Philosophical journalism

Through the story of a ten-minute argument between two great and quirky philosophers, the book under review takes us through Viennese history and culture at the turn of the last century, says SUNIL KHILNANI.

IN the globe of ideas, philosophers eye the prize of certainty and truth, but in routine life they stumble like the rest of us, befuddled, troubled by pettiness, and tricked by memory. One Cambridge evening in Michelmas Term 1946, three of the greatest philosophers of the 20th Century, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper, were assembled together in one room, three wise men surrounded by a score or more undergraduates and scholars. It was an evening that was to live long after in legend - although no one still knows quite what happened. The occasion was the weekly meeting of the Cambridge Moral Sciences Club in Richard Braithwaite's rooms in King's: the club - always gladiatorial - was at this time dominated by Wittgenstein, overwhelming in his intelligence and charisma, as well as his capacity to induce sheer social terror.

The guest speaker that autumn evening was Karl Popper, recently appointed to a Readership at the London School of Economics (LSE), and whose The Open Society and its Enemies had appeared the previous year. Popper, like Wittgenstein, was from Vienna, but that was about all they shared - they had arrived at their Cambridge destination by routes that could not have been more different.

David Edmonds and John Edinow's book, something of a philosophical shaggy dog, detours via these routes, as it leads us towards the bizarre encounter itself. It is an excellent piece of philosophical journalism, which uses this incident to great effect, taking us easily and pleasurably through Viennese history and culture, Cambridge philosophy, and the personal quirks of its protagonists.

Wittgenstein had been the enigmatic pope of Cambridge philosophy virtually since his arrival there in 1912, when he was hailed by Bertrand Russell as his true successor. Despite frequent absences from the University - to serve as an ambulanceman during World War I, to build a house for his sister, to live in a wood cabin in Norway - his intellectual presence was inescapable, and his Tractatus Logico-Philosphicus, published in 1921 and available in English the following year, appeared to revolutionise the discipline. Wittgenstein was renowned for his personal austerity, a trait that belied his descent from a wealthy Viennese family (Jewish in origin) and of deep cultural sophistication and talent (grand pianos were scattered through the rooms of the family residence, the Palais Wittgenstein). Averse to social small talk, entirely unconcessive to intellectual frailty, he expected to be deferred to - but also expected his interlocutors to do so with social polish.

Popper, younger by a decade, had felt his philosophical youth to have been spent at the edge of big events elsewhere. Solidly bourgeois, also from a family originally Jewish, he was never really a core member of the Vienna Circle, although he had studied with several of its stars. He fled Vienna in 1937, only to end up in New Zealand, where he spent the war working out his philosophical critique of totalitarian ideologies. An admirer of Russell (whose approval he desperately wished for), he had an intense dislike for Wittgenstein - in large part a chippiness towards Wittgenstein's easy grandeur.

The real gap between the two Viennese professors lay, however, in their sense of philosophy and its purpose. Wittgenstein, by the time of their encounter, had moved past his earlier philosophy, which focussed on the character of language. He had first seen language as picturing the world through symbols; the responsibility of philosophy was to clarify, to keep polished the glassy essence of language. Now, Wittgenstein saw it more as a human capacity, a capacity for dealing with predicaments rather than a tool for perceiving more sharply the contents of the world. Language owed obligations not to truth, but to necessity. In this view, the purpose of philosophy was not to solve problems, but therapeutically to treat our confusions and uncertainties as if they were illnesses. Popper, familiar only with Wittgenstein's earlier views (the more recent ideas had not yet drifted to New Zealand), found even these disagreeable: too passive, in the face of urgent pressures on philosophy to combat error and uphold truth - for, from errors in knowledge, Popper insisted, grew political catastrophe.

For Popper, his Cambridge visit was an occasion to set Wittgenstein publicly right, and he was sure Russell would be his ally in this. As they tell it - and Edmonds and Eidenow have put together more evidence for what happened that evening than anyone has done or is likely to do - Popper targeted Wittgenstein explicitly in his remarks. The latter, edgy, irritated by Popper's needling, and with a habit of playing with a fire-poker from Braithwaite's fireplace, suddenly picked this up and "began convulsively jabbing with it to punctuate his statements ... "Popper, you are WRONG". Jab, jab ... "WRONG". Russell tried to stop him; Wittgenstein, in a fury, left the room, slamming the door behind him. Each philosopher, in fine Stoppardian vein, accused the other of misunderstanding and confusion. To worsen things, the disciples of Wittgenstein and Popper circulated quite different versions of the evening's events: when Popper died almost 50 years later, bitter letters were still being exchanged in the Times Literary Supplement as to whose account was true.

Wittgenstein's Poker, David Edmonds and John Eidinow, Faber.

Published in the Financial Times, London, April 21, 2001.

The writer is the author of The Idea of India and teaches at Birkbeck College, University of London.

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