Wittgenstein's Poker. By David Edmonds and John Eidinow. Faber & Faber. 267pp, £9.99 in UK
There is a fashion nowadays among authors, and, no doubt, publishers, for more and more outrageously whimsical titles, as, for instance, Captain Kelly's Ukele, Voltaire's Coconuts, The Pope's Aspidistra - one of those three is real, honestly - and potential readers may be put off by Wittgenstein's Poker. This would be a pity. Edmonds and Eidinow have a very good story to tell, and they tell it wonderfully well.
The title might lead one to expect a survey of Wittgenstein's hitherto unknown work in the area of games theory, or even a racy account of the great philosopher's all-night sessions among the smoke and whiskey fumes at the green baize table. In fact, the poker referred to is not the card game, but the metal implement that is used for stoking fires, and specifically the one that Wittgenstein picked up from the fireplace in Room H3 of King's College, Cambridge, at a meeting of the Moral Science Club on the night of October 25th, 1946, and brandished at his fellow countryman and rival philosopher, Karl Popper, until Bertrand Russell ordered him to "put down that poker at once!" Wittgenstein angrily obeyed, the poker in one account dropping to the hearth tiles "with a little rattle", and turned on his heel and stalked out of the room, slamming the door behind him. Quite an evening.
The book's sub-title says that it is "The story of a 10-minute argument between two great philosophers".
It is much more than that. Those 10 minutes shook the world of Western philosophy literally to its foundations. There are arguments still as to what exactly happened that night, who said what and to whom, and whether the poker was brandished as a threat or merely in an excited effort to emphasise a point. Most controversial, however, is the remaining question as to who won, Wittgenstein or Popper, both of whom claimed victory.
What on earth were they fighting about? How could two of the greatest thinkers of the century, both refugees from Nazi Austria, one settled at the heart of the English intellectual world, the other seeking an entrΘe into that world, both more or less proteges of Russell - how could they descend like this to unseemly tussling? Edmonds and Eidinow write:
"The poker incident was unique in that it arose from the coming together of two visitors from a now vanished Central European culture. The meeting took place in the exhausted aftermath of a desperate struggle for European democracy and just as a new and equally dangerous threat to that democracy was taking shape. On the big issues it was not enough to be right - passion was vital."
Ludwig Wittgenstein was born in 1889 in Vienna into a fabulously wealthy family of industrialists, soldiers and artists - his brother Paul lost his right arm in the first World War but went on to be a successful concert pianist; another brother committed suicide after suffering what he considered a military disgrace - and would have been one of the richest men in Europe had he not signed over all his inherited wealth to his brother and sisters. In the first war he served on various fronts, was wounded, and received several decorations for bravery. While he was in the trenches he began work on his most famous philosophical text, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, in which he formulated his picture theory of language - language does not so much speak the world as picture it - a theory he later repudiated. He also claimed, almost incidentally, to have solved all outstanding philosophical questions, showing them to be merely tautological, and supremely insignificant. He went to Cambridge at Russell's invitation, where his personal eccentricities no less than his passion for intellectual argument made him an instant legend. In the years up to the second World War he divided his time between Cambridge and Vienna, with spells of school-teaching in Austria and Scandinavia. In the second World War he worked in London, with great diligence and humility, as a hospital orderly and laboratory assistant.
We may judge the extent of the Wittgenstein family's wealth by the fact that the philosopher's sisters were ransomed from the Nazis early in 1940 for some 1.7 tonnes of gold, the equivalent of two per cent of the Austrian gold reserves at the time. Although Karl Popper came from a well-to-do family - his father was a successful lawyer - on the ladder of class he was very many rungs below the patrician Wittgenstein. Born in 1902, Popper worked in the 1920s as an apprentice to a cabinet-maker, and studied music with Arnold Schoenberg. He had contacts with the Vienna Circle of logical positivists, and although he would have liked to be invited to join that magic circle, the invitation never came; Wittgenstein, on the other hand, was greatly admired by the logical positivists, who mistakenly took the Tractatus to be a vindication of their views.
(A briefish explicatory note may be helpful here. The logical positivists eschewed metaphysics in favour of scientific rigour, and insisted that the true and only task of philosophy is the clarification of propositions. As Edmonds and Eidinow put it, "Wittgenstein had parcelled up propositions into those which can be said and those about which we must remain silent. Scientific propositions fell into the former category, ethical propositions into the latter. But what many in the Circle misunderstood was that Wittgenstein did not believe that the unsayable should be condemned as nonsense. On the contrary, the things we could not talk about were those that really mattered." Popper later claimed that he had, single-handedly, destroyed the Vienna Circle by showing that the central tenet of its method, the principle of verifiability, was itself unverifiable. Popper was fond of assertions of affirmative negativity. In The Logic of Scientific Discovery he had propounded his celebrated theory of falsifiability - science is distinguished from pseudo-science by the fact that in the former a hypothesis can be disproved, while in the latter it cannot - and later, in The Open Society and its Enemies he declared that what is most remarkable, and most to be prized, in the democratic process is not the people's power to elect a government, but that governments can be removed without bloodshed.
Wittgenstein, of course, would have considered all this to be poppycock - or Poppercock, as he might have put it, for he had a fondness for awful jokes. In 1937, Popper accepted an academic post in Christchurch, New Zealand; it was hardly the nub of the philosophical world, but he remained there until 1945, when, after the successful publication in Britain of The Open Society, probably his masterwork, he was offered a Readership at the London School of Economics. He was to remain at the LSE for the rest of his working career.
These two extraordinary human beings were destined to clash. Popper, the bourgeois, career philosopher, with his firm belief that philosophy has clear social and political responsibilities, regarded Wittgenstein, the semi-mystical, highly-strung aristocrat - "He has the pride of Lucifer," Russell said of him - as a morally bankrupt charlatan who had misled an entire generation of young philosophers with his insistence that there are no serious problems in philosophy, only puzzles arising from our misconception of what language is and how it works. Wittgenstein's theories he saw as not wrong but dangerously trivial, and his obsession with language and its limits as mere tinkering with philosophical preliminaries, or even preliminaries to preliminaries, while the great task of shaping human society was left at best to fools, at worst to tyrants.
Popper also found repugnant Wittgenstein's almost priest-like position among the younger Cambridge philosophers. "If we wish our civilisation to survive," he declared, "we must break with the habit of deference to great men." Yet he was himself no shrinking violet when it came to claiming greatness. He savoured the attentions of the high and the mighty, and never hesitated to tender advice to rulers; in a draft letter to Mrs Thatcher after her forced resignation as Prime minister, he could not resist tempering his condolences with criticisms of her education policies.
Popper came to the meeting in Room H3 - once occupied by Isaac Newton - intent on grinding Wittgenstein into the dust. For his part, Wittgenstein was determined to show Popper, a bourgeois upstart who knew next to nothing about philosophy, that he was "wrong, wrong, WRONG".
The row started immediately, when Popper criticised the wording of the invitation to speak that had been tendered to him by the Moral Science Club - of which Wittgenstein was the chairman - because it referred to philosophical "puzzles" rather than "problems". Wittgenstein responded immediately with furious interjections. According to Popper, he met Wittgenstein's protests by putting forward as evidence of the rightness of his argument a number of authentic philosophical problems, all of which Wittgenstein dismissed. When the question of ethics arose, Wittgenstein, by now brandishing the poker, challenged Popper to give an example of a moral rule, and Popper promptly replied: "Not to threaten visiting lecturers with pokers." However, the recollections of others who were at the meeting suggest that this may be a case of esprit d'escalier, and that Popper did not think up his swift and witty riposte until well after Wittgenstein had left the room.
So: an absurd, undignified row among eggheads, or a crucial battle for the soul of modern philosophy?
It was both, of course. Further, it is possible to see it as part of the struggle between what C.P. Snow would identify as the "two cultures" of art and science. Like Leopold Bloom, there was a touch of the artist to Wittgenstein, who once described himself, even if a little ruefully, as a "great maker of metaphors".
Popper, on the contrary, despised what he saw as the "artistic", transcendental aspects of Wittgenstein's work; for him, science is the great paradigm, and scientific method the best exemplar philosophy could follow. Ironically, as Edmonds and Eidinow note, the semi-mystic Wittgenstein's reputation is still immense, while Popper the mover and shaker is hardly remembered. We do love a dreamer.
John Banville is Chief Literary Critic and Associate Literary Editor of The Irish Times.