Brain Storm

'Wittgenstein's Poker: The Story of a Ten-Minute Argument Between Two Great Philosophers' by David Edmonds and John Eidinow

WITTGENSTEIN'S POKER
The Story of a Ten-Minute Argument Between Two Great Philosophers
By David Edmonds and John Eidinow
Ecco. 267 pp. $24

In Wittgenstein's Poker, two gifted BBC journalists, David Edmonds and John Eidinow, describe a 10-minute serio-comic encounter between philosophers Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper, two men with strikingly different ideas about what philosophy should do. On the night of Oct. 25, 1946, Popper came to Cambridge University, where Wittgenstein was in residence, to present his thoughts to a rigorous discussion group. For Popper, this was not merely another visiting lecture. It was to be a showdown. Popper knew a good deal about Ludwig Wittgenstein, disliked what he knew, and was determined to set Cambridge's most influential philosopher -- and Cambridge philosophy -- onto the right road.

Expertly, Edmonds and Eidinow set the scene. They describe the participants in the forum, with particular attention to Britain's (and probably the world's) most popularly known philosopher of the time, Bertrand Russell, once Wittgenstein's champion, now his still slightly awed detractor. They describe postwar Cambridge -- dowdy, cold, continuing to suffer from wartime deprivations. And best, they evoke the characters of Popper and Wittgenstein. Both men were Viennese, both of Jewish descent, but they were very different individuals. Popper was a striver. He was ambitious, obsessively hard-working, recently arrived in England from the obscurities of a university post in New Zealand. Wittgenstein was a Viennese patrician, coming from one of Austria's wealthiest families. His genius seemed to flow into everything he touched -- he designed a remarkable jet engine, compiled a dictionary, collaborated on a successful architectural plan.

But as consequential as his achievements was his presence, for Wittgenstein seems to have burned with more than human incandescence. His intensity, his deep seriousness about life, his unwillingness to tolerate cant or deception, either in others or in himself, contributed to making him an unforgettable man. People who met Wittgenstein once sometimes pondered the encounter for the rest of their lives. The novelist Iris Murdoch described a Wittgenstein encounter this way: "With most people you meet them in a framework, and there are certain conventions about how you talk to them and so on. There isn't a naked confrontation of personalities. But Wittgenstein always imposed this confrontation on all his relationships."

But did Wittgenstein really -- as some of the participants in the Oct. 25 discussion recall -- flourish a fireplace poker in Karl Popper's direction when Popper refused to be still and heel to his masterly voice? And did Popper, challenged by Wittgenstein to offer one clear moral rule, get off the memorable remark with which, in his autobiography, he credits himself? "I replied," says Popper, " 'Not to threaten visiting lecturers with pokers.' " And did Wittgenstein storm away, enraged by the affront? It depends on whom you ask, and the authors do a fine job of questioning the surviving observers: Philosophizing, as Edmonds and Eidinow note, is apparently good for longevity, there being surprisingly many left to question.

What was at stake, intellectually, in the encounter? To most of the general reading public, I suspect, philosophy -- which, after all, means "the love of wisdom" -- should be an inquiry into major issues, major problems. What is beauty? What is an ethical life? Who should govern? Who should submit? But to Wittgenstein, these were not, by and large, within the province of philosophical investigation. He was more interested in pondering what makes a sentence true; in considering how language can reflect the logical structure of the world; or, later, in brooding on how words can function pragmatically, as tools.

Though Wittgenstein did not disdain the questions that fascinated Plato, Aristotle and Nietzsche -- in fact, he found them critically important -- he did feel that their pursuit by philosophy and philosophers was often presumptuous in the extreme. At certain points in his life, no questions mattered more to Wittgenstein than religious questions -- but they were, for him, too profound for philosophy to address. In general, the objective of philosophy was to encourage us to talk as much sense and as little nonsense as possible. And that meant clearing up the various logical and linguistic puzzles that impede cogency.

Popper thought that philosophy should pursue big game. He wanted to make thought clear and logical, but once that was done -- and he thought that it could be -- language was to be a vehicle for inquiries of universal import. In The Open Society and Its Enemies, the book that caught Russell's attention and got Popper the engagement at Cambridge, the stakes are high. The book is a frontal assault on the likes of Marx and Hegel, thinkers who presumed that they could map the future trajectory of human history and society. Popper believed that such thinking, however well-intended, led to totalitarianism. By taking up such weighty matters, Popper sought to offer an alternative to Wittgenstein's close, nuanced broodings on language and meaning.

Popper is little studied in today's universities; Wittgenstein continues to be held in high esteem. But as the authors suggest at the close of their thoughtful, lively book, "if a resurgence of communism, fascism, aggressive nationalism or religious fundamentalism once again threatened the international order based on the open society, then Popper's books would have to be reopened and their arguments relearned." It seems now that such religious fundamentalism is indeed on the rise: Perhaps Karl Popper will once again have his day. •

Mark Edmundson teaches English at the University of Virginia. His memoir, "Teacher," will be published in the spring.