Russell
and Wittgenstein: A Study in Civility and Arrogance*
Justin Leiber
In
1956, when I was a callow sixteen-year-old sophomore early entrant to the
University of Chicago, I read my first twentieth century philosophical book, A.
J. Ayer’s Language, Truth, and Logic.
While I had already gorged on the Russian novelists, read through the then
obligatory Hemingway and Faulkner, consumed Freud and a raft of popular
sociologists, and managed to get myself expelled from my tenth grade social
science class for issuing disparaging quotes from Marx and Schopenhauer, I was
only then being introduced to classical philosophical and scientific texts
through the marvelous and soon-to-be-by-stages-dismantled Robert Hutchins’
three year great books curriculum, in which the Natural Sciences sequence began
with Aristotle’s Physics, Bk. II,
continued with Galileo’s Dialogue,
selections from Newton’s Principia,
and on to papers by Laplace, Mach, Jeans and Einstein. Mathematics ABC was a
simplified version of whole stretches of Principia
Mathematica, the content of Russell’s great work having become common
collegial culture for logicians and mathematicians.
I soon read some of the less
technical works of Russell, whom Ayer cast as Hamlet to his own humble Horatio,
and of David Hume, whose skeptical contentions Ayer claimed merely to update
and cast into a linguistic vein. With the further help of Hume and Russell, I
emended Rene Descartes’s insufficiently skeptical “I think, therefore I am” to
the minimalist “There are experiences”. I wryly chuckled in agreement with
Russell’s saucy contention that the only materialists in the world were Russian
commissars and American behavioral scientists. Common sense realism about
physical objects leads to science, which inevitably refutes naïve realism.
Disaster and apostasy loomed in my
first concerted encounter, at the graduate course level, with 20th century
Anglo-American philosophy. Young, newly-appointed Vere Chappell – a confident
Yale acolyte of ordinary language philosophy – assigned us two G. E. Moore
essays that comfortably asserted common sense realism, “proving” the existence
of the external world of objects by raising one hand, and then, to make it
plural, the other, and then stoutly insisting that he was surer of their existence
than of any dissenting assertion. Taking this to be an argument comparable to
Samuel Johnson’s here-to-fore impossibly crude “refutation” of Berkeley, which
consisted of kicking a stone, I submitted a scornful and confident critique of
Moore to Professor Chappell, who gave me a failing grade of C and appended the
comment “cavalier” in his neat red script.
Next up we read Russell’s 1918 Philosophy of Logical Atomism, which I
soon realized was supposed to exemplify the very worst sort of building houses
out of cards, just the sort of language-on-holiday scientistic popularizing
poppycock that Wittgenstein’s Investigations,
our final reading, righteously scourged, Wittgenstein now cast in the role
of fully-realized Savior to Moore’s John the Baptist. Philosophy, my would-be
profession, now had nothing to do with science! Rather, “doing philosophy” had
now become an esoteric form of linguistic psycho-analysis that fought off the
mind’s bewitchment by language, and left everyday experience and our common old
city as it is, undistorted by grand card-house illusions. Indeed, it guarded
the world of everyday experience from the arrogant and improper intrusions of
science.
While the Investigations and his lecture books make clear Wittgenstein’s
skepticism about set theory and introspective psychology, we must be grateful
for Ray Monk’s copious demonstration, in his 1990 biography of Wittgenstein The
Duty of Genius, that in his more informal comments, Wittgenstein came to
disparage, despise, and condemn science in general as perhaps the chief evil of
our age. While aside from mentioning that Wittgenstein disdained Russell’s
attempts to write philosophy for the general reader, Professor Chappell never
said anything about Russell’s vigorous and radical political and moral
advocacy, but it was obvious to us that such gadfly-on-the-body-of-the-state
activity was, conveniently, neither professional nor philosophical, and indeed
the furthest thing from “doing philosophy”.
While I had first understood my C
grade rather as the third grader in a Catholic school understands how “three
can be one” after the nun has suitably ministered to his knuckles with her
ruler, I soon learned to do linguistic analysis in Professor Chappell’s
ordinary language manner. I received an A+ on my term paper, and “paradigm case
argument” and “don’t look for the meaning, look for the use!” soon slipped as
easily from my lips as “you can’t get an ought from an is”. Even in the full
throes of conversion, I did notice a few incongruities. Professor Chappell wore
three-piece J. Press suits, Wittgenstein, scruffy leather jackets (although
Monk tells us these and the rest of his wardrobe were very carefully selected
in shopping expeditions). And when I briefly took to following Wittgenstein’s
example in my philosophical prose, writing short conversational sentences,
addressing my reader as “you”, dropping erudite footnotes, and avoiding all
technical, scholarly, or philosophical terminology, the reaction was far more
negative than the earlier “cavalier”.
And why were people trying to
extract philosophical theses, theories, arguments, and general views, from a
text that relentlessly disavowed and railed against such activity – to ascribe
a philosophy of language to a man
whose unsystematic sketches displayed our linguistic, perceptual, and cognitive
life as full of incoherence, families of resemblances, and illusions that tempt
us to specious philosophical card house building? Further, Wittgenstein
perpetually claimed, from the Tractatus to
the Investigations, that philosophy
was a trivial, non-genuine, deluding, and deeply pointless enterprise (except
perhaps as practiced by himself). Going from Hamlet to a minor Horatio, I am
reminded of a frustrated 1983 Oxford graduate student who remarked, after
hearing another demolishing lecture from linguistics Professor Roy Harris, that
it was hard to study a subject – linguistics – that her professor denied
existed. But Wittgenstein cast such a magnetic spell that those who did not
walk out generally fell under it.
J. L. Austin claimed that a good
motto for a philosopher is “neither a be-all or an end-all be”. Wittgenstein’s
remarkable arrogance is that he was always trying to do both. In the Tractatus, after confessing that perhaps
his “expressive craftsmanship” might have occasionally faltered, Wittgenstein
said:
On the other hand the truth of the thoughts
communicated here seems to me unassailable and definitive. I am, therefore, of
the opinion that the problems have in essentials been finally solved… The value
of this work secondly consists in the fact that it shows how little has been
done when these problems have been solved. (Wittgenstein 1922, p. 29)
Hard
to be more be-all and be-endian than that. In the preface to the Investigations, Wittgenstein says he has
decided to publish because his
results, variously misunderstood, more or less
mangled or watered down, were in circulation. This stung my vanity.
(Wittgenstein 1953, p. v‑vi)
Latterly,
he adds,
if my remarks do not bear a stamp which marks them
as mine, – I do not wish to lay any further claim to them as my property.
(Wittgenstein 1953, p. vi)
This
is of course the proud statement of an artist or poet, insisting on the
inimitable trademark of his style, his voice. But it is inappropriate to a
common collegial enterprise.
Although he did enjoy having
students, Wittgenstein, as the quotes above from the Investigations suggest, did not want philosophical disciples who
would spread his views any more than a Jackson Pollock would want to spawn a
second generation of Pollockians or a Faulkner, Faulknerian novelists.
Nonetheless Wittgenstein did get disciples, lots of them. There are
Wittgensteinians, just as there are or used to be Whiteheadians, Hegelians,
Marxists, and so on. But there are no Russellians in the relevant sense. When
Ayer said he was happy to be Horatio to Russell’s Hamlet, he was speaking for
the collective field of logical positivism or, better, analytic philosophy more
generally.
It could be said that Russell
originated analytic philosophy, but the collegial and civil Russell wouldn’t
have said or thought this. Russell, in fact, handsomely credited Gottlob Frege
for much of the initial work; indeed Frege might well have rested in obscurity
had not Russell publicized his work. And through the 1910s, Russell frequently
said that Wittgenstein was his natural successor at Cambridge and would take
the next great steps in philosophical logic. It is impossible to imagine
Wittgenstein behaving in this way: previous philosophy, of which he read little
and found what little he read full of errors, was hopeless; and there was for
him no good prospective for subsequent philosophy – at least in the near
future. While Russell might enthusiastically refer to Wittgenstein as his
natural successor in mathematical logic, it is impossible to imagine
Wittgenstein regarding anyone as his worthy successor. Indeed he clearly did
not feel he was engaged in a common enterprise to which one or another might
make contributions to a collective project.
Monk, in The Duty of Genius, quotes a poem of I. A. Richards about
Wittgenstein, appropriately titled ‘The Strayed Poet’,
Few could long withstand your haggard beauty,
Disdainful lips, wide eyes bright-lit with scorn,
Furrowed brow, square smile, sorrow-born
World-abandoning devotion to your duty. [Footnote:
Monk 1990, p.290; Richards 1990,
pp. 159-162]
And
Monk adds:
Wittgenstein’s lecturing style, and indeed his
writing style, was curiously at odds with his subject-matter, as though a poet
had somehow strayed into the analysis of the foundations of mathematics and The
Theory of Meaning. He himself [Wittgenstein] once wrote: ‘I think I summed up
my attitude to philosophy when I said: philosophy ought to be written as a poetic composition.’ [Footnote: Monk 1990, pp.
290-91]
A keen example of this is
Wittgenstein’s relationship with Friedrich Waismann, an Austrian Jew of the
Vienna Circle but latterly an ally in, and public representative of,
Wittgenstein’s attack on set theory and formalism in mathematics. Waismann
followed Wittgenstein to England and Cambridge, and assiduously worked with
Wittgenstein on co-authoring an account of his new philosophical views.
Wittgenstein let him proceed with the project for some time but eventually
detached himself, apparently telling Waismann that he must proceed on his own.
The ensuing book, The Principles of
Linguistic Philosophy, was in galley proofs in the late 1930s when
Wittgenstein finally put his foot (or jackboot) down, using his considerable
influence on Waismann and the press to stop publication. (Waismann continued to
pain-takingly work, rework, and expand the galleys until his death in 1959, and
the book was finally published in 1965.) Wittgenstein also made a passing
effort to, unsuccessfully, prevent Waismann from getting a philosophy post in
England.
This story may be profitably
compared to the more well-known case of Wittgenstein’s attempt to get the Tractatus published shortly after the
end of World War I. After several rejections, Wittgenstein pleaded with Russell
to write an introduction so that a publisher might take a chance on
publication, given the endorsement of a world famous philosopher. Russell
dutifully complied, only to have Wittgenstein thunder that he had completely
misunderstood the work. Russell went on to ensure its publication. A decade
later Russell also cooperated with G. E. Moore in helping Wittgenstein get a
teaching position in Cambridge.
For his long and intermittent
philosophical career, Russell worked within a common collegial community,
respectfully reading and referring to other philosophical work. There is a
common myth, abetted by Wittgenstein’s disciples among others, and occasionally
by Russell himself, that Russell’s serious philosophical work, as opposed to
popularizations and political and social commentary, ceased shortly after World
War I. Nonetheless, Russell returned to technical philosophy in the late 1930s
and the 1940s and did innovative and important work. Monk notes incredulously
that W. V. Quine opined that Russell’s 1940 Inquiry
Into Meaning and Truth was “Russell’s most important book” (Monk 1990, p.
144). Initial drafts of Inquiry were
delivered to a University of Chicago class attended by Rudolph Carnap, Charles
Morris, and others; Carnap later recalled, “Russell had the felicitous ability
to create an atmosphere in which every participant did his best to contribute
to the common task” (Monk 1990, p. 221). Inquiry
was followed in 1948 by Human Knowledge:
Its Scope and Limits, in which Russell emphasized the importance of
empirical science to philosophy – a view that many found then hopeless dated
but now appears prescient.
Wittgenstein, by contrast, was not
only a poetical artist, he was specifically an epigrammist. In perhaps the best
essay written on Wittgenstein’s work, Stanley Cavell likens him to La
Rochefoucauld (Cavell 1962, p. 92). That is decidedly the point of
Wittgenstein’s famous comment that his worthy “sketches” were trademarked as
his own. Russell, on the other hand, occasionally wrote idiosyncratically in
his least philosophical pieces – and he did write short stories. But his most
philosophical writing, as Carnap’s remark suggests, is part and parcel of a
common philosophical tradition (which is perhaps why my University of Chicago
Mathematics ABC course contained no specific Russellian prose).
In 1955, The Prisoner appeared, a movie in which Alec Guinness played a
Polish Cardinal and Jack Hawkins his communist inquisitor/confessor (Grenville
1955). Roughly conforming to historical fact, the Hawkins interrogator, through
sleeplessness and ingenious questioning, manages to convince the Cardinal that
he is a proud and vain man who can only expiate his sinfulness to a working
class populace through confessing to collaborating with fascists during and
after World War II. Captivated inquisitorially, caught by memories of his
childhood and distaste for his humble origins, the Cardinal confesses in open
court. His suave confessor then has the best line in this remarkable, and
remarkably political, movie. He says of the Cardinal, “A proud man would have
been more skeptical.”
The same might be said respecting
Russell in Monk’s increasingly insistent indictment of him as a monstrously
vain and prideful egotist. To invert Churchill’s remark that modest Clement
Attlee had much to be modest about, Russell had much to be proud of. But what
is extraordinary in Russell’s history are the instances in which he humbly
submitted to a younger and less accomplished inquisitor who impressively
insisted to Russell that he, Russell, was fraudulent, incapable of serious
thought, lacking moral or person integrity or genuineness. Russell fell for
this gambit most famously to Wittgenstein, but also to D. H. Lawrence and, to a
lesser degree, others.
After Russell completed Principia Mathematica, his next
substantial philosophical work was The
Theory of Knowledge, but Wittgenstein’s attack in 1913 on this and his
other work, affected Russell so deeply that he felt, for many years, that he
was incapable of serious technical philosophical work (the manuscript itself
was not published until years after Russell’s death). Russell turned to writing
on political and social topics and fiction. Through the Bloomsbury circle he
came under the spell of D. H. Lawrence. For a time Russell was inspired by
Lawrence’s wild, fascist talk and his penchant for criticizing Russell. But
when war came, Russell eventually turned away from Lawrence’s anti-democratic
and blood thirsty views. One of Lawrence’s parting shots may have seriously
wounded Russell, “You are too full of devilish repressions to be anything but
lustful and cruel. I would rather have the German soldiers with rapine and
cruelty, that you with your words of goodness…It is not the hatred of falsity which inspires you. It is the hatred of
people, of flesh and blood” (Monk 1996, p. 426). Doubtless a proudly cruel man
would have been more skeptical.
And presumably a proudly cruel man
would have been less engaged. While Monk might have found the suggestion for
his title in Richards’ line, “World-abandoning devotion to your duty,” Monk
saws off “world-abandoning” part and adds “of genius” to get his title The Duty of Genius. We know Wittgenstein
deplored Russell’s attempt to write about philosophy for the general public and
we may suspect that he was no more pleased with Russell’s attempts to address
the general public about moral and political matters. Familiarly, Russell
vigorously campaigned for a quick and equitable end to World War I, losing many
of his friends and his Cambridge lectureship, and spending six months in
prison. Wittgenstein, on the other hand dutifully joined the Austro-Hungarian
army, eventually becoming termed the “bible soldier” because of his attempts to
recommend Tolstoy’s version of the Gospels. Tolstoy’s version avoids
attributing any supernatural actions to Christ. Subsequently, Wittgenstein
vigorously defended a view of religion that made it irrefutable to any
scientific discovery, and his scorn for science was matched by his respect for
religion. After his manifest failure as a schoolteacher, Wittgenstein sought to
become a monk but was discouraged in this venture. “World-abandoning” does seem
appropriate.
When Russell visited the Soviet
Union in the 1920, he deplored the totalitarian regime long before Stalin’s
ascendancy. Wittgenstein, however, held a rather romantic view of the Soviet
Union long into the Stalinist era, even seeking jobs there as common labor for
himself and one of his student companions. This was rather to the consternation
of the Soviet authorities, who, in suspicion and puzzlement, were inclined to
suggest an academic position to Wittgenstein.
Monk’s remarks at the beginning of
his second volume on Russell suggest that he is aware that someone else might
put together the many facts he collected in a very different picture. That is
certainly true. Yet Monk is perplexed that Russell’s apparently rational and
intelligent daughter Kate sees a near wholly admirable Russell while more
intimately contemplating the same data that Monk finds so appalling. Again he
reports with astonishment that Russell’s first wife Alys retained a marked
affection for Russell to her death several decades after their separation.
What seems to particularly outrage
Monk was Russell’s involvement in the Cuban missile crisis and his subsequent
highly public anti-American activities. Or, even more, what enrages Monk is his
belief that Russell might think his actions had any influence on the world’s
events and that a professional philosopher should disgrace himself and the
profession by egotistically engaging in public affairs. There is more than a
little of Professor Chappell’s attitude in Monk’s screed against Russell.
Philosophers shouldn’t address the general public, particularly about political
matters, and they should never have the gall to believe that they can ever have
any effect on political matters. Just as for Professor Chappell, no gadflies on
the body of the state, please!
When the Cuban missile crisis brewed
up, with the USSR clearly trying to give Cuba some protection against repeated
US invasion attempts, JFK produced a naval blockade of Cuba and demanded the
removal of the partially installed missiles. Both actions were acts of war and
ones without the slightest support from international law or the UN. Russell
dispatched telegrams to Kennedy and Khrushchev, suggesting what in fact became
the eventual solution – namely, that the US should forswear the invasion of
Cuba and that the USSR should in turn remove its missiles, with the eventual
removal of US missiles in Turkey. Khrushchev responded with a telegram to
Russell, seemingly as an informal way of announcing his sentiments to the
world. Kennedy did not address Russell directly, aside from the response to a
reporter’s question that Russell did not speak for the Free World. Monk is
quite right to insist that there is no credible evidence that Russell’s
intervention had an effect on the event. However, there is no obvious evidence
that it had no positive effect whatsoever. It may not be the duty of genius but
it is the duty of anyone to speak out to the degree that they can for legality,
morality, and peace in human affairs. Russell had a loud voice and took it as
his duty to make it as loud as he could and use it rationally and well. Surely,
in the Cuban missile crisis he did the best a man in his position could do. He
also spoke civilly and with worldly concern to his fellow citizens about common
concerns.
Wittgenstein’s reaction to the
atomic bomb was rather different. Monk writes “In a curious sense he even
welcomed the bomb” and he quotes Wittgenstein as saying:
The hysterical fear over the atom bomb now being
experienced, or at any rate expressed, by the public almost suggests that at
last something really salutary has been invented. The fright at least gives the
impression of a really effective bitter medicine. I can’t help thinking: if
this didn’t have something good about it the philistines wouldn’t be making an
outcry. But perhaps this too is a childish idea. Because really all I can mean
is that the bomb offers a prospect of the end, the destruction, of an evil, –
our disgusting soapy water science.… there is nothing good or desirable about
scientific knowledge and that mankind, in seeking it, is falling into a trap.
(Monk 1990, p. 485)
Monk
goes on to remark, “Thus, his ‘dream’ of the coming collapse of science and
industry was an anticipation of an age in which his type of thinking would be
more generally accepted and understood. It is linked with his remark to Drury:
‘My type of thinking is not wanted in this present age … Perhaps in a hundred
years people will really want what I am writing.’”
Toward the end of Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy
(1919) Russell committed one of his few deviations from standard philosophical
prose, remarking that he would stress the ambiguity of the verb “to be” even if
he were dead from the waist down and not “merely in prison.” Much latter, in
his eighties, Russell was briefly jailed for his opposition to British possession
of nuclear weapons. This led to an immortal cartoon in Punch in which we see gadfly Russell between two large bozos in
prison uniform against a prison wall with a large hole in it. Surrounding them
are several thick-headed policemen of whom one says “Now who’s the brains
behind this?” Arrogantly “world-abandoning” Russell was not. Socratic
philosopher he was.
Philosophy
Department
Florida State University
Tallahassee, FL 32306
[Starred
Footnote to title: *(Bertrand Russell Society Quarterly, May, 2004 / number 122)
An
earlier draft of this paper was read at The Bertrand Russell Society session of
the Pacific Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association, San
Francisco, March 2003, with Professor David White commenting.]
References
Cavell,
S. (1962). “The Availability of Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy. Philosophical Review. 71, 67-93.
Grenville,
P.: 1955. The Prisoner. Directed by
Peter Grenville; starring Alec Guinness and Jack Hawkins.
Monk,
R.: 1990. Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty
of Genius. New York: Penguin Books.
Monk,
R.: 1996. Bertrand Russell: The Spirit of
Solitude 1872-1921. New York: Penguin Books.
Monk,
R.:2000. Bertrand Russell: The Ghost of
Madness 1921-1970. New York: Free Press.
Richards,
I. A.: 1990. Selected Letters of I. A.
Richards. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Waismann,
F.: 1965. The Principles of Linguistic
Philosophy, ed. Rom Harré. London Macmillan.
Wittgenstein,
L.: 1922. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.
London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Wittgenstein,
L.: 1953. Philosophical Investigations.
New York: Macmillan.