The Ten-Minute Mystery

Wittgenstein and Karl Popper met briefly for the first and last time in Cambridge in 1946. In that confrontation lies a clue to the intellectual history of the 20th century

Wittgenstein’s Poker
By David Edmonds and John Eidinow
Faber & Faber
Price: £6.50

Atul Chaturvedi

It is a popular misconception that those who profess themselves to be philosophers live in ivory towers, isolated from the world. It must be remembered that philosophers are also human beings and live in society and interact with other individuals — philosophers or not. Philosophers, like everyone else, can also be eccentric; in their case, of course, it manifests in a highly accentuated form — take a look at Bertrand Russell, Nietzsche. Not to speak of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Sir Karl Popper, the protagonists of this highly entertaining take on 20th century intellectual history.

The authors weave their story around a 10-minute meeting between Wittgenstein and Popper that took place in 1946 at Cambridge. It was, strangely enough, the first time the two met. It was also the last. Popper, newly installed at the London School of Economics, was to deliver a lecture on ‘‘Are there philosophical problems?’’ at a meeting presided over by Wittgenstein. The meeting became acrimonious and ended abruptly. Wild rumours flew that Wittgenstein threatened Popper with a red-hot poker. In 1974, Popper wrote an account portraying himself as the victor, but everybody else who was there seems to have remembered it differently.

How did two Jewish intellectuals, the epitome of assimilation into Austrian society, become the focus of this absurd affair? And why were they so opposed to each other, not only at the intellectual level, which is understandable, but also in virtually every other sphere?

At one level, the answer may lie in their backgrounds. Wittgenstein inherited a fortune from his father, Popper tried to earn a living as a carpenter and road-mender while pursuing his studies. Both fled Austria when Wittgenstein’s schoolmate, Adolf Hitler, took over the country. While Wittgenstein was able to easily meld into English academe, Popper went to New Zealand to write The Open Society, an indictment of Plato, Hegel and Marx as the intellectual mentors of totalitarianism.

Wittgenstein was the High Priest of Philosophy in England. Popper appears to have felt that Wittgenstein needed to be displaced if he himself was to make any headway. If this sounds extreme, just take a look at the drafts of the article describing the Cambridge incident. Popper, after considering what word was to be used to describe the reason for his visit, after discarding ‘‘incite, seduce, bait, challenge’’ Wittgenstein, he settled for ‘‘provoke’’.

Did he succeed? Wittgenstein died in 1951, as Popper’s star was taking off. His reputation has never taken the dive that usually occurs in the intellectual pecking order, as happened to his friend Russell. In fact, a 1998 poll of professional philosophers placed him fifth after Aristotle, Plato, Kant and Nietzsche. He was an important influence on the Oxford language philosophers before they went out of fashion. Popper’s influence began to wane with the collapse of totalitarianism in Eastern Europe — which he lived to witness. As a political philosopher, he will make a comeback if there is a totalitarian resurgence. As a philosopher of science, Paul Feyerabend, whose interest in the language of science is sub-Wittgenstein, and Thomas Kuhn, who coined the phrase paradigm shift, have eclipsed him. It does look as if Wittgenstein, had, if not the last laugh, at least a direct hit with the poker.