those who
get to this point without any previous knowledge of the subject may
well feel doubts about what is going on. Still, the assessment
proceeds smoothly and, not surprisingly, it ends badly for
Wittgenstein. Findlay's final verdict is that Wittgenstein "has
offered us no adequate philosophy of language, nor of logic or
mathematics, nor of mind and its conscious experiences nor of anything
absolute and transcendent." Still, we were told at the beginning that
he "was a systematic philosopher of immense consequence and
originality."
A reviewer of books about Wittgenstein must expect to encounter
paradoxes, but it really is remarkable that Ayer makes Wittgenstein
fail so many tests before allowing him to pass the whole examination
with flying colors, and that Findlay makes him fail the whole
examination before conceding his great potential. (If only he had
worked within the main tradition of Western philosophy instead of
trying to break it!) It is, of course, a relief not to find the sort
of complete identification with Wittgenstein that often overtakes
those who write about him. Findlay says that his book is "highly
critical," which is true, and Ayer confesses that his "admiration
falls short of idolatry," which is an understatement. It is possible,
however, to distance oneself too far from the center of Wittgenstein's
interests.
BUT FIRST, where exactly did he stand? Consider an example. It is
chracteristic of philosophical inquiries that their scope tends to be
total. Can the human mind grasp anything at all without altering it in
the act of grasping it? Have we any notion, then, of what things are
like before we make contact with them? These questions were originally
asked about the use of our senses to perceive the world around us, but
they are easily transferred to our use of language to describe that
world. Perhaps the divisions that our vocabulary makes between one
kind of thing and another are really alien to the true natures of
those things. Maybe the general forms in which we cast our
descriptions of the world are really a kind of distorting lens. A
cartographer who puts the earth's pattern of land and sea onto a flat
plane has to choose a map projection and, whichever one he chooses, he
cannot honestly say that is how things really and objectively are. is
it not the same with language?
Wittgenstein placed these questions at the center of philosophy, and
the history of the subject bears him out. His response to them was
never direct. It never seemed to him that he had to choose between
saying, "No, we cannot tell what things are really like" and saying,
"Yes, we can, because fortunately there is a perfect match between our
language and their nature." Instead, he questioned the legitimacy of
the questions themselves. He concluded that we have no conceivable
way of answering them.
We are by now so used to hearing this sort of thing from philosophers
that we can easily underestimate it. Why should we not go on
answering the central questions of philosophy in the traditional way?
It is a bit like bicycling: you fall off if you pause to reflect on
what you are doing and it is best to keep on pedaling. Yet
Wittgenstein's point cannot be dismissed in this easy way. For his
radical objection is that there is no conceivable way of getting
between language and the world and finding out whether there is a
general fit between them or a general misfit. You can ask, of course,
whether a particular factual sentences is true or false, because
factual language has its own rules for answering such a question.
What you cannot do is to ask whether the whole system of factual
language is, in some further way, a good match with the totality of
facts with which it is concerned. That is a question that you have no
conceivable resources for answering.
Wittgenstein rejects everything "absolute and transcendent," but his
position must not be confused with subjectivism or conventionalism.
He is not saying that our choice of a vocabulary or our preferences
for certain forms of description are arbitrary, and that as a result
our language may, for all we know, act as a distorting lens. He is
rejecting the way the question is framed; instead of checking "Yes" or
"No," he scores out the whole box.
FINDLAY IS well aware of the radical character of Wittgenstein's
critique of traditional philosophy, but he underestimates the threat
that it poses. This is because he is ready to be impressed by
systematic arguments for Wittgenstein's position, but not by the
arguments that Wittgenstein himself uses in support of it. Or rather,
not by the arguments that he uses in his later writings: for in the
Tractatus he did argue for it systematically--too systematically, as
he came to think later, when he abandoned all philosophical
theorizing. So not surprisingly, Findlay is impressed by the
Tractatus, saying that "nothing that Wittgenstein later wrote can bear
comparison with it." He fails to see, however, that Wittgenstein is
still arguing for the same position in his second book, Philosophical
Investigations. True, he uses arguments of a very different kind, but
why not? He had come to think that systematic arguments were ruled out
by his radical objections to traditional philosophy. The dice would
really have been loaded against him if he were obliged to base those
very objections on systematic arguments, as Findlay requires.
Let us go back to Wittgenstein's central group of problems and take a
closer look at the way in which he deals with them--which will clarify
Findlay's misjudgment of Wittgenstein's method. What exactly are the
points he makes and why do people miss them? Consider the question of
whether our words divide one kind of thing from another along lines
that correspond to the real differences between them. How, for
example, does this question apply to colors? We can hardly mean to ask
whether they are classified in a more realistic way by modern English
or classical Greek. It is too obvious that different color
vocabularies simply operate in different ways, each relying on its own
rules. True, one might be better than another for a particular
purpose, but we could not express its superiority by saying that it
picked out the real differences between colors, because the inferior
vocabulary would pick out real differences too--different differences,
of course, but equally recognizable ones. How else could the inferior
vocabulary be used consistently? All that we can legitimately say is
that one classification may be better than another for a particular
purpose.
We seem to have lost the point of the question. But perhaps it did
not really have a point for us to lose. That, at any rate, was
Wittgenstein's view. He believed that anxiety about the objectivity
of the distinctions enshrined in our vocabulary tends to produce an
illusion: we treat the differences marked by our words as differences
that force our hands and make it impossible for us not to mark them.
It goes without saying that they were there before we arrived on the
scene, waiting to invite us to acknowledge them. The illusion begins
when we suppose that they gave us no option and that we just had to
acknowledge them.
Colors are a simple example, but the illusion is profound. Its name,
in fact, is Platonism. It is as if someone sat in a plane watching
its shadow race over the ground below and imagined that the movement
of the shadow dictated the movement of the plane. That, of course,
would be absurd, but only because it is a misunderstanding that does
not come naturally to us. Platonism, on the other hand, does come
naturally to us, as anyone can discover from the history of Western
thought. It is for this reason that Wittgenstein does not argue
against it in the traditional, systematic way.
Instead, he encourages it to grow wherever it will in all its
exuberant variety of forms and then, having held his hand for long
enough, he cuts them back one by one. He compares this method to
psychotherapy, because it requires the patient to understand not only
where he went wrong, but also why. it is evidently a method that will
not satisfy anyone who assumes that philosophy ought to be done in the
old systematic way.
THERE IS also a second reason for the underestimation of
Wittgenstein's later work. He sometimes seems to help himself to the
assumption that his adversaries are mistaken, so that all he needs to
do is explain how they came to make their mistakes. But in fact that
is not what is going on. He does not just assume that his adversaries
are mistaken: he uses an impressive group of arguments to prove that
they are. But at this point the exegesis of his later philosophy
becomes notoriously difficult. These arguments have provoked endless
discussion, and there is still no agreement about their precise force.
Most commentators maintain that he uses a single "Private Language
Argument," but then they discover that they cannot agree about its
identification. Some claim that it is to be found at one point in
Philosophical Investigations, while others locate it at a different
point in the text. It is like the quest for the True Cross (except
that the assumption of uniqueness was justified in that case).
This is one of the topics on which Ayer dwells at length, but like
Findlay and many other commentators, he does not make enough of its
place in Wittgenstein's general campaign against Platonism. So it may
be helpful to begin by establishing that connection. Let us go back
to the possibility that our vocabulary might fail to capture the real
differences between things. Two ideas were seen to underlie this
suggestion. One was the unexceptionable idea that the differences
marked by our vocabulary were already there before we picked them out.
The other was the questionable idea that of all the possible
preexisting differences, the real ones were the ones that we had to
acknowledge because they forced our hands and made it impossible for
us not to acknowledge them.
The second idea, the questionable one, gives us a Platonic picture of
the book of rules for any part of our vocabulary. For example, the
difference between red and green was supposed to force itself on us,
so taht we could not help introducing names for them, each name
governed by a rule reflecting the nature of the color. Our linguistic
reactions had to be what, in fact, they are, and anyone following
either of the two rules found himself pulled along a kind of monorail,
fixed in advance and stretching on to infinity. Nobody ever exercised
any choice at any point in his use of these color words or in his use
of any other part of our descriptive vocabulary.
This idea is a manifestation of Platonism, and Wittgenstein criticized
it in a way that was first analyzed by Saul Kripke. Previous
commentators had not entirely overlooked this part of Philosophical
Investigations, but they did not pay much attention to it until Kripke
demonstrated its importance. Unfortunately, he failed to see that
Wittgenstein's argument is reductive; its point is that Platonism
leads to an absurdity that is not inherent in language itself.
========================================================
Source: The New Republic, May 19, 1986 v194 p37(5).
Title: Wittgenstein: a critique._(book reviews)
Author: David Pears
People: Findlay, J.N.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig - Philosophy
Full Text COPYRIGHT The New Republic Inc. 1986
THE MYSTERIES OF MEANING
WITTGENSTEIN'S reductive argument is that language would seize up if
the meanings of words were tied to their future correct uses and then
those uses were pictured as fixed rails stretching to infinity. This
Platonic theory would make language seize up, because it would take a
speaker's mental equipment and tie it by definition to the imagined
rails of his future correct utterances--a piece of fantasy inspired by
anxiety, because in fact we are equipped by training in the use of our
language and have to use our equipment as best we can. It is as if
someone saw a machine as a symbol of its own ideal performance,
instead of seeing it as a contraption that might not work and so might
fail to achieve its ideal performance, or even as a contraption that
might not have had an ideal performance assigned to it.
It is, of course, true that a speaker's mental equipment usually makes
it overwhelmingly natural for him to proceed in the way he does, but
it does not make it inevitable. In any case, the standard of correct
procedure is partly fixed by the way in which he finds it natural to
proceed, and more fully and firmly fixed by the way in which the whole
community of speakers finds it natural to proceed. These speakers are
more like drivers of the machine that lays the rails.
Ayer dismisses this account of language too easily, no doubt because
he is not satisfied with Kripke's version of it. It would have
appealed to Rousseau, because it locates the authority of a rule in
the attitudes of its followers, and even makes what counts as
obedience to it depend on what they find it natural to do when they
are obeying it. They vote with their feet on its import. This is a
liberating theory, because it substitutes real but incomplete guidance
for the complete but unreal guidance offered by Platonism.
In the 1950s, after the publication of Philosophical Investigations,
insufficient attention was paid to this argument because it was
eclipsed by another, related argument that immediately follows it in
the text: the argument hailed at the time as "Wittgenstein's Private
Language Argument." This name was never used by him, and it is a waste
of time to look for the true "Private Language Argument." The
interesting question is about the structure of the second argument and
its relation to the structure of the first one.
The conclusion of this second argument was that it would be impossible
for anyone to develop a language solely for recording his own
sensations, if his sensations were not connected in any regular way
with anything in the external world. That is a very strong condition;
it excludes any use of material samples for calibrating the speaker's
reactions to his sensations and any natural response to a sensation,
like a groan of pain. But even then it is not entirely obvious why
Wittgenstein did not allow that a person might develop such a language
entirely for his own mental use.
THE REASON given by him is that in such a case there would be no
difference between applying a word to a sensation correctly and
applying it incorrectly. Of course, the speaker might know that he was
trying to use it correctly, and it might seem to him that he actually
was using it correctly. But Wittgenstein argued taht these inner
resources would not be enough. The only way to make it look as if
they would be enough would be to tie the standard of correctness by
definition to the speaker's intentions and impressions of success.
But, Wittgenstein concludes, that would make language seize up again.
Ayer rejects this argument on the ground that whatever checks the
speaker's recognitional capacities required could be carried out on
the phenomenal level just as well as on the physical level.
Thus Wittgenstein's two arguments are related to one another in an
interesting way. Each of them draws out the implications of a certain
philosophical theory, and then tries to show that it would make
language impossible. The first argument is directed against
Platonism, the second against Russell's theory that a person could set
up a sensation language for himself completely independent of anything
in the external world. Both arguments assume that there must be a
certain tension between language and the world, a sort of
give-and-take that is most conspicuous when someone is learning the
use of a word.
Wittgenstein's idea is that this tension would collapse if either the
correct use of a word were tied by definition to its user's intentions
and impressions of success, or its user's mental equipment were tied
by definition to its future correct applications, pictured as already
fixed. The two ends of the transaction, mind and world, must maintain
a certain independence from one another. If they lose their
independence because they are connected by definition, then, though a
"private linguist" might seem to have learned a language and to be
speaking it, that would be an illusion. There would have been nothing
for him to learn. He would not really be doing anything. Of course,
in real life, when we find that we cannot learn a language, that will
be because it is too difficult for us. The philosophy that
Wittgenstein opposed reduced the difficulty to zero and, with it, the
achievement.
==========================================================
Source: Benet's Reader's Encyclopedia, Edition 3, 1987 p1072AA.
Title: Wittgenstein, Ludwig.(Reference Source)
Subjects: Philosophers - Biography
People: Wittgenstein, Ludwig - Biography
Full Text COPYRIGHT 1987 HarperCollins Publishers
Wittgenstein, Ludwig
(1889--1951) Austrian philosopher and professor at Cambridge
University. In his seminal books Tractatus Logico -Philosophicus
(1922) and Philosophical Investigations (1953), Wittgenstein proposed
a critical method of linguistic analysis as the solution to most
philosophic problems, which were the result, he argued, not of
difficulty or inadequate knowledge but of the systematic misuse of
language by philosophers. "Philosophy, " he said, "is a battle against
the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language." His work
was central to the development of logical positivism.
================================================================
Source: The Economist, Aug 13, 1988 v308 n7563 p76(1).
Title: Wittgenstein: A Life, Young Ludwig 1889-1921.
Subjects: Books - Reviews
People: McGuinness, Brian
Full Text COPYRIGHT Economist Newspaper Ltd. (England) 1988
IF WITTGENSTEIN had been called Mueller, Schmidt or Braun, he would
not be a coffee-table name today. But his surname jangles with the
promise of learned Teutonic depth, so it has become a byword for
philosophy among people who do not have the faintest idea what he said
about anything. At least Einstein is widely known to have said that
something or other was relative to something else.
Wittgenstein's early work was largely technical; and his later work,
though untechnical, gave answers to questions that only professional
philosophers ask. Reading Wittgenstein's later writings is, for a
nonphilosopher, like reading Plato's dialogues with everything except
Socrates's replies crossed out. There has, until now, been no proper
biography, but the explanation is mundane. Brian McGuinness, an Oxford
don who was given access to Wittgenstein's papers, is a slow worker.
Wittgenstein was the fifth son of one of the most powerful
industrialists in Austria. Three other sons committed suicide, and the
fourth was the pianist for whom Ravel wrote his "Concerto for the Left
Hand". Deep cultivation-especially musical-and great wealth made the
family home one of the pre-eminent salons of turn-of-the-century
Vienna. Ludwig went to school in Linz (Hitler was a fellow pupil),
studied engineering at Manchester, then philosophy at Cambridge,
fought in the first world war, gave away his inheritance, taught as a
village schoolmaster in Austria, and ended up teaching philosophy back
in Cambridge.
Guilt and self hatred explain many of his restless changes of career,
his desire for danger at the front, and (partly) his financial
suicide. His love of machinery led to engineering, which, in an
intellectual mind, led on to an interest in mathematics. Mathematics,
like any machine, had to be disassembled to see how it worked. Hence
his studies with Bertrand Russell at Cambridge on the foundations of
mathematics-a hair's breadth away from philosophy.
Almost as soon as he met him, Russell (then 40) came to think of the
23-year-old Wittgenstein as the man who should take over his life's
work. Perhaps the sharpest picture of Wittgentein in this book is to
be found in the account of his meetings with Wittgenstein that Russell
furnished, especially in his letters to Lady Ottoline Morrell. One can
almost hear Wittgenstein pacing in Russell's rooms, highly agitated by
some problem of logic, or life, or both.
Cambridge 1911-13 takes up nearly a third of this book. It is a pity
that the first world war takes up another fifth. Mr McGuinness's
meticulous march through military paperwork and dull logistics will be
heavy going for all but the most dedicated army buff. He has not dared
to leave anything out-except the latter half of Wittgenstein's life.
That will be recorded in a second volume. Of Wittgenstein-and perhaps
also Mr McGuinness--the best is yet to come.
===============================================================
Source: The Nation, Jan 30, 1989 v248 n4 p137(4).
Title: Wittgenstein: A Life: Young Ludgwig, 1889-1921.
Author: Paul Mattick Jr.
Subjects: Books - Reviews
People: McGuinness, Brian
Full Text COPYRIGHT The Nation Company Inc. 1989
WITTGENSTEIN: A LIFE: Young Ludwig, 1889-1921. By Brian McGuinness.
University of California Press. 322 pp. $22.50.
In the late 1960s Vogue touted an unusual item in its trend-noting
column: "People Are Talking About . . . Ludwig Wittgenstein's
Tractatus Logico-Phiiosophicus." I myself remember the thrill of
owning and leafing through this short book - which I certainly did not
understand-as a college freshman interested in philosophy. People are
still talking about the Tractatus (though it may have fallen somewhat
out of fashion), and they talk even more about Wittgenstein's later
writings, especially the Philosophical Investigations. The stream of
academic commentary on his work is a broad one, carrying with it,
lately, two novels inspired by Wittgenstein, and now the first volume
of a new biography by Brian McGuinness, a translator of the Tractatus
and professor of philosophy at Oxford University.
Young Ludwig follows its subject from his youth in Vienna, the years
of study at Cambridge University and his experiences in World War I to
the publication of his first book in 1921. It is based, we are told,
on personal communications and unparalleled access to archives and
manuscript and letter collections. It must be said at once that, with
all this help and the best will in the world, McGuinness has produced
a dissatisfying book. An awkward writer ("Even the piano Ludwig was
taught by an unsuitable method and lessons were discontinued"),
McGuinness has been ill served by his editors, who have permitted his
baffling use of Austrian abbreviations and references to British
academic customs.
More seriously, his book will confuse rather than aid the
nonspecialist reader who wishes to understand Wittgenstein's
philosophical importance. Someone who does not already have a sense
of the revolution wrought in logic by Gottlob Frege and Bertrand
Russell will be at a loss to understand the significance of
Wittgenstein's responses to their work, while the philosophically
sophisticated reader will be annoyed by errors and the absence of
illuminating exposition.
The reader who is interested in the story of a personality will find
much to ponder here. The product of a wealthy, cultured and
pathological family (three brothers committed suicide) ruled with an
iron hand by a robber baron father, Wittgenstein experienced the world
as filled with "vile" and "disgusting" people,
not exempting himself. He told David Pinsent, the close companion of
his prewar years in Cambridge, that he felt he had "no right to live
in an antipathetic world . . . where he perpetually finds himself
feeling contempt for others, and irritating others by his nervous
temperament without some justification for that contempt etc. such as
being a really great mall and having done ready great work." He began
to think of suicide at the age of 10 or 11; a decade or so later he
told Pinsent he "felt ashamed of never daring to kill himself," and in
1918 we find him "on his way to commit suicide somewhere." McGuinness
cites a story of Russell's: "Once I said to him: 'Are you thinking
about logic or about your sins?' 'Both,' he replied, and continued his
pacing. I did not like to suggest that it was time for bed, as it
seemed probable both to him and me that on leaving me he would commit
suicide."
Though Wittgenstein eventually died of natural causes, he was clearly
a tormented figure. His search for decency and honesty not only led
him to give his entire fortune away but often took the form of
browbeating others (such as the denunciation of a kind landlady who
had written to him about the death of her child, for her "unnatural"
and 'journalistic" mode of expression, which, he replied, "caused me
such repugnance and the feeling of such a difference between us that I
put aside as absurd any idea of achieving an understanding with you").
Such behavior somehow contributed to the image Wittgenstein enjoyed as
a near-saintly ascetic. It also helped him provoke quarrels with
various father figures, notably Russell and G.E. Moore. Meanwhile,
he managed to surround himself with adoring male disciples, whose
opinions and even lives he controlled to a remarkable degree. While
McGuinness provides us with a rich store of materials for a picture of
his subject, he brings to the understanding of this tale of
brilliance, misery and manipulation nothing more sophisticated than
allusions to Wittgenstein's "genius" and the "high moral standards"
inherited from his family (thus Wittgenstein's inability to establish
good relations with the enlisted men he encountered in the army during
World War I is "plained by references to their "mean natures").
On the question of Wittgenstein's sexuality ,long a topic of rumor and
rarely of public discussion, nearly nothing direct is included beyond
a footnote that says an earlier biographer's hypothesis of recurrent
bouts of homosexual promiscuity is incompatible with the testimony of
some of Wittgenstein's friends. We have only references to
"sensuality" and Wittgenstein's struggle against it; we are told that
physical Labor during the war rendered him "completely a-sexual" at
the time, but hear of no contrasting earlier or later sexual activity.
It has been suggested by another reviewer that McGuinness's reticence
may have been required by some of Wittgenstein's executors as the
price of access to his files, but I do not believe this. It is too
much of a piece with the old-fashioned donnishness visible in
McGuinness's inability to deal with the psychological and cultural
complexity of Wittgenstein's affective life in general.
Wittgenstein's misogyny is noted but not commented on (he was against
women's suffrage because "all the women he knows are such idiots").
It is left unconnected with either the European culture of the time or
with his idea of his mother a"someone he had to support, not a source
of strength to him" and the fact that after his father's death,
Wittgenstein had difficulty visiting his family, "a largely female
family to whose standards he did not feel ready to submit."
McGuinness finds it "unimportant" that Weininger's Sex and Character,
widely read at the beginning of the century and a major influence on
young Ludwig, identified the drive to truth, goodness and strength
with the male, and that to sexuality and weakness with the female
principle. Weininger's suicide, apparently provoked by his despair at
being homosexual arid Jewish (both identified in his theory as
feminine characteristics) is claimed to have had little resonance with
Wittgenstein's feelings, though Ludwig too spoke of his Jewishness as
barring the way to originality, and in later years seems to have
wished to hide it. McGuinness sees as praiseworthy patriotism
Wittgenstein's admission during the war that "the thought that our
race is going to be beaten depresses me terribly, because I am
completely German," though he also felt that the English were "the
best race in the world" and would therefore win. But McGuinness
himself is prone to speak in terms of race; he also has a notable
enthusiasm for military history, explaining the Austrian eastern
campaigns with more care than the logic of Russell's Paradox. So it
is not surprising that he is touched by Wittgenstein's donation of a
million crowns to the Austrian government for the purchase of a
twelve-inch howitzer.
The big question posed by a biography like this one is that-evoked so
nicely by Russell's story - of the relation between the demons of
Wittgenstein's emotional life and the pull that logical analysis
exercised on him. Clearly, the absolutism of logic was attractive to
one who often felt so out of control as to be on the verge of suicide.
In the preface to the Tractatus, he says that he has, by rigorous
methods, solved the basic problems of philosophy. At the same time,
he continues, his book "shows how little is achieved when these
problems are solved." It showed, in fact, that the truly important
problems - of ethics, aesthetics and "the sense of the world"- are not
to be dealt with by philosophy. Peace of the self, "the solution of
the problem of fife," is to be achieved not through discursive thought
but through a mystical experience of the world "as a limited whole,"
an experience seemingly led to by the argument of the Tractatus
itself.
These views represented a fundamental break with the academic
philosophy of the period before World War 1, especially that of the
English philosophers who were Wittgenstein's dosest intellectual
companions. The idealism of Bradley, McTaggart arid their foUowers,
which dominated British philosophy until 1900, held that reality is a
whole whose resolution into parts must involve an element of
falsification; true knowledge can only be knowledge of the totality.
At the tum of the century Russell and Moore, each in his way,
challenged this by asserting that mathematical, natural-scientific and
moral knowledge are all matters of a relation between individual minds
and independent objects in the world. While agreeing that the
knowable world consists of a plurality of autonomous items facts, or
states of affairs -Wittgenstein opposed his friends' realism as well
as the earlier idealism by holding that philosophy of the traditional
sort could not be meaningfully done at all.
Just as basic to the importance of Wittgenstein's place in modem
philosophy was the method by which he reached this conclusion. In his
work the analysis of ideas or concepts, central to Western
philosophical investigation since its Greek origins, was replaced by
the analysis of language. In this Wittgenstein was a pioneer of
contemporary thought beyond the domain of philosophy, as language has
emerged in all intellectual fields from molecular biology's discovery
of the "genetic code" to Barthes's decoding of the "fashion system"-
as the dominant metaphor for meaningful structure. This reflects the
increasingly important place in modem culture of various modes of
communication and what that culture so characteristically terms
"information management," on the one hand, and our increasing
consciousness of the socially constructed character of all forms of
meaning, on the other. The focus on language, in addition, has the
ideological advantage (both expressed and aided by the displacement of
historical by structural linguistics) of recognizing the constructive
nature of culture, in a practice defined by relatively fixed,
unconsciously operative structures: a practice that, though man-made,
has the appearance of a natural function.
As carried out in the Tractatus, Wittgenstein's shift to the analysis
of language rested on a few presuppositions: first, that thought, as
the substance of human knowledge of reality, could be identified with
language; and second, that logic yields the underlying structure (the
"logical form") of language. The logic developed by Frege and Russell
for the analysis of mathematical statements treats sentences as
complexes formed from elementary sentences in such a way that the
truth or falsity of a complex sentence is exclusively a function of
the truth or falsity of its constituent parts. Accepting this as a
model of language generally, Wittgenstein reasoned that the truth or
falsity of elementary sentences must be determined by their
correspondence to the facts constituting reality. What gave the
notion of "correspondence" ks content was his idea of how linguistic
signs bear meaning.
This was the "picture theory" of language. Sentences are formed out
of objects - signs - placed in fixed relations to one another. The
individual signs correspond to, or name, other objects, things in the
world; the relations between signs correspond to the relations between
things that group them into facts. An elementary sentence can thus be
thought of as a picture of a fact, and an accurate picture is a truth.
The totality of such truths - descriptions of facts - is everything
that can be meaningfully said about the world.
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What cannot be spoken of (or, therefore, thought), according to
Wittgenstein, is the structure of sentences, which makes meaningful
speech possible. Sentences "can present the whole of reality, but they
cannot represent what they must have in common with reality in order
to represent it -logical form." This is a very deep point indeed: that
because we can only talk about language in language, any attempt to
explain linguistic meaning must assume it. In other words, there is
no standpoint we can take outside of language from which to represent
the relation between language and the world ("The limits of my
language mean the limits of my world"). But while sentences cannot
state what makes meaning possible, they "show the logical form of
reality." Our relation to the world as knowers, therefore, cannot be
described but only shown. The same must, Wittgenstein asserted, be
true of other aspects of our relation to reality, such as our
experience of life as good or evil: "How things are in the world"
(what can be said) "is a matter of complete indifference for what is
higher" (how we judge it from an ethical or aesthetic point of view).
It follows from all this that the Tractatus itself, which after all is
a discussion of exactly those things it claims can be shown but not
said, is in Wittgenstein's own words "nonsensical,"a ladder to be
discarded after one has used it to climb. The very irrationality of
this position, one could say, is an expression of Wittgenstein's
point. It certainly makes a heady brew for the undergraduate and even
the professorial mind. The call for a combination of scientific
precision with recognition of the Emits of rationality was echood by
many, in many ways, in the 1920s and 1930s .It is, for example, a
guiding theme of Musil's The Man Without Qualities and can be felt
both in art movements as disparate as futurism and surrealism and in
the Nietzsche revival of that time. The Tractatus had a strong effect
on the positivist philosophers of the Vienna Circle, whose program was
based on the distinction drawn between what can and what cannot be
meaningfully said. If today this book has lost its original power
this is largely because assumptions fundamental to it have been
rejected -in the first place by Wittgenstein himself.
Wittgenstein came to view as incorrect both the idea that logic is the
key to language and that language has its meaning in a correspondence
of descriptive sentences to facts in the world. He continued,
however, to identify language as the substance of thought and to see
the limits of language as the limits of the world. But this had in
his later work quite different implications than in his earlier
writings, for he came to think of language not as one thing, a sign
system for factual description and scientific theory, but as a
congeries of what a more current jargon calls "signifying practices"
or "discourses," used quite as legitimately for praying, moral
judgment or poetic play.
It is Wittgenstein's later work that is really alive in today's
philosophical world. One striking feature of it is the focus on the
errors embodied in the Tractatus. This, in fact, has helped to
generate continued scholarly interest in the early work, a remarkable
epitome of contemporary philosophy's tendency to keep itself alive by
feeding on its own past. Beyond this, the ease with which the
intellectual buzzwords of recent decades can be slipped into a
discussion of the later Wittgenstein suggests how he has come to
figure as the leading philosopher of our time, not only among
philosophers but also among literary theorists, art writers and other
intellectual movers and shakers (along with their readerships), many
of whom have little familiarity with or understanding of his work.
It is no accident that Bruce Duffy's biographical novel The World as I
Found It opens with Wittgenstein's celebrated figure o"duck-rabbit," a
drawing that can be seen as depicting either of the two animals.
Wittgenstein's use of it in his Investigations metaphorically
expresses the idea that the signs we use for communication, far from
showing their signifying relation to the world, have no such relations
beyond those given by the various complex social behaviors in which
they have a role. This commonsense conventionalism resonates beyond
its theoretical context in the minds of those for whom the
contemporary world seems to hold no alternative to cognitive, ethical
and aesthetic relativism. The Wittgenstein of the Investigations is,
if you wish, a "postmodern "philosopher: in his emphasis on language
as the stuff of cultural experience; in his portrayal of the human
world not as unified by some general principles of meaning but as a
multitude of"forms of life," each with its own "language gone; in his
consequent abandonment of the right claimed by modern philosophy,
since its seventeenth-century origins, to pass critical judgment on
cultural institutions; and even in the role played in the diffusion of
his fame by his cranky, commanding personality and oracular style.
Though his name has been linked with Marx's (for example, in a 1981
study by David Rubenstein), Wittgenstein's vague concept of"forms of
fife and his ahistorical critique of the main features of modem
philosophy as due, roughly, to misuse and misunderstanding of ordinary
language, recognize the social character of human experience without
requiring too close a look at the particularities of social structure.
Summary comments on a complex figure are bound to be distorting. But
certainly the deep response elicited by both his earlier and his later
writings and teaching shows that Wittgenstein's ideas, for all their
abstruseness, incarnate some basic elements of the periods in which he
lived. The biographer who succeeds in telling the tale of the
development of this man and his work will also shed much light on the
transformations of modern culture as it has felt its way through two
world wars to the problematic present.
==============================================================
Source: The New Republic, May 1, 1989 v200 n18 p35(6).
Title: Wittgenstein: A Life; Young Ludwig, 1889-1921.
Author: William H. Gass
Subjects: Books - Reviews
People: McGuinness, Brian
Wittgenstein, Ludwig - Biography
Full Text COPYRIGHT The New Republic Inc. 1989
The Wittgenstein home in Vienna, it was said with some exaggeration,
held seven grand pianos, a condition that certainly stamped it as
Viennese. It also housed five sons, the first three of whom were
suicides: one by drowning, one from a gunshot, one through poison.
The two sons who remained often considered taking their own lives,
too, but, through some inadvertence, did not. The family's three
daughters fared better in this regard because, although just as much
was expected of them, it did not include measuring up to quite so many
marks or reaching quite such stressful heights.
In those days, if music appeared to be the rosy flush of Vienna's
fame, suicide seemed its fever. The newsworthy surface of society was
regularly ruffled by someone's dramatically premature demise. There
was Otto Weininger, whose crackpot book on Sex and Character
Wittgenstein, in his early years, admired; Ludwig Boltzmann, important
for his work in statistical dynamics, and one with whom, equally
early, Wittgenstein wished to study in Vienna; the poet Georg Trakl;
notables like the architect of the Imperial Opera House, Eduard van
der Null; aristocrats of a rank as elevated as the Baron Franz von
Uchatius, including actual imperialities such as the Crown Prince
Rudolf himself-each a distinguished suicide.
For the old, dying is dismal and takes the shine from death. One has
grown accustomed to the succession of small disappointments that make
up most of life, so the failures that have followed one about like a
smelly, undismissible mutt now resemble a faithful, if antic,
companion. The young, however-still so near the time when they were
not alive that not being alive again exerts a powerful
fascination-cannot help but look at the threat of the years to come
and expect them to be as marked by loneliness, remorse, and triviality
as those that they have so far survived. Success turns down no
soothing bed of rest either, since it can seem to supply but the
starting place for yet another, more arduous, climb. Life, they have
to wonder (since they once had such hopes for it), life comes to . .
. is for . . . what? And if life is so precious, why is so much
of it-everywhere around them-habitually, extravagantly, wasted? If
life is a meaningless chore, it were well one's chores were concluded
promptly, and the mess swept. Thus the suicide skips dying and goes
to death as through a door-a door he may slam, if he likes, as he
leaves.
In households like the Wittgensteins', what is remembered of the
mother is often pale as an old print tacked to an outof-the-way wall:
its image gray, stiff, still, ornately ovaled. It is the father who
is the moving Figure, the Presence, the Ghost of the Olden Days. It
is his chains that will send their rattle through the rooms and bind
the occupants to a presence that is past, yet a past that will not
release its outlived days to die away in rings of weakening
reverberation, but one whose hold grows greater by being gone.
Gone, or for the moment far away, the Presence is enlarged by the
erasure of what seems irrelevant until it can be simply felt as moral
authority, heard as stern commandment, seen as shining example. That
the Presence picks his teeth, is forgetful, frequently falls asleep
and is afraid of dreaming: these foibles are mislaid, every sign of
weakness is turned to point the other way. Whatever is ordinary fades
until only a giant is remembered, one that is cross and condemnatory,
implacable, its sentences certain, its judgments final. One thinks of
the anger, the terror, the cringing obedience, the need to please,
that Kafka's father inspired, and how the father's frown became a
crease across his son's face, and how loathsome the son's sense of
servitude was to both of them. For such a son, too, a role was
reserved, defined for him &om the beginning, waiting for him like his
plot in the cemetery: to husband a wife, to father her children, to
head a household, to emulate a feared figure, to overcome, to succeed
. . . to be what he could not compel himself to be.
Karl, who would occupy the Presence in this case, had a vigorous
intelligence with an energy to match, and set a brisk, if not
impossible, pace. He was quick of both head and hands, decisive,
charming, bold, brutal (he became a successful industrialist),
good-looking, confident, arrogant, witty (more German than Jew, he was
loyal to his culture, not to God), a despiser of failure in any form,
and of every form of humbug. Like the dyspeptic Flaubert, who
compiled a dictionary of thoughtless thoughts in common use, or more
likely Karl Kraus, who publicly exposed them, he snipped outstanding
imbecilities from periodicals and papers and, in later life, sent them
to his son, Ludwig, who took custody of the collection.
To Karl's beleaguered sons an early death must have seemed the
inherited fate of the family. In any event, Ludwig faced a life, as
we read of it, which was remarkably free, almost from its inception,
of those pleasures that fasten, like lions, young teeth to their meat;
that tempt them to pranks, into forbidden explorations, or lead them
to enliven dull routine with frivolity and flamboyance. There was,
along his road, but rare success and frequent failure: success that
was usually deceitful and temporary, and failure he took so to heart
it could scarcely beat beneath the burden of it.
Dutifully enough, Wittgenstein begins the study of mechanical
engineering in Berlin, but shortly finds an excuse to enrich his
education in Manchester and on the moors near Glossop, where he
designs and flies his own kites during aeronautical and meteorological
experiments. This is 1908, when he's 19, and the flying machine is
more than a dream. Although he had the inventor's handyman mind, in
addition to the abstract intelligence he would later display, his
attention quickly turned from the kite to the motor that would drive
it, and then, by stages that were by no means direct, to physics and
the formulas that expressed its principles from the craft to
its-engine, from the propeller to the propeller's torque and the
algebras of air, from the movement of molecules finally to the
behavior of numbers). Wittgenstein flew to the fundamental as
naturally as his kites and balloons rose in the wind, so that even
when he whistled Mozart, the dexterity of his tongue and lips was
still in the service of the logical articulation of an idea. One of
his more dazzling-and puzzling-notebook entries runs: "Musical themes
are in a certain sense propositions. And so the recognition of the
essence of logic will lead to the recognition of the essence of
music." Schopenhauer, whom Wittgenstein had been reading, would have
put it the other way around: "Propositions are in a certain sense like
musical themes. And so the recognition of the essence of music will
lead to the recognition of the essence of logic."
Taught by tutors, and with consequently little training in how to plod
through a discipline from one bleak peak to another, it was easy for
Wittgenstein to appear to drift toward whatever was prior and basic
and presumably free of the clutter of applications. Very soon his
father's funds were financing a sojourn in Cambridge, where he took in
Bertrand Russell's lectures the way some people might take in the Taj.
In no time he was suffering from that fever for first principles we
call philosophy; that heavy hunt for ultimates that only skepticism,
or the petty grind and pretentious rites of graduate schools, can
cool.
Initially an eccentric, "unknown German," the
presence that Wittgenstein eventually made known to Russell, and then
to Moore and Keynes, to Lytton Strachey and other members of the
rather notorious Cambridge society called "The Apostles" who
endeavored with mitigated success to recruit him, was a furious jostle
of warring qualities-of emotional highs and succeeding lows, of
course, ranging from intense excitement to despondency-yet an active,
elbowing crowd of all kinds of other contraries as well. He was shy,
but quick to correct his superiors. He had a poor opinion of himself,
but he repeatedly required special treatment, and he regularly
expected, for himself, an ungrudging suspension of the rules, since as
low as he often felt he'd sunk, most of mankind still lay beneath him.
If others understood their true condition, they would feel terrible,
too. His misery, however, wanted no competition.
Wittgenstein's manners were formally aristocratic and coolly correct,
except when he was excoriating someone's errors, because his pursuit
of truth was often an excuse to be rude. He would feel bad about his
behavior and apologize, but not without reminding his victim of the
nearly sufficient reason that had provoked him. He believed that
menial tasks were humbling and generally good for you, except when
menials did them, and then they became demeaning. His taste was for
an elegantly simple life, with the simplest part of it, of course, an
absence of the demands others might make of him. He approached people
as warily as an animal &om the wild, one whose recurrent and natural
impulse is to run away. Although he seemed unusually self-absorbed,
driven-in upon himself as one in pain, he sought in his studies the
solution to problems of apparently the most impersonal and objective
sort. He prized solitude, especially for his work, and was instantly
furious when any course of thought was interrupted, yet he dropped
round to Russell's rooms nearly every midnight to bounce ideas off
those patient walls, or to recount his weaknesses and consider
suicide. As Russell writes in 1912:
Wittgenstein is on the verge of a nervous breakdown, not far removed
from suicide, feeling himself a miserable creature, full of sin.
Whatever he says he apologizes for having said. He has fits of
dizziness and can't work-the Dr. says that it is all nerves. He
wanted to be treated morally, but I persisted in treating him
physically. I told him to ride, to have biscuits by his bedside, to
eat when he lies awake, to have better meals and so on. I suppose
genius always goes with excitable nerves-it is a very uncomfortable
possession. He makes me terribly anxious, and I hate seeing his
misery-it is so real, and I know it all so well. I can see it is
almost beyond what any human being can be expected to bear. I don't
know whether any outside misfortune has contributed to it or not.
Stubborn, arrogant, critical, demanding, prickly, solipsistic: Was it
only his intellect that saved him from being principally a pain in the
ass? Russell initially found him "obstinate and perverse." Very soon,
however, he was referring to Wittgenstein, with affection, though
understandable condescension, as "my German." "My German friend
threatens to be an affliction." Was he only a crank or really a
genius? "My German, who seems to be rather good, was very
argumentative." "My German engineer, I think, is a fool."
Consulting my own brief memory of the man, I am inclined to think it
was not Wittgenstein's brilliance by itself that impressed Moore,
Russell, Keynes, and the others, but the fact that he did indeed bum
with a bright, gemlike flame; that his commitment was not merely
quirky, but intensely real; that he brought to his Investigations the
desperate energy and concentration of one whose mind has drawn a noose
around its body; because, if his reasoning failed to reach the
necessary degree of clarity and insight, if it showed itself to be
more than momentarily incompetent, then Wittgenstein might not decide
upon another day of life, but choose suicide instead-hanging his head
in order to throttle some sinfully inadequate thought.
The Wittgenstein of the Tractatus (of whom the first volume of Brian
McGuinness's biography treats) might be characterized philosophically
as a romantic rationalist. He is a "rationalist" because he believed
in grounds and foundations; because he thought that these were to be
found in the fundamental principles of logic; because these
principles, in themselves, were easy enough to understand, and could
probably be grasped in a single mental intuition, so that what
difficulties there were would have to be ascribed to the shortcomings
of the thinker, not to an inherent darkness or complexity in the
proper objects of his thought; because one could make the move from
logic to the world without damaging or mislaying all the latter's
furniture. He is a "romantic" because he believed that thinking
clearly, correctly, sincerely, completely was the central human
obligation, and a moral struggle; that one made oneself, consequently,
into a soul that could see, and then sawthen plumbed and
discovered-just as Rilke, for example, felt he had to become a poet
first in order to write his poems, rather than become talented, wise,
or strong by trial and error, effort and exercise.
In the realm of morals and manners, Wittgenstein disdained principles
and programs, justifications and excuses. Talk was a screen for who
knew what weakness. He made most of his decisions in secret, because
(although he would pace up and down through his miseries with Russell)
most talk disguised and entangled; it led others to think that they
had a say; it encouraged "saws"; it proceeded from partial truths.
One's acts ought to spring spontaneously from the sort of person one
was: calculation suggested subterfuge, obedience suggested servility.
Hence his frequently brutal frankness, his lack of social concealment,
his mysterious reversals of course and changes of heart.
Character was something that simply showed itself in the way one
thought, in the way one lived. Style and idea were inseparable; so he
rarely troubled to hide the fact that what was most important to him
was the course and quality of his own mind. It was, after all, his
art. His impatience with what he took to be lackadaisical reasoning,
philosophical obfuscation, or any weakening of intellectual resolve
was severe and immediate, and based upon the identification of
knowledge with virtue, and of the right to exist with the claim of
creative accomplishment. It was always all or nothing with him.
I do not believe that Russell had wings, so he can't have taken the
young Austrian under one, but he did gradually grow fonder of this
intense intelligence. The picture of their relationship that emerges
&om McGuinness's pages does Russell great credit, I think. A hint of
jealousy (or perhaps envy) shows up later, but this is only a speck on
what is otherwise an unblemished record of magnanimous behavior on the
part of the older, more established, and more esteemed philosopher.
Russell was a man, furthermore, of quite a different cut and character
than Wittgenstein: sensual, worldly, keenly observant, calculating but
capable of real devotion, and able on occasion to achieve the
impulsive life that Wittgenstein longed for and, paradoxically,
planned, yet could never achieve because his personality was far from
free and easy, because it was, instead, neurotically impacted.
Wittgenstein makes immense demands upon Russell's time, his patience,
his energy, his ego .In the name of philosophical truth, the student
is mercilessly, sometimes scornfully, critical of his teacher's
labors. Russell takes the criticisms to heart, however, only to find
the easy flow of his work slowed, its course altered, its publication
consequently postponed. Although Russell sometimes allows himself an
impatient rejoinder, his appreciation of Wittgenstein's genius never
weakens, and he welcomes his surIy friend's retum to friendship
whenever it occurs. Russell reports to Lady Ottoline Morrell:
We were both cross from the heat-I showed him a crucial part of what I
have been writing. He said it was all wrong, not realizing the
difficulties-that he had tried my view and knew it wouldn't work. I
couldn't understand his objection-in fact he was very inarticulate-but
I feel in my bones that he must be right, and that he has seen
something I have missed. If I could see it too I shouldn't mind, but
as it is, it is worrying, and has rather destroyed the pleasure in my
writing.
Russell became aware of Wittgenstein's mystical tendencies very early.
Still, his ardent young pupil's love of logic can hardly have prepared
the positively inclined Russell for Ludwig's later romance with
informality, or his repeated religious temptations. He did not
immediately realizethat Wittgenstein, in removing reason from the
realm of religion, was really protecting faith. An urgent need for
salvation pursued Wittgenstein always, and it intensified immediately
following the First World War (during the time the Tractatus was being
translated, titled, prefaced, and published by his English friends),
whenamong his choices for the future-suicide, school teaching, and a
somewhat monastic withdrawal were the favored alternatives.
Wittgenstein distinguished himself as a soldier; and despite the
hardships of many campaigns, the crassness of the common soldier, the
repeated bollixes of a decrepit bureaucracy, the cultural limbo of
military life conditions that he patiently enduredthe war perversely
supplied him with something he desperately needed: an objective hell
that could replace his private one, and an equally dangerous outside
enemy. In the army there were not only an order of sorts, aims of
several kinds, discipline and routines; there were hands other than
his own hand raised against him; there was death as it might come to a
comrade as well as to himself, a death unwilled, even unexpected.
Thus Wittgenstein performed under fire with that coolness that comes
when a world gone mad asks for sanity from the asylumed, and through
hardship and valor he recovered the ordinariness in himself, felt as
his fellows felt, and had his small sins swallowed by more substantial
woes.
Wittgenstein tells us that when he was about 21, at a performance in
Vienna of a mediocre play, the necessary word was nevertheless said
(as if a random note had completed a chord in his heart), so that the
possibility of a religious life, stripped of the theology that had
previously rendered it unacceptable, became suddenly attractive and
real. The revelation, if that is what it was,lay in the assertion by
one of the characters that he was, in effect, "beyond the fell clutch
of circumstances," that nothing bad could happen to him.
Wittgensteing gave this bit of bragging a semi-Stoical interpretation,
and it reappears later as one of the consequences of the Tractatus.
The world is an ensemble of facts. Nowhere, among these facts, are
there any values to be found, nor are any values connected to them by
whatever devious means a philosopher may imagine. To all the chief
questions of culture "it" is totally deaf; it neither promotes nor
prohibits; it neither disdains nor cares. It's it, and that's that.
Nothing that I decide to do can tum a value into a fact (as
existentialism endeavors to), but I am certainly free to affirm the
world, as Nietzsche exhorts us, or to deny it, as Schopenhauer
inclines. If that liberty were real, however, why would I be tempted
to view existence despondently when joy, instead, were happily at
hand? In a suicidal mood, Wittgenstein writes to his friend Engelmann:
In fact I am in a state of mind that is terrible to me. I have been
through it several times before: it is the state of not being able to
get over a particular fact. It is a pitiable state, I know. But
there is only one remedy that I can see and, that is of course to come
to terms with that fact. I think it is reasonable to suppose that
anyone concerned to give an account of Wittgenstein's life would be
determinedly interested in what-precisely-that fact was: its nature,
its etiology, its consequences, Reluctant as McGuinness's pages are
even to tum, they nevertheless present us with the picture of a
pathologically driven personality whose prickly petulance and swings
of mood we are forced unpleasantly to place alongside his
philosophical achievements, whose passionate presence we can only
intermittently glimpse in the letters of others, or in some lines of
his own, but rarely in the biographer's pale, pussy-footing prose,
through which little that is -powerful pushes, not even the harmless
letter "p," like a daffodil or a daisy-a letter that might stand for
the point of it all.
All that McGuinness says about Wittgenstein's homosexuality is
contained in two footnotes, which, if they could have been pushed a
bit further away, would have found themselves entirely off the page.
The first, which refers to the philosopher's sexual prefer ences for
the first time, we must wait until page 196 to receive. Then we are
slipped the information in an astonishing "by the This is perhaps the
place . . . ," McGuinness blandly begins. The question that
elicits this "revelation" is whether Russell disapproved of
Wittgenstein's homosexuality, whether it played any part in the
cooling of their relationship. Probably not, is McGuinness's
reasonable conclusion. But why, we have to wonder, were Russell's
letters to Lady Ottoline Morrell on that subject not quoted, when so
many others were? Why wasn't the issue raised when it was central to
the story being told, rather than far after the fact? Why did we have
to learn at this time that "intrigue" is the biographer's code word
(borrowed from Keynes) for homosexual flirtation, since it might have
helped us understand his earlier account of Wittgenstein's election to
the Apostles? And why did we have to pass through two-thirds of the
book under the impression that our subject had a lively soul, but no
body?
The second footnote occurs 100 pages later, near the end of this
volume, and it concerns that one "particular fact" that Wittgenstein
could not get over. To the suggestion, offered by another writer, that
the philosopher was experiencing guilt about his homosexual
encounters, McGuinness does everything for his subject but take the
Fifth. "I have not paid much attention to this hypothesis," he says:
It is above all an unnecessary one, as I hope I have shown, and it is
in fact totally incompatible with the frank discussion of
Wittgenstein's difficulties which I for one have had with close
friends of his from that time.
It is, however, the only hypothesis that makes sense. Instead of the
offending proposal, McGuinness would have us accept hopeless
simplicities instead: that Wittgenstein was tempted to suicide by the
example of his brothers; that he felt he was not perfect; that he was
in despair over the human condition; and that he was principally kept
from the deed by the offense he knew it would give to his
faith-factors that may have been important, certainly, and even
sufficient, if we knew what they meant. McGuinness may have had frank
discussions with Wittgenstein's friends, but he has not had one with
us. We have no other choice but to imagine a man driven along the
edge of life by sexual shame and unspeakable guilt, half-hoping for
the excuse (that combination of cowardice and courage) that would take
him over the edge-out of grief into expiation.
Some of McGuinness's shortcomings as a biographer can be attributed to
inexperience and a lack of literary skill. He often cannot make up
his mind what to include, what to leave out, what quietly to decide,
what openly to debate. There are indications that he has postponed
for a second volume-divulging certain information that we may badly
need now. Although the Russell material is wonderful, he can't do
much more than hand it to us. In any case, he is unable to revivify a
scene or create any kind of narrative sweep, nor does he weave
thought-lines and life-lines together very well (it is admittedly
difficult); and he seems happy to refuse every opportunity to
conjecture. His discussion of the Tractatus (as well as a number of
other technical points) is not nearly careful enough to interest a
professional and will be wholly confusing to an interested layman.
Furthermore, McGuinness's coyness concerning the sexual life of his
subject leaves the reader wondering whether he has given no account of
such a life because Wittgenstein didn't have one, or because evidence
is massively absent, or because the facts are being suppressed in
order to protect the philosopher's "good name," as well as the good
name of unnamed others. Since McGuinness gives us no help with these
conjectures, except by his silence to encourage them, the reader loses
confidence in his guide, and begins to suspect the sources he cites in
addition, since Wittgenstein's followers have frequently been jealous
about the ownership of ideas, and overly imitative and protective of
him, even to the point of aping his stammer, his gestures of
intellectual effort, his expressions of despair, and pretending to his
impatience, aspiring to his arrogance. It is not just one disciple
who betrays the master. All of them do.
There are a few vocations (like the practice of poetry or the
profession of philosophy) that are so uncalled for by the world, so
unremunerative by any ordinary standards, so inherently difficult, so
undefined, that to choose them suggests that more lies behind the
choice than a little encouraging talent and a few romantic ideals. To
persevere in such a difficult and unrewarding course requires the
mobilization of the entire personality-each weakness as well as every
strength, each quirk as well as every normality. For every one of
those reasons that a philosopher offers to support the principle he
has taken in to feed and fatten, there will be in action alongside it,
sometimes in the shade of the great notion itself, coarse and brutal
causes in sequently stunning numbers, causes with a notable lack of
altruism and nobility, causes with shameful aims and antecedents.
This is to be understood and accepted. Valery's belief that every
philosophy was an important piece of someone's autobiography need not
be rejected as reductive; for whatever the subliminal causes and their
kind are like, the principle put forth must stand and defend itself in
a stockade of arguments, it must make its own way out into who knows
what other fields of intelligence, to fall or flourish there.
The psychological space between a work of intellectual willlike the
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and the energies and organs supporting
it, between the fears and foolishness and childish avowals of the
unsophisticated self and the forms of its sophistication: these are
far from thoroughly explored or understood. It seemed to me there was
a chance in this book to shorten some of that distance. But the steps
taken have been tentative, as if the full truth about the breath
within the trumpet might sour the tones the trumpet told, as if
against the force of Wittgenstein's uncompromising search for form
there was still some strength for shame.
===========================================================
Source: The New Republic, June 20, 1994 v210 n25 p34(6).
Title: Wittgenstein: The Terry Eagleton Script, the Derek Jarman
Film._(book reviews)
Author: Colin McGinn
Subjects: Books - Reviews
People: Eagleton, Terry
Jarman, Derek
Full Text COPYRIGHT The New Republic Inc. 1994
None of this survives in Wittgenstein's later work. In place of
abstract deductions about the essential nature of language and the
world, we have meticulous observations of what actually occurs in the
use of language; an intense distrust of generality; an insistence on
the irreducible multiplicity of our "language games"; and the
introduction of the living human being at the root of what makes
language work. There is no longer any such thing as "the general form
of a proposition," any more than there is a general essence for what
we call a game; and no longer is it the function of all words to
denote a constituent of reality. The whole notion of an ideal language
is riddled with error and confusion. No picture, however arcane or
mental or logical, could ever confer a meaning. Rules of language,
even for mathematical terms, cannot take a grip on our thought and
conduct independently of our being naturally prone to make particular
choices. Our justifications always run out, and we must act without
appeal to foundations.
What is basic, in the later philosophy, are the language games that we
actually play, and the "forms of life" into which they are woven.
Meaning must be sought in those activities, not in a hidden mechanism
or a sublime structure. Where once meaning seemed crystalline, unitary
and remote, now it is humdrum, multifarious and humanly mediated. Its
study is not part of formal logic or metaphysics, but of human
"natural history." This is the force of Wittgenstein's celebrated
dictum that the meaning of an expression is revealed in its use: there
are no pre-existent meanings onto which our minds magically latch.
Rather, our ways of behaving with words are the sole repository of
semantic significance. Wittgenstein was fond of quoting a line from
Goethe: "In the beginning was the deed."
What links Wittgenstein's philosophies is a deep ambivalence about
language. In the earlier work language is credited with a marvelous
inner logic; yet it is also held to be inadequate to the expression of
some of our most profound concerns. It is like a perfectly engineered
precision tool that can work only within severe limits. Even the ideal
language of Wittgenstein's first philosophy cannot say what can only
be shown. And in the later work we are told that "philosophy is a
battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of
language," though elsewhere we are assured that "philosophy may in no
way interfere with the actual use of language; it can in the end only
describe it." On the one hand, ordinary language is held to be
perfectly in order as it is, not needing reform or censure on
philosophical grounds alone. On the other hand, it is supposed to give
rise to intractable confusion, because of the misleading analogies it
suggests, and because its grammar fails to reflect the actual use of
words. Language encourages us to talk nonsense, but it is not less
than ideal because of it. It is like a perfectly adapted organism that
has a regrettable tendency to turn on its owner.
Moreover, language has its limits, in the early Wittgenstein and the
late, as a foundation for thought and action, since it rests upon
something nonlinguistic in nature. The learner of language needs more
than verbal explanations if he is to latch onto what is meant, since
no word is self-interpreting; the teacher must rely on the learner's
taking his instructions in a certain way and acting appropriately. For
the same reason, the analysis of one sentence by means of another
sentence cannot escape the circle of signs, and the slack must be
taken up by modes of natural response that resist codification.
Language is possible only because it is not self- reliant, because it
is parasitic on a foundation of nonlinguistic abilities and
dispositions. In this sense--here we see the ghost of the
Tractatus--language cannot communicate its own presuppositions.
This ambivalence about the powers of language reveals itself in
Wittgenstein's prose style. There is great confidence in the
expressive capacities of language, even the pared-down, monosyllabic
vernacular that he preferred; but his style is also halting and
allusive, discontinuous and metaphorical. He writes as if he is
determined not to ask more of language than it can deliver, not to
give the reader the illusion that things are clearer and straighter
than they really are. Certainly his prose requires the utmost
scrutiny, as well as an ability to engage creatively with what is
being said. And it strives for an intellectual effect that goes beyond
discursive formulation to alter one's "way of seeing." "Say what you
choose," he says at one point, "so long as it does not prevent you
from seeing the facts." This can sound odd, coming from someone who
ceaselessly reminds philosophers of their perilous tendency to misuse
language; but it fits the deeper aim of curing distortions of vision
caused by language itself. For all his obsession with language,
Wittgenstein's heart was not exactly there. He was as much concerned
with what language cannot do as with what it can.
In Philosophical Occasions, James Klagge and Alfred Nordmann have
usefully and skillfully assembled various writings by Wittgenstein
that have been scattered and hard to obtain. The variety is such as to
permit a synoptic view of his several concerns--from comments on
Frazer's The Golden Bough, to pieces on ethics, sense-data, cause and
effect, free will, the nature of philosophy. There are also some
revealing letters and an informative essay by Henrik von Wright on the
writings that Wittgenstein left behind. The book is an excellent
source, and it provides a nourishing supplement to the Investigations.
jum...@my-deja.com
Particularly interesting are the remarks on the nature of philosophy,
which expand illuminatingly on themes pursued in the Investigations.
Philosophy, for Wittgenstein, is not to be conceived in the
traditional way as a maximally general science, so that the task of
the philosopher is to develop an entirely universal theory of reality.
Instead, philosophical work consists in dismantling confusions and
mythologies by paying careful attention to our ordinary concepts,
resisting the false analogies suggested by our forms of expression.
The problems are difficult, not because they concern especially deep
features of reality, but rather because it is hard for us to obtain a
clear view of what we already know very well. Philosophy, or the
search for the ultimate theory, is over, but philosophizing must go
on. "Philosophical problems can be compared to locks on safes, which
can be opened by dialing a certain word or number, so that no force
can open the door until just this word has been hit upon, and once it
is hit upon any child can open it." There is nothing intrinsically
profound about the right combination, nor about the result it secures;
the difficulty lies purely in the trouble we have in hitting upon the
answer, in seeing what is before our eyes. This has the consequence
that the workings of our language are as opaque to us as a secret
code, even as there is nothing hidden or recondite about these
workings. We fail to grasp the truth about our language precisely
because it is so familiar to us. The philosopher must approach his own
mastery of language like an anthropologist, striving to see it afresh.
Alienation is sound method.
Wittgenstein's influence, for good or ill, has been continuous and
unparalleled. Something of his own estimate of the nature of this
influence can be gleaned from the lapidary preface to the
Investigations, where he says of the "remarks" that compose that
"album": "I make them public with doubtful feelings. It is not
impossible that it should fall to the lot of this work, in its poverty
and in the darkness of this time, to bring light into one brain or
another--but, of course, it is not likely." The pessimism here is not
the result of feeling that he will be ignored or underappreciated,
since he goes on to admit that fear of plagiarism was a major stimulus
to publication: "I was obliged to learn that my results (which I had
communicated in lectures, typescripts and discussions), variously
misunderstood, more or less mangled or watered-down, were in
circulation. This stung my vanity and I had difficulty in quieting
it." It is worth asking whether these presentiments apply also to his
posthumous reverberations. How much mangling and diluting has there
been? More to the point, how much projection and assimilation has
there been? For it takes two to influence; and in the case of
Wittgenstein the influence tends to be more of a mixing than a
pouring. Cloudiness is apt to be the upshot.
From the moment he stepped into philosophy, from the not-so- adjacent
field of engineering, Wittgenstein had an impact of extraordinary
proportions. From the first he thrilled Bertrand Russell, no lagger in
the head area, with his intensity and his brilliance, leading Russell
to proclaim him the next great hope in philosophy. Later
Wittgenstein's criticisms so withered Russell intellectually that he
more or less gave up the kind of philosophy of which he was a main
architect, turning instead to less theoretical matters. (Russell
eventually turned against Wittgenstein's mature style of philosophy,
declaring him to have given up serious thinking.) In Vienna in the
1930s, the logical positivists found the rationale for their own
scientistic ideology in Wittgenstein's Tractatus, and their teachings
went on to dominate philosophy for a lamentably extended
period--though they grotesquely misrepresented the content of that
work, notably in respect to its professed mysticism. This aspect of
the Tractatus was totally antithetical to their own outlook.
Installed at Cambridge in the '30s, Wittgenstein dominated the scene,
founding a new style of philosophy and combining torment and
insouciance in a way that was to become de rigueur in certain
quarters. There were no genuine philosophical problems to fret over,
but it was agony to philosophize all the same. ("The real discovery is
the one that makes me capable of stopping doing philosophy when I want
to.--The one that gives philosophy peace, so that it is no longer
tormented by questions which bring itself into question.")
"Wittgensteinians" everywhere mimicked the master's mannerisms,
declining to theorize, airily dismissing the exertions of earlier
thinkers. Whether or not you understood him, Wittgenstein had to be
right.
Then, in the '60s and '70s, came the backlash. Systematic philosophy
reasserted itself, and Wittgenstein was eclipsed by Frege, Quine,
formal semantics, cognitive science. He was too low- tech, too
reactionary, too depressing. There was a new thirst for theory. During
the last decade partisanship has tended to give way to scholarly
exegesis, to learned detachment: the arch anti- professional has
become professionalized. Wittgenstein is now beaten down by footnotes.
Much of this has been fruitful, enabling us to gain a clearer idea of
what he really means, though the boldness of his thinking is apt to be
obscured by the sobriety of the commentary. What still remains to be
done, however, is to identify what is good and bad in the man's work.
He was neither a philosophical god nor a philosophical curio. He
should be engaged more than exhibited. Let's argue with him.
But the fascination with Wittgenstein is not owed only to his
philosophical work. His life also has a transfixing effect. For
professors especially, Wittgenstein represents an ideal of
intellectual purity and worldly indifference that answers to an
impulse that still throbs, however faintly, within their conventional
breasts: no home, no money (he gave his fortune away), no tie. He is
the rootless poetic genius they might have been in another life. But
the interest has spread beyond the borders of the academy in recent
years, even to those not contaminated by the philosophical disease.
There have been Wittgenstein novels, Wittgenstein memoirs,
Wittgenstein biographies. You hear his name on television.
Some of this interest stems, no doubt, from prurient interest in his
homosexual behavior, which was actually much less extensive than one
might wish. Far from indulging in vigorous promiscuity with legions of
unschooled lads (as some have alleged), Wittgenstein seems to have had
trouble engaging in any kind of sexual relationship with the objects
of his affection. But I suspect that the current obsession with the
difficult and austere Viennese-Oxbridge philosopher has a grander
reason. It is that Wittgenstein exemplifies an idea of heroism.
Of flawed heroism, to be sure; but still he stands for something for
which people yearn, even if they would run a mile if it tapped them on
the shoulder. Wittgenstein seems like a man who twangs to his own
extreme ideals, who is racked by his own integrity. His life is made
up of a series of dramatic gestures in placation of a god of flint and
fire. He has a clear center but not a still one, not one at peace with
itself. The core rages with molten purity, scorching the human
surround. You can see this white-hot demon patrolling behind his eyes,
unsleeping and merciless, missing nothing. It bears down on the man,
the mere man, refusing to cut him the slightest moral slack. People
are stirred by this vision, but also frightened by it. They see what
it might do to the usual moral mush.
Much was required of Wittgenstein by his steely god. First he must
escape the comfortable embrace of his rich and cultured Viennese
family and go to Manchester, where he studies engineering. Then he is
called upon to abandon that career for the philosophy of mathematics,
though profoundly uncertain of his capacities in this area. Having
made a resounding success of this new vocation, he is obliged to
remove himself from his friends and his supporters in Cambridge to
live alone in a self-made hut in deepest Norway. During World War I,
naturally, he has no alternative but to enlist in active service, to
put his life at serious peril with a view to self-purification. (He
reads Tolstoy and Augustine at the front.) Only this proximity to
death puts thoughts of suicide out of his mind.
When he completes the Tractatus, he feels the need to abandon
altogether the field in which he has excelled, give away all his money
and become an elementary school teacher, which he quickly comes to
hate. He flees again, and reluctantly returns, after a period as a
monastery gardener, to Cambridge, where he develops a new philosophy,
repudiating the work for which he has become famous. Then he decides
that a job as a manual laborer in Communist Russia is what his soul
craves. Sadly, they will employ him only as a professor, unskilled
labor not being a scarce commodity, so he declines to go, glumly
resuming his Cambridge professorship, which he describes as "a living
death." A spell doing menial work as a hospital porter during the
Second World War is then indicated, followed by more solitary
hut-living in Ireland. Finally, he spends his last days, penniless, in
the house of his doctor, working on the subject of certainty, dying of
prostate cancer.
All this is interspersed with spasms of self-loathing, forced
confessions of his supposed sins to friends and tireless perfectionism
about his work and his moral state. Spiritual struggle is the
unrelenting theme: struggle with the philosophical incubus, with his
own pride, with a soiled and compromised world. No wonder he described
himself as like a man glimpsed through a window in an unseen storm,
appearing to walk quite normally, but in fact keeping his balance only
with the greatest exertion. This is heroism of a sort, despite the
invisibility of the opposing forces. It carries the idea that decency
(a favorite word of Wittgenstein's) is something that comes as a
hard-won achievement, and that it must fight a constant battle with
the corruption of the soul. Purity costs. It hurts. It can make you do
peculiar things.
The drama of Wittgenstein's life and personality makes him a uniquely
suitable subject for a philosophical film. I once discussed the idea
of such a film with Jonathan Miller, but we decided it would be too
difficult to get right. Recently the project has been executed by the
literary theorist Terry Eagleton and Derek Jarman, who died this year.
They have attempted to convey Wittgenstein's life and thought in
visual form. The film consists of an album of cinematic
paragraphs--visual remarks, as it were-- and it is an imaginative and
serious attempt to render its subject's life in form and in color.
Especially in color: Jarman renders the austere philosopher of
language from a painterly standpoint. It is not a prism of
Wittgenstein's own devising; he was interested in color for its
logical grammar, not its aesthetic or expressive possibilities.
Spatially, the film is confined and claustrophobic, shot against a
uniformly black background. Optical interest is supplied by the vivid
hues of the clothes worn by everyone except the protagonist, who
remains steadfastly gray and dowdy. He will not brighten up. (Karl
Johnson's portrayal of Wittgenstein accumulates to an eerie
reincarnation of the original. Johnson presents an uncanny physical
resemblance to Wittgenstein, in both face and physique; he has
Wittgenstein's eyes and mouth exactly right, the fragile ferocity of
the gaze, the sensual rejection of the thin, inturned lips. And the
voice is the perfect blend of the military, the preacherly and the
childlike.) Russell wafts about in bright red, Ottoline Morrell
traverses most of the spectrum, Keynes mixes and matches like a
chromatic polymath. There is even a loquacious Martian sporting the
reptilian green that is standard in that community. This method of
representation is quite successful, and it aptly projects an
impression of floating abstractness on the characters, condensing them
into conceptual beacons, animated categories. That is probably how
Wittgenstein himself tended to see people, despite his advice that one
should study people's faces with the utmost care. It is a mark of his
personal solipsism, as well as his extreme sensitivity to the presence
of others. (He always chose to live alone.) Yet he himself stands in
no need of chromatic heightening, having a natural, if somewhat
glacial, internal iridescence.
There is a fair amount of philosophical talk interpolated into the
narrative. My unease peaked at these points. It is not that what is
said is inaccurate, but it gives the impression that philosophical
discussion is just a clash of portentous profundities, a duel of
gnomic pronouncements; and the mordant tone of the film encourages
this impression. But philosophical discourse is nothing like that: it
consists of argument, counterargument, clarification, detail,
restatement, recantation. Philosophy is not intrinsically
incomprehensible or faintly silly. I note that no philosopher appears
to have been consulted in the making of the film, which is really
quite amazing. Did anybody involved in making the film actually study
Wittgenstein's works, or the commentaries on them? I fear that they
took the view that Wittgenstein is what you make of him. If so, they
were wrong: his philosophy does not consist of a series of "inspired
suggestions," from which the reader is invited to derive his own
lessons, or to indulge his own fancy. It is a tightly constructed body
of doctrine.
Eagleton's original script was substantially altered by Jarman, no
doubt because of its dramatic inertia: it is all spouting heads. Apart
from the amateurish way in which the philosophy is presented, the
central flaw in Eagleton's script is its inaccurate and stereotypical
depiction of Russell, who appears as a shallow libertine much given to
the hackneyed phrase ("Oh come on, old bean, don't be so ornery"). I
suppose that, aside from not doing his homework properly, Eagleton
finds it politically unacceptable that an English aristocrat could
have been as intense and as passionate as any exotically accented
European.
In his introduction to the script, Eagleton asserts that the Tractatus
is "the first great work of philosophical modernism," and that "its
true coordinates are not Frege and Russell or logical positivism but
Joyce, Schoenberg, Picasso." This is bizarre, and it is sufficiently
refuted by the pedestrian fact that Wittgenstein expresses his debt to
Frege and Russell in the preface to that abstract and technical work
(no mention of those other guys). This is a particularly brazen
attempt by Eagleton to wrench Wittgenstein from his natural context
and put him in the service of Eagleton's own purpose, which is the
interpretation of the humanistic disciplines according to social
theory.
It is not remotely correct to say, as Eagleton does, that "before
contemporary cultural theory, Wittgenstein was teaching us that the
self is a social construct," whatever that means. Wittgenstein was not
concerned with such issues. The social intrudes on his thinking only
as the requirement that rules of language should be open to public
correction, that they not be "private." This has nothing to do with
whether one's personality is a product of social determinants. It is a
risible distortion to read Wittgenstein's later work as some kind of
anticipation of Foucault and company. Wittgenstein never abandoned the
traditional problems: knowledge, meaning, mind, mathematics, logic,
explanation, analysis. He was not a literary or political theorist. He
was a pure philosopher.
Understanding Wittgenstein on his own terms, however, is often the
last thing that the fascinated want. They have their own needs, their
own uses, for him. They seek confirmation of their own views and
values by an acknowledged genius. But what really makes Wittgenstein
so interesting, as a thinker and a man, is the distance that separates
him from familiar ways of thinking and being. To get the most out of
him, you have to see that he is nothing like yourself.
===========================================================
Source: The New Republic, June 20, 1994 v210 n25 p34(6).
Title: Philosophical Occasions, 1912-1951._(book reviews)
Author: Colin McGinn
Subjects: Books - Reviews
People: Klagge, James
Nordmann, Alfred
Wittgenstein, Ludwig
Full Text COPYRIGHT The New Republic Inc. 1994
Ludwig Wittgenstein did most of his publishing after his death,
leaving that sordid business to his literary executors. The modest
curriculum vitae that accumulated during his lifetime--one short book,
which was his doctoral dissertation, one article, one book review--has
now expanded to fifteen substantial volumes. And there is more where
that came from. Wittgenstein would hardly have flourished in today's
academic environment. The greatest philosopher of the century would
have had to fight hard for tenure. His kind of perfectionism is no
longer tolerated.
Not that Wittgenstein would himself have cared, given his propensity
for leaving the profession of his own free will. It is only the world
that would have suffered. There is a characteristic poignancy, in any
case, in the fact that his great mature work, Philosophical
Investigations, should have been published two years after he died in
1951, thus sparing him the anguish of its instant and prolonged
celebrity. So canonical is that work, indeed, that it is hard to
believe that it was written by anyone. It stands there like a natural
monument, the result of superlunary dictation.
Wittgenstein's philosophical legacy consists principally of the binary
star formed by the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which appeared in
1922, and the Philosophical Investigations, high- density objects
giving off complementary glows. The views expressed in these two works
are sharply opposed in content and in outlook, but there persists a
single underlying preoccupation, and there are common threads. More
than any philosopher before him, Wittgenstein was concerned with the
link between language and reality. He wanted to understand how, by
emitting sounds, we manage to say something about the world beyond
language. By what mechanism or means does language, and hence thought,
come to be meaningful? And what are the limits of meaning?
Wittgenstein's contribution, put in the broadest terms, is that he saw
how difficult this simple question is. Talking about things is a
deeply puzzling phenomenon, not the transparent act of mind- world
engagement that we tend to assume. How must the world be, and how must
language be, for it to be possible that the two should join in
occasions of meaning? What constitutes this unlikely nexus?
In the Tractatus the answer was a highly abstract metaphysical system,
buttressed by formal logic, in which the structure of reality and the
structure of thought were deduced from the requirements for any
possible kind of semantic representation. This became known as the
picture theory of meaning. "What any picture, of whatever form, must
have in common with reality, in order to be able to depict
it--correctly or incorrectly--in any way at all, is logical form,
i.e., the form of reality." That is, for language to depict the world,
it is necessary for these two poles to share an inner logical
structure, so that facts and propositions partake of the same
transcendent logical order. Language and the world are one, in their
deep metaphysical essence. This ultimate monism may not be apparent on
the surface of language, but it must be so beneath the surface; and
there must exist an ideal language in which the necessary sameness of
form with reality is made fully transparent. To construct such a
language would be to devise a symbolic system in which the structure
of the world would reach right through our modes of representation: a
flawless metaphysical mirror, as it were. The puzzles produced by our
imperfect ordinary language would be finally laid to rest once the
ideal language was available.
And yet Wittgenstein did think that there is a residue of significance
not covered by such an account of meaning. For there are things that
cannot be said, but only shown. "There are, indeed, things that cannot
be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is
mystical." This realm includes ethics, aesthetics, philosophy itself.
Strictly speaking, utterances of those kinds are literal nonsense,
since they cannot be brought under the picture theory of meaning, but
Wittgenstein has no doubt about their importance and their legitimacy.
The famous last sentence of the Tractatus, "What we cannot speak about
we must pass over in silence," is not intended to suggest a dismissive
attitude toward the unsayable. It recommends, instead, a reverential,
attentive speechlessness in the face of the transcendent. What cannot
be put into language can still be apprehended, in quiet obliqueness.
The form of the mystical, unlike the form of reality, is not any kind
of logical form. It lies outside the space of possible fact.
============================================================
Source: The Economist (US), Dec 7, 1996 v341 n7995 p79(3).
Title: The philosophers that Sophie skipped.(modern philosophers;
book
'Sophie's World')
Abstract: The novel, 'Sophie's World,' virtually neglects modern
philosophers. The ideas of Bertrand Russell, Ludwig
Wittgenstein, JL Austin, Willard Quine, Moritz Schlick,
members of the Vienna Circle are discussed, along with
changes in philosophical thought.
Subjects: Philosophers - Criticism, interpretation, etc.
Philosophy - History
People: Wittgenstein, Ludwig - Criticism, interpretation, etc.
Russell, Bertrand - Criticism, interpretation, etc.
Full Text COPYRIGHT 1996 Economist Newspaper Ltd. (UK)
"SOPHIE'S WORLD", a history of philosophy written in the form of a
novel, has sold at least 9m copies in 36 languages by offering
philosophy without tears. What its Norwegian author, Jostein Gaarder,
also offers is philosophy without the 20th century. His tour begins
2,600 years ago, and ends, in effect, in the late 1800s. The past
century is reduced to a few cups of cafe-philosophy distilled from
Jean-Paul Sartre, a dose of pop physics and one passing reference to a
remark by Bertrand Russell about a doomed chicken. Perhaps this was
wise. There is, after all, a widespread belief that today's philosophy
is bunk. Many people say that "analytical" philosophy-which dominates
English-speaking universities, and which has become the main
philosophical movement in the West-is a mixture of trifling semantics
and impenetrable mathematical squiggles.
Yet here is a funny thing. Who was it who complained about "the
over-refined linguistic quibbling of some philosophers"? And who
whinged that "mathematics has come to be the whole of philosophy for
modern thinkers"? The first complaint is from Galen, a doctor who
wrote long before the fall of the Roman Empire. The second is even
older: it comes from Aristotle. The fact is that such criticisms are
as ancient as philosophy itself. They are the sort of thing which
thinkers in every century have tended to say about the philosophers of
their own times. Maybe the 20th century is not so very different from
what came before. Philosophy is always liable to look trivial and
misguided until it is old and seen through spectacles fogged by
nostalgia for some past age of intellectual greatness.
But an even larger obstacle to any proper appraisal of present-day
thinking in the English-speaking world is often sheer unfamiliarity.
Today's philosophy is much abused but little understood. For a fairer
view, it may help to take a closer look at the thinkers with whom
20th-century philosophy began. The story opens as a tale of two
cities: Cambridge and Vienna. In 1898, a Cambridge mathematician,
Bertrand Russell, fell under the sway of a classicist, G.E.Moore. Both
men had turned to philosophy, and Moore was aghast at what he found.
He could barely believe that the Hegelians who then dominated the
British scene meant what they said. Like the honest boy in Hans
Christian Andersen's tale, Moore came to the conclusion that the
emperor had no clothes. "What on earth do you mean by that?", he would
gasp incredulously in discussions. He wrote that the disagreements
which had dogged philosophy "are mainly due to a very simple cause:
namely to the attempt to answer questions without first discovering
precisely what question it is which you desire to answer." What
philosophy needed, according to Moore, was more careful analysis and
fewer ridiculous statements.
Russell agreed that philosophy required a firmer footing, and when he
went to a mathematical conference in Paris in 1900, he thought he had
found it. There he met an Italian, Giuseppe Peano, whose work set new
standards of logical rigour. Russell thought that Peano had uncovered
the true nature of mathematics and had thus answered a puzzle which
had baffled philosophers for centuries. This gave Russell an idea. It
seemed to him that 19th-century mathematicians had resolved "many of
the topics which used to be placed among the great mysteries-for
example, the natures of infinity, of continuity, of space, time and
motion." Perhaps philosophy could borrow their methods of analysis and
finally start to make progress.
This idea was worked up in a vast tome, "The Principles of
Mathematics" (1903). While writing it, Russell discovered the work of
Gottlob Frege, a German mathematician, who had taken Peano's sort of
work even farther. Frege tried to show that part of mathematics was
really a branch of logic (and in doing so developed the mathematical
logic from which today's computer languages come). Though Frege had no
interest in applying his methods outside mathematics, Russell thought
they could be the model for a revolution in philosophy as a whole. The
"logical-analytical method", he said, amounted to "the same kind of
advance as was introduced into physics by Galileo: the substitution of
piecemeal, detailed and verifiable results for large untested
generalities recommended only by a certain appeal to imagination."
Here at last was the sort of philosophy that would not arouse Moore's
incredulous gasps.
"The Principles of Mathematics" unveiled key methods and tools that
shaped 20th-century philosophy. One was the "theory of descriptions",
which purported to solve a problem that Plato had wrestled with,
namely how one can think and speak of non-existent things. The theory
showed how various tricky propositions could be translated into
something more perspicuous and less puzzling; it soon came to be seen
as a model of how to philosophise. Even more important was the
"doctrine of types", which was designed by Russell to deal with some
mathematical paradoxes. It proposed a "definite set of rules for
deciding whether a given series of words was or was not significant."
By specifying a technical criterion of meaningfulness which
mathematics had to satisfy, it eliminated the paradoxes. To some
philosophers it also suggested the possibility of something broader.
Perhaps there could be a general criterion of meaningfulness, which
would eliminate not only mathematical paradoxes but a whole host of
philosophical problems. This idea was enthusiastically taken up in
Vienna.
Logical negativism
In the 19th century there was a tradition in the German-speaking world
of mixing physics and philosophy. Ernst Mach, one of the main
influences on Einstein, was an early example. This tradition was the
foreign soil in which Russell's "logical-analytical method" grew most
impressively; and it was one of the later occupants of Mach's chair in
Vienna, Moritz Schlick, who did the most to tend the seedlings.
Schlick earned his PhD in physics under Max Planck, one of the
founders of quantum theory; then he turned to more philosophical
matters. In 1918 he published a study of knowledge which aimed at
"correctly interpreting the achievements of the sciences". It sought
not only to analyse scientific results, but also to philosophise in
accordance with a scientific method. This was philosophy in Russell's
style, and with many references to Russell.
Yet Schlick and his colleagues soon added a twist of their own. In
1924 Schlick founded "the Vienna Circle for the Dissemination of the
Scientific Outlook", a discussion group whose members were mainly
scientists and mathematicians. By the early 1930s, the group had
formed alliances with like- minded thinkers in Berlin, Poland, the
Netherlands and Scandinavia. They called their approach to knowledge
"logical positivism", though in fact it was rather negative as far as
philosophy was concerned. "All real problems are scientific ones,"
wrote Schlick, "there are no others". What used to be called
"philosophical problems" were fated to disappear. Some of them would
be "shown to be mistakes and misunderstandings of our language and the
others will be found to be ordinary scientific questions in disguise."
According to the positivists, there was to be a strict division
between all- conquering science and the dwindling ancillary discipline
of philosophy. Philosophy could talk about the meanings of statements,
but it was up to science to decide if these statements were true. The
most useful thing philosophers could do was pack up awkward bits of
intellectual furniture so that the scientific removal-men could come
and take them away.
Russell disagreed. Philosophy was "more critical and more general"
than science, but not radically different from it. He wanted to apply
scientific methods of analysis to some of the ancient problems of
philosophy, not to abolish that venerable discipline. As we shall see,
Russell's approach won out in the end. But several other things
happened first.
Inspired partly by the success of Russell's "doctrine of types" in
mathematics, the positivists tried to wield a mighty axe called the
Verification Principle. This was supposed to provide a general
criterion of meaningfulness for all statements of fact, and any which
did not meet it were condemned as nonsense. Whatever was empirically
unverifiable had to go, so it was farewell to most of traditional
philosophy-and much else. This negative aspect of the Vienna Circle's
doctrine owed much to their reading of the "Tractatus
Logico-Philosophicus", which had been published by Ludwig
Wittgenstein, a former pupil of Russell's, in 1921.
Bewitched-genstein
In fact, Wittgenstein had less in common with the positivists than
they thought. Russell, too, interpreted Wittgenstein's work in his own
slanted way. Everyone had his own version of Wittgenstein in those
days, and the only point of agreement was that Wittgenstein was a
genius.
Wittgenstein was the offspring of one of Europe's mightiest industrial
barons. In 1908 he left his native Austria to fly kites in Derbyshire,
for aeronautical research, and then went to Manchester to study
engineering. He became interested in the work of Frege and Russell and
came to Cambridge to study under Russell in 1911. After a short period
during which he thought that Wittgenstein was mad, Russell soon came
to the conclusion that he would shortly be eclipsed by his pupil.
Wittgenstein's criticisms of some of Russell's work on mathematical
logic were brilliantly penetrating; his views on logic were powerfully
original. Russell and Moore thought that the next breakthroughs in
philosophy would come from Wittgenstein.
Neither of them realised just how unusual Wittgenstein's agenda was.
Russell and Moore held that the job of philosophy was to analyse the
world, but Wittgenstein believed that its job was to analyse language.
Most philosophy, he maintained, is fuelled by a dangerous temptation
to transgress the limits of language and say the unsayable. Proper
philosophy should instead offer a "critique of language", which would
reveal these limits and then maintain a dignified silence.
Moreover, Wittgenstein was vehemently opposed to the optimism and
scientific spirit of Russell. "I have no sympathy for the current of
European civilisation and do not understand its goals," he later
wrote. It was a delusion, Wittgenstein believed, to think that science
and industry could solve man's problems. To philosophise in a
scientific spirit-as Russell and the positivists did in their various
ways-was a symptom of this delusion.
Wittgenstein left Cambridge in 1913 and returned 16 years later. In
between, he fought in the first world war, wrote his "Tractatus", gave
away his fortune, spent six years as a village school-teacher,
designed a house for his sister and met a few members of the Vienna
Circle. By the time he came back to Cambridge in 1929, he was evolving
a new, therapeutic conception of his "critique of language". The
Oxford movement that came to be called "ordinary-language philosophy",
and had its heyday from the late 1940s to the early 1960s, was
influenced by this new approach.
According to Wittgenstein's revised outlook, philosophical problems
are to be solved "by looking into the workings of our language . . .
not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have always
known. Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our
intelligence . . ." The main cause of this alleged bewitchment was
language, though it was not the only cause. Another was people's
"craving for generality". A third was scientism-that is, a misplaced
confidence in purely scientific ways of thinking.
The new therapy was supposed to work by examining what people say and
thereby revealing the rich diversity of linguistic behaviour.
Appreciating this diversity would prevent us from falsely assimilating
one "language-game" to another. Wittgenstein had read very little of
the philosophy of previous centuries, but he was convinced that this
sort of thing was relevant to it. For example, his linguistic therapy
showed (or so he thought) that it was a mistake to look for some sort
of proof of the existence of physical objects, as many philosophers
since Descartes had done. To try and provide such a proof revealed a
misunderstanding of how we use words such as "know". We cannot
meaningfully question the existence of physical objects, so we should
not speak of "demonstrating" their existence either. The language-game
of "proof" could not be played in this context.
Much of Wittgenstein's therapy concerned the way people talk about
mental states. It was this topic which produced some of the best-known
work of the Oxford school. Gilbert Ryle's "The Concept of Mind", which
sought to exorcise "Descartes's myth" of "the ghost in the machine",
is one example. It argued that to talk about human intelligence and
consciousness was, in effect, to talk about publicly observable
behaviour, not ghostly, inner events. The book's contents and approach
are broadly Wittgensteinean.
Wittgenstein acknowledged that his way of doing philosophy was a
radical departure. But this seemed to him to be entirely appropriate:
"Why", he asked, "should philosophy in the age of airplanes and
automobiles be the same as in the age when people travelled by coach
or on foot?" Russell was not convinced. He accused Wittgenstein and
the Oxford school of having abandoned serious intellectual work. He
was not the only critic to do so.
Although the Oxford men officially denied that the analysis of
language provided the last word on any philosophical subject, it did
seem to take up much of their time. They sometimes substituted an
obsession with language for the much-derided obsession with science.
(Most were trained as classicists, so they were simply doing what they
knew best.) One pupil recalled handing a draft of his thesis to J.L.
Austin, a leader of the school, whereupon Austin opened the file at
the page of contents and "proceeded to spend the next three hours
discussing the differences between 'contents', 'list', 'index',
'table', etc." The pupil experienced "a Zen-like illumination". But it
faded in minutes.
The Vienna Circle had broken up just before the second world war, and
most of the top positivists from the continent emigrated to America.
They had mellowed somewhat; the harsh Verification Principle had been
largely abandoned by 1950. But they retained their focus on science
and mathematical logic. Their continuing work had an enormous impact
on American philosophy, and eventually succeeded in reinstating
Russell's original conception of philosophy as a partner of science.
Russell's revenge
From about the mid-1970s, the transatlantic trade in philosophy began
to reverse its flow, and America became the great exporter of ideas.
British philosophers went as pilgrims to America rather than vice
versa. Willard Quine, a Harvard philosopher who had visited the Vienna
Circle as a student, and who had worked closely with positivists and
ex-positivists ever since, became the most-discussed figure among
English-speaking philosophers. Quine propounded a crucial argument
that helped to combat the influence of Wittgenstein and to bring
philosophy and science closer together. Many people, on both sides of
the Atlantic, disagree with the argument, but philosophy is now
largely pursued as if it were correct.
Quine argued that the difference between matters of fact and matters
of meaning is a difference of degree, not a difference of kind. "All
bachelors are unmarried" is true in virtue of its meaning; "Bill
Clinton is married" is true in virtue of fact. Quine developed a
"holistic" philosophy of language according to which truths of fact
blend into truths of meaning, so that there is no absolute distinction
between the two. Because Wittgenstein, the early positivists and the
Oxford analysts had all asserted that philosophy was concerned with
meanings, whereas science was concerned with facts, the barriers which
they erected between philosophy and science began to crumble.
As if to reflect this change, many philosophers have been mingling
with psychologists, biologists, computer scientists and theoretical
physicists, especially in America. Insofar as their work remains
distinctively philosophical, it is so largely in Russell's sense of
being "more critical and more general" than everyday scientific work.
It is more likely to look askance at fundamental presuppositions and
to try to relate work in different fields.
Still, this is a blurring of the boundaries, not a wholesale merger,
and by no means all of today's philosophers specialise in questions
that have much connection with any scientific research. Nevertheless,
most branches of philosophy now have closer links with other
subjects-political theory, economics, jurisprudence, for instance-than
they had in Wittgenstein's time. Very few philosophers now think of
their subject as entirely cut off from all others.
jum...@my-deja.com
The other big change in philosophy since Wittgenstein's day is that
there is much more of it. This too has affected how it is done, and in
ways that Russell would largely have approved of. According to a
forthcoming study by Tom Baldwin of York University, there are now
about 480 professional philosophers in Britain, compared with 122 in
1947. There are about 8,500 in America, according to the Philosophy
Documentation Centre (PDC) in Ohio, and the number of philosophy PhDs
granted in America grew from 83 in 1949-50 to 255 in 1988-89. The
result is increased specialisation and the division of labour. The
replacement of "large untested generalities" by detailed piecemeal
results, which Russell called for, have now been delivered, partly
because of changes in academic life.
But are there perhaps now too many detailed piecemeal results? The PDC
records no fewer than 320 philosophical journals currently published
in English, of which 184 are American. Privately, and unsurprisingly,
many philosophers confess that not all of these outpourings are
worthwhile. Yet something similar is true of all academic disciplines.
The "logical- analytical method" which Russell advocated, and which
the majority of English-speaking philosophers still practise in some
form, has become a professional tool like any other. This is
presumably what Russell would have wanted. If "analytical" philosophy
really is very different from more traditional varieties, it is
largely in virtue of being more professional.
==============================================================
Source: Library Journal, Sep 1, 1997 v122 n14 p184(1).
Title: Leading a Human Life: Wittgenstein, Intentionality, and
Romanticism._(book reviews)
Author: Leon H. Brody
Subjects: Books - Reviews
People: Eldridge, Richard
Full Text COPYRIGHT 1997 Reed Publishing USA
In contrast to those who see the later Wittgenstein's work as
"unprofessional, or unreasoned, or grandiose," or as demonstrating the
end of the need to ask ultimate questions, Eldridge (philosophy,
Swarthmore) sees in it a profound drama that attempts to provide a
philosophical understanding of the essence of human life. This drama
unfolds, Eldridge argues, in Wittgenstein's Philosophical
Investigations, where he tries to understand conceptual consciousness
and give a unified account of meaning and understanding. This is a
penetrating and insightful interpretation of Wittgenstein's thought --
one that goes well beyond the usually straight-forward analytical
treatments (although it is that, too) to encompass the broader
questions of the nature of culture and human existence. For academic
collections and readers highly conversant with contemporary
philosophy.
==========================================================
Source: New Statesman (1996), March 13, 1998 v127 n4376 p18(1).
Title: The idea that Hitler and Wittgenstein were once schoolmates
is certainly compelling. But it's hardly the stuff of
serious historical conjecture.
Author: Sean French
Abstract: Kimberley Cornish reports in the book 'The Jew of Linz'
that Adolf Hitler was once the schoolmate of the Jewish
leader Ludwig Wittgenstein. The author theorizes that their
interaction may have played a role in Hitler's attitude
toward Jews. However, the arguments are not supported by
evidence.
Subjects: Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) - Portrayals, depictions, etc.
People: Cornish, Kimberley - Criticism, interpretation, etc.
Hitler, Adolf - Biography
Wittgenstein, Ludwig - Biography
Full Text COPYRIGHT 1998 Statesman and Nation Publishing Company Ltd.
(UK)
I once wrote a diary in which, in some foolishly generous mood, I made
available various ideas for people to use as the basis of a film or
play, on the model of Tom Stoppard's Travesties, which was inspired by
the fact that James Joyce, Lenin and the Dadaist Tristan Tzara were in
Zurich at the same time during the first world war.
I mentioned that Adolf Hitler and Ludwig Wittgenstein were, briefly,
pupils together at the Realschule in Linz. The idea that one of the
great representatives of German-Jewish culture should have brushed
shoulders in a school corridor with its ultimate destroyer seemed
irresistible to me. Now Kimberley Cornish has written about the
"encounter" in The Jew of Linz, the argument of which was summarised
in this week's Sunday Times.
Consider the following extraordinary paragraph: "If I am right,
Wittgenstein's complex, prickly personality was a contributory cause
of the events that climaxed in the attempted extermination of European
Jewry. Hitler, with his own complex, prickly personality, was repelled
by Wittgenstein and came to attribute what he saw as Wittgenstein's
particular personality defects to Jews in general."
In his excellent biography of Wittgenstein Ray Monk mentions the
connection as follows: "Hitler, though almost exactly the same age as
Wittgenstein, was two years behind at school. They overlapped for only
the year 1904-05, before Hitler was forced to leave because of his
poor record. There is no evidence that they had anything to do with
one another."
So what has Cornish come up with to establish a connection? The "real
clue" comes from a mention in Mein Kampf of a Jewish boy at the school
whom "we did not particularly trust. Various experiences had led us to
doubt his discretion."
Cornish connects this with a diary of the time in which Wittgenstein
wrote of a "talk about confessions with my colleagues", which he takes
to be evidence that Wittgenstein may have informed on his classmates.
And he connects that to an entry in the second volume of Mein Kampf in
which Hitler equates "a boy who snitches on his comrades" with
treason.
The "real denouement" occurs in Cambridge in the thirties. Cornish
suggests that Wittgenstein may have been the "recruiter who created
the Soviet spy ring in Cambridge", enlisting Kim Philby, Guy Burgess,
Donald Maclean and Anthony Blunt. After all, he was gay, a member of
Trinity and the elite intellectual society, the Apostles, a
sympathiser with Stalin, a charismatic teacher. He therefore played a
major role in helping the Soviet Union in the years before and during
the war, and "thus" the Jew who played the decisive role in inspiring
the Holocaust also played the decisive role in bringing it to an end.
There is something heroic about this argument and it would be a good
subject for a novel about the dangers of creating theories out of
nothing. Nabokov should have written it. It is not just that there are
weak links in the theory. There are no links in the theory. No
evidence that Hitler, in his final unhappy year, even knew a boy two
years above him. If they did know each other, there is no evidence
that he was the boy Hitler distrusted, no evidence that Hitler's
remarks on snitching related to specific incidents at the Linz
Realschule, no evidence that Wittgenstein informed on his fellow
pupils.
Nevertheless the process is strangely hypnotic. Wittgenstein had
perfect pitch and used to correct singers who were out of tune.
Cornish then cites an anecdote from later years when Hitler was
whistling a tune: "When a secretary had the temerity to suggest that
he had made a mistake in the melody, the Fuhrer was furious, shouting,
'I don't have it wrong. It's the composer who made a mistake.'"
Imagine young Hitler's feelings when Wittgenstein corrected his
whistling in the school corridor. QED. Strange things happen to your
mind when you sit for years alone working on a book.
===============================================================
Source: The Economist (US), March 14, 1998 v346 n8059 p18(1).
Title: Magnates and metaphysics: what links Wittgenstein with
Hitler, Stalin and Rupert Murdoch? Nothing has been proved
- yet.(new book accuses Ludwig Wittgenstein of Nazi
sympathies; press freedom and the Murdoch
empire)(Editorial)(Brief Article)
Subjects: Press and politics - Anecdotes, cartoons, satire, etc.
People: Wittgenstein, Ludwig - Media coverage
Murdoch, Rupert - Anecdotes, cartoons, satire, etc.
Full Text COPYRIGHT 1998 The Economist Newspaper Ltd. All rights
reserved.
THE damning truth is out. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein caused
the Holocaust. It is "a fair bet" that it was he who, as a schoolboy
in Vienna, "turned Hitler into the killer of 6m Jews." There is more.
Wittgenstein recruited the Soviet spy ring of Blunt, Burgess, Philby
and Maclean at Cambridge in the 1930s. And he also once threatened his
fellow philosopher, the late Sir Karl Popper, with a poker. The
shocking news about Hitler and about Wittgenstein's career as a master
spy was splashed across the pages of the London Sunday Times on March
8th. The poker tale appeared in the Times Literary Supplement. And
here is the real story. Both papers are owned by the media magnate,
Rupert Murdoch, who last month dumped a book about Hong Kong because
he feared it would damage his business interests in China. Which of
the magnate's interests are now behind this attack on the century's
most famous philosopher?
First consider the facts about Wittgenstein. In 1904-05 he and Hitler
were indeed pupils at the same school (though two classes apart).
Wittgenstein's family had converted, but it was of Jewish origin, and
it is possible that Hitler met and disliked Wittgenstein. At Cambridge
in the 1930s, Wittgenstein did flirt with the idea of giving up
philosophy to work as a labourer in Stalin's Russia. He opposed
Marxism but admired the Soviet solution to unemployment. On this
slender basis, Kimberley Cornish, an Australian writer whose book "The
Jew of Linz" was excerpted in the Sunday Times, makes his inferences.
The logic is simple: if a claim has not been conclusively refuted,
then that is a good reason to believe it. This principle is of little
use in the natural sciences, but it works profitable wonders in the
science of publishing.
Can such reasoning be used to cast light on Mr Murdoch's motives?
Indeed it can. In a passage that is well-known to undergraduates yet
curiously neglected by Mr Cornish, Wittgenstein makes fun of someone
who buys "several copies of the morning paper to assure himself that
what it said was true". What clearer evidence could there be of
Wittgenstein's hostility to men such as Mr Murdoch? In a place like
Britain, where one man owns many titles, it is hard to get at the
truth even by buying several copies of different newspapers. Plainly
it is in Mr Murdoch's interests to discredit such opponents of
diversified media ownership.
And consider this. Wittgenstein often bemoaned the cheapening of
culture and the Americanisation of life. He wrote that the spirit
which informs "the vast stream of European and American civilization
in which we all stand", and especially its dependence on technology,
was "alien and uncongenial" to him. That takes little decoding. It
means that Wittgenstein would never have bought a satellite dish, or
tuned into one of Mr Murdoch's cable channels, or surfed along to
foxnews.com on the Internet. Then there is Wittgenstein's apparent
hostility to reporters. In conversation he was quick to deride the
work of his rivals as "philosophical journalism". Might this distaste
for journalists have marked Wittgenstein out for attack? Well, maybe
not, since Mr Murdoch is believed by some of his employees to share
that prejudice.
Perhaps there is room for reconciliation between the metaphysician and
the magnate. Wittgenstein once wrote in one of his notebooks that "I
have often learnt a lesson from a silly American film." Surely that is
a sentiment to gratify the owner of 20th Century Fox.
================================================================
Source: Booklist, Sept 1, 1998 v95 n1 p59(2).
Title: The Jew of Linz: Wittgenstein, Hitler, and Their Secret
Battle for the Mind._(book reviews)
Author: George Cohen
Subjects: Books - Reviews
People: Cornish, Kimberly
Full Text COPYRIGHT 1998 American Library Association
Cornish presents two alarming and possibly controversial theories. The
first is that the Austrian-born British philosopher Ludwig
Wittgenstein was the target of Hitler's wrath in Mein Kampf, and that
some of Hitler's subsequent beliefs about Jews came from his
association with Wittgenstein. Second, Cornish writes that
Wittgenstein, a covert Stalinist, joined the Comintern at Cambridge
University, where he recruited Anthony Blunt, Kim Philby, and other
spies to undermine the German war effort by passing military
information to the Soviet Union. The book includes a school photograph
of the 1904-05 class at the Linz (Austria) Real-schule. Cornish
identifies two of the students as Hitler and Wittgenstein, both 14
years old at the time. Cornish reminds readers that Hitler wrote in
Mein Kampf that his anti-Semitism developed after an interchange with
a student; the author says that the student was Wittgenstein. Cornish
also points out that Hitler's interest in the occult and
Wittgenstein's mysticism had common roots. Whether readers and
scholars find Cornish's theories plausible or implausible, this is an
important book.
=============================================================
Source: Great Thinkers of the Western World, Annual 1999 p511.
Title: LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN.
Author: CONSTANCE CREEDE
Subjects: Language and culture - Philosophy
Meaning (Philosophy) - Criticism, interpretation, etc.
People: Wittgenstein, Ludwig - Criticism, interpretation, etc.
Full Text COPYRIGHT 1999 HarperCollins Publishers
Born: 1889, Vienna, Austria
Died: 1951, Cambridge, England
Major Works: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), Philosophical
Investigations (1953)
Major Ideas
Language and the world share a common logical form.
Sentences are logical pictures of the world: The logical relations
between the elements of a sentence reflect the relations between the
elements in the world.
Sentences can show their form but they cannot say it; Sentences that
attempt to say what can only be shown are pseudo-sentences or
nonsense.
Language consists of "language games" that reflect forms of life.
For many expressions, the meaning is the use: To grasp the "meaning"
of such an expression is to know how to use it.
Ludwig Wittgenstein is distinguished among philosophers for developing
two very different philosophical theories, a feat that attests to his
reputation as a man both brilliant and eccentric. He was born in
Vienna, Austria in 1889. By 1912, an initial interest in engineering
had brought Wittgenstein to England to study the foundations of
mathematics with Bertrand Russell. He completed his dissertation while
serving in an artillery unit of the Austrian army during World War I.
After the war, believing he had solved fundamental philosophical
problems, Wittgenstein returned to Austria to teach in village schools
until 1926. Over the next few years, conversations with members of the
Vienna Circle led Wittgenstein to reconsider his early work. In 1929,
he was back at Cambridge and he lectured there until 1946. He died of
cancer in 1951.
Questions about the relationships between language, thought, and
reality preoccupied Wittgenstein throughout his career. His project
was critical. Like Kant, Wittgenstein sought to define the limits of
thought. Unlike Kant, he took language as his starting point. In his
early work, Wittgenstein argued that sentences "picture" the world by
reflecting its logical structure, that is, the arrangement of simple
objects in a state of affairs. According to the theory of meaning
developed in this period, most traditional philosophical problems lie
outside the limits of what can be sensibly said. Wittgenstein's later
work rejects the systematic aspirations of his early theory. A new
understanding of language as first and foremost a product of social
convention replaces the early realism. This new understanding of
language in turn implies a new conception of meaning and philosophical
method, both of which are perhaps most prominently displayed in what
has come to be known as the private language argument.
Wittgenstein's major works are notoriously obscure and dense. His
writing style is austere, almost epigrammatic. Two works in particular
represent Wittgenstein's two distinct conceptions of philosophy. The
Tractatus, Wittgenstein's dissertation, was the only book he published
during his lifetime. He left instructions that his second major work,
Philosophical Investigations, should be published after his death. The
investigations contains the core of Wittgenstein's refutation of his
own early theory. In addition to these two authorized works,
collections drawn from Wittgenstein's lectures and notebooks have been
published by colleagues and friends.
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicas
The central feature of the Tractatus is the distinction Wittgenstein
draws between "showing" and "saying." On the one hand, in a sequence
of numbered sentences Wittgenstein develops his picture theory of
meaning. This picture theory defines the limits of what can be said
But it is a consequence of the theory that the sentences of the
Tractatus itself cannot sensibly be said Instead, the limits they
describe can only be shown. Wittgenstein's distinction between saying
and showing turns the book from a treatise on the logical foundations
of language to a work on metaphysics and, Wittgenstein himself
claimed, ethics.
The basic intuition behind the Tractatus is Wittgenstein's conviction
that all languages share a common logical form, a form they also share
with the world. In fact, this shared form makes it possible for
sentences to "say" something. What a sentence says is just the logical
picture it presents of the world It is the understanding that
sentences are pictures that leads to the distinction between showing
and saying. Sentences give pictures of the world but they cannot give
pictures of themselves. They show the logical form they share with the
world, but they cannot say it. Sentences can only show their logical
form, because trying to make them say it pushes language beyond the
limits of sense.
When he wrote the Tractatus, Wittgenstein had a very particular
understanding of what "sense" could be As he saw it language is made
up of names arranged in sentences. The names have meaning because they
stand for objects in the world These names can be arranged in
sentences in certain ways and the possible ways of arranging them
define the limits of sense. For Wittgenstein, then only a sentence has
sense, and its sense is the arrangement of names that pictures a
possible arrangement of elements in the world.
The problem as Wittgenstein saw it, is that sentences lose their sense
when they try to do more than picture a possible state of affairs in
the world. Wittgenstein never gave an example of what he meant by a
"name" or the kind of objects names stand for (sense data or ordinary
objects, for instance) but a rough sketch of his ideas might go as
follows:
That the world is as it is a purely contingent matter. "The cat is on
the mat" describes one possibility. "The cat is not on the mat"
describes another. To know which sentence is true, one would compare
the picture with the world. But now consider the sentence "Either the
cat is on the mat or the cat is not on the mat." This sentence is what
logicians call a tautology It is a special kind of sentence in that it
must always be true; it cannot be false. The either-or sentence does
not give a picture of the world. Instead, it tries to give a picture
of the relationship between the sense, or form, of two sentences.
According to the Tractatus, sentences like tautologies are not really
sentences at all. They are pseudo-sentences. Pseudo-sentences
transgress the bounds of sense because instead of just showing their
sense in a picture of a possible state of affairs, they try to say
something necessary about the forms and limits of sense. But if
sentences say something and have sense only by presenting pictures of
the world, then pseudo-sentences, which do not present such pictures,
say nothing. They are nonsense.
Like tautologies and contradictions, all of the sentences in the
Tractatus lack sense. By describing the limits of what can be said,
they go beyond them. Wittgenstein's attempt to describe the limits of
language from within marks his project as Kantian. Wittgenstein
recognized that there is no vantage point outside language from which
to describe the limits of language, just as Kant had tried to show
that there is no vantage point outside experience from which one can
describe the limits of all possible experience. And just as Kant
emphasized that reason constantly and inevitably seeks to transgress
its limits, so Wittgenstein believed that we constantly try to say
what cannot be said.
According to Wittgenstein's early view of sense and meaning, most
philosophical theories, and in particular ethical discussions, come
out as nonsense. It was for this reason that he thought he had solved
philosophy's problems. However, calling them nonsense did not for
Wittgenstein mean that they are unimportant. On the contrary,
Wittgenstein thought that some nonsense, like the Tractatus, could be
illuminating. This is the source of Wittgenstein's so-called
"mysticism."
By 1929, when he returned to Cambridge, Wittgenstein had begun to
revise his conception of meaning and language. He no longer thought
that language primarily reflected the logical structure of the world.
Instead, he now saw language as a product of social convention. There
were several reasons for Wittgenstein's change of mind, one of the
most important being his new sense of what is necessary to learn a
word, or grasp a concept.
In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein argued that the meaning of a name is
the object for which it stands. The intuition here is that the
paradigm for learning the meaning of a word is ostensive
definition-the teacher points at the object while saying the word and
the student learns to associate the two together. But how does the
student know what is being pointed to? For instance, if the teacher
says "red" while pointing at an apple, how does the student know she
means its color, and not its shape or taste?
Philosophical Investigations
The analogy of a chess game is often used to illustrate what
Wittgenstein saw as the problem with thinking we learn a language by
way of ostensive definitions. Someone who just knows that the king is
the tallest piece on the board does not yet understand the meaning of
the king. He does not understand even if he knows in addition how the
king moves. To understand the meaning of the king is to understand its
function in the game as a whole. Similarly, Wittgenstein argued in the
investigations, to grasp the meaning of a word is to know how to use
it in a given context, that is, a particular "language game," a
linguistic procedure. Meaning is use. Learning a language is like
learning a game or, more accurately, a multitude of related games.
In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein asserted that the sentences of a
language reflect the logical structure of the world in a kind of
systematic unity. The investigations rejects this view. Language is,
instead, made up of interrelated language games that reflect "forms of
life." It is not as though each game has definite boundaries and a
distinct identity. It is not even possible to say precisely what a
game is. Rather, language games are knit together by resemblances like
those that mark the members of a family.
The rules of the games are embedded in the grammar of the language. By
"grammar," Wittgenstein meant more than just how words are combined
correctly in a sentence. He also meant to refer to the kinds of
contexts in which certain words and sentences make sense. In the
Tractatus, philosophical problems arise when language transgresses the
limits of sense. In the Investigations, they arise when philosophers
transgress the limits of grammar by confusing the limits of a language
game. For instance, one speaks of having an understanding as though
this were like having an apple, and one may then begin to wonder where
the understanding is located (thus confusing the game of mental
processes with that of material objects). In such situations,
Wittgenstein claimed, meaning is lost, language is idling.
The new purpose of philosophy is to combat such confusion. The
Philosophical Investigations is a kind of dialogue. The author
speculates and raises questions designed to show an opponent where he
or she has gone astray This is nowhere more true than in the passages
of the private language argument, where Wittgenstein argues against
the sophist, who believes it is possible, and even unavoidable, to
speak a language and live in a world of ones own. The author of the
Investigations corrects the sophist of the Tractatus.
Further Reading
Hacker, P. M. S. Insight and Illusion: Wittgenstein on Philosophy and
the Metaphysics of Experience. Rev. ed. New York: Oxford University
Press, 1987. A thorough and sophisticated study of the evolution of
Wittgenstein's philosophy The revised edition contains a response to
Kripke's interpretation of the private language argument.
Janik, Allan, and Stephen Toulmin. Wittgenstein's Vienna. New York
Simon and Schuster, 1973. This work details the influence of the
Austrian intellectual climate on the development of the Tractatus,
correcting earlier, more narrow interpretations.
Kripke, Saul A. Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language. Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982. An original and provocative
interpretation of the Investigations' private language argument.
Pears, David Francis. Ludwig Wittgenstein. New York: Viking Press,
1970. A clear and accessible introduction to Wittgenstein's
philosophy.
================================================================
Source: Time, March 29, 1999 v153 i12 p88+(1).
Title: Philosopher: LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN He began by trying to
reduce all mathematics to logic and ended by finding most
metaphysics to be nonsense.(TIME 100)
Author: Daniel C. Dennett
Abstract: Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein studied with philosopher
Bertrand Russell, and produced a famous book "Tractatus
Logico-philosophicus.' Wittgenstein espoused mathematical
logic, although the debate about what he meant in his work
still goes on long after his death. Alan Turing also
studied with Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein's life and career
are outlined.
Subjects: Philosophers - Conduct of life
Philosophy - History
People: Wittgenstein, Ludwig - Conduct of life
Full Text COPYRIGHT 1999 Time Inc. All rights reserved.
If you would like to watch philosophers squirm--and who
wouldn't?--pose this tough question: Suppose you may either a) solve a
major philosophical problem so conclusively that there is nothing left
to say (thanks to you, part of the field closes down forever, and you
get a footnote in history); or b) write a book of such tantalizing
perplexity and controversy that it stays on the required-reading list
for centuries to come. Which would you choose? Many philosophers will
reluctantly admit that they would go for option b). If they had to
choose, they would rather be read than right. The Austrian philosopher
Ludwig Wittgenstein tried brilliantly to go for a) and ended up with
b).
The revolution in mathematical logic early in the 20th century opened
up a delicious prospect: a rigorous science of meanings. Just as the
atomic theory in physics had begun to break matter down into its
constituent parts and show how they fit together to produce all the
effects in nature, logic held out the promise of accounting for all
meaningful texts and utterances--from philosophy and geometrical
proofs to history and legislation--by breaking them into their logical
atoms and showing how those parts fit together (in an ideal language)
to compose all the meanings there could be.
As a young engineering student in England, Wittgenstein saw the hope
of the new mathematical logic, and rushed to Cambridge to become the
protege of Bertrand Russell, whose monumental Principia Mathematica
(1913), written with Alfred North Whitehead, was an attempt to reduce
all mathematics to logic. Wittgenstein's first book, published in
England in 1922, the even more grandly titled Tractatus
Logico-philosophicus, went even further, and was thought by him, and
by some of his admirers, to have brought philosophy to an end, its key
problems definitively solved once and for all. Some "philosophical"
propositions could be readily expressed and evaluated within his
system, and those that couldn't--among them, metaphysical riddles that
had bedeviled philosophers for centuries--were nonsense.
Wittgenstein returned to Austria to become a schoolteacher. But the
worm of doubt soon gnawed, and he returned to England in 1929 to
declare dramatically that he had got it all wrong the first time. The
"later Wittgenstein" spent the next 18 years agonizing in front of a
small Cambridge seminar of devoted and transfixed students, who posed
curious questions that he then answered--or pointedly did not
answer--with wonderfully austere if often enigmatic aphorisms. An
obsessive perfectionist, Wittgenstein worked and reworked his notes
and left his second masterpiece, Philosophical Investigations, for
posthumous publication in 1953. Both books will be required reading as
far into the future as any philosopher could claim to see.
The family into which Wittgenstein was born in 1889 was one of the
wealthiest in Vienna, and young Ludwig grew up in a hothouse
atmosphere of high culture and privilege. Brahms and Mahler were
frequent visitors to the palatial family home, and Ludwig's brother
Paul, a concert pianist who lost an arm in World War I, commissioned
works for the left hand by Richard Strauss, Ravel and Prokofiev. It
was during the war that Ludwig, a volunteer in the Austrian artillery,
completed the Tractatus shortly before he was captured and taken
prisoner. Always an ascetic, he gave away his inheritance, relying on
the generosity of his Cambridge champions, Russell and John Maynard
Keynes, to secure academic employment for him, living frugally and in
later life being cared for by his disciples.
You know from the moment you open the Tractatus that it is something
special. Each left-hand page is in German, facing its English
translation on the right, and the sentences are numbered, using a
hierarchical system that tells you this is a formal proof. The book
begins straightforwardly enough: "1. The world is everything that is
the case." (In German, it makes a memorable rhyming couplet: Die Welt
ist alles, was der Fall ist.) And it ends with an ending to end all
endings: "7. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."
In between, there is some tough sledding. Wittgenstein draws a
distinction between what can be said, using words, and what can only
be shown, and this raises the inevitable question: Does the Tractatus,
as a text, say things that can't be said? Maybe. The next-to-last
proposition is a famous shocker: "6.54. My propositions are
elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them
as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over
them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed
up on it.) He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world
rightly."
Did this mean that the wonderful dream of logical atomism--a science
of meanings--was hopeless? Or that there was much less to be said than
one might have thought? Or what?
When Wittgenstein returned to philosophy in 1929, it was with the
message that the rigorous methods of pure logic could get no grip on
the problems of philosophy: "We have got on to slippery ice where
there is no friction and so in a certain sense the conditions are
ideal, but also, just because of that, we are unable to walk. We want
to walk: so we need friction. Back to the rough ground!" Where before
he had favored explicit logical rules, now he spoke of language games,
governed by tacit mutual understanding, and he proposed to replace the
sharp boundaries of set theory with what he called family
resemblances. "Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our
intelligence by means of language," he declared, and language
bewitches us by enticing us to concoct "theories" to solve
philosophical problems that arise only "when language goes on
holiday."
Wittgenstein set out in particular to subvert the seductive theories
about mind and consciousness that philosophers since Descartes had
puzzled and battled over. Again and again in Philosophical
Investigations, he catches his interlocutors in the act of being
suckered by their overconfident intuitions about what their words
mean--what their words must mean, they think--when they talk about
what's going on in their own minds. As he says, "The decisive moment
in the conjuring trick has been made, and it was the very one that we
thought quite innocent." (Today's neuroscientists fall into these same
traps with stunning regularity, now that they have begun trying to
think seriously about consciousness. Unfortunately, Wittgenstein's
work has not been appreciated by many scientists.) But didn't his own
antidote to such theories constitute a theory of the mind? That is
just one of many quandaries and paradoxes he has left behind for
posterity.
In 1939, Wittgenstein's Cambridge seminar on the foundations of
mathematics included a brilliant young mathematician, Alan Turing, who
was giving his own course that term on the same topic. Turing too had
been excited by the promise of mathematical logic and, like
Wittgenstein, had come to see that it had limitations. But in the
course of Turing's formal proof that the dream of turning all
mathematics into logic was strictly impossible, he had invented a
purely conceptual device--now known as a Universal Turing
Machine--that provided the logical basis for the digital computer. And
whereas Wittgenstein's dream of a universal ideal language for
expressing all meanings had been shattered, Turing's device actually
achieved a somewhat different sort of universality: it could compute
all computable mathematical functions.
Happily, in those days before tape recorders, some of Wittgenstein's
disciples took verbatim notes, so we can catch a rare glimpse of two
great minds addressing a central problem from opposite points of view:
the problem of contradiction in a formal system. For Turing, the
problem is a practical one: if you design a bridge using a system that
contains a contradiction, "the bridge may fall down." For
Wittgenstein, the problem was about the social context in which human
beings can be said to "follow the rules" of a mathematical system.
What Turing saw, and Wittgenstein did not, was the importance of the
fact that a computer doesn't need to understand rules to follow them.
Who "won"? Turing comes off as somewhat flatfooted and naive, but he
left us the computer, while Wittgenstein left us...Wittgenstein.
Some will say that in the longer run, Wittgenstein's legacy will prove
to be the more valuable. Perhaps it will. Wittgenstein, like any other
charismatic thinker, continues to attract fanatics who devote their
life to disagreeing with one another (and, presumably, with my brief
summary) about the ultimate meaning of his words. These disciples
cling myopically to their Wittgenstein, not realizing that there are
many great Wittgensteins to choose from. My hero is the one who showed
us new ways of being suspicious of our own convictions when
confronting the mysteries of the mind. The fact remains that one's
first exposure to either the Tractatus or Philosophical Investigations
is a liberating and exhilarating experience. Here is a model of
thinking so intense, so pure, so self-critical that even its mistakes
are gifts.
Philosopher Daniel Dennett is the author of eight books, most recently
Brainchildren: A Collection of Essays 1984-1996
[BOX]
BORN April 26, 1889, in Vienna 1912 Moves to Cambridge to study with
Russell 1918 Completes the Tractatus during active service in World
War I 1920 Works first as a schoolteacher, then as a gardener 1929
Returns to Cambridge as a lecturer and begins work on Philosophical
Investigations 1951 Dies in Cambridge
-QUOT-
"Philosophers are often like small children who scribble random marks
on paper and then ask an adult, 'What is this?'" WITTGENSTEIN, who
deliberately posed for a photo in front of this wall
"I asked him to admit that there was not a rhinoceros in the room, but
he wouldn't." BERTRAND RUSSELL, on Wittgenstein's refusal to believe
his own eyes
Milton N. Bradley
Am I missing something here?? What, if anything has this to do with Go??
And if nothing - or even if not much - what is it doing posted to this
ng??
Milt
--
"Better to light one small candle than to curse the darkness."
Visit my web page at http://www.villagenet.com/~bradleym
jum...@my-deja.com wrote:
> Source: The New Republic, May 19, 1986 v194 p37(5).
> Title: Wittgenstein._(book reviews)
> Author: David Pears
> People: Ayer, A.J.
> Wittgenstein, Ludwig - Criticism, interpretation, etc.
>
> Full Text COPYRIGHT The New Republic Inc. 1986
- massive snip -
Kirk
I must admit, it is better than your server war posts....
Kirk
Bill Taylor
Has jumangi cracked?
His posts were often a bit rambling, but never like this before.
Is he sane?
WTF?
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Bill Taylor W.Ta...@math.canterbury.ac.nz
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
William Tell, missing the apple but hitting his son in the eye 3 times:
"YES! Look at that GROUPING!"
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Roy Schmidt
> Has jumangi cracked?
> His posts were often a bit rambling, but never like this before.
Frankly, this is the reason Jeff Boscole is in my kill file. He only posts
drivel and taunts.
Note that even though I have some serious disagreements with some of Bill
Taylor's posts, he still posts some fascinating and relevant pieces on this
ng. Thus, I haven't put Bill's posts down the memory hole.
Since I only see the *effect* of Jeff's posts through replies, I am amazed
at the number of follow-ups to what are essentially non-posts as far as this
ng is concerned. If a few more of you would just invoke the Kill option,
and a few others would resist following up ...
Cheers, Roy
=======================================
My reply-to address is gostoned at fgi dot net
=======================================
Roy Schmidt
Part-time translator for Yutopian Enterprises
Full-time Professor of Information Systems
Bradley University, Peoria, Illinois, USA
Marc Massar
> skip <
> anything larger requires approximation:
> 9x9: prob 0.235
> 13x13: prob 0.087
> 19x19: prob 0.012
>
Hum,
0.235^4 = 0.003 << 0.012
So this seems to indicate that, for 9x9, most illegal position arrise
because of problems on the edge (i am approximating 9*2=19). Could you
make the same simulation for a board (19*2)x(19*2) to see if boundery
effect are small for a 19x19 board. My guess is that the boundery effect
will still be noticable. In fact, one would think that the most
interesting board sice would be one where the boundery effects and the
bulck effect are of the same order of magnitude (by most interesting, I
mean most complicated to play).
Marc
John Tromp
>John Tromp wrote:
>> skip <
>> anything larger requires approximation:
>> 9x9: prob 0.235
>> 13x13: prob 0.087
>> 19x19: prob 0.012
>>
>Hum,
>0.235^4 = 0.003 << 0.012
>So this seems to indicate that, for 9x9, most illegal position arrise
>because of problems on the edge (i am approximating 9*2=19). Could you
>make the same simulation for a board (19*2)x(19*2) to see if boundery
>effect are small for a 19x19 board. My guess is that the boundery effect
The prob of a legal 38x38 is much less than 0.000001, and so is that
of a 34x34...
For 33x33, it's about 0.000015
-John
jum...@my-deja.com
From: Bill Taylor <mat...@math.canterbury.ac.nz>
> WTF is all this Wittgenstein crap doing here!?
>
> Has jumangi cracked?
> His posts were often a bit rambling, but never like this before.
>
> Is he sane?
Robert Jasiek and Milton Bradley had expressed some interest in
Wittgenstein, who is regarded in philosophy as third in a succession
stemming from Plato and then John Locke. Wittgenstein was also a
Chess player who promoted the notion of language as a gamed activity.
It is possible that Wittgenstein was familiar with Go, though the
documentation for that is meager, even if it should be forthcoming.
His association with Alan Turing and British cryptanalysis projects
may shed light on that question. The posted literature was extracted
from public library archives, so you'd have to establish that public
library records and resources are invalid due to your allegation of
them being rambling and/or insane to make your point, whatever it was.
At any rate the language wasn't mine, so any assessments of me, based
on its merits, are totally irrelevant. Maybe I should be surprised
that you fail to distinguish language which refers to the external
world from language which refers to itself, or that you don't very
well appear to distinguish citations from main text, however in light
of an assessment over the years in the rec.games.go newsgroup, and
elsewhere, from your prolific contributions which typically complain
about wasting bandwidth, I'm not very much surprised anymore where
you fail to measure up to commonly-adopted philosophical standards.
Questions have been brought up with regards to the issue of whether
Wittgenstein was sane, which is rather ironic since Wittgenstein was
devoted to an investigation of precisely that topic among many others.
In retrospect he is acknowledged as the philosophical genius who had
revamped the fundamental misconceptions of Plato, then John Locke's
fundamental misconceptions of Plato's misconceptions. Someone with
the capacity to do that, and in the position to do so, understandably
might be under considerable stress and anxiety over the prospect. It
is unarguable that Wittgenstein exerted considerable influence upon
Russell, Keynes, and Moore directly, and then most of 20th-century
philosophy, to include the American Pragmatists Dewey, Peirce and
James. Offered corrections, in response to Nietzsche, was no mean
achievement, though Wittgenstein is also credited with that task.
If we are to consider a "game theory origin" for communications, it
is perhaps Wittgenstein who was chief among those from philosophy who
had promoted that notion, maximally utilized in the analysis of WW-II
propaganda. Quine later returned with a reintegration of preliminary
"dichotomy" between philosophy and science, whose foundations had been
laid out clearly, perhaps for the first time, by Wittgenstein.
An artificial intelligence project, which propounds the possibility
of machine-play for Go, thereby builds upon ideas set into motion by
Wittgenstein in the early part of this century. Difficulties abound
everywhere yet among them are those of selection of rule-structures,
since perhaps nothing obstructs an algorithm from achieving competency
in play more than the problem of misapplication of a rule, or rules.
Wittgenstein's emphasis on an inquiry into the nature and propriety
of rule-sets, and meta-rules, is at the core of that task which seeks
to improve current models. As players we are all familiar with the
nagging sense of doubt concerning a particular game, that if only one
had played an earlier move differently its outcome might have been
more in keeping with the spirit of Go: this was the 20-20 hindsight
produced by retrospective _tewari_ analysis. That, too, is basically
what Wittgenstein had noticed in philosophy, and I think few, if any,
had previously brought to philosophy the notion that all of it could,
or should, be placed on the chopping-block of game theoretic analysis.
The fact that I should need to take the time to explain or justify
an academic inquiry concerning matters of ongoing research, is itself
disturbing, particularly for individuals who ostensibly are in the
employ of institutions of presumably higher education. Furthermore
the means by which "intellectual suppression" occurs, would seem to
be those which conduct personal attacks by means of putative "sanity"
criteria, if merely due to a situation where fleas cannot understand
the elephant. There's no medical definition of "sanity/insanity" but
these are terms applied by a legal system which itself is obligated
to follow established principles of inquiry, and recognized methods
for adjudication and appeal. Neither Bill Taylor nor Roy Schmidt are
in any position of competence to arrogate judgment, and speculation
on their part merely casts negative aspersions upon the quality of
their professions and the likelihood of hypocrisy in their immediate
working environments. If provocation of a reply was being sought,
it was not necessary to do so through insinuations aimed merely at
putting others into question. Instead, one could simply say, "I don't
understand the newsgroup relevance; could you please explain?" Really
now, questions of sanity are hardly relevant to this newsgroup. Such
tactics which attempt to invalidate others by means of labels and
their categorical imperitives are not dissimilar to those employed by
Hitler's Nazis who sought the last word, serving little or no function
in the process of reasoned discourse which has for one of its premises
that from any proffered statement, or set of statements, there will
nevertheless be the unavoidable possibility of its being subject to
the unblinking scrutiny of reviews, replies, and responses, fundmental
to a notion that moves in Go (as with "combinatorial games" generally)
are -alternating- so that the probability of having a "final solution"
at any given stage of the discourse, is not the most likely prospect.
And I will note again for the record that Bill Taylor's signature
block once more exceeded in length substantial text of his "message."
Centuries hence philosophers still will be studying the "Wittgenstein
crap" with Bill Taylor's contributions relegated to the bit-bucket.
Your observation implied by "WTF" is neither creative nor original in
terms of academic philosophy, nor contributory to improved algorithms.
From: Kirk <ki...@mcelhearn.com>
> What does this have to do with go?
>
> I must admit, it is better than your server war posts....
My intent behind the "server war posts" was to chill the position,
a considerably difficult task as it turns out, though not entirely
successful at that. I have some updates, however. First, I decry
the notion that one who is "non-IGS" should be labelled "anti-IGS."
I don't think that follows. Second, criticism of IGS or promotion
of NNGS on this newsgroup is not itself a disqualifier for being a
member in good standing at IGS. Third, an operating agreement with
the owners of IGS requires 'tweet' to act in an administrative role
so it's incorrect to identify 'tweet' as any putative "culprit" to
that scenario. Fourth, it's entirely reasonable for an Internet
Service to promote an "access agreement" just as one might have to
employ revocable passwords to access restricted websites. Fifth,
the fact that 'tweet' might need to employ brevity is chiefly the
consequence of a fact that he may be fielding hundreds of messages
at his terminal while trying to maintain his end of a conversation
with any given user. Sixth, it's really not very easy to be "booted"
from IGS -- one must insist on being willfully intransigent -- and
evidence of that willful intransigence is quite often provided by
their ceaseless and repetitive whining to this newsgroup in seeming
ignorance of the causes and circumstances (rather ironic). Seventh,
reinstatement is possible to IGS -- and has occurred in a number of
cases -- and I can report that some who were reinstated are actually
quite neutral and can even be mildly critical, if necessary, about
aspects of IGS policies which from time to time undergo improvement.
From: Roy Schmidt <r...@anti-spam.com>
> Frankly, this is the reason Jeff Boscole is in my kill file. He only
> posts drivel and taunts.
So your remark was -not- an example of "drivel and taunts?"
From: Roy Schmidt <r...@anti-spam.com>
> Note that even though I have some serious disagreements with some of
> Bill Taylor's posts, he still posts some fascinating and relevant
> pieces on this ng. Thus, I haven't put Bill's posts down the memory
> hole.
Much of the fascination with Bill Taylor's posts is suitable for
low-level kyu players; I'll grant you that.
From: Roy Schmidt <r...@anti-spam.com>
> Since I only see the *effect* of Jeff's posts through replies, I am
> amazed at the number of follow-ups to what are essentially non-posts
> as far as this ng is concerned. If a few more of you would just
> invoke the Kill option, and a few others would resist following up ...
In Go the "Kill option" doesn't work on situations having two
eyes, such as with the case of valid arguments. Of course you're
not getting the full story when you insist upon looking at only
one side of it. Furthermore, one of the guidelines for "mental
health professionals" consists of seeking balance rather than
imbalance in the gathering of informative evidence.
- regards
- jb
Eric Osman
> Frankly, this is the reason Jeff Boscole is in my kill file. He only posts
> drivel and taunts.
i don't have a "kill" file but it occurs to me that such files must be
rather useless, since even if you filter out all posts by user
xyz, you'll still see all the quoted stuff (with ">" characters) by
user xyz when OTHER people respond and include what
xyz said.
yes ? /Eric
k_corn...@my-deja.com
jum...@my-deja.com quoted a review article of my book, "The Jew of
Linz":
>
>
> There is something heroic about this argument and it would be a good
> subject for a novel about the dangers of creating theories out of
> nothing. Nabokov should have written it. It is not just that there are
> weak links in the theory. There are no links in the theory. No
> evidence that Hitler, in his final unhappy year, even knew a boy two
> years above him. If they did know each other, there is no evidence
> that he was the boy Hitler distrusted, no evidence that Hitler's
> remarks on snitching related to specific incidents at the Linz
> Realschule, no evidence that Wittgenstein informed on his fellow
> pupils.
The thesis of my book was that Ludwig Wittgenstein, the future
Cambridge philosopher, who attended school with Hitler in 1903/4, was
the occasion of Hitler becoming anti-Semitic. Quite to the contrary of
the review comments, the argument of The Jew of Linz is deductive and
can be presented as follows: Here is a list of ALL students at the
Realschule in 1903/4 who were halachically Jewish (that is, Jewish
under Jewish religious law):(DATA COURTESY OF THE BUNDESREALGYMNASIUM
1999)
1. Friedmann Paul DOB: 18.08.1886
2. Groag Wilhelm DOB: 07.01.1892
3. Grün Oskar DOB: 08.09.1892
4. Klein Oswald DOB: 23.03.1889
5. Ludwig Robert DOB: 18.06.1886
6. May Heinrich DOB: 15.05.1890
7. Peschek Oskar DOB: 07.11.1890
8. Pisinger Fritz DOB: 08.08.1892
9. Piskaty Erwin DOB: 13.06.1890
10. Pisker Johann DOB: 07.09.1887
11. Rosenblum Emil DOB: 28.03.1891
12. Rübinstein Ernst DOB: 31.01.1890
13. Taussig Bruno DOB: 24.04.1890
14. Taussig Erwin DOB: 04.12.1890
15. Taussig Victor DOB: 09.03.1887
16. Vogelfänger Gustav DOB: 03.01.1892
17. Wittgenstein Ludwig DOB: 26.04.1889
Alone of the 17 students in this list, Wittgenstein was enrolled as a
Roman Catholic. To the schoolboys, however, he appeared Jewish and was
indisputably “of Jewish descent”. His halachic Jewishness is
established not by the fact that he later “confessed” to being Jewish
at Cambridge or claimed (I think corrrectly) that his thought was "100
percent Hebraic" and that he was the greatest of Jewish thinkers, but
because his three Jewish grand-parents and Jewish mother make him
Jewish under Jewish religious law. Though halachically Jewish,
Wittgenstein, unlike the others, was enrolled as a Catholic. All the
others listed were registered as Jews and therefore knew they were
Jews. Now here is the earliest recorded record of Hitler making an anti-
Semitic remark:
It was reported by Franz Keplinger, who was in Wittgenstein’s class at
the Realschule (and who knew and visited Hitler later in Munich) and
recounted to Dr Franz Jetzinger: “Once Adolf shouted at another
boy, ‘Du Saujud!’ (You filthy Jew!“) The boy concerned was
staggered; he knew nothing of his Jewish ancestry at the time and
only discovered it years later ... “. (Jetzinger, Franz. Hitlers
Jugend, Vienna 1956, translated as Hitler’s Youth, by Lawrence Wilson,
Greenwood Press, Connecticut, p.71.)
The rider adding that the boy knew nothing of his Jewish ancestry gives
the quote the ring of truth and enables the researcher to deduce who
the boy was.
The only POSSIBLE candidate as the target of Hitler's abuse is Ludwig
Wittgenstein. The others knew they were Jews, if not from their parents
enrolling them as Jews and consequent different treatment in religious
education classes, then via their circumcised state amidst the
uncircumcised Austrian schoolboys in the changing room. Ray Monk
reports on p.5. of his Wittgenstein biography that one of
Wittgenstein's aunts did not know the Wittgenstein family was Jewish
and had to be informed they were "pur sang" – pure blood. It was
clearly not common knowledge within the family, but suppressed as a
sort of skeleton in the family closet. Ludwig had to DISCOVER that he
was Jewish through none other than Adolf Hitler sensing it and hurling
the "Du Saujud!" accusation. That is, the boy at the school whom Hitler
abused in his very first recorded anti-Semitic remark was the young
Ludwig Wittgenstein, the stuttering, truss-wearing, homosexual son of
the richest man in the Austro-Hungarian empire. Whatever the blindness
of the British reviewers, this argument will not go away. Interested
readers are referred to my book, where I demonstrate also that
Wittgenstein's cousin Joseph Joachim was Richard Wagner's greatest hate
amongst all German Jews. The links are too many to list here, but the
above argument (which, minus the student names, is in my book) should
convince.
Kimberley Cornish.
Milton N. Bradley
How I hate to be repetitive! But ...... This is all very interesting, but
what has it to do with Go?? And if nothing, as is painfully obvious, why is
it posted to rgg?????
Our Go-related flame wars are unpleasant enough, without yet another on a
completely unrelated topic!
(Thanks for bearing with me while I blow off my displeasure.)
Milt
k_corn...@my-deja.com wrote:
> In article <7u2m5v$6jd$1...@nnrp1.deja.com>,
> jum...@my-deja.com quoted a review article of my book, "The Jew of
> Linz":
> >
> >
> > There is something heroic about this argument and it would be a good
> > subject for a novel about the dangers of creating theories out of
> > nothing. Nabokov should have written it. It is not just that there are
> > weak links in the theory. There are no links in the theory. No
> > evidence that Hitler, in his final unhappy year, even knew a boy two
> > years above him. If they did know each other, there is no evidence
> > that he was the boy Hitler distrusted, no evidence that Hitler's
> > remarks on snitching related to specific incidents at the Linz
> > Realschule, no evidence that Wittgenstein informed on his fellow
> > pupils.
>
> Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
> Before you buy.
--
Mike Vaughn
<eric....@digital.com> wrote:
but at least you see the same stuff so many times.
> yes ? /Eric
yes, but you can also kill entire threads.
naturally, that means updating killfiles when the same old parties restart
the same old arguments.
it works for me.
jum...@my-deja.com
From: <k_corn...@my-deja.com>
Subject: Re: Wittgenstein._(book reviews)
Date: Tuesday, October 19, 1999 4:19 AM
> The thesis of my book was that Ludwig Wittgenstein, the future
> Cambridge philosopher, who attended school with Hitler in 1903/4,
> was the occasion of Hitler becoming anti-Semitic.
>
> [ ... ]
>
> The links are too many to list here, but the
> above argument (which, minus the student names, is in my book)
> should convince.
First, an aside to the "irrelevancy experts" on this newsgroup:
Some continue to maintain a (false) notion that the game of Go has
no bearing upon issues of individuals and societies, nor has any
relationship to history, nor to academia, nor to philosophy, nor
to science, nor to people working in these professions. I offered
some accounts of Wittgenstein's influence on early questions of
artificial intelligence and technology development in this century,
however the naysaying "irrelevancy experts" did -NOT- reply to the
remarks I had offered but chose to argue in a vacuum. While those
naysaying "irrelevancy experts" continue to conceptualize the game
of Go as having no "people component" we have at the same time the
postings on teaching pedagogies for children, and various posts on
techniques for "educating machines" on how to play the game of Go.
So I'm going to insist that if one keeps an "open mind" on these
ongoing development issues, it is not any foregone conclusion that
something is necessarily "irrelevant" to this game, particularly in
context to compelling arguments that seem to establish significant
relevancy. To state that a study of philosophy -is- relevant offers
some vision at doing so, while the naysaying "irrelevancy experts"
apparently say it is not, perhaps because they haven't sufficient
vision to perceive its connections. A lack of vision should not be
considered the qualifying criteria for determining the potential
relevancy or irrelevancy of information. While it is true that not
all philosophers nor all philosophies bear a direct or an indirect
connection with games, it is manifestly clear, and without a doubt,
that notions of "language games" -- propounded by Wittgenstein --
places him well within the horizon of topical relevancy for this
newsgroup, and many other newsgroups as well. My intent here does
not promise to engage with the "full-blown" discourse required to
provide an adequate understanding of Wittgenstein's philosophy but
simply to introduce a few others to the possibility that they might
want to take a serious look. The all-too-often "low-grade methods
of inquiry" given by negativistic naysaying whiners, on a number of
issues discussed on r.g.g., point to a sorry state of philosophical
lacuna, "acceptable" only due to the fact that such "methods" have
long gone unchallenged, even by those who could be in the pro-active
position to challenge them. Methodology is at the heart of how one
goes about "discovering" matters of truth, and how one sets about
engineering improvements to a system. It is manifestly illustrative
to contrast events of history, particularly with regards to inquiry
into methodologies employed by (for example) Nazi anti-semites, and
others of such tendencies, to determine whether tactics & strategies
resembling those of Nazi anti-semitism are going to prove ultimately
productive in one's life endeavors, or to endeavors generally in the
realm of cybernetics and game-theory. It seems to be a consensus,
so far, that an atmosphere of "open mind" in an "open society" is
prerequisite for software development, increased cognitive-skill at
boardgames such as Go, and the process whereby truthful information
can be gleaned. Where we find that atmosphere compromised a question
is raised concerning whether inferior tactics could possibly be those
correlated with optimal learning strategies. Thereby one returns to
philosophy. Rather than offering profused "apologies" on challenges
to relevancy it is instead incumbent upon negativistic naysayers to
apologize for their lack of long-range forecasting, if not outright
blindness, to projects of critical importance that have nothing to
do with their negativistic naysaying tendency. The entire universe
does not revolve around the brain of any particular individual, nor
around the brains of any particular "group" of individuals, nor even
around the collective brains of collective humanity, nor even around
the story of any particular species, nor even around Planet Earth.
Lobotomized "small mindedness" is -NOT- what this story is about.
It strikes me as unfathomably ironic that with the literary wealth
available, even in the "restricted region" of inquiry such as Go, we
still continue to be witness to crass negativistic naysaying. I do
not have many answers to explain causes of solipsistic neurological
derangement displayed by far too many contributors to rec.games.go.
There is a problem inherent to human species, it seems, which stems
possibly from the fact that its breeders tend to be those of less
intelligence than those who do not breed, a problem that has become
recently even more aggravated by 20th-century malaise in context to
certain "unthinkable options" attendant to nuclear/biological war,
i.e. "promise" of a future nobody of right mind wishes to inhabit.
I had some opportunity to review Richard Feynman's marvellous book
_Six_Not-So-Easy_Pieces:_Einstein's_Relativity_and_Space-Time_, and
those with literacy in physics can even locate a few minor errors in
its text, such as an amusing confusion on pgs. 138-139 where Feynman
says in Figure 6-19 that the parabolic trajectory occurs in "uniform
gravitational field" which cannot be "uniform" because he states that
clocks placed in various locations on a rocket (page 131) do not all
run at the same rate, though very nearly so. Feynman's discussion
therein is to illustrate Einstein's reformulation of Newton's "laws
of motion" which he summarizes on page 142 as:
(1) How the geometry of space-time changes when matter is
present -- namely, that the curvature expressed in
terms of the excess radius is proportional to the mass
inside a sphere.
(2) How objects move if there are only gravitational forces
-- namely, that objects move so that their proper time
between two end conditions is a maximum.
For many who study relativity physics, the evident correlations of
relativity, Darwin's evolution, hypergeometric equation, philosophies
of anti-solipsism, Hopf fibration topology, and game-theoretic notion
(such as boardgames of Chess or Go) is all too evident. The problem
seems to be that of attempting to explain relativity to twelve-year-
olds, or nine-year-olds as some insist, or more generally to adults
appearing to display childish regressive tendencies when their brains
no longer feature the "connection forming" mechanisms they formerly
had as children (thus a preponderancy to complain about things not
"linking up" and "connecting" for them). All these problems could be
prevented by considering some of the basic philosophical principles
that should really not "go away" unless our philosophical attitudes
have in later life become suppressed along with everything else. One
among those principles is that the "universe" (if it exists) is an
"inter-connected web" without the demarcations brought to it by the
kind of mind which insists upon imposing its "form" upon that which
has no intrinsic form. Bohm's "implicate order" is not an intrinsic
"form" but a quality of the undemarcated formlessness we can observe
nevertheless having abstracted characteristics such as those of the
physical laws considered invariant only because we observe invariance
in our locality. Locality exists objectively, says Einstein, though
our -perceptions- of locality are subject to relativistic variances
which in terms of measurment take the form of (competing) coordinate
systems not unlike a situation of two players each facing the "same"
coordinate system but with differing ideas about how to represent
those coordinates in their own game-plans. So "Player-A" has an X-Y
orientation while "Player-B" has a W-Z orientation, and the composed
structure of "Player-A" plus "Player-B" has a W-X-Y-Z orientation in
four-coordinate space-time. As a game progresses the situation can
occur whereby "Player-A" & "Player-B" exchange coordinate references
so that possible pairs formed may or may not necessarily invoke all
four coordinates, i.e. four-coordinate space-time might be 4-Dim in
the general case but that would not prevent cases of 3-Dim or 2-Dim
from occurring. The 1-Dim case is much easier to analyze because it
is a local "atari" situation where local _miai_ is not involved.
Maxwell's electromagnetic equations have two types of solutions,
as Lorentz discovered, so from the dynamical case Einstein built the
metaphysics of special relativity and published his preliminary 1905
paper, this being about the same period of time that Wittgenstein and
Hitler were schoolchums in Austria, which Kimberly Cornish ascribes
as the origins of the WW-II holocaust agenda, starting when Hitler
made an anti-semitic remark to Wittgenstein when they were both 14.
Special and general relativity both stem from investigations into the
hypergeometric differential equation. It acquires "hypergeometricity"
because its dimensionality runs beyond itself, as would many general
types of differential equations, but that doesn't literally imply
that it "runs anywhere." It is a particular kind of differential
equation distinct from other sorts of differential equations though
offering properties amenable to Bernoulli numbers and Conway's game
theory combinatorics. Once Bernoulli numbers are invoked we also
have elliptical forms and so thereby applications to random process.
This accounts for generality inherent to hypergeometric differential
equations and why Einstein's derivations proved to be both workable
and accurate to observed physical facts of our universe. What also
"falls out" from the Lorentz transform is the feature of "velocity
addition" having qualities rendered according to simple Pythagorean
rational triangles, or rather, one can say alternatively that the
feature of rational "velocity addition" works for Maxwell's Equations
in either the static or dynamic case, but at speeds approaching that
of "light" one employs the Lorentz transform to obtain the correct
means of "velocity addition" so that (example) c/2 + c/2 = 4c/5
and c/3 + c/3 = 3c/5 , and so forth, given by:
u/n + x/m
v = ----------- with u & x speeds and
1 + nm n,m simple rationals
Applicability to random process enters the picture once recognizing
that right triangles with congruent hypoteneuse having leg measures
of simple rationals form a sine & cosine series of "magic numbers"
that are more accurate in math multiplication boxes for perspective
projective geometry engines. If all tensorial transforms are taken
from a "base origin" then accuracy is not much of an issue, but where
tensorial transforms might be applied successively, as with a general
formulation, then selecting simple rationals does a much better job
of preserving coordinate accuracy than would general irrationals of
the sine & cosine functions. We can say, however, that coordinates
are made to be as accurate as possible in any case so working back
from that one may infer that the tensorial transforms which led to
that selection of accurate coordinates were most likely those of a
series of simple rationals in their sines and cosines in the general
case where tensorial transforms are applied successively. Therefore
all speeds are most likely those being some fraction of light speed.
The ultimate imposition of formulation in accurate coordinates makes
for simple rationality in the most likely available velocities, and
therefore the feature of Einstein's laws of motion stipulating that
from any condition of random coordinate selection, objects will tend
to move in elliptical (or parabolic) pathways, since conic sections
are also generated by "simple rational" dimensional-demarcation.
The answer to the question concerning "what is good shape in Go" is
provided by saying "Good shape in Go is that which is obtained by
practice, practice, practice ..." and invokes elliptical forms.
Good shape in Go is what wins the game, not what wins a particular
local position. Not in changing the policies of a particular Go
Server, but in changing the consciousness of humanity do we find
Good Shape.
Now to return for some remarks on the book by Kimberly Cornish:
Second, the "origins of the holocaust" are not founded in any set
of individuals, nor in any particular (alleged) conversation between
individuals, even granting that the thesis of the Cornish book is
correct, because the "origins of the holocaust" are traced instead
to a general problem among human beings which is essentially that of
a problem of (un)consciousness with regards to the meaning of being
human and the obligations entailed which human beings must sustain.
Third, the "effects of early education" appear to be overdramatized
by an account which pinpoints an event among the many millions and
billions of events which constitute educational process.
Fourth, the tendency of "psychologism" wants to ascribe dramatism
to events where it may not necessarily be warranted.
Fifth, the spirit of Wittgenstein's philosophy was not that of
mysticism which would assert faith as knowledge through conflation.
Sixth, it is a premature assessment to assume "sensibility" to a
universe that is not on its face meritoriously sensible.
Seventh, a "first recorded object" of Hitler's anti-semitism does
not in fact establish this was indeed Hitler's anti-semitic origin.
Instead Wittgenstein's family assertion to Catholicity would also
ascribe anti-semitic origins to certain aristocratic Jews who for
the most part maintain antipathy toward intransigence of other Jews.
On balance, however, the Cornish thesis is quite interesting if it
succeeds in providing a frame for reinvestigation of what appears to
be an ongoing "human problem" in the area of anti-semitism, and what
may be required as an appropriate response by the world community.
- regards
- jb
.
=============================================================
http://homepages.anglianet.co.uk/johnm/jewof.html
-------------------------------------------------
The Jew of Linz by Kimberly Cornish
Hitler, Wittgenstein and their secret battle for the mind
298pp. Century Ł17.99
07126 79359
There are a few scientists who believe in the Loch Ness monster. The
reason more do not, it is argued, is because it would be career
suicide - those who want to pursue an academic career do not take what
would be considered eccentric positions. Visionaries may have been
considered mad in their day, but so were the genuinely mad, and few
academics today would want to spend their careers isolated and
reviled.
It is refreshing, then, to find Kimberly Cornish willing to don the
mantle of the completely mad eccentric and write a book about
Wittgenstein which has earned him universal condemnation and amongst
academics and scholars. Is this condemnation justified? As it turns
out, no. Not because his arguments are correct (although they may be
more correct than he is given credit), but because so far no one
appears to have understood the real point of the book. As we shall
discover, Cornish is actually very clever at achieving his real aim,
which isn't anything to do with Wittgenstein.
But first, Cornish's notorious claims about Wittgenstein. These occur
in the opening chapters of the book, and consist of two basic charges:
firstly that Wittgenstein and Hitler went to school together, hated
each other, and played out this hatred for the rest of their lives;
secondly that Wittgenstein worked for the Soviet Union and recruited
many of the Cambridge spies. Without further ado, the arguments for
these claims will now be listed.
Although it is generally accepted that Wittgenstein and Hitler went to
school together, scholars do not believe they had anything to do with
each other. Wittgenstein's biographer Monk says "there is no evidence
that they had anything to do with one another" (p.11). Against this,
Cornish provides the following arguments:
A school photograph (shown on the cover of the book) shows Hitler
and Wittgenstein standing next but one to each other.
The school had 329 pupils - not a huge school , and of a size when
pupils would likely know each other.
They were the same age, although not in the same class, as
Wittgenstein was a year ahead and Hitler a year behind the average
(p.10).
A pupil records that Hitler called someone a "filthy Jew" who at the
time did not realise he had Jewish ancestry, this description fits
Wittgenstein.
In Mein Kampf Hitler recalls a Jewish boy "who was treated by us
with caution, but only because various experiences had led us to
distrust his discretion and we did not particularly trust him".
Wittgenstein is well known for his "confessions" and his obsession
to tell the truth, again making the link between Wittgenstein and
Hitler at school.
Wittgenstein's family was incredibly rich and powerful, hence
Wittgenstein because of his family alone would have been well-known
to the other pupils. However in addition Wittgenstein was a "small,
unathletic, stuttering, homosexual, adolescent" (p.18) which means
it is inconceivable Hitler could not have known Wittgenstein.
Both Hitler and Wittgenstein loved Wagner (p.12-14) and were both
able to whistle large sections of his music. This common interest
not shared by the other pupils again makes it likely they would have
known each other.
Wittgenstein referred to other pupils as "muck" and spoke down to
them using the term "sie" (p.18). It is on record that Hitler also
referred to other pupils as "sie" (p.21) and this term was also used
in later life by Hitler (p.22). Their both speaking in the same
manner again points to a connection.
Both pupils were major figures of the twentieth century, it is
likely that as children they would have stood out and hence be known
to each other (p.18).
Wittgenstein had two homosexual brothers who had killed themselves.
This would have made him widely talked about at the school (p.30),
again showing Hitler must have known of him.
Wittgenstein's family financially supported anti-Wagner artists and
musicians. As a lover Wagner, Hitler would have known this and
resented Wittgenstein for it.
The descriptions Hitler in later life gives of Jews actually fits
Wittgenstein: the outward appearance of being european (p.23);
bearing titles of nobility (p.23); being `court Jews' (p.25);
writing for the world press (p.27); spending the night in the Hotel
Excelsior (p.30). Even Hitler's laws defining who was a Jew (three
of the four grandparents had to be Jews) seemed especially to be
written for Wittgenstein (three of his four grandparents were Jews).
This shows Hitler had Wittgenstein in mind when he pursued his war
against the Jews.
Another reference Hitler makes to the Jews is "of German he
possesses nothing but the art of stammering its language" (p.23) -
Wittgenstein was a stammering Jew, hence again Hitler makes specific
references to Wittgenstein into general attacks on the Jews.
Statically there few Jews at the school, hence Hitler's references
to Jews at the school make it more probably he was referring to
Wittgenstein or had him in mind.
Hitler actually refers to Wittgenstein in a speech following
invasion of Austria, when he says "would that on this evening, some
of our international seekers after truth whom we know so well could
not only see the facts but later admit them to be facts". "Seekers
after truth" is a reference to a philosopher whom Hitler knows well
- Wittgenstein.
So in summary Cornish argues the Hitler and Wittgenstein must have
known each other at school, there is plenty of evidence to show they
must have hated each other, and Hitler in later life played out this
hatred of Wittgenstein by projecting Wittgenstein's characteristics
onto Jews as a whole.
Wittgenstein spent a lot of time at Cambridge. He went there before
the First World War, and returned afterwards. The common view is that
Wittgenstein was non-political, interested only in philosophy. Cornish
offers the following arguments against this.
Wittgenstein was offered the chair in Philosophy at Kazan
University, Lenin's old university (p.400). This would never have
been offered to a non-Stalinist. In 1922 Wittgenstein "fled to
Russia" (p.42).
Bartley records that at the monastery where Wittgenstein worked in
1926, people remembered him as "a left-winger" (p.42).
Wittgenstein returned to Cambridge in 1929. Philby started at
Trinity in 1929, Burgess in October 1930, Maclean in 1931 and Blunt
was elected to Trinity in 1932.
All Trinity spies were homosexual, as was Wittgenstein.
Wittgenstein was an early member of the "Cambridge Apostles" many of
whom were communists, and all the spies were members (p.43).
Wittgenstein was excommunicated in 1912 but this was revoked on his
return in 1929 "certainly with communist support" (p. 44). All the
Cambridge Apostles were under surveillance from Australia by AS10
(p.45).
Wittgenstein influenced a number of well-known Marxists such as
Julian Bell (p.44) and Lettice Bell (p.45).
Wittgenstein and Blunt lived at the same hostel (p.45).
It is likely the "dispute over poetry" which led to many
resignations from the Communist Party in Cambridge was Bell's poem
against Wittgenstein (p.47).
George Thompson describes Wittgenstein's attitude to Marxism as "he
was opposed to it in theory but supported it in practise" (p.48).
In 1934 Wittgenstein said to Rowland Hill "I am a Communist at
heart" (p. 48). Many of Wittgenstein's friends were Marxists, e.g.
George Thompson, Nichola Bachtin, Maurice Dobb and Piero Sraffa
(p.48).
Piero Sraffa was a Communist Marxist whose opinion Wittgenstein
valued above all others, and who Wittgenstein said was a major
influence on him in Philosophical Investigations (p.45).
A.C. Jackson said "Wittgenstein's politics were ultra-left wing,
strong sympathies for Stalin and the Soviet Union" (p.49).
Rush Rhees records Wittgenstein records Wittgenstein's support for
the Soviet Union (p.49).
Monk notes Wittgenstein was taken to be a "Stalinist" (p.50).
Wittgenstein is on record expressing his support for Stalin in 1939
(p.51).
Wittgenstein's students formed the nucleus of the Cambridge
Communists (p.52).
The recruiter for the Soviet Union at Cambridge had to be there by
1929, was a Cambridge Apostle and was at Trinity - there are 13
possible candidates including Wittgenstein and of them Wittgenstein
is the most likely name on the list (p.56).
Against the common view from friends that Wittgenstein was a
left-wing, Marxist, Stalinist, one of Wittgenstein's associates
Fania Pascal writes that Wittgenstein's views were "old-time
conservative". However it is highly likely she was a Communist agent
(p.72), and if Wittgenstein was working for the Soviet Union this
would explain why she would write this.
Wittgenstein was a powerful influence on people (p.58) such as
Malcom, Seale, McConville (p.59) - just the quality needed as a
recruiter for the Soviet Union.
Rush Rhees records Wittgenstein speaking in defense of Communist
party discipline (p.60).
Wittgenstein spoke from a left-wing perspective on Jarrow (p.61).
In 1935 Wittgenstein was still planning to live in Russia, a wish he
had expressed in the 1920s (p.62).
Wittgenstein's activities indicate he was finding out about British
scientists working on the atomic bomb (p.64-65).
Wittgenstein was an acquaintance of leading Communist Maurice Dobb
(p.71).
Wittgenstein learned Russian to become a Soviet Citizen (p.73).
Wittgenstein is again on record as expressing "strong sympathies
for.. Russia" (p.73).
Blunt and Wittgenstein were both in Moscow together in 1935 (p.74),
and at this time there were a number of Communists who sailed for
Leningrad in 1935 (p.74).
Wittgenstein had family connections with Russia (p.76-77).
Wittgenstein died on April 28th, 1951. Burgess and Maxlean defected
Friday, 25th May 1951. Burgess returned to Cambridge on May 19th to
"tidy up some loose ends" then defected. This indicates
Wittgenstein's death prompted the defections.
Wittgenstein wanted to work on a collective farm in the USSR, but
was told to carry on his work as he was making a "useful
contribution" (p.81).
These arguments are typically seen as what the book is all about.
These opening chapters were the ones printed in the Sunday Times
serialisation of the book, and are what are picked up on in reviews of
the book. However "refutations" of the arguments tend to be based on
pouring scorn on how "obviously" absurd the conclusions are, rather
than engaging with the arguments themselves. To go back to the Lock
Ness monster analogy, there was a Channel 4 documentary recently about
scientists who believe the evidence supports the likelihood of a Loch
Ness monster, and the scientific arguments supporting the theory were
explained. Yet those who don't believe in the monster will rarely if
ever refute the evidence, instead they will argue that since the
conclusion is "obviously" absurd there must be something wrong with
the argument somewhere, but they have no interest in identifying
where. The same appears true for Cornish's arguments about
Wittgenstein. Reviewers say the conclusion is obviously wrong
(Cornish's claims have been described as "outrageous") so the
arguments must be wrong. Other comments have been that Cornish is
wicked to suggest such things about Wittgenstein and that he hasn't
read enough books in German to have an opinion.
One reviewer even said Cornish did not provide a shred of proof that
Wittgenstein was the principle Soviet recruiting agent at Cambridge,
and that his claims were all based on his psychological profiling of
Wittgenstein and Hitler fighting a secret battle. Philosophy Now
readers have now seen the arguments for themselves and can decide if
there is anything in them.
As we said at the beginning, these opening chapters of the book are
not actually what the book is about. In a sense these chapters are the
"bait" to get people reading a philosophy book, which is what the rest
of the book is. There is a long and honourable tradition of authors
being creative and imaginative to get their books more widely read.
Most scholars now accept that a number of letters attributed to St
Paul in the New Testament were actually written by someone else, but
who used St Paul's name to increase their readership ("authorship"
wasn't as fixed a concept then as now apparently). More recently an
article appeared on the internet in which the author of the C++
computing language apparently reviled the language in an "unpublished
interview". In fact the "interview" was a total fabrication, but if
the real author had written an article "what I don't like about C++"
how many would have read it? Very few. Instead he puts his arguments
into the mouth of the very author of C++, and they are read by
thousands. Cornish is clever enough to know if he wrote a book on his
"no ownership" theory of language it would not have a wide readership.
If he says this "no ownership" theory was taught by Wittgenstein,
learned and twisted for his own ends by Hitler, and actually needs
Cornish to explain it all in great detail for the rest of the book he
has the book reviewed in every paper and even serialised in the Sunday
Times. This is not to say his arguments about Hitler and Stalin are
bogus, it is not to say the pseudonymous letters in the New Testament
aren't deeply spiritual, it is not to say the arguments in the
internet article on C++ aren't perfectly valid. Kimberly Cornish has
been creative and imaginative to increase his audience because he has
combined a perfectly reasonable bit of historical detective work with
a presentation of his philosophical views. What is curious is that no
one appears to have noticed what he has done! All the reviewers
happily read through a book at least half of which is pure philosophy
and think they have just read some bizarre historical theories. A
spoonful of sugar perhaps.
Since I have revealed the book to have some philosophical content
perhaps it is only fair to comment on it. Cornish does go into some
detail to explain his ideas and it does not do him justice to put them
in just a few sentences, however it is possible to give a flavour of
what he is interested in. Cornish argues that Western views of the
mind have seen them in very individual, ownership terms. Coming from
Australia, Cornish says he is more interested in a broader, social
understanding of the mind - indeed a mystical even magical view of the
mind. He takes seriously experiences of being able to "leave the body"
and presents a theory which explains how medicine men can see what is
happening many miles away, or witch doctors can put a curse on someone
and kill them. He calls this theory the "no ownership" theory of mind
and believes its theoretical framework can be developed from
Wittgenstein's ideas. The theory is as different as the format of the
book, and a challenging way of understanding our place in the world.
If you're looking for a book which offers history, politics, magic and
philosophy, try The Jew of Linz. Nothing about the Loch Ness monster
though.
John Mann
19th June 1998
2527 words
===============================================================
http://www.richmondreview.co.uk/books/jewoflin.html
---------------------------------------------------
Book Review, The Jew of Linz by Kimberley Cornish
Copyright © 1999 The Richmond Review
The Jew of Linz
by Kimberley Cornish
Reviewed by Andrew Harrison
How's this for the worst school story ever? In 1904-5 Hitler and
Wittgenstein, both 14 years old, attended the same school, the
Realschule at Linz. Most biographers are inclined to suppose that
these two schoolboys had little to do with one another. Kimberly
Cornish however begins his book by presenting quite tempting
circumstantial evidence that they made close contact. The dust jacket
of the book illustrates a school photograph which shows (if accurate)
a sad little 14 year old Hitler just behind what seems to be the
schoolboy version of the sensitive and unhappy face of Ludwig
Wittgenstein. On Cornish's account these sad little boys had
(apparently) much in common: a passion for the writings of
Schopenhauer and for the music of Wagner - and for whistling. They
also had quite enough for a terrible antagonism: Wittgenstein, from a
wealthy, over-cultivated family of Jewish (and anti-Semitic)
Catholics, frail, stammering, hyper-sensitive, emotionally indiscreet,
perhaps even then with homosexual feelings, would have been the
perfect object for a little bully's hatred of an outsider and victim.
Cornish supposes that their antagonism must have revolved around a
rivalry concerning their shared schoolboy obsessions. Schools can
indeed be awful places. But if Cornish is right, that childhood horror
was to grow thereafter to monstrous proportions. 'Hitler, I suggest,'
he says '...was repelled by Wittgenstein and came to attribute what he
saw as Wittgenstein's particular personality defects to Jews in
general... Something happened between Wittgenstein and Hitler at the
Realschule. We face, I think, the astounding possibility that the
course of the twentieth century was radically influenced by a quarrel
between two schoolboys.'
Could it really be that six million Jewish victims and all those
others were systematically murdered by the mass production methods of
a significant part of a civilised society just because of an
antagonism between two bewildered small boys? The horrifying thought
belongs not to 'the detective work of history' (Cornish's description
of his project) but to speculative drama. There is a powerful play to
be written that presents it, but this book is not its vehicle. The
scene now shifts to Cambridge, the home of those well-known Communist
Apostles and homosexual intellectuals, and dominated by the thought
and personality of the famous philosopher Wittgenstein. The claim is
that it was Wittgenstein who all along was the elusive recruiter of
all those spies and fellow travellers. Cornish's evidence is thin and
spread over many pages. There is a familiar smell of homophobic
spycatching. Wittgenstein knew all the right people - but then so did
everybody: it was a small, intense place. Wittgenstein had goo motives
for disliking Nazis - so did most of the best people (without having
to recall schooldays in Linz). Cornish's clincher is that the Russians
offered Wittgenstein a chair at Kasan University (Lenin's university!)
- perhaps as a reward. What reward, for whom?
From then on it's down hill all the way to the Big Philosophical Idea.
Cornish's thesis is that behind Wittgenstein's philosophical attack on
the idea of the mind as a privileged private arena of experience from
which we cannot escape into a public and communicable world lies a
positive mystical belief in a Universal Mind in which the individual
has no real place. As an account of Wittgenstein this is unconvincing,
sometimes even unintelligible. It never occurs to Cornish that such
ideas are the objects of reductio ad absurdam arguments of a deep and,
for Wittgenstein, all-pervading sense of intellectual irony. Kimberly
Cornish senses no irony, deep or otherwise. But then... Hitler (like
Wittgenstein, haunted by a schoolboy fascination with wilder elements
of Schopenhauer) also had his Universal Mind Theory - the great Aryan
dream of Nazi insanity. So the subsequent horrors had their origins in
a tug of war over the ownership of a schoolboy's intellectual fantasy
developed, just possibly, in the oppressive schoolrooms of Linz. There
is evidence that Cornish really does believe something like this.
Despite a closing discussion of the so-called 'no-ownership theory of
mind' where 'the young Peter Strawson' (sic) is discussed in the light
of Aquinas, and which establishes Cornish's philosophical location,
this book is not ad majorum dei gloriam: it remains a not
un-entertaining, if tasteless, form of learned sensationalism.
The Jew of Linz by Kimberley Cornish, Century, 297pp Ł9.99 ISBN: 0
7126 7935 9 UK Edition: Amazon.co.uk
k_corn...@my-deja.com
"Milton N. Bradley" <brad...@villagenet.com> wrote:
> All:
>
> How I hate to be repetitive! But ...... This is all very interesting,
but
> what has it to do with Go?? And if nothing, as is painfully obvious,
why is
> it posted to rgg?????
>
> Our Go-related flame wars are unpleasant enough, without yet another
on a
> completely unrelated topic!
>
> (Thanks for bearing with me while I blow off my displeasure.)
Please accept my apologies. I hadn't realized whoever posted the review
comments was simply spamming your site. (I found the reference to my
book via a web search on the topic "Hitler Wittgenstein" and simply
replied to it.) I should have checked first.
Again, my apologies,
Kimberley Cornish.
Patrick G. Bridges
jo
>Kill-filed.
Who? <g>
--
jo