Poet and Professor

Poor Russell! Prose always loses out to poetry, not even a Nobel Prize for Literature to disguise the obvious fact: he was no Wordsworth. Instead, Russell’s pages the paste in which to set another’s poetic jewels; Why I Am Not a Christian valueless without those priceless Wittgenstein gems. Oh dear! Our British master of clear, philosophic prose is condemned for his clarity. Better a misty twilight in an Austrian wood, than a clear day on a Welsh beach. Or to switch to a more a topical metaphor: Germany 4 England 2, in Tübingen in 1966. It didn’t even have to go to extra time.

I’d better not show Michael Nedo Ernest Gellner’s Language and Solitude; a late work that cuts the legs off the legendary giant, reducing him to a dwarf: Wittgenstein to stand on the shoulders of Schopenhauer to reach the brows of Bronislaw Malinowski.1 Not that Gellner is an impartial judge. When it comes to Wittgenstein’s poker, Gellner is on Sir Karl’s team.2 This philosopher, sociologist and anthropologist not keen on poets, mythographers and dreamers.

Like a good scientist Michael Nedo clears up the mystery of that famous event: ein Treppenhaus witz; a joke that comes to us on the stairs when leaving a party. The poker a happy symbol for the atmosphere in that room; Wittgenstein’s anger at the effrontery of his Viennese antagonist standing up to him in his own territory. Yet it seems typical of our man that he enjoys the joke (as well as becoming friendly with Popper, despite belonging to the Devil’s camp). No dry-as-dust pedant, only interested in separating fact from fiction. This meticulous scholar, who tracks down every error, is also a dreamer who needs a poet’s significance. By aptitude and training - degrees in mathematics, physics and zoology - a scientist, Michael Nedo in feeling and belief is a German Romantic; an intellectual lineage to which Wittgenstein belongs; though he did peculiar things with its inheritance.

This mix of qualities produces strange results. Giving up science to be editor and archivist, our man becomes the keeper of the family archive, surrendering his life to Wittgenstein’s words. Microbes under a microscope. Although the image of a Biblical scholar and their textural analysis is what comes to mind. The Tractatus. The Philosophical Investigations. Sacred texts, where every semi-colon is holy. It is why the family agreed to give him the manuscripts; both his attention to detail and his insight - he has an eye for error, a feel for the Wittgensteinian sensibility - persuading them this chap perfect for the job. They were not wrong. For every Jesus Christ is there a Matthew, Luke and John. It is this mixture of the pendant and the mystic that fascinates; and I regret that shortness of the interview: a quick sprint along the coast when a vast hinterland is to be explored, and with Alan, our expert guide, to help us.

His origins are in the Sorbish (or Wendish) language and region; a part of Germany once on the fringes of modern Europe. His transmission from periphery to centre, Wendish to German, countryside (I’m guessing) to town, creating a double-aspect view of life and thought. Thrown into German, school, university, science, Michael Nedo becomes the complete contemporary man; his adolescence a beautiful journey, a painless intercity ride, past the great monuments of 20th-century advance; until, one day, his train hits the buffers of Wittgenstein’s prose. The first doubt about this new world of science. And what a hit! A few carriages don’t just crumple, but the whole train comes off the rails. Because the foundations are shaky.3 This man not a native of a Dusseldorf or Dortmund, the old values retain their hold; and suddenly return when the shallowness of the new (Russell) is so sharply contrasted with the depth of the old (Wittgenstein). Epiphany! That solid Weltanschauung, a glorious concrete block, now looks a ramshackle shack. Science alone is not the answer. Indeed, a purely scientific worldview is a ‘disaster’, he says; our man only too aware of what modernity loses when it gives up traditional modes of being and thinking. It is the classic story of the exile, who failing to fully assimilate - the acquired role never quite fits because it is a role, self-conscious and artificial - lives in a liminal space between the old and the new; where nothing quite satisfies.4 Here it takes peculiar forms.

Consider the time and place. In the 1960s, German youth reacted against the crude materialism of the German economic miracle. Something extreme and messianic about this generation; unable to cope with the size of the transformation and its silence about the Nazi past. Imagine storing a murderer in your state-of-the-art kitchen cupboards. Culture shock and horrorshow! The reaction took many forms; in art and music an obsession with the avant-garde; in politics a revolutionary socialism, while in the counter-culture there were various kinds of New Age religion. Across the generation religious feeling was strong; as many sought to escape from the economic reality, through sex, drugs, music, politics and mysticism. The age and place miraculously caught in Edgar Reisz’s Die Zweite Heimat.

Bertrand Russell an unwelcome guest at this party.

A philosopher treated with a scientist’s careful hand; a poet dissected in a lab. Such combinations produce unusual results; for although the pedantry is in the service of the poetry the pedantry seems also to excise it. Our man shows the failure of Anscombe’s ‘examination’ when Wittgenstein’s German is ‘point of view’; he says, correctly, that these are quite different perspectives; Anscombe’s translation not capturing that sense of a whole life but demarcating a (technical) aspect of it. This fine piece of textural analysis supports the big philosophical picture Michael Nedo wants to draw. And yet, I know the old poseur only through Elizabeth Anscombe’s English, and...I reached the same conclusion about his philosophy. Not the individual words, but the tenor of the attack (on his earlier philosophy!), the poetics of his prose, its touch of turn-of-the-century symbolism, seeking essences not facts-of-the-case, is what gives his work meaning. Wittgenstein a philosopher in the Platonic mode, concerned about forms of life not disciplines or methodologies (little wonder that a conventional academic boxes him in). Every comma and semi-colon is important to a poet - how she shuffles between them when writing a line! -; nevertheless, meaning transcends all punctuation and every phrase. It is the paradox of language, but especially poetry, which relies so much on intellectual ‘feel’, a mental spirit, to deliver the connotative goods. Parts are essential to the whole, but parts that merge into the whole when felt, by writer and reader. Long-legged Fly combusts inside our heads to produce a physical response, an embodied meaning, a sort of mind-gas. The problem of much academic criticism is that removes these responses, by treating text as text - mere material - and transforming a complex feeling into clunky conceptual language, which concentrates on meaning alone; often thin and extraneous to the poetry.5 The power of the vague removed by so much fake clarity. It is why traditionally emphasis was placed on memorialisation: to recite the poetry to act it out, so reproducing its inner life, with all that cannot be said. A poem belongs to body rather than head; the body of the mind, its spirit-presence. The reader’s response not of absolute fidelity to the text; for our readings float free of individual markers; albeit each is vital to the overall effect: a wrong word and a stanza plays off-key. Every word relative to the harmony of the piece, with little significance in itself (except when charging a poem with a lightening-strike effect). Curious tensions, difficult to resolve; and the reason why literary critics become hamsters in the meaning-wheel; as they try to reduce a complicated organism to simple mechanics with the aid of poorly translated manuals.

Sex, says the poem, is not what the Churchmen say, it is not sinful but pure; there is no need to mortify ourselves. At least, that proposition is what the text of 1669 (the first to print the poem), as enshrined by Sir Herbert Grierson.... Empson thought it needed no apology for the vigour with which it confuted conventionality: its resolute heterodoxy. But the lovely line 46 ‘There is no penance due to innocence’, is a textual crux; other manuscripts, arguably more authoritative, read variously ‘There is no penance, much less innocence’ and ‘Here is no penance, much less innocence’ — both of which reverse the meaning of the line, as Empson maintained, by scoffingly acknowledging the speaker’s impenitent gilt. The wooer’s expressions of urgent wonder turn into the rake’s profession of bad faith.6

A fascinating example on how the meaning of a poem turns on a crux; and why careful scholarship is essential to literature. What this extract doesn't capture are the different lifestyles that inform this dispute; Empson and his critics are not arguing about the same thing. The academics, with no existential investment in the poem, are only concerned about getting the text right. Not so Empson. His interpretation is a matter of mental health; for he identifies with Donne, whom he conceives as a fellow warrior in the fight against a repressive Christianity; and whose guardians did indeed (almost) ruin his life.7 Now we understand Russell; he isn’t writing about philosophy and religion but ethics and lifestyle; Why I Am Not a Christian an instrument to loosen the hold of Christian priests and Christian morals on social and sexual mores. Prose in the service of poetry.

It is remarkable how much Jesus Christ and his disciples appear in this interview (more than with Alan’s Rowan Williams interlocution, I’m guessing). Drawn by the Wittgenstein spell, you fall under the magic of a charismatic (beautifully caught in Norman Malcolm’s memoir). Wittgenstein is the sophisticated variant of a new age religion and the cleverest person in town; his brilliant metaphors wrapped in the most arcane of academic language, not the cheap crystals and charms of Annabelle’s Avalon on Mill Road. It is why our man met such hostility when he amended the holy text. Although a cynical me thinks of professional reputation: a lifetime’s career, built on the speculations of a single word, to disintegrate when shown wrongly transcribed or translated. Oops!

Spring: 

A hill without a name

Veiled in morning mist.8

A critic uses different analytical skills to a poet. Both are obsessed by words, but the poet is obsessed in a curious way...less in their meaning, as in their multiple effects, acting on different levels of mind, and directly onto the spirit. To read Yeats or Pound to experience a moment of sweet disorientation as one see-feels the world fresh. Poems kaleidoscopes. Print’s psychedelics. Times are when the magic hit is a phrase, but this the effect of the piece; the feel of the entire poem concentrated in some verbal condensation. The good poetry reader, like the poet, usually a mystic of some sort: responding to the semantic whole not the syntactical atoms. The critic is a sobersides; a surgeon picking up each word with a forceps. Meaning is everything for a critic but a meaning already named and tamed in scholarly monographs. With a poet words must float free of such constraints, if the poem to convey an atmosphere which touches both his ideas and feelings. Meaning itself is too clear. While complete opacity (the technique of mediocre avant-gardists) lacks the requisite mental hit. The perfect poem gets the combo of the clear and the vague just right, but it is the combination - the poem as a single entity - that works its magic, itself intimate with the personality.

The artist like the rest of us, is torn by various desires competing within himself. But, unlike the rest of us, he makes each of these desires into an element for use in his art. Then he seeks to synthesise his elements all together to form a style. The sign of a successful synthesis is a unified and unique style plain for all to recognise.9

Michael Nedo is right to insist on getting the details as precise as possible. And yet poets go beyond the details to evoke the feel of a text, its own special runic truth. Isn’t this why Wittgenstein had such an effect? The Delphic Oracle had arrived in Cambridge, that rather dry, Roundhead, literal, place. Ascetic. Philosopher (of a heavy technical bent). Word Magi. Charismatic. An aristocrat to boot. A strange and strong cocktail for light heads. No surprise, then, that so many wild parties were to follow in the quiet quads of this Fenland Arcadia.10 Wittgenstein a visionary of an odd kind; swinging from one extreme totalising vision to another equally extreme vision which says there are single superior visions at all. Talk about leaps of epistemology! Russell of course would have none of it: science the measure by which all knowledge is judged.11 But for those less committed, or even sceptical of the scientific worldview, Wittgenstein was a saviour; offering not only a new Weltanschauung but a refutation of the philosophic pretensions of science, its claims to an epistemological preeminence, which, moreover, Wittgenstein himself had appeared to endorse in his original work.12 An insider proves its claims are empty.

We see the effects on our man; a scientist turns archivist when the revelation hits that science but a view of the world; one insufferably narrow and dangerous if not qualified by other perspectives and forms of life. I agree! The Soviet Union was an engineering society, where the great innovators of Russian science were replaced by technicians; one explanation for the Chernobyl disaster.13 The same forces operate in today’s West, as Big Tech empties out the culture.14 A scientific society should be informed by ethics, philosophy and the arts; while religious and mystic resonances can add their weight and restraint. Without these wider influences Science to take us down a narrow and ugly alley, where thugs and other disreputables lurk. Nedo gives a marvellous metaphor for the problem; it is Schiller’s description of a child’s elementary book: fine to learn the basics, but we need skilled teachers to acquire a sophisticated understanding and so stand upon our own judgements. Science itself is that elementary book. To think it alone the solution is to end up a mere technocrat; where values become valueless; only the technics to matter. I think of Edward Teller, for whom hydrogen bombs were but instruments.

I’m with Nedo! And yet I have reservations. He correctly dismisses Wittgenstein’s Poker as a piece of journalism.15 However, the second of his detailed criticisms - the first concerns the use of logic in the (original German) title: it was not used by Wittgenstein, but by characters like Popper and Carnap to attack the Catholic Church - goes against my memory of the book, which admittedly is twenty years old. He says the authors concentrate on the protagonists’ Jewishness, which not part of their lives until the 1930s: neither man considered himself a Jew. What affected these maestros was social status; Wittgenstein from the elite, Popper amongst the middling crowds. Yet it was just this emphasis that caused my negative reaction to the book: that the authors, I felt, had become enchanted with the rich, flamboyant, aristocrat, while showing a snobbish disdain for the middle class upstart, who had all the narrowness of a petite-bourgeois.16 It was, I felt, to totally misread Popper. Both men aristocrats of the intellect.17 The journalists, being journalists, only looking at the social surface. Julian Barnes has deeper insight....

French art in the nineteenth century was, broadest terms, a struggle between colour and line. So an additional reason why Delacroix sought the imprimatur of the Institut was that, in a society where the arts have always been highly politicised, it would officially endorse his kind of painting. At the start of the century, line had held sway through David and his school; by the century’s end, colour was to triumph through Impressionism; in between, the mid-century was taken up with a combat between the champion of line and the champion of colour (in the square corner, Ingres, in the round corner, Delacroix). Nor was this confrontation always high-minded: once, after Delacroix had visited the Louvre, Ingres pointedly had the windows opened to dispel ‘the smell of sulphur’. Du Camp tells the story of a banker who, innocent of artistic politics, managed mistakenly to invite both painters to dinner on the same evening. After much glowering, Ingres could no longer restrain himself. Cup of coffee in hand, he accosted his rival by a mantelpiece. ‘Sir!’ he declared, ‘Drawing means honesty! Drawing means honour!’ Becoming over-choleric in the face of the cool Delacroix, Ingres upset his coffee down his own shirt and waistcoat, then seized his hat and made for the door, where he turned and repeated, ‘Yes, sir! It is honour! It is honesty!’18

For thinkers like Wittgenstein and Popper ideas are life and death. The meaning of a word, the nuance of an idea, a missed argument, those tricky little details of a theory, are apt to take up weeks if not years of one’s mental existence. Nightmares over a single logical error! An insight to result in a decade’s work. Any wonder you’d flourish a poker at someone who not only dismisses your great revolution in philosophy, but argues its riddled with conceptual disease.

We have come back to the poker. Michael Nedo thinks he has the conclusive argument: a fire makes the room too stifling for so many people and the poker too hot to handle. The incident never occurred; it is an imaginative reconstruction. Popper more or less admitting this in conversation. I read Popper again.

At that point Wittgenstein, who was sitting near the fire and had been nervously playing with the poker, which he sometimes used like a conductor’s button to emphasise his assertions, challenged me: “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 of the room, banging the door behind him.19

In discussions I often pick up what is closest to me. Noel Annan saw Wittgenstein playing with a poker when speaking.20 Doubts rise again. Oh no! How make a decision in this courtroom? Let’s try.... I often say ‘next to the fire’, even when the fire is not alight. Has Nedo mistaken a metonym for the actual thing, a fire for a fireplace? More conclusive is Popper’s description of the incident. It feels too circumstantial and low-key for Treppenhaus witzen, which are usually some verbal repartee never made. Ah ha! This judge decides! For Popper the most important part of the scene are his words, that brilliant rejoinder; Sir Karl wished he had said: “Not to threaten visiting lecturers with pokers.” This too neat a reply to be thought of in the heat of argument; but perfect for a Treppenhaus witz; which is mostly of language rarely of deed. I wait with trepidation for the great scholar to take my argument to pieces....

A wonderful interview, and something out of the usual run...less about a life than an implement. Alan wanting the lowdown on the poker, the star of this show.21

Interview: Michael Nedo


_________

Notes

1 Language and Solitude: Wittgenstein, Malinowski and the Habsburg Dilemma. For just how much Schopenhauer Wittgenstein absorbed: Bryan Magee, The Philosophy of Schopenhauer.

2 Introduction to the second edition of Words and Things: An Examination of, and an Attack on, Linguistic Philosophy.

3 Contrast with Gellner. For discussion of his biography see my Interstitial Lives.

4 An extraordinary description of an exile’s fragile relationship to the new country is V.S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival. One reaction is to become more conservative than the locals, who are shown to be more adaptable (to a landscape that is constantly changing) than the newcomer who needs and craves stability.

5 The classic misreading of art, one that overemphasises the concept, is Kant’s aesthetics. A succinct summary of his aesthetic theory: Roger Scruton, Kant.

6 A discussion of John Donne’s To his Mistris Going to Bed, in John Haffenden, William Empson, Volume II: Against the Christians, pp.578-79.

7 John Haffenden, William Empson, Volume I: Among the Mandarins.

8 Matsuo Bashō, in The Penguin Book of Japanese Verse: From the Earliest Times to the Present.

9 Jerrold Northrop Moore on Elgar, in Anthony Storr, Solitude, p.151.

10 Think of the description of John Wisdom in Norman Malcolm’s memoir.

11 For Russell knowledge is that which exists outside the individual ego; this the great achievement of science. Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits.

12 The Logical Positivists read the Tractatus as confirming their view that the only worthwhile knowledge is science; everything else nonsense. They missed the (Kantian) transcendental element, which Wittgenstein would have absorbed through Schopenhauer: there is much, perhaps the greatest part of our mental existence, that is outside our knowledge-making capacities.

13 See the conclusion to the Adam Curtis film A is For Atom in his Pandora’s Box series.

14 Acutely described in Jill Lepore, If Then: How One Data Company Invented the Future.

15 The book by David Edmonds and John Eidinow.

16 I see a similar prejudice in Ved Mehta’s treatment of Gellner in Fly and the Fly Bottle.

17 Brought out in Bryan Magee’s memoir: Confessions of a Philosopher: A Journey Through Western Philosophy.

18 Julian Barnes: Keeping and Eye Open: Essays on Art, pp.52-3.

19 Karl Popper, Unended Quest: An Intellectual Autobiography, p.123. Contrast with other accounts in footnote 21.

20 ‘I once saw him seize a poker and thought he would strike Richard Braithwaite with it when convicting him of error.’ Our Age: The Generation That Made Post-War Britain, p.407. 

21 To see Alan with poker: https://www.sms.cam.ac.uk/media/1291366 

 Howard Hodgkin: The Meeting