David Edmonds and John Eidinow

Wittgenstein’s Poker:  The Story of a Ten-Minute Argument Between Two Great Philosophers (2001)

In a paragraph

An investigation of different recollections of a 1946 meeting where Popper challenged Wittgenstein that philosophy should be about important problems rather than defusing linguistic puzzles, examining the characters of the two philosophers, their Vienna origins, their relations to Russell and their philosophical dispute. 

Key points

• Popper spoke on ‘Are There Philosophical Problems?’ at a Cambridge Moral Science Club meeting on 25 October 1946 in Rooms H3, Gibbs Building, Kings College. The meeting was chaired by Wittgenstein with attendance of around 30 including Russell, Geach, Braithwaite and Vinelott.

• According to Popper in his autobiography ‘Unended Quest’, Wittgenstein stormed out after Popper gave as an example of a moral rule ‘Not to threaten visiting lecturers with pokers.’ Some other witnesses say that Wittgenstein left quietly, and Popper’s quip was later. Popper was on a mission, but Wittgenstein’s thoughts were elsewhere. They probably talked past each other.

• There were real problems, Popper maintained at the meeting, not just puzzles. Breaking in, Wittgenstein ‘spoke at length about puzzles and the non-existence of problems’. Popper describes himself as interrupting in turn with a list of problems he had prepared. The existence of actual or potential infinity, induction and causation were all brought up.

• Take a dispute fundamental to philosophy, for whose future both men felt personal responsibility; take the cultural, social and political differences between the protagonists; take the obsession of one with the other, who is in turn totally self-absorbed; take their no-holds-barred style of communication; take their complex relationship with their father figure, Russell – throw all these into the cauldron that was H3 and a major explosion seems to have been inevitable.

• Wittgenstein was a bewitching character. His family was enormously wealthy, he reinvented himself and succeeded in different projects, he inspired disciples, he had strong idiosyncracies, he was obsessed, he dominated, he took over meetings, he was omnisient.

• Popper was socially unassuming but was fierce and intolerant in teaching and debate, not practicing what he preached.

• Russell was initially bewitched by and strongly supported Wittgenstein, but this cooled, and Russell opposed Wittgenstein II. Popper greatly admired Russell, but Russell’s reciprocation was limited. 

• Wittgenstein and Popper had in common tragic histories, being from converted Jewish families in Vienna. Both were erroneously associated with Schlick’s Vienna Circle. 

• Having rejected the Circle’s principle of verification as flawed, because grounded on inductive reasoning, Popper used his alternative falsifiability thesis to distinguish not sense from nonsense, but the scientific from the non-scientific.

• Popper: ‘There are genuine philosophical problems which are not mere puzzles arising out of the misuse of language. Some of those problems are childishly obvious.’

• Russell on Wittgenstein: ‘It is not the world that we are to try to understand but only sentences, and it is assumed that all sentences can count as true except those uttered by philosophers.’

• It is the story of the schism in twentieth-century philosophy over the significance of language: a division between those who diagnosed traditional philosophical problems as purely linguistic entanglements and those who believed that these problems transcended language.

Comments

The story is well told as an investigation into the mystery of what happened at the 1946 meeting with rich and engaging descriptions of the characters, the times and the philosophical background.  For someone with an interest in philosophy and philosophers in the first half of the 20^th Century, it is a delightful and educational read. 

On the question of the importance of philosophical problems, I strongly side with Popper.  It is regrettable that he was not able to properly engage Wittgenstein in debate, but it seems their characters made this impossible.

Links

David Edmunds Website

David Edmunds lecture about the book

Wittgenstein’s Poker at Amazon UK

My review of David’s Edmunds Parfit Biography

My review of Bertrand Russell’s Autobiography

Extracts from the Book

It is the story of the schism in twentieth-century philosophy over the significance of language: a division between those who diagnosed traditional philosophical problems as purely linguistic entanglements and those who believed that these problems transcended language

Popper saw Russell as ‘our great master. Even when one cannot agree with him, one must always admire him. He always speaks clearly, simply and forcefully’

Wittgenstein never expended energy in the analysis of such practical ethical issues. For him, morality always remained one of those areas which could be shown but not commentated upon, being revealed in the way people conducted their lives but not susceptible to logical rigour.

When A. J. Ayer was asked about the failings of the movement, he would answer, ‘Well I suppose that the most important of the defects was that nearly all of it was false.’

Whatever the social and cultural differences between Wittgenstein and Popper, one similarity of character made it inevitable that H3 would see a raging confrontation: their sheer awfulness to others in discussion and debate.

The later Wittgenstein used to speak of ‘puzzles’, caused by the philosophical misuse of language. I can only say that if I had no serious philosophical problems and no hope of solving them, I should have no excuse for being a philosopher: to my mind, there would be no apology for philosophy – Popper

The picture of the world conjured up by Meinong seemed to Russell intolerably cluttered and disorderly. ‘Logic’, he thought, ‘must no more admit a unicorn than zoology can.’ And it was to spring-clean this metaphysical mess that he invented his ingenious Theory of Descriptions

The text of the Tractatus is sandwiched between its well-known opening and closing statements: ‘The world is all that is the case’ and ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent.’

In Wittgenstein II the metaphor of language as a picture is replaced by the metaphor of language as a tool

Russell and the early Wittgenstein believed that everyday language obscures its underlying logical structure. ‘The King of France is bald’ is a proposition whose logical structure is not immediately apparent on the surface

The later Wittgenstein held that, instead of language being somehow chained to the world of objects, grammar is autonomous – it runs free. We, not the world, are the masters.

Since language is governed by rules, it is also essentially public; it is embedded in our practice, in our ‘forms of life’.  The idea of a private language – a language that only one person can understand – is incoherent.

To disentangle ourselves from our self-enveloped confusion – ‘to show the fly the way out of the fly bottle’. Our bafflement arises when language is used in unfamiliar ways, ‘when language goes on holiday’. His method combats the philosopher in us all. We are almost bound to topple into fly bottles – it comes with the language.  The underlying goal of separating sense from nonsense

Until his death, in what borders on obsessive behaviour, Popper could not resist taking potshots at Wittgenstein. As far as he was concerned, the ‘existence of urgent and serious philosophical problems and the need to discuss them critically is the only apology for what may be called professional or academic philosophy’

‘I have long believed that there are genuine philosophical problems which are not mere puzzles arising out of the misuse of language. Some of those problems are childishly obvious.’

Popper compared the interest in language to the practice of cleaning spectacles. Language philosophers might think this is worthwhile in itself. Serious philosophers realize that the only point of the cleaning is to enable the wearer to see the world more clearly.

Russell believed that the new ideas being promoted by Wittgenstein were dragging Cambridge philosophy down a cul-de-sac of tedium and triviality. 

It is not the world that we are to try to understand but only sentences, and it is assumed that all sentences can count as true except those uttered by philosophers.  Russell.

What passes for common sense, Russell thought, was often in reality just prejudice and the tyranny of custom. 

I may be wrong and you may be right, and by an effort, we may get nearer to the truth

Having rejected the Circle’s principle of verification as flawed, because grounded on inductive reasoning, Popper used his alternative falsifiability thesis to distinguish not sense from nonsense, but the scientific from the non-scientific.

There were real problems, Popper maintained at the meeting, not just puzzles. Breaking in, Wittgenstein ‘spoke at length about puzzles and the non-existence of problems’. Popper describes himself as interrupting in turn with a list of problems he had prepared. The existence of actual or potential infinity, induction and causation were all brought up.

Take a dispute fundamental to philosophy, for whose future both men felt personal responsibility; take the cultural, social and political differences between the protagonists; take the obsession of one with the other, who is in turn totally self-absorbed; take their no-holds-barred style of communication; take their complex relationship with their father figure, Russell – throw all these into the cauldron that was H3 and a major explosion seems to have been inevitable.

In attempting to piece together what happened that night, we must understand that Popper and Wittgenstein came to the meeting in quite different states of mind and with quite different objectives. For Popper, combat and a culminating moment beckoned. For Wittgenstein, a chore, an obligation to be fulfilled

We are students of problems using rational methods. These are real problems … not problems of language or linguistic puzzles.