In conversation with David Edmonds
There he stood, flames at his back, weapon in his hand, yelling the small room into silence; his voice cracking with anger. Ludwig Wittgenstein was the preeminent philosopher of the day – an “atom bomb” of thought and intellect. Those watching-on, trying to smuggle-in a word or two through the “tornado” of noise and emotion, were only slightly less eminent in their own right. Most were household names in (and beyond) the world of philosophy: John Wisdom, C.D Broad, Alfred Ewing, Richard Braithwaite, G.E. Moore, Margaret Masterman, Bertrand Russell, and an increasingly smug looking guest around whom all the fuss was building.
On that wet autumn night, Karl Popper had been invited (for the first, and only, time) to attend the regular meeting of Cambridge University’s Moral Science Club. He was asked to bring with him a philosophical “puzzle”. Instead Popper showed-up with a handful of philosophical “problems” and a grudge of sorts against the club’s president: “I admit that I went to Cambridge hoping to provoke Wittgenstein into defending the view that there are no genuine philosophical problems, and to fight him on the issue.”
Following established tradition, “the guest opened the meeting”… and that is where all the courtesy, kindness, and tolerance, ended. Puffed-up for battle, Popper went immediately for blood and victory, attacking the wording and implication of his invitation. Wittgenstein literally sprang from his seat to challenge the “upstart” in all his “foolishness”. Back and forth they went, interrupting, berating, shouting each other down, until Wittgenstein stormed over to the fireplace, and pulled out a glowing red poker. Waving it around in strong, violent strokes, he demanded that Popper provide a single “example of a moral rule”.
With the poise and delivery of a stand-up comedian, Popper replied “Not to threaten visiting lecturers with pokers.” Everyone roared with shock and laughter, while the slighted Wittgenstein dropped the poker on the ground and “stormed out of the room, banging the door behind him”.
Or did he?
The clash between Wittgenstein and Popper had been a long time coming. Both men were raised in the heady atmosphere of inter-war Vienna; both from assimilated Jewish families. Popper grew up firmly middle class, his father was a prominent lawyer, while his home was decorated with rare luxuries: pianos and a “library of ten thousand books”. Yet even before the hyperinflation of the early 1920s wiped out the savings of the Popper family, they – along with everyone else in Austria – were being looked down upon by the Wittgensteins. Not out of contempt or animosity of any kind, but from the disinterested and escapist heights of extreme wealth.
A “business genius”, Ludwig’s father Karl had built an empire on the back of the steel trade. In the evenings prominent scientists, musicians, painters, sculptors, and all manner of people from Vienna’s cultural elite would stop-by the Wittgenstein estate for dinner, drinks, and debate. With the image and riches of the American Rockefellers or Carnegies, Ludwig might not have known who Popper was, but Popper certainly was aware of Wittgenstein.
And he judged Wittgenstein accordingly, telling people that Ludwig “couldn’t tell the difference between a coffee house and a trench”, and that his book Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, “smelled of the coffee house.” On this point, Popper couldn’t have been more wrong! During the First World War, Wittgenstein volunteered for duty, and refused the safe posting that his family connections would have afforded him. Instead he asked to join the frontlines as an artillery officer, and fought until captured, quite literally in the trenches. And it was there, in that mud and fear and agony and exhaustion and death, that Wittgenstein wrote the Tractatus.
At each turn in his life, Wittgenstein continued in this way – against the grain of assumed privilege. The youngest of nine children, three of Ludwig’s older brothers committed suicide, and he once confessed to a colleague that “all his life there had hardly been a day, in which he had not at one time or another thought of suicide as a possibility.”
After his release from a prisoner of war camp, he trained as a teacher and later worked at a rural elementary school. He left the job in a hurry after beating a particularly slow-witted student unconscious. He then tried his hand at architecture. Before that he was a gardener at a monastery, and had previously studied to become an engineer at the University of Manchester. Then at the height of his philosophical fame, Wittgenstein left it all behind for the isolation of a log cabin in the arctic forests of Norway; remaining there for years, communicating with the outside world only through letters. And when his father died, Wittgenstein chose to give away the entirety of his vast inheritance.
Back as a young boy in Austria, Wittgenstein briefly attended a state school (he was home schooled until then), K.U.K. Realschule in Linz, only a few grades apart from his fellow pupil, Adolf Hitler. Decades later, when Nazi forces were annexing Austria, all that long-denied privilege was suddenly – and understandably – too hard to ignore. Travelling back to Vienna from his naturalised British home (and then on to Berlin), Wittgenstein cut deals with influential politicians, paid bribes, and leant on his old family connections. And it worked! Wittgenstein’s sisters were allowed to live out the war years in safety, while their fellow Jews of Vienna were being dragged away into concentration camps; amongst whom – without the money nor resources of the Wittgensteins – were 18 members of Karl Popper’s family.
Fleeing the collapse of mainland Europe, Popper and his wife pulled hard on the few strings they had. They applied for British citizenship, were rejected; applied again, and were rejected again. Searching the globe for safe harbour, only a single, solitary offer ever materialised: the quiet hills of New Zealand… literally the other side of the globe. Even then, the Poppers had a hell of a time securing the necessary exit permits and visas (“our departure problems are appalling”). All this, while Wittgenstein was quickly handed British naturalisation on the backs of personal recommendations from the country’s elite, and then rode-out the war on a Cambridge scholarship.
A world away in the eerie silence of Christchurch, what little philosophical news managed to bounce its way across the oceans to Popper’s ears, always looked and sounded the same: Wittgenstein, Wittgenstein, Wittgenstein… Ludwig walked the halls of Trinity with a flock of acolytes in tow, copying his fashion, mimicking his mannerisms, and adoring his every word. So much so that Bertrand Russell was soon saying out loud that Wittgenstein had surpassed him, becoming the teacher in their relationship. But Wittgenstein was also becoming a man famous beyond his philosophy, a mystical public figure. While no one beyond a small – and parochial – group of close colleagues even knew Popper’s name; an outsider amongst outsiders.
It wasn’t the first time that Popper felt unjustly excluded from a world dominated by Wittgenstein’s shadow. As a young academic growing up in inter-war Austria, each and every Thursday evening Popper would sit at home, stewing in isolation, painfully aware of the party he wasn’t invited to.
That rare collection of Europe’s leading scientists, mathematicians, and philosophers, known as the Vienna Circle would meet each week to build upon the then-fashionable idea of logical positivism (“the view that scientific knowledge is the only kind of factual knowledge and that all traditional metaphysical doctrines are to be rejected as meaningless.”) and to discuss novel breakthroughs in knowledge creation. But what they spoke about most of all, was Wittgenstein, walking through his Tractatus line-by-line, revelling in its complexity and in the intellect of its author.
Invited to join the meetings countless times, and even made an honorary member of the Circle (considering how important his work was to them), Wittgenstein still never bothered to turn up, not even once. Popper on the other hand was desperate to join – publishing articles that he hoped would catch the Circle’s attention, while also chasing down its members on University campuses – and yet was never invited.
To Popper’s credit though, he had a very good – and unpopular – reason for wanting the eyes and ears of the Circle: he thought they were wrong… about everything that mattered!
Obsessed with building a criterion of meaning, the logical positivists believed that there were only two types of valid statements: “statements such as ‘All bachelors are unmarried men’, equations such as ‘2+2=4’, and logical inferences such as ‘All men are mortal; Socrates is a man; therefore Socrates is mortal’. And those which were empirical and open to verification: ‘Water boils at 100 degrees Celsius’, ‘the world is flat’ (which, being open to verification, is meaningful even if false).” All other statements – those not fitting within these categories – are literally meaningless by this account.
‘Does God exist?’ is impossible to verify, and is classified as a meaningless statement/question. But so is the claim that ‘Murder is wrong’, as it too sits beyond the scope of verification, and therefore belongs in the intellectual rubbish bin next to ‘Does God exist’. Even if you follow the logical positivists in this line of reasoning, and accept that ‘Murder is wrong’ is indeed unverifiable, why should that also make it meaningless? Why bundle the two together?
As you might expect, all this hinges around just what counts as verification. And it is here where the Vienna Circle found the philosophy of Wittgenstein so useful, digging into the Tractatus and embracing Wittgenstein’s ideas as their own. Ideas that Popper disregarded as “facile”.
Popper pushed back at the Circle by “polish[ing] up a two hundred year old artefact” from David Hume: the problem of induction. Restated here by Bertrand Russell: “the man who has fed the chicken every day throughout its life, at last wrings its neck instead, showing that more refined views as to the uniformity of nature would have been useful to the chicken.” Or to move this image out of the farm and into the laboratory, “no number of experiences can prove the validity of a theory.” So, in short, verification of this kind was impossible!
But Popper wasn’t done there. He railed against the Circle’s central project: the attempt to delineate sense from nonsense. He did so not only because by following this criterion they were carelessly discarding important philosophical problems, but also because the important demarcation was rather that between science and non-science. The question of meaning – as Popper saw things – simply had nothing to do with it.
And as Popper would note, they (the Circle) were people and a theory (logical positivism) that couldn’t survive by their/its own standard: logical positivism is itself a metaphysical claim, and one that is unverifiable in the same way as ‘Murder is wrong’ is unverifiable. So by its own light, logical positivism declares itself meaningless.
If these were the cold arguments of fact and theory, where Popper took things a little more personally was with Wittgenstein’s claim that there were no such thing as philosophical problems, only philosophical puzzles. That is, all apparent problems were really only problems of language – things that could be soothed-out with some “linguistic therapy”. And that all such issues could be easily avoided by simply not using language in unfamiliar ways (“when language goes on holiday”). For Wittgenstein, when we unravel important questions in philosophy, we are not exposing a hidden logic or underlying explanation, but rather just reminding ourselves of how language is properly used.
This was much too much for Popper to handle. What he saw in Wittgenstein here was an indifference to the real world around him, an indifference to the important questions within that world, and worst of all an indifference to the everyday people out there who longed for progress and a little less suffering: “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.”
Which brings things back to the heat and fury within the Moral Sciences Club, and with that red-hot poker waving around the startled room. Popper had come for a fight, with a lifetime of bitterness and injustice to correct, while Wittgenstein had walked into an ambush of sorts. And yet even without this tensely built stage, things were always unlikely to go well between the two men. Both were unbelievably intolerant at the best of times… and notoriously so.
Bryan Magee once described the typical meeting with Popper like this: “an intellectual aggressiveness such as I had never encountered before… in practice it meant trying to subjugate people.” A former student and colleague of Popper’s, John Watkins, remembered typical seminars where invited lecturers would get as far as “announc[ing] his title”, before “Popper would interrupt” so much that “the speaker got through his title and nothing more.” Badgered with the energy and fixation of a schoolyard bully, these visiting dignitaries would routinely leave the seminars in tears, leading many people to joke under their breath that Popper’s book The Open Society and Its Enemies ought to be renamed The Open Society by One of Its Enemies.
And yet somehow, in terms of sheer prickliness and hostility – as well as a complete lack of social etiquette – Wittgenstein managed even to out-do Popper. The novelist Iris Murdoch said that Wittgenstein imposed “confrontation on all his relationships”, with his favourite advice to aspiring young students of philosophy being “abandon the subject” and instead “work with [their] hands”. As a school teacher he would beat his pupils beyond what were then reasonable standards. While living in Norway he once threatened to attack his neighbour with a stick. And when, in 1929, Cambridge was manufacturing a way to award Wittgenstein a doctorate for his Tractatus, he scoffed and belittled his examiners, Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore (titans of philosophy in their own right), from across the table.
He ended the meeting – and the questioning of his work – abruptly by slapping Moore on the shoulder and saying “Don’t worry. I know you’ll never understand it.” Wittgenstein would later smirk that Moore was living proof of just how far someone could get in life with “absolutely no intelligence whatever.”
So, it would seem, that the fateful meeting at the Moral Sciences Club was always going to end with fireworks, anger, and intrigue. But perhaps not intrigue that would linger and remain hot over half a century later!
In 1998, while working as journalists at the BBC, the Times Literary Supplement fell on the desks of David Edmonds and John Eidinow. Within its pages was a letter claiming that Popper’s account of the meeting with Wittgenstein “was a lie”. A week later another letter arrived from a new author, saying that they had witnessed the encounter, and that both Popper and the previous letter were wrong. Then, remarkably, another week later someone else wrote-in saying that ‘no’, everyone else was mistaken and that he had the true story.
Edmonds and Eidinow were hooked, and began digging into the question, recovering old documents and compiling witness accounts. Memory is a difficult thing, but what we can – and should – say from this reporting, is that Popper did, in fact, lie. Or at the very least he embellished certain details in his favour to fluff-out a long cultivated self-image, as well as the pages of his autobiography.
It was, and is, a damn good story nonetheless!
*** The Popperian Podcast #11 – David Edmonds – ‘Wittgenstein's Poker’ https://popperian-podcast.libsyn.com/the-popperian-podcast-11-david-edmonds-wittgensteins-poker