The Story of a Ten-Minute Argument Between Two Great Philosophers.
ENCOUNTERS between great literary figures are often anticlimactic. The one time that Marcel Proust and James Joyce crossed paths, for example, each reportedly inquired of the other whether he liked truffles, received an affirmative answer, and that was that. When great philosophers bump into each other, however, the results can be more dramatic. Take the sole encounter between Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) and Karl Popper (1902-94). It occurred the night of Oct. 25, 1946, during a meeting of the Moral Science Club in a small and crowded room in Cambridge, England. Though lasting only 10 minutes, it ended up becoming a famous bit of philosophical lore. Wittgenstein was presiding over the meeting; Popper was the invited speaker, addressing the question ''Are there philosophical problems?'' Supposedly Wittgenstein got so angry at Popper's remarks that he picked up a poker from the fireplace and began waving it around in an intimidating way. Then he stormed out of the room. At some point Popper, pressed to give an example proving his claim that there were valid moral rules, said something like, ''Thou shalt not threaten a visiting lecturer with a poker.''
This face-off makes for a great anecdote, but can it sustain a whole book? I wouldn't have thought so before reading ''Wittgenstein's Poker.'' David Edmonds and John Eidinow, both journalists with the BBC, were shrewd enough to spot three terrific angles. First, there is the biographical/historical angle: how did two characters like Wittgenstein and Popper, both of them refugees from the morbid culture of fin de siècle Vienna, come to confront each other in the phlegmatic cloister of Cambridge? Second, there is the detective angle: precisely what happened that night, and why are the surviving witnesses still squabbling about it? Finally, there is the purely intellectual angle: what does the fleeting clash between Wittgenstein and Popper say about the schism in 20th-century philosophy over the significance of language? Can we declare one of the antagonists the victor?
At the time of the poker incident, Wittgenstein was regarded as a sort of deity, at least in Cambridge. ''God has arrived,'' John Maynard Keynes said. ''I met him on the 5:15 train.'' Other philosophers were bewitched by Wittgenstein's incandescent genius, his austere ways, his devotion to rigor and clarity and -- not least -- his good looks and eccentric mannerisms. (Disciples could not resist imitating his way of clapping his hand to his forehead and shouting ''Ja!'') His ''Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,'' written in the trenches during the First World War, inspired awe with its lapidary, numbered propositions on logic, language, solipsism and the unsayable.
Popper, by contrast, was a homely, ordinary-seeming fellow whose most important work, ''The Logic of Scientific Discovery,'' had yet to appear in English and whose chief intellectual attribute was -- unexcitingly -- common sense. Whereas Wittgenstein was homosexual (the authors decline to join the controversy over just how active he was), Popper had an adored wife, albeit one whom he could never bring himself to kiss on the lips.
Even their common Viennese origin set these two men apart. Wittgenstein came from the patrician class. His family's home was a palace where the likes of Brahms, Mahler and Klimt were routinely received. When his father, a steel magnate, died in 1913, Wittgenstein became the richest man in Austria and one of the richest in Europe -- at least until he gave his fortune to his siblings and took up an ascetic existence. Popper, the son of a lawyer, had a thoroughly bourgeois upbringing; the deprivations he experienced as a Viennese schoolteacher in the 1930's were not self-imposed. Both Wittgenstein's and Popper's families had converted from Judaism, and ''Wittgenstein's Poker'' gives an especially absorbing account of the uneasy existence of assimilated Jews in Vienna, the seedbed for Hitler and the Holocaust. One arresting detail: to secure non-Jewish status for his sisters so that they could escape Nazism after the Anschluss, Wittgenstein and one of his brothers had to turn over a staggering 1.7 metric tons of gold to the Third Reich, equivalent to 2 percent of Austria's gold reserves.
Despite their differences, Wittgenstein and Popper did have an important trait in common: their ''sheer awfulness,'' as the authors put it, with slight understatement. Popper was a wrathful bully in argument, unable to brook dissent. But Wittgenstein's manner was ''unearthly, even alien''; he inspired fear even in those who loved him, and his astringency of character could cause men and women alike to burst into tears. A tortured soul, obsessed with his own sinfulness, he thought constantly of suicide. (Three of his four brothers had died by their own hands.) The authors, in foreshadowing the poker incident, note that Wittgenstein had a history of shaking sticks at people. They neglect, however, to connect this with a more disquieting incident: when he briefly taught school in a poor Alpine village between the wars, he was forced to resign over allegations that he had repeatedly struck a sickly student, causing him to collapse.
And there was another element that night at the Moral Science Club that promised good theater: Popper, the outsider, was gunning for Wittgenstein. He hated Wittgenstein's idea that philosophy was merely a kind of therapy aimed at releasing us from the confusion caused by the misuse of ordinary language -- that its purpose was, in Wittgenstein's round phrase, ''to show the fly the way out of the fly bottle.'' Popper passionately believed that philosophy should be concerned with genuine problems -- the relationship between mind and body, the ideal structure for society, the nature of science -- and not just linguistic puzzles. ''I admit that I went to Cambridge hoping to provoke Wittgenstein . . . and to fight him on this issue,'' he later wrote. And, as the authors show, Popper was egged on to the battle by Bertrand Russell. Russell had been an ardent champion of the young Wittgenstein, agreeing with him that language pictured the logical structure of reality. But when Wittgenstein renounced the metaphor of language-as-a-picture for the new one of language-as-a-tool, Russell professed to find his subsequent philosophizing ''completely unintelligible.''
The philosophical bits of ''Wittgenstein's Poker'' are simple enough to enlighten the beginner and breezy enough not to bore the expert. If Wittgenstein was preoccupied with language, the authors explain, Popper was preoccupied with ''openness.'' The mark of a scientific theory, he held, was that it be open to the possibility of falsification by evidence; the mark of a good society was that it be open to change of government without bloodshed. The book also contains a creditable account of some of the harder problems that Popper thought philosophers should be grappling with, like probability and infinity -- both of which, we learn, came up during the poker incident.
As for what else happened, of the 30 or so dons and students in the room that night, nine have survived to give testimony to the authors. Did Wittgenstein brandish the poker menacingly at Popper, or did he merely shake it for emphasis? Did Wittgenstein leave the room after having words with Russell, or when Popper made the crack about not threatening visiting lecturers with pokers? Although none of the witnesses could agree on these terribly important points, the authors nevertheless manage to come up with an enthralling reconstruction of the episode.
So who won on Oct. 25, 1946? If you mean whose legacy has prevailed, the easy answer is Wittgenstein's. In a 1998 poll of professional philosophers, Wittgenstein was ranked fifth among the all-time greats, after Aristotle, Plato, Kant and Nietzsche, and ahead of Hume and Descartes. Popper may remain the favorite philosopher of Margaret Thatcher and his former student George Soros (who says that he made his billions by investing along Popperian lines), but his influence in the academy, never great, is fading. In another sense, though, Popper is the victor. As the authors acknowledge, it is his vision of philosophy that has largely prevailed. Today philosophers carry on as if there are indeed real philosophical problems, problems that transcend the use and misuse of language. (Wittgenstein's attempt to reduce the mind-body problem to a linguistic puzzle, for example, now strikes most philosophers as forced and unconvincing.)
In the culture at large, of course, it is Wittgenstein who dominates. ''The invocation of Wittgenstein in a stream of literary and artistic works,'' the authors write, ''is a striking confirmation of the hold he exercises long after his death.'' Their ''Wittgenstein's Poker'' now takes its place on the shelf next to such titles as ''Wittgenstein's Ladder,'' ''Wittgenstein's Nephew'' and ''Wittgenstein's Mistress.'' Against which the Popperians have nothing to set, I suppose, except ''Mr. Popper's Penguins.''
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Drawing (Gary Panter)On the evening of Friday October 25 1946, the Cambridge Moral Science Club - a discussion group for the university's philosophers and philosophy students - held a meeting. The members assembled in King's College at 8.30pm, in a set of rooms in the Gibbs Building - number three on staircase H.
Although its tenant was a don, Richard Braithwaite, H3 was just as neglected as the other rooms in the building, squalid, dusty and dirty. Heating was dependent on open fires and the inhabitants protected their clothes with their gowns when humping sacks of coal.
That evening, the guest speaker was Dr Karl Popper, up from London to deliver an innocuous-sounding paper, Are There Philosophical Problems?. Among his audience was the chairman of the club, Professor Ludwig Wittgenstein, considered by many to be the most brilliant philosopher of his time. Also present was Bertrand Russell, who for decades had been a household name as a philosopher and radical campaigner.
Popper had recently been appointed to the position of reader in logic and scientific method at the London School of Economics. The Open Society and Its Enemies, his remorseless demolition of totalitarianism, had just been published in England. It had immediately won him a select group of admirers, among them Russell.
This was the only time these three great philosophers - Russell, Wittgenstein and Popper - were together. Yet, to this day, no one can agree precisely what took place. What is clear is that there were vehement exchanges between Popper and Wittgenstein over the fundamental nature of philosophy. These instantly became the stuff of legend. An early version of events had Popper and Wittgenstein battling for supremacy with red-hot pokers.
In Popper's account, found in his intellectual autobiography, Unended Quest, published in 1974, more than two decades after Wittgenstein's death, he put forward a series of what he insisted were real philosophical problems. Wittgenstein summarily dismissed them all. Popper recalled that Wittgenstein "had been nervously playing with the poker", which he used "like a conductor's baton to emphasise his assertions", and when a question came up about the status of ethics, Wittgenstein challenged him to give an example of a moral rule. "I replied: 'Not to threaten visiting lecturers with pokers.' Whereupon Wittgenstein, in a rage, threw the poker down and stormed out."
Those 10 or so minutes in October 1946 still provoke bitter disagreement. Above all, one dispute remains heatedly alive: did Karl Popper lie in his published account of the meeting?
If he did, it was no casual embellishing of the facts but directly concerned two ambitions central to his life: the defeat at a theoretical level of fashionable 20th-century linguistic philosophy and triumph at a personal level over Wittgenstein, the sorcerer who had dogged his career.
To an outsider, a violent confrontation between Wittgenstein and Popper might have seemed implausible. They were both Jews from Vienna and, superficially, they had in common a civilisation - and its dissolution. Although Wittgenstein was the older by 13 years, they had shared the cultural excitement of the last years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. They had in common, too, the impact on their lives of the lost first world war, the attempt to raise a modern republic on the ruins of the monarchy, the descent into the corporate state, and the maelstrom of Hitler and Nazism. With their Jewish origins, interest in music, contacts with cultural radicals, training as teachers, and their connections with the fountainhead of logical positivism, the Vienna Circle, Wittgenstein and Popper had many potential links. That they had never met was remarkable.
Of the great figures in 20th-century philosophy, only a very few have given their names to those who follow in their path. That one can be identified as a Popperian or a Wittgensteinian is a testament to the originality of these philosophers' ideas and the power of their personalities. Those extraordinary qualities were on display in H3. The thrust of the poker becomes a symbol of the two men's unremitting zeal in their search for the right answers to the big questions.
Three years after Popper's death, a memoir published in the proceedings of one of Britain's most learned bodies, the British Academy, recounted essentially Popper's version of events. It brought down a storm of protest on the head of the author, Popper's successor at the LSE, Professor John Watkins, and sparked off an acerbic exchange of letters in the Times Literary Supplement. A fervent Wittgenstein supporter who had taken part in the meeting, Professor Peter Geach, denounced Popper's account of the meeting as "false from beginning to end". A robust correspondence followed as other witnesses or later supporters of the protagonists piled into the fray.
There was a delightful irony in the conflicting testimonies. They had arisen between people all professionally concerned with theories of epistemology (the grounds of knowledge), understanding and truth. Yet they concerned a sequence of events where those who disagreed were eyewitnesses on crucial questions of fact.
But why was there such anger over what took place more than half a century before, in a small room, at a regular meeting of an obscure university club, during an argument over an arcane topic?
Of the 30 present that night, nine, now in their 70s or 80s, responded by letter, phone and, above all, email from across the globe to appeals for memories of that evening. Their ranks include a former English high court judge, Sir John Vinelott. There are five professors. Professor Peter Munz had come to St John's from New Zealand and returned home to become a notable academic. His book, Our Knowledge of the Search for Knowledge, opened with the poker incident: it was, he wrote, a "symbolic and in hindsight prophetic" watershed in 20th-century philosophy.
Professor Stephen Toulmin is an eminent philosopher, co-author of a demanding revisionist text on Wittgenstein, placing his philosophy in the context of Viennese culture and fin de siècle intellectual ferment. As a young King's research fellow, he turned down a post as assistant to Karl Popper.
Geach, an authority on logic, lectured at Birmingham University, and then at Leeds. Professor Michael Wolff specialised in Victorian England, and his academic career took him to the US. Peter Gray-Lucas became an academic and then switched to business, first in steel, then photographic film, then papermaking. Stephen Plaister became a classics master.
"Consider this poker," Geach hears Wittgenstein demand of Popper, picking up the poker and using it in a philosophical example. But, as the discussion rages on between them, Wittgenstein is not reducing the guest to silence (the impact he is accustomed to), nor the guest silencing him (ditto). Finally, and only after having challenged assertion after assertion made by Popper, Wittgenstein gives up. At some stage he must have risen to his feet, because Geach sees him walk back to his chair and sit down. He is still holding the poker. With a look of great exhaustion, he leans back in his chair and stretches out his arm towards the fireplace. The poker drops on to the tiles of the hearth with a little rattle. At this point Geach's attention is caught by the host, Braithwaite. Alarmed by Wittgenstein's gesticulating with the poker, he is making his way in a crouching position through the audience. He picks up the poker and somehow makes away with it. Shortly afterwards, Wittgenstein rises to his feet and, in a huff, quietly leaves the meeting, shutting the door behind him.
Wolff sees that Wittgenstein has the poker idly in his hand and, as he stares at the fire, is fidgeting with it. Someone says something that visibly annoys Wittgenstein. By this time Russell has become involved. Wittgenstein and Russell are both standing. Wittgenstein says: "You misunderstand me, Russell. You always misunderstand me."
Russell says: "You're mixing things up, Wittgenstein. You always mix things up."
Munz watches Wittgenstein suddenly take the poker - red hot - out of the fire and gesticulate with it angrily in front of Popper's face. Then Russell takes the pipe out of his mouth and says firmly: "Wittgenstein, put down that poker at once!"
Wittgenstein complies, then, after a short wait, gets up and walks out, slamming the door.
From Gray-Lucas's standpoint, Wittgenstein seems to be growing very excited about what he obviously believes is Popper's improper behaviour and is waving the poker about. Wittgenstein is acting in "his usual grotesquely arrogant, self-opinionated, rude and boorish manner. It made a good story afterwards to say that he had 'threatened' Popper with a poker."
Plaister, too, sees the poker raised. It really seems to him the only way to deal with Popper, and he has no feeling of surprise or shock. To Toulmin, sitting only six feet from Wittgenstein, nothing at all out of the ordinary is occurring. He is focusing on Popper's attack on the idea that philosophy is meaningless and his production of various examples. A question about causality arises and at that point Wittgenstein picks up the poker to use as a tool in order to make a point about causation. Later in the meeting - after Wittgenstein has left - he hears Popper state his poker principle: that one should not threaten visiting lecturers with pokers.
Vinelott alone sees the crucial point - whether Popper makes what was probably an attempt at a joke to Wittgenstein's face - in Popper's way. Vinelott hears Popper utter his poker principle and observes that Wittgenstein is clearly annoyed at what he thinks is an unduly frivolous remark. Wittgenstein leaves the room abruptly, but there is no question of the door being slammed.
The debate continues and the story has achieved the status, if not of an urban myth, then at least of an ivory-tower fable. The story goes beyond the characters and beliefs of the antagonists. It is also the story of the schism in 20th-century philosophy over the significance of language: a division between those who diagnosed traditional philosophical problems as purely linguistic entanglements and those who believed that these problems transcended language. In the end, of course, it is the story of a linguistic puzzle in itself: to whom did Popper utter what words in that room full of witnesses, and why?
And what of the sine qua non of this story? The fate of the poker remains a mystery. Many have searched for it in vain. According to one report, Braithwaite disposed of it - to put an end to the prying of academics and journalists.
• This is an edited extract from Wittgenstein's Poker: the Story of a Ten- Minute Argument Between Two Great Philosophers, published on April 9 by Faber, price £9.99. To order a copy for £7.99 plus p&p, freephone Guardian CultureShop on 0800 3166 102
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Many years ago, when I was young and still in search of wisdom, I went on a pilgrimage to meet the man I thought was the wisest in the world. I came away wiser, though what I learned was what most pilgrims learn, which is that if you want to become wise you should not go on pilgrimages. I hadn’t thought much about the pilgrimage, or the wise man, until the past few months, when a friend sent me a new book that brought it, and him, back to mind.
The book is “Wittgenstein’s Poker” (Ecco; $24), by the British journalists David Edmonds and John Eidinow, and it has become an improbable best-seller. It’s a terrific book, a fuguelike account of everything we know and don’t know about a ten-minute squabble between two great and ornery Austrian-Anglo-Jewish philosophers, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper—the wise man I went to see. The squabble took place in 1946 in a Cambridge tutorial room, where Wittgenstein either did or did not threaten Popper with a poker and Popper either did or did not, when asked by Wittgenstein to give an instance of a moral rule, say, “Not to threaten visiting lecturers with pokers.” The authors conclude that the poker incident happened but that the line was strictly a wishful afterthought. They also suggest that a real pivot of the fight was both men’s need for the attention of a third philosopher in the room, Bertrand Russell, who was Wittgenstein’s intellectual father.
Though Wittgenstein is the star of “Wittgenstein’s Poker,” Popper is, I think, meant to be its hero: while Wittgenstein’s puzzles made for the bigger reputation, Popper’s problems presented the bigger ambition. Yet Popper suffered from the shortest half-life, and wore the smallest halo, of any great thinker who has ever lived. He reconfigured the image of the natural sciences in a way that altered everything from art history to Marxist philosophy, whose pretensions to scientific force he ended. In 1945, Russell could write, as an unexceptionable fact, that science dealt with the realm of the definite, philosophy with the unprovable. A half century later, no philosopher (including Russell) would have written that. Everyone accepts that science centers on the hypothetical and the conjectural, the imaginative leap and the subsequent search for a significant test, and the questions turn on just what tests, and just what guesses, count.
Popper was almost single-handedly responsible for this revolution and never got enough credit for it, as he would have been the first to tell you. In fact, since his death, in 1994, he seems to have receded right into history. Though a very good biography of him came out in 2000, Malachi Haim Hacohen’s “Karl Popper: The Formative Years” (Cambridge), and though he has had fierce admirers (George Soros’s Open Society Institute was inspired by him), his reputation is closer today to Ayn Rand’s, say, than to Russell’s, sectarian rather than secure.
Among the many themes of “Wittgenstein’s Poker,” the most human involves not so much the space between character and achievement (“Nasty Men Make Nice Things; Unpleasant People Think Important Thoughts” is, after all, the headline on almost every chapter in cultural history) as the more ticklish, almost taboo subject of intellectual glamour. Why is it that some people—and no one is a better instance of this than Wittgenstein—are able to impose their personality so forcefully on a time that they seem unencompassably large, while others, however large their thoughts, remain in some way little? This mystery, which, fully inflated, takes in everything from the different receptions of John the Baptist and Jesus to those of Billy Joel and Bruce Springsteen, is one of the great, unacknowledged motives of human affairs—and one whose mystery I experienced when I went on my pilgrimage to visit Popper, at his home in the English countryside. No hero, I learned, ever made it harder on his worshippers, and no thinker gave better evidence in his person of just how much it is temperament that can fix a thinker’s place in the history of thought, changing and transposing and often untuning the song he sings.
It was the winter of 1975; I was staying with my sister in Oxford, and had spent Christmas in Paris with my cousin, with whom I went to movies. I also went to the Louvre every day. I haunted Raphael’s portrait of Baldassare Castiglione, the famous courtier and humanist. In Castiglione’s gentle gaze and half smile, civilization dancing at the serene corners of the eyes, I was sure that I was already seeing the face of the philosopher I was on my way to visit.
Karl Popper had been an inquisitive, socially conscious young man in post-First World War Vienna. He was from a solid but by no means aristocratic family of assimilated Jews, and he had, one senses from his biographer, a kind of Gandhi-like innocence that comes to people who will one day think big thoughts. Preoccupied by social questions—his essential obsessions as a youth were music and the education of poor children, and for years he did social work—he was excited by the philosophy of science at a time when Einstein’s physics was new, and had about it a world-changing, everyone’s-talking-about-it thrill.
Even though the new physics was transforming everything in science, most philosophers agreed about what science was. Scientists, it seemed clear, began with careful observations, cautiously proceeded to a tentative hypothesis, progressed to more secure but still provisional theories, and only in the end achieved, after a long process of verification, the security of permanent laws. Newton saw the apple fall, hypothesized that it had fallen at one speed rather than another for a reason, theorized that there might be an attraction between all bodies with mass, and then, at long last, arrived at a law of gravitation to explain everything. This “observation up” or “apple down” picture of how science works was so widespread that it defined what we mean by science: when Sherlock Holmes says that he never theorizes in advance of the facts, he is explaining why he can be called a scientific detective. Various thinkers poked holes in this picture, but generally their point was that, while the program was right, it was harder to do than it appeared.
That picture, though, as the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher David Hume had been the first to insist, was always haunted by a small, permanent ghost of uncertainty: no matter how many times the apple fell down, one could never be entirely certain that someday an apple might not fall up. In the textbook example, if the law was “All swans are white” you could count white swans for centuries but still not know that all swans were white, not for sure. This caveat—Hume’s “problem of induction”—seemed to most working scientists, however, to be one of those insoluble philosophical difficulties that haunt the game without actually spoiling the party.
Popper came of age around the Vienna Circle, a group of philosophers who were trying to apply the principles of science to all human thought. Yet he had, in a way, been even more deeply affected by the new physics than his contemporaries, because he saw that Einstein’s observations weren’t just new ones resting on the edifice of old ones. The new physics had begun as stunning, original insights. What if science didn’t proceed from observations to theories—what if it was the other way around? But, if the guesses came first, how could you tell the right conjectures from the wrong ones? How could you tell the new physics from the old astrology? Because of a simple asymmetry, Popper went on to reason: no number of white swans could tell you that all white swans were white, but a single black swan could tell you that they weren’t. Hume’s problem might be not a problem at all but a disguised solution—the problem of induction wasn’t a problem for science, because scientists had never really used induction in the first place. Newton thought of gravity, and then saw the apple falling.
Science, Popper proposed—first in conversations with members of the Vienna Circle, later in his first published book, “Logik der Forschung” (“The Logic of Scientific Discovery”)—didn’t proceed through observations confirmed by verification; it proceeded through wild, overarching conjectures, which generalized “beyond the data” but were always controlled and sharpened by falsification, by refutation, by the single decisive experiment, or swan. It was the conscious, purposeful search for falsifications, and the survival of theories in the face of them, that allowed science to proceed and objective knowledge to grow.
In the real world, as Popper knew perfectly well, the response of the scientist who has proposed that all swans are white when a black swan appears is not to say, cheerfully, “Wrong again!” It is to say, “You call that a swan?” The principle of falsification would begin an argument rather than prove a point. But the argument was the point. The argument that the black swan would produce—an argument about what evidence was crucial, and why—was different from all other kinds of argument. Science wasn’t a form of proof. It was a style of quarrelling. The reason science gave you sure knowledge you could count on was that it wasn’t sure and you couldn’t count on it. Science wasn’t the name for knowledge that had been proved true; it was the name for guesses that could be proved false.
In exile in New Zealand in the forties, Popper gave this insight a surprising political twist in the greatest of his books, “The Open Society and Its Enemies.” He saw that political philosophers, from Plato to Hegel and Marx, had tried to make political philosophy rigorous by making it, like the false idea of science, authoritarian, proceeding from close observations to fixed laws of history. Once it was apparent that science had no certain truths, or secure foundations, the notion that a good theory of the state should begin with something solid—with fixed ideals about virtue, or with a large-scale view of historical development—had to give way, too. A truly scientific political philosophy would be “open”—to criticism even of its own foundations—and so would the societies based on that philosophy. (Popper pointed out that Marx, in particular, had made clear predictions—and, as history falsified each one of them, the Marxists pretended that they hadn’t been made in the first place, disguising the fact that Marxism failed by sanctifying its white swans and sending its black swans, so to speak, to the Gulag.)
In the forties and fifties, when the most gifted defenders of humanism were counting up the “costs” of modernity—uncertainty, ambiguity, alienation—Popper was arguing that these things were exactly what allowed science to tell us plain truths and give us great gifts. The growth of knowledge begins in uncertainty, and increases it: it opens more questions than it answers, and is possible only through the institutionalization of doubt. Anxiety is fruitful. All you need for liberty to continue is a tradition of seeking out criticism. In the Louvre for the umpteenth time, I looked at Castiglione’s smile and was reminded of the serenity this belief must bring to the man who held it.
A few days after my return to Oxford, I got on a bus to High Wycombe, in Buckinghamshire, which was the nearest stop to Popper’s home, in the hamlet of Penn. (I didn’t record, in the notes I made later about my pilgrimage, exactly what I said in my letter to the great man, but I had somehow wangled an invitation.) I recalled something that he had written in his autobiography, “Unended Quest”: “It was after our first visit to America that we moved to Penn in Buckinghamshire, which was then a quiet and beautiful little place.”
Popper had told me on the telephone to take a taxi from the bus depot, and the cabdriver, a Pakistani, I think, reacted immediately when I gave him Popper’s address.
”Ah, Professor Pop!” he said. “A very smart man.”
”You’ve met him?” I asked.
”Oh, many times. He never talks. All the time he is busy thinking, thinking.”
”His books are very famous.”
”I tell you, this is no surprise to me. People going to pay good for all that intelligence.”
We drove up to Popper’s cottage, and I knocked on the door. In “Unended Quest,” Popper wrote that one of his first memories was feelings of admiration for his cousin Eric Schiff, “whom I greatly admired for being one year older than I, for his tidiness, and, especially, for his good looks: gifts which I always regarded as important and unobtainable.” Good looks as an important gift, like a gift for writing or for thinking—it had seemed a strange idea to me at the time. But now I got it. Popper was a small, unimpressive man, several inches shorter even than I was—and I was a pipsqueak—and his long, solemn face was bracketed by a pair of elephantine ears. He was wearing a gray sweater, gray trousers that were too large in the seat, and a white shirt, missing a button from the left cuff.
The house led to a terrace that led to a small and straggly garden, with a scrawny, expiring apple tree.
”It’s pleasant here,” I said politely.
”Once it was pleasant here, but no more,” he replied, shaking his head. An airplane hummed overhead and he looked at it as though it were an unrepentant Hegelian. We stood at the terrace door.
”I have something I wish to show you,” he said abruptly, and he disappeared into the house. I stared blankly at my notebook full of high-minded questions. The sky looked threatening.
”Here,” he said, coming back with two new books in his hand. “I have just received these in the mail this morning.” One of the books was called “A Critique of Karl Popper’s Methodology,” by a certain Ingvar Johansson. The other one was in German. I opened the Johansson book and, at Popper’s urging, read the inscription. “To Sir Karl with admiration, I. Johansson.”
”Do you know Johansson, sir?” I asked.
”No, no.” He took back the book and began to flip desultorily through its pages. “It is another attack, no doubt. You know, people do not distinguish between intellectual criticism and personal attacks. I don’t receive criticism. They think it is enough to call me a fool.”
”Oh, surely no one does that,” I protested.
He smiled sadly. “All of my students are attacking me now. Three of my students, all of them I helped to get positions, to get chairs, and they know this, and still they attack me personally. You know, when you do things for people there are two types of reactions. There are those who cannot forget you for it and those who cannot forgive you for it. Do you see?”
He returned to thumbing through the book by Johansson. “He has read nothing of mine, of course. He will then attack this imaginary Popper. Since he already knows what is contained in my works, he need not read them, you see.”
”Tell me,” I said, “what criticism have you received in your career that has helped you—that you regard as really useful?”
He stared off for a long moment. “None,” he said. “I have never received any of this kind of criticism.” He looked away again. “Come. Let us go into the house.”
The living room was large, and nearly empty, except for a grand piano in one corner. Six or seven small Rembrandt reproductions were hung around the room. We sat down in armchairs, with a table between us, and I realized that Popper was rather deaf; for the next four hours, as we spoke, he would cup one of his enormous ears and press it toward me. We talked, interrupted only by Popper’s rising, at key moments, to go and fetch some book that he had mentioned and plop it down on the table. It seemed that for him the books were the reality; that the discussion about a book could not continue unless the book, the Real Presence, was at hand.
It is difficult to convey, after all these years, the vehemence with which he put forth his views—the silly, the profound, the trivial, and the deep. This was a man alive with resentments, vindictive anger, and persecution mania; at the same time, he had a kind of large-spiritedness, not remote from simple naïveté, that led him to open his door to a kid from Canada and fill him up with all his dogmas and doubts as though he were an old colleague.
Music—the great sequence that, for him, began with Bach and ended with Schubert—was his favorite art form, and he began to talk of his distaste for modern music. “It is terrible,” he said. “And this is one of the most interesting and encouraging phenomena of our time—the failure of the historicist propaganda for the modern in music.” Another famous book of his, “The Poverty of Historicism,” attacked the popular notion that history had a shape, a progression, followed laws of development. “We have been exposed to this propaganda for fifty years, and it has been quite unsuccessful,” he said. “There is something I must show you in this connection.” He got up again, went into the next room, and came back with Charles Rosen’s introduction to Schoenberg, a volume in the old Fontana Modern Masters series. (Popper himself had been a subject, in a short book by Bryan Magee.) He stood over me. “Read out the first paragraph of this book,” he insisted.
I read, “Arnold Schoenberg always thought of himself as an inevitable historical force.”
Popper grabbed the book from my hands and threw it down on the table. “Now, what has this to do with music?” he demanded. “We can wish to do our work well—but this wish to do work that is ahead of its time, this is nothing but historicist propaganda. Bach and Mozart never wished to shock people—they never worried about the ‘shock value’ of their work.”
I tried to turn the subject to books, and asked him if there were any contemporary writers he admired.
”There are a very few I have enjoyed,” he said. “The writer J. D. Salinger is the one I admire most. He has written one or two things that are quite good.” He got up, found a dog-eared copy of “The Catcher in the Rye,” and placed it on the table, where it joined Schoenberg and Johansson and the rest. “Yes, this is a very good study of adolescent psychology,” he said. “I do not care for his last book. Tell me, what has he published recently?”
I informed him that Salinger hadn’t published anything in a decade.
Popper stared off again. “Yes, no doubt he, too, was a victim of historicism.”
What iron had entered his soul? Twenty-five years later, I still don’t know. “Wittgenstein’s Poker” is full of similar testimony, about Popper’s ferocious temper and his inability to accept criticism of any kind. Even Bryan Magee, his most articulate popularizer, wrote, in a memoir, that “everything we argued about he pursued relentlessly, beyond the limits of acceptable aggression in conversation. . . . He seemed unable to accept the continued existence of different points of view, but went on and on and on about them with a kind of unforgivingness until the dissenter, so to speak, put his signature to a confession that he was wrong and Popper was right.”
The situation was straight out of Molière: the greatest living exponent of the value and necessity of criticism would fly into a rage at the least breath of criticism. In one way, Popper’s paranoia was a critique of his philosophy. People don’t welcome criticism. In fact, even scientists dismiss criticism and potential falsifications until someone builds a new edifice on the basis of the black swan. Popper believed that competing hypotheses fought each other off nobly while we watched; the reality is that competing hypotheses are mauled, and then one creeps away to die in peace. No one ever really changes his mind about anything; there are just more minds that think the new way. Behaviorism, Freudianism—no one refuted them, really. They just passed away out of loneliness.
In another way, his persecution mania wasn’t entirely unfounded. He had changed the climate of thought, but he had not changed the weather in philosophy departments. He felt cheated, and in a sense he had been. Although big ideas are meant to go from controversial to celebrated, in truth they more often go from contemptible to commonplace. “The earth is round!” someone says, and the world’s first response is “You’re mad!” and then, after someone takes measurements, “Of course it is! Who didn’t know that?” It’s a rule that applies with special force to Popper.
But what really underlay the contradiction between what he thought and what he was, I now think, after a quarter-century’s reflection, is a perversity of human nature so deep that it is almost a law—the Law of the Mental Mirror Image. We write what we are not. It is not merely that we fail to live up to our best ideas but that our best ideas, and the tone that goes with them, tend to be the opposite of our natural temperament. Rousseau wrote of the feelings of the heart and the beauties of nature while stewing and seething in a little room. Dr. Johnson pleaded for Christian stoicism in desperate fear of damnation. The masters of the wry middle style, Lionel Trilling and Randall Jarrell, were mired in sadness and confusion. The angry and competitive man (James Thurber) writes tender and rueful humor because his own condition is what he seeks to escape. The apostles of calm reason are hypersensitive and neurotic; William James arrived at a pose of genial universal cheerfulness in the face of constant panic. Art critics are often visually insensitive—look at their living rooms!—and literary critics are often slow and puzzled readers, searching for the meaning, and cooks are seldom trenchermen, being more fascinated by recipes than greedy for food.
It is not so much that we are drawn to things that frighten us as that we are drawn to things that we can think of as things—as subjects that exist outside the boundaries of all that is just the way we are. It is not merely that we do not live up to our ideals but that we cannot, since our ideals are exactly the part of us that we do not instantly identify as just part of life. An original thought is like a death mask of a man, with the solids made hollow and the nose a cavity, a portrait pulled inside out. We are our ideas (Popper, with his long, slightly overformal sentences, lucid but unornamented by wit, sounded like Popper, and no one else), for they include everything we are—but turned right around to face us, and looking back at us in surprise.
I stayed for two more hours. Popper held forth on the question of “big” science—technological science, the science that sent men to the moon and made hydrogen bombs. (“It is a myth that the success of science in our time is mainly due to the huge amounts of money that have been spent on big machines. What really makes science grow is new ideas, including false ideas.”) He recalled conversations with Albert Einstein in the fifties. (“You must understand that I learned nothing from Einstein directly, as a consequence of our conversations. He tended to express things in theological terms, and this was often the only way to argue with him. I found it finally quite uninteresting.”)
At the very end, as the winter light dimmed in that cold and cheerless way it does in England, I asked him what unsolved problems might still interest him. I suppose I was trying to raise his spirits. “In contemporary philosophy there are no such problems,” he said. “This is owing to the influence of Wittgenstein. As you know, Wittgenstein said that there are no philosophical problems, only linguistic puzzles. This has been the predominant attitude in Britain throughout my lifetime. As a result, there are no philosophers left, real philosophers who grapple with real problems. There are only professors who worry about words.”
He turned and looked out the window, over the wintry hills of a Britain denuded of philosophy. He looked, as Holden Caulfield might say, goddam depressed. By now, the pile of books between us, Salinger and Bellow and Johansson and Ernest Jones and Kuhn and Forster, well-thumbed paperbacks and old university textbooks and leather-bound volumes all mixed up, had risen until he almost disappeared behind it.
Ironically, Popper was on the brink of a false spring of fame. Many of the first generation of Thatcherite intellectuals admired him keenly, and pointed to him as a model. But British Toryism was unhappy with a too tightly argued position, while his brief romance with the right damaged his reputation with the social democrats. In the century’s last decade of liberal triumph, then, Popper’s contemporary Isaiah Berlin, who in the seventies had seemed too plummy and sonorous and lacking in fighting spirit for a hero, became the image of enlightened humanism. Popperians, now and then, tend to be suspicious of Berlin, since he had all the gifts Popper lacked, and, though unquestionably on the right, or same, side, let rhetorical grace do a lot of the work of hard thought. Berlin lifts the curtain, peeks at the irrational, and then quickly closes it again, with a reassuring bow to his audience. It is squalid in there, but, fortunately, not too squalid to bear.
Yet Berlin, too, we now know from Michael Ignatieff’s biography, was the man his thought denied. The news his work provides that liberal humanism is superior precisely because it can encompass the humanity of even those who are most anti-liberal was a revelation. But it left him divided. He ended up believing in his head that the ideas of the good life could not be reconciled, and in his heart that they could all be reconciled in one genial temperament, or at one great dinner party. His charm and social curiosity—which, according to his biographer, flowed from his sense of insufficient accomplishment, as Popper’s charmlessness flowed from his sense of thwarted recognition—ended by having a political meaning: though thoughts were not reconcilable, thinkers were, or might be. (It is an awkward truth that social life is the antidote to scholarly paranoia; it drains intellectual differences of their drama. The cure for the acrimony of intellectuals is dinner. Had Jesus invited a few Pharisees over for the Supper—and the Pharisees, let us remember, had been revolutionaries only a little while before—it might not have been his last. Dining with disciples is a perilous business.)
Between the heart and the head lies the soul, and soulfulness is not the least thing we ask of thought and thinkers. Liberal humanism, as much as it is a theory, is a style—even, at moments, a look, an appearance—of openness turned inward, social tolerance, geniality writ large; my naïve instinct that the civilized spirit was represented by Castiglione’s smile had a drop of truth in it. Popper’s philosophy, I now think, explained everything but Popper—left no room for the forces of ambition and attraction and jealousy and rage that governed his own life. His philosophy, so rich in so many other ways, did not allow for that kind of human perversity, or for his own doubleness. It was humane but inhuman.
I went to the British Museum the day after I returned from my pilgrimage, and happened to come across the vase that Keats wrote his ode about. Well, I thought, looking at the thing, so truth is not a black swan gliding, or a bunch of dancers dancing. Truth is an ugly duckling with big ears, truth is whatever it may be, and beauty is whatever it may be, and they are not the same, not at all, not even close. That urn had it all wrong. I knew that much now, and for sure. ♦