[NYTimes]
November 8, 2001
>From a Clash of Titans, a Window on a Century
By JANET MASLIN
On Friday, Oct. 25, 1946, the Moral Science Club at Cambridge University assembled in rooms called H3 for its weekly meeting. The group was to hear its guest speaker, Dr. Karl Popper, deliver a paper entitled "Are There Philosophical Problems?" The answer was a demonstrable yes, since it took only 10 minutes for the club's chairman, Ludwig Wittgenstein, to brandish a fireplace poker while announcing "Popper, you are wrong." At this point Bertrand Russell may or may not have exclaimed, "Wittgenstein, put that poker down at once!"
The authorship of that remark is unclear, no matter how much it sounds like the work of Woody Allen. Witnesses to the confrontation - including C. D. Broad, a faculty member who began his first lecture after a sabbatical by saying "Point D . . ." - passionately disagreed about the details of what transpired. And as the BBC journalists David Edmonds and John Eidinow point out, there is a "delightful irony" to be found there, since everyone present was well versed in epistemology. But it is one thing to contemplate the nature and origin of truth and quite another to concur about facts.
No matter how furious the flap, a 10-minute episode could not ordinarily be stretched to assume book- length proportions. But the authors' ingenuity is way beyond ordinary. In "Wittgenstein's Poker," this small, highly charged event is made to fan out vigorously until it includes matters from the history of 20th-century philosophy to the plight of assimilated Jews in Hitler's Vienna to precisely what Wittgenstein ate earlier on Oct. 25: the last of some tomato sandwiches from Woolworth's.
First the book must explain the two men and the roots of this animosity. It helps that their families lived only a mile apart in Vienna, though in vastly different circumstances. Wittgenstein, the older by 13 years, came from a family so privileged that when its members chose to hear music, visiting artists would use one of their palace's six grand pianos. Popper went to concerts and came from a bookish, middle-class home.
Raised as Christians, both had little interest in their Jewish origins and were surprised to find that invading Nazi forces felt otherwise. Popper fled to New Zealand after being refused British citizenship; Wittgenstein emigrated to Britain after he and his siblings bought their freedom with the family fortune. At first Wittgenstein had believed that his relatives would remain unharmed if they stayed in Vienna. "He was a better philosopher than clairvoyant," the authors observe.
Wittgenstein became an influential, austere and much-imitated figure. Disciples imitated his mannerisms, like putting his hand over his forehead, exclaiming "Ja!" when he emphatically approved of something, soaking celery in water and using string bags to carry vegetables. By contrast, Popper lacked demonstrable charm and was distinguished by long ears, enlarged by tugging. The one thing they did share was "their sheer awfulness to others in discussion and debate."
"Wittgenstein's Poker" offers many illustrations of this. "Yes, you lack sagacity," he once told a teacher. One of his students recalled, "We struck him as intolerably stupid." He paid a visit to John Maynard Keynes and his new bride, Lydia in 1925. "Lydia remarked to Wittgenstein, no doubt brightly, `What a beautiful tree,' " Keynes's biographer Robert Skidelsky wrote. "Wittgenstein glared at her: `What do you mean?' Lydia burst into tears."
Popper's excesses tended to be more self-promoting. In "Who Killed Logical Positivism?," a section of his intellectual autobiography, "Unended Quest," he writes, "I fear that I must admit responsibility." He also made reference to "the Popper legend" at times. He listed Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr and Russell as personal references on a grant application and invoked Russell frequently in his autobiography, even though Russell's autobiography fails to mention Popper at all. Ru ssell was interested in treating Wittgenstein as his heir apparent, even when Wittgenstein reciprocated with characteristic condescension. To further fan the flames on the night of the poker incident, Wittgenstein claimed to have no knowledge of Popper, even though Popper obsessively took issue with him in print.
Above and beyond attesting to the charm gap between its two principals, "Wittgenstein's Poker" clearly addresses their philosophical differences. Wittgenstein's work centered on the philosophy of language: "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent," he had famously declared. But for Popper, who would eventually be celebrated as a philosopher of science, there were matters of interest that extended beyond puzzles and words, to the point where his student George Soros had great success in applying Popper's theories to the stock market. The authors make note of his "intellectual common sense - an admirable quality, but not a fascinating one." Nonetheless, they maintain, there are ways in which his is the more enduring legacy.
"Take a dispute fundamental to philosophy, for whose future both men felt personal responsibility," they write in summation. "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. The poker becomes only a fuse."
Whether the explosion is of that magnitude remains debatable even after "Wittgenstein's Poker" has built its case. What is not in doubt is the degree of skill, wit and resourcefulness with which this story is told.