Shandean Postscripts to Politics, Philosophy, & Culture

In May 1913 Bertrand Russell was working on a manuscript called Theory of Knowledge. The project was abandoned in June when Russell decided that he could go no further. His theory was at a dead-end and he couldn't back out and start over. It was because of Wittgenstein's criticism in conversations with Russell that the manuscript was abandoned and Russell never attempted to publish his "theory."

This history is recounted in Russell and Wittgenstein on the Nature of Judgement by Rosalind Carey (Continuum, 2007, 150pp., $110.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780826488114. [That is right; $110 for 150 pages]). The technical reasons for Russell's failure are accounted for in this very expensive book. (Such books are produced for libraries and then mostly cordoned off from the general public on the shelves of security-guarded university establishments; establishments; which are, by the way, supported in one way or another at the public expense. Such is the state of knowledge in the corporate state. For the most part the general public does not feel the loss because these expensive published theses of 150 pages are mostly nests made by the academic squirrels. The historical nut-gathering that these nests are made to hold is often badly written, though sometimes interesting. But the academics themselves are not really to blame since they are fulfilling an institutional imperative -- publish or perish. Publication seems to be the university's way of accounting for the productivity of their professorial employees, like the aggregation of standardized tests are supposed to measure the health of our elementary schools. Call this the "Fordism" of the educational factories.)

For biographical, historical, and philosophical reasons I am interested in Russell and Wittgenstein in 1913 and thus this book would be interesting to me. But how am I to get hold of such an outlandishly priced piece of work unless I gather some friends to storm the Columbia Library while decommissioning the security guards in the process? So I must make do with book reviews and with my own knowledge, when discussing Carey's book.

Some squirrels do interesting things, and this book is a case in point. I think that someone should write a piece of fiction focusing on the lives of Russell and Wittgenstein from May to June 1913, the period of the writing and abandonment of Russell's Theory of Knowledge, and bringing into the novel the events of the subsequent six years, as if in a dream of history.

Within six years of the Russell and Wittgenstein conversations both were imprisoned; Russell for his opposition and protest against World War I and Wittgenstein as an Austrian prisoner-of-war in Como and Cassino. While Russell was in prison in 1918, he returned to philosophy after a long time writing only social and political works, and wrote Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, and began the book The Analysis of Mind, which was partially a tactical retreat from his attempt to create "a theory of knowledge." While Wittgenstein was a prisoner-of-war in Italy in 1918-19 he rewrote and rethought some of the portions of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which he had finished during his course of military service. (Someone should compile a list of the great men and women who were imprisoned during the period of the First World War. Russell, Eugene Debs, and Rosa Luxembourg come to mind immediately, but the list could be extended to hundreds of names. Does anyone know of a good book that gives a global history of resistance to World War I? If it hasn't already been written it should be written.)

The countries that Russell and Wittgenstein called home were fighting a war against each other and still, in the early part of the war at least, the two managed to exchange letters and post-cards.

In February 1919 Wittgenstein wrote to Russell,

I am prisoner in Italy since November, and hope I may communicate with you after a three-year interruption. I have done lots of logical work which I am dying to let you know before publishing it.

How did such posts get through the lines of war? Did they go by way of neutral countries? According to Ray Monk this post-card found Russell at Lady Ottoline Morrell's country house, Garsington Manor. A postman delivered the card to a place where Russell was not listed. Perhaps the British postal services favored the ruling classes because it beats me how a card gets from an Italian prisoner-of-war camp to a person of no certain address, unless that person got special attention paid to him by the postal services.

But in the Spring of 1913 all of this was in their future. Wittgenstein had not even published a major work when he froze Russell into place on his theory of knowledge. In fact Wittgenstein was in effect Russell's student, not a fellow teacher, and yet his influence, his ability to paralyze thought, was infamous.

This shows one of the great missions of Wittgenstein. In spite of the philosophers, because of the philosophers, Wittgenstein's mission was basically an anti-philosophical practice. He endeavored to get philosophers to shut up -- or at least to stop publishing so much of what they write on the "deep" philosophical subjects. He was against proclamations of philosophical "knowledge" and the propounding of philosophical theories. He was engaged in a philosophical practice that would in effect limit the very notions of what we call knowledge.

Wittgenstein's only published major work, the Tractatus, was anti-theoretical to the core. It did not present "a theory" of logic and its relation to language, or a "theory" of propositions. What it set out to do is to clarify certain aspects of language use and misuse from within a philosophical frame. The Tractatus attempted to set the limits of what any philosophical theory could accomplish. It did this by attempting to show that the capacity of language could only express through propositions what can be thought, and that there is much else that cannot be thought through propositions but can only be shown. On the level of propositions the Tractatus itself does not present a theory, but rather makes clarifications about the possibility of philosophical theories given the limits of language use. But on the level of "showing" the Tractatus as a whole is emblematic of a kind of anti-philosophy: we are shown the limits of human thought and knowledge. The limits of knowledge that can be made from propositions "show" from the book as a whole.

There are only a few philosophers who agree with this interpretation of the Tractatus, and fewer still who agree with the interpretation of Wittgenstein's work which would turn the work as a whole into an anti-philosophical practice. The underpinnings of Wittgenstein's Tractatus, his clarification of language use as putting limits on what we can call thought or knowledge, is itself an anti-philosophical practice to the core. Personally, I think that Wittgenstein is correct, when he insisted that nobody understood the Tractatus, when it was written, and few understand it now. It is because very few people can accept a work that is a set of propositions that say one thing and a book as a whole that illustrates what the set of propositions says cannot be theorized or philosophized by pointing the way to silence. The book is a form of practice. It practices what it preaches. If most philosophers set out to accept the anti-philosophical practice of the Tractatus, they could not write the articles and books, which are their bids for job security in the current academic system.

So Wittgenstein while writing from the prison camp in Italy continually complained, perhaps even whined, that Russell would never understand the Tractatus.

Russell wrote back:

Throughout the war I did not think about philosophy, until, last summer. I found myself in prison, and beguiled my leisure by writing a popular text-book, which was all I could do under the circumstances. Now I am back at philosophy, and more in the mood to understand…. Don't be discouraged, you will be understood in the end. (p. 162)

I think in the matter of understanding both men were wrong about the other. Wittgenstein has yet to be understood because philosophers have a hard time understanding books that are also practices. (Perhaps poets best understand such philosophical works.) And Russell understood Wittgenstein on an intuitive level that has never been acknowledged.

Back in June 1913, because of Wittgenstein's anti-philosophical criticism, Russell quit his Theory of Knowledge. And for the first time Russell himself began to think about the limits of knowledge and the limits of theory. Theory, after all, can only confront and provide knowledge of a very small part of the world.

More than thirty years later Russell came out with a book called Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits. It is my contention that this book is a strange bastard child of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. In 1913 Wittgenstein planted the seeds of "theory-skepticism" into Russell's thinking and over the course of Russell's long life that skepticism grew. Unlike our modern skeptics, the likes of Dawkins and Hitchens, Russell's skepticism constantly turned around on itself and embraced nationalism, the social system of classes, philosophy and even science. Russell's skepticism did not limit itself to skepticism about religion. There came a time at the end of his life that he began to look at his own intellectual pretentions as also a form of superstition. Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits is not a "theory of knowledge" but an attempt to describe knowledge and how we come to know. In short, Russell's book is an anti-theory. It is not an anti-theory in the multiple ways that the Tractatus is an anti-philosophy -- propounding, illustrating, and practicing anti-philosophy all at once -- but an anti-theory in a much more everyday way. The goals of Russell's long book were modest, unlike the immodest idol-smashing goals of Wittgenstein's short book; one of the limits of human knowledge is that there can be no grand theory of knowledge, and no metaphysical ground to knowledge, but only local descriptions of how in a common sense way we as individuals, with these brains, can come to know limited parts of the world through specific theories. As Russell himself wrote at the beginning of Human Knowledge:

To scientific common sense (which I accept) it is plain that only an infinitesimal part of the universe is known, that there were countless ages during which there was no knowledge, and that there probably will be countless ages without knowledge in the future. Cosmically and causally, knowledge is an unimportant feature of the universe; a science which omitted to mention its occurrence might from an impersonal point of view, suffer only from a very trivial imperfection.

When commenting on Cantor's ideas of uncountable sets and different levels of infinity, Wittgenstein called it a "cancerous growth on the body of mathematics". Cantor's (and others such as Dedekind) ideas have since provided the basis for much of the development of mathematics thereafter. What could have led Wittgenstein to make such a remark? What did he mean by it?

"There is no religious denomination in which the misuse of metaphysical expressions has been responsible for so much sin as it has in mathematics."

"I shall try again and again to show that what is called a mathematical discovery had much better be called a mathematical invention."

6.54 My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them -- as steps -- to climb up beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.)

He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world aright.

'7 What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.'

The whole sense of the book might be summed up in the following words: what can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence.

Thus the aim of the books is to draw a limit to thought, or rather -- not to thought, but the expression of thoughts: for in order to be able to draw a limit to thought, who should have to find both sides of the limit thinkable (i.e. we should have to be able to think what cannot be thought).

It will therefore only be in language that the limit can be drawn and what lies on the other side of the limit will simply be non-sense.

"In reality... the point of the book is ethical. I once wanted to give a few words in the forward which now actually are not in it, which, however, I'll write to you now because they might be a key for you: I wanted to write that my work consists of two parts: of the one which is here, and of everything which I have not written. And precisely this second part is the important one. For the Ethical is delimited from within, as it were, by my book; and I'm convinced that, strictly speaking, it can ONLY be delimited in this way. In brief, I think: All of that which many are bubbling today, I have defined in my book by remaining silent about it." (Quoted in Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius by Ray Monk p. 178.

"If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of the iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. The writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing."

I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain. We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them, on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it. There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of the places were all you could say and have them mean anything. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene besides the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates. Gino was a patriot, so he said things that separated us sometimes, but he was also a fine boy and I understood his being a patriot. He was born one. He left with Peduzzi in the car to go back to Gorizia.

"The theory of atomic structure... like everything else in theoretical physics, is capable of expression in mathematical formulae; but like many things in theoretical physics it is also capable of expression in the form of an imaginative picture.... When we consider the nature of the evidence upon which the above theory of the atom is based, we can see that the attempt to make a picture of what goes on has led us to be far more concrete than we have any right to be. If we want to assert only what we have good reason to believe, we shall have to abandon the attempt to be concrete..." (In Bertrand Russell, An Outline of Philosophy p. 83.)

When commenting on Cantor's ideas of uncountable sets and different levels of infinity, Wittgenstein called it a "cancerous growth on the body of mathematics". Cantor's (and others such as Dedekind) ideas have since provided the basis for much of the development of mathematics thereafter. What could have led Wittgenstein to make such a remark? What did he mean by it?

"There is no religious denomination in which the misuse of metaphysical expressions has been responsible for so much sin as it has in mathematics."

"I shall try again and again to show that what is called a mathematical discovery had much better be called a mathematical invention."