by Bruce Duffy
a. here wd. correspond with a negative fact, a solid body with no room within it for a body or possibility; & b. with a positive fact, one that has room for a body or possibility.
Understand that the ideas are germinal & still a bit jumbled. Nor are either of us entirely clear on all the ramifications of the foregoing. Nevertheless, this is, I think, a truly original & important contribution that may give us another look into the hole of logical form. One thing we see is that a proposition is not a name for a fact. The reason for this is that there are two propositions corresponding to each fact. Suppose it is a fact that Socrates is dead. You have two propositions: “Socrates is dead” & “Socrates is not dead.” And with those two propositions corresponding to the same fact, there is one fact in the world wch. makes one true & one false. That is not accidental, & it shews how this two-pole relation of a proposition to a fact is a totally different one from the one-to-one relation of a name to the thing named.
To the layman, these ideas may seem evident, even trivial, but like many an important discovery we forget that somebody had to think of it. He is a lightning rod — it gives me chills to hear him & I feel what it is to be young again & vital. “Two poles!” he shouted. “Every proposition has two poles!” I thought for a moment he wd. smash the furniture, he was so excited.
He was so pent up — I gather he had an awful holiday since he virtually refused to discuss it. I thought of sharing with him some of my own new ideas, but then I held back, knowing the ferocity with which he treats germinal ideas — except of course his own. He told me then that he has further ideas — so much is coming free in him. I suppose I should have held my tongue, but I sd. that while intuition is the seed of many great ideas, he ought not simply state what he thinks is true but also give the proper arguments. But he sd. arguments wd. only spoil its beauty; he wd. feel he was dirtying a flower with muddy hands, especially one still only days old. Wittgenstein does so appeal to me — the artist in intellect is so very rare. I told him I hadn’t the heart to say anything against that, & that he had better acquire a slave to state his arguments. But he was in no mood then to be lectured, even if it was well intentioned. Joking, I sd., “You don’t suppose I will write out your arguments for you, do you?” He sd., “How could you? Then they wd. be your ideas. Which is to say they would be your problems.” I sd., feeling rather hurt, “Do we not share the same problems?” He looked so pained, so concerned for me, then sd. rather mysteriously, “I certainly hope for your sake we do not.”
It made me melancholy for some reason, this wish that we might shoulder the same burden. Could I reconstruct Wittgenstein’s vision from a fragment in the way a paleontologist might produce a whole mammal from a knucklebone? I suppose it’s my fear that he shall not last, & that I shall have to do something of the sort. I do fear for him.
But still, my love, there are limits to induction & I am happy I have you, if only reconstructed from a scented letter. But this is, as you say, a Sir Philip Sidneyism — a mild reproach to one’s fair mistress. Still, I need more than a lock to rape or handkerchief to hold. So when, prithee, shall it sithee? Saturdee? …
Russell had the results — the knucklebone — but, as Wittgenstein said, Russell did not have the history that gave rise to the life, of which bipolarity was just a fragment. Perhaps this was why Wittgenstein was so evasive when Russell asked how he had come upon his idea. Acting as if it was quite beside the point, Wittgenstein said, I was walking in the Prater. I wasn’t looking for the idea, if that is what you ask.
Perhaps Russell should have asked not how or where but why and at what cost Wittgenstein’s idea had come to him. No answer, Wittgenstein would come to realize, is a virgin birth; every answer comes as a response to a discrete set of problems. An answer, like a life, is a prism. Seen one way it seems sound, a complete solution. Seen from another vantage point, however, it is only a further bewitchment, one step forward and one step back.
Still, Wittgenstein had told the bare truth. The concept of bipolarity had come to him while he was walking in the Prater. This was several days after The Golem of Prague, and Wittgenstein was still haunted by that image of the empty golem hauling the Rebbitzen’s heavy buckets. Pain was in the buckets. The buckets were as brimming full as Wittgenstein was empty. In one hand was a bucket full for the living; in the other hand was an empty bucket for the looming dead who block the path of the living. And then the door opened, and out burst bountiful white water, the grass inundated. To have a thought is one thing, but it is another to say what that thought means or portends. Full or empty, both buckets were as full with meaning as he, the hauler of buckets, was then hollow enough — receptive enough — to divine their meaning.
It had been dusk when he returned to the Prater, that hour when respectable people are bundled up and heading home. In the early winter darkness, the Ferris wheel, that whirling constellation of lights, pitched down for its last ride, and then the white lights blinked out. The sun was almost spent. Looking up, he saw a weak red light that just tinged the treetops, and above that, a dry winter sky sliding beneath a hazy half circle of moon. Ahead, across the meadows, he could dimly see the distant peaks of the easternmost Alps, as his mind, like a dog sled, pulled him along, still thinking, he solemnly told itself, about logical form and the mystery of negation. He remembered thinking that the problem was really one of a profound simplicity, a thing so simple that it seemed almost insurmountable. And then in that unaccountable way in which things dawned on him, appearing as if planned in queer relief, he looked down and noticed how the snow outlined an empty footprint. White space had formed around a black space where once a foot had stood. The logical space might admit the foot; or it might negate it by saying, The foot must not stand in this spot. And then, feeling as if he had touched cold iron, it struck him: the sublime oddity of being able to say, This is not how things are, and yet we can say how things are not.
The space of logic was large, offering both unlimited space and possibility — or no possibility. It was the Blocker again, holding the purloined nose just close enough to elicit belief yet not close enough to dispel doubt. And then, with a shiver, Wittgenstein saw the trees had also lost their light as the wind reared up and the boughs cast down their bony branches. Tack tack tack came the wind across the crystallized pond, and he pulled his head down into his coat. No evading it. His eyes now settled on a spot where he saw not empty footprints but a pair of formless boots filled with stout legs. Here was a possibility, one before which he saw no possibility. And as with that empty footprint, Wittgenstein then saw a logical space that he would fill, crouched before this stranger who now approached like Mammon, giving no name as he unburdened himself in the roaring darkness.
Walking home later, not so much sorry as empty, Wittgenstein wondered if a man might build around his life a machine by which he might become decent. The full bucket, this was easy to fathom; but to realize that in emptiness also there was pain — this he did not expect. Nor was it much recompense when his germinal idea came to him, and he saw, like a piece of logic, what it is to be both true and false, as well as empty.
Furniture
WITH WITTGENSTEIN’S DISCOVERY, then, Russell ceased to think of him as a student. From this time on, he treated him as a full equal, if not sometimes more than an equal. Yet with this acceptance other tensions emerged as the two put their heads to the same questions.
They were tremendously idealistic. As they both saw it, ego and pride had no place in a great collaboration. To differing degrees, they both recognized the dangers but felt that with humility there was certainly room enough in the wide world (and one full of such tremendous technical problems) for two to fit into the same trousers — at least so long as they could agree on the cut.
Fortunately, Russell was an experienced collaborator. And collaboration was so very modern: it was the method of science, that collegial relay race of progress. After all, for a single mind to try to unite all the spheres of philosophy or put forth one
unassailable view that the world is like this — that was the legacy of the old philosophy, of the system builders in whose fantastic contraptions logical error cavorted with religious belief, superstition and blind prejudice. In a sense, Russell was like the proverbial general fighting the last battle and the last enemy: even now, years later, he was still beating back those now vanquished idealists like McTaggart, who held that the external, physical world was but a figment of the mind. Surely, Russell felt, it was most pleasant to sit in the parlor with our teacups perched on our knees while imagining the world as a phantasmagorical dance animated by the brain. Perhaps, as Dostoyevsky opined, men do crave miracle, mystery and authority, but if Ars Philosophia was ever to stroll with Dame Science into the sunlight of this new century, Russell felt that philosophers would finally have to pledge themselves to sobriety — to renounce their mundane personal desires for power, salvation and the presto of metaphysic. Still, Russell found it hard to take his logical-empirical philosophical science cold. Increasingly now, the scientist had to taste, nay, to squeeze the bosomy grapes of mystery.
Having endured years of abstinence plying abstract mathematics, Russell found it hard to curb this sudden desire to seize the pulpit and speak baldly from the heart. Wittgenstein was still young. He remained fresh and uncompromising in his fervor, not yet realizing that, at its ecliptic, the mind must bend like the rainbow, stretching always back to earth. And really, it was a difference of style: whereas Russell was the Enlightenment man who felt that everything could be rationally discussed and attained through diligent effort, Wittgenstein, that most impatient of men, was the desert mystic subsisting on bread, rainwater and silence. Professing to expect nothing, preaching only patience and submission, Wittgenstein was like a child peeping through a blindfold, hoping against hope to be granted his guilty metaphysical wishes.
If anything, Russell was incomparably more modest and earthbound in his expectations. Wittgenstein’s power, by comparison, was the priest’s power, a distillation of abstinence and self-denial. Better, thought Wittgenstein, to fast — to anticipate that meal — than to wolf it down and still be hungry. Better a fresh promise than a bitter afterward, cursing the barren tree.
As Wittgenstein saw it, Russell had broken fast over the holidays, first completing The Problems of Philosophy, a popular book on the subject that he had begun that summer, then writing an article entitled “The Essence of Religion.” Russell gave Wittgenstein The Problems of Philosophy almost as soon as it came back from the typist. And, predictably enough, Wittgenstein disliked it, feeling it was impossible to provide a popular treatment that wasn’t more misleading than illuminating. But above all, Wittgenstein hated the book’s final chapter, “The Value of Philosophy.”
How can you say that philosophy has a value? he asked. This you can say no more than a proposition can say it is correct. It is not for the proposition to say; it is for the proposition to be judged. With philosophy it is the same. Either a person sees its value or he does not. Philosophy does not need you to say it has a value. You only muck it up.
Wittgenstein was even more shocked by “The Essence of Religion.” The moment Russell put the manuscript in Wittgenstein’s hands, he knew he had made a mistake. Three hours later, Russell heard an urgent knock. In burst Wittgenstein, the typescript flapping in his hand.
I’m sorry, he said, taking a deep breath. I’m very, very sorry …
You don’t like it, said Russell, trying to soften the blow.
Like it? Wittgenstein threw down his arms. I detest it!
There was silence then, that trapped, hopeless look as Wittgenstein brought up more words:
It’s completely glib — superficial. Your terms — they’re wholly inexact. What do you mean, freedom from the finite self? What self is this you speak of? Here we work to build a world based on something — and then you write this! I am very sorry, but, please, you must not print this. Even if they want to publish it, you must not…
As Wittgenstein was making his ultimatum, Russell could hear this same criticism well up from some buried annex within him. In a gush of ego and arbitrariness, Russell felt he should at least defend himself against this onslaught. And yet it was queerly agreeable, like his fantasies of being crushed beneath a train. Later, in his nightly letter to Ottoline, Russell wrote:
I must stop, I must. Much as I hate to admit it, Wittgenstein is right about the paper, & I have already written the journal, requesting that it be withdrawn. I had planned to expand it into a book, but I see this is quite impossible; & damn it, he is right — I am sure it is for the best. I understand your concern, my love — I know at times he can be destructive, but he does not intend it. In his way, he is really very gentle, & he was so hurt to think badly of me, that I could write such a thing.
As for your other fears, I agree that I am influenced by him, but not, I think, overly. Harsh as it may be, truth is never harmful. If Wittgenstein is right, then he is right, & that is the end of it. I can hardly complain if he is right, can I?
So Russell abandoned the book. And with that he began to cede even more to Wittgenstein. To Wittgenstein he would bequeath the purely logical end of their work. Let Wittgenstein undertake those questions which require youth and freshness of approach — that is, the purely philosophical pursuit of what propositions are and what forms they take, as well as the related problem of developing a system of logical notation by which one logical form could never be mistaken for another.
But Russell had another reason for giving ground. He was restless. More and more now, Russell wanted to rove in places where the field was still open, where the sod was not broken by his own repeated attempts. With this in mind, Russell was now interested in taking logic into the realm of matter and epistemology, searching for a more scientific understanding of the great question of whether humans can really know anything, and, if so, what?
Not long after the publication of The Principles of Mathematics in 1903, Russell had retreated from his belief that every phrase in a sentence achieves its meaning by denoting something that in some way exists. The problem, again, was the one raised by denoting phrases like the present king of France, which give rise to those never-never zones where fictions run pell-mell with absurdities.
Russell’s theory of descriptions was a method of logical code breaking: it broke down a troublesome expression like the present king of France into sensible substatements; or at least made its patent nonsense more apparent. More recently, Russell had tried to take matters a step further — and to a rather different vantage point — by developing a model of the act of judging. As with the theory of descriptions, Russell was partly concerned with problems of nonsense: specifically, how one can judge what is not the case. Unlike the theory of descriptions, however, the theory of judgment was not fully elaborated but rather a still rough sketch of the directions such a theory might take. Yet now, with Wittgenstein freeing him to pursue other things, Russell wanted to rework his judgment theory, the idea being to create a model that could embrace not only the logical relation of, say, A = B, or even the comparatively uncomplicated acquaintance of an ego with an object. Instead, Russell wanted a theory that could encompass the additional, and still more complex, mental act of judging that relation. In this way, Russell hoped to connect the judging mind with logic and the external world, thereby wedding the abstract concept of, say, “greenness” with the physical particulars of real grass — fragrant, new-mown grass redolent of grass and greenness, the whole whiffed through the sensorium of eye, nose and mind. Indeed, this quest had even assumed a certain parallel with Russell’s conflict with Ottoline. Russell did not want a rarefied idealist’s world that would remain locked like a virgin in the tower of the mind; he wanted Rapunzel to let down her hair, revealing a world that might be climbed, ravished, eaten.
But again Russell was practical. He knew these questions would only be solved progressively, with a theory and then an improved theory, and so on.
Wittgenstein had no such pr
acticality. He put no stock in the notion that he was part of that trumped-up tinker’s guild known as a profession. He found repugnant the notion that he was to work in fraternal amity and cooperation with learned colleagues who purportedly shared the same general aspirations, and who, with time, would help him perfect his ideas, and even extend them.
Never!
For Wittgenstein the work had to be delivered whole and complete! A virgin birth, no more, no less.
He was such a bloody perfectionist — so utterly lacking in that blithe English sense of getting on with it that Russell had in abundance. Refusing to accept compromise of any kind, lashing himself, Wittgenstein was driving himself to the verge of illness with his infernal bucket bearing. It irked Russell that Wittgenstein should persist in this stubborn fast. On the other hand, it sorely irked Wittgenstein to see Russell publish what was less than perfect and indeed often flawed. But in Wittgenstein’s reaction there was also more than a hint of jealousy. The truth was, it pained him to see how effortlessly Russell slipped through the world.
Despite appearances, though, Russell was slipping by with mounting difficulty. One big problem was his craving for Wittgenstein’s imprimatur, as when he asked Wittgenstein to read the proofs for the third volume of his Principia Mathematica. Russell all too readily accepted Wittgenstein’s judgment that the book was riddled with errors. If anything, Wittgenstein was more distraught about it than Russell, sick to always be the bearer of bad news. Russell tried to put the best face on it, but for Wittgenstein this only made things worse — he hated Russell’s need to put a pleasant face on everything. Surely, Russell said, Wittgenstein could help him put the proofs to right. Yes, Wittgenstein agreed, he could. But Wittgenstein also strongly implied that this offended his sense of personal responsibility, his belief that the author alone must deliver the work, and deliver it whole, without blemish.