Not many are called, and even fewer chosen.
Tales from the Vienna
Circle Woods
Vienna, 1927:
After several more appointments
with Schlick alone, Wittgenstein had been persuaded to get together with a
select group from the Circle, though he had never once attended an official
Circle gathering.
Waismann began, subconsciously, to
imitate Wittgenstein’s speaking-patterns.
Schlick began to attribute some original ideas of his own to Wittgenstein, though they had been expressed before he
had even read the Tractatus. Wittgenstein must have approved of this
submissive attitude: by the fall
of 1929 he was choosing to
restrict his discussions to Schlick and Waismann alone, usually at Schlick’s
home.
-- David Edmonds, The Murder of
Professor Schlick (2020), p. 48-52
Though recalcitrant about joining, or even really following
the lead of, the Wiener Kreis, Wittgenstein did attend their summer 1930
congress in Königsberg
(the one-time hometown of Kant, who was the Circle’s Aunt Sally),
which honored him with a presentation
re “The Nature of Mathematics:
Wittgenstein’s Standpoint”.
Here he again encountered a couple who had known him as a teen:
Present too at Königsberg were Professor Stanislaus Jolles and
his wife, Adele. They were the
couple with whom Wittgenstein had stayed during his spell in Berlin,
1906-08. Their relationship with
their lodger had been affectionate;
Stanislaus felt protective and paternal toward “Little Wittgenstein”, as
they called him. But, as so often
with Wittgenstein, there had been a rupture, and, typically again, it seems to
have arisen from Wittgenstein’s perception that his hosts had fallen short of
his exacting standards.
-- ibid, p. 97
It didn’t take much for the prickly master to cancel you (or, to use the term current
among Berkeley lefty groupuscules during the 1970s before cancel acquired its later flavor among the Woke, to “break with”
you).
If you did manage to remain in Wittgenstein’s good graces, it
was a mixed blessing, for he tended to treat such scholars as acolytes or thuriféraires, rather than full
colleagues. Consider the case of Friedrich
Waismann, mathematician and physicist, and a core member of the Kreis, who enjoyed
the rare privilege of occasionally being closeted with Wittgenstein alone:
Waismann’s principal function was
prompt and note-keeper. One
philosopher later described his relationship to Wittgenstein as one of “glove
puppet to controlling hand.” … There
was something shocking about the degree to which he subordinated his interest
to those of Wittgenstein, and the ingratitude with which his efforts were
rewarded.
-- ibid, p. 101, 104
Bertrand Russell, a supremely well-established
logico-philosophical panjandrum himself, could not be so scanted; yet “Bertrand
Russell, according to Ayer, was now downgraded to being merely ‘a forerunner of
the Christ (Wittgenstein)’.” (ibid, p. 109)
Russell himself was cordial to Wittgenstein, who had read
Russell’s mathematical philosophizing, and who in 1911 showed up at Russell’s rooms in
Cambridge, and soon formed a close relationship. Russell had
been a member of the Cambridge Apostles, cosily known to themselves as simply
“the Society”; and Wittgenstein
received an invitation to join. But
once again, Wittgenstein held back from any circle whose multiplicity made them
unwieldy to dominate as a whole.
In a letter of 1913, Russell wrote to a friend:
My friend Wittgenstein was elected
to the Society, but thought it was a waste of time, so he imitated henry john
roby and was cursed.
-- The Autobiography of Bertrand
Russell (v. 1, 1951), p. 364
(The reference is to an earlier selectee, who disdained ever
to attend the Apostle conventicles;
the miffed members promptly canceled him by decapitalizing his name for
all eternity, and pronouncing a ritual malediction from time to time.)
~ ~
~
In 1932, through the good offices of Gilbert Ryle, the Oxford philosopher A.J. Ayer was
introduced for the first time to
Wittgenstein at Cambridge. Queried by the eminent Austrian as to what was the most recent book
he’d read (cocktail-party filler or ice-breaker, one would have thought), Ayer replied, La Vida es Sueño,
adding modestly that he hadn’t understood it very well. That was actually owing merely to his
shaky Spanish; but Wittgenstein apparently took it as trenchant skepticism,
much along the lines of the logical empiricists protesting that they “didn’t
understand” (i.e., considered as rubbish) a great many everyday non-scientific
statements. “From then on he
treated me as a protégé.” (-- A.J.
Ayer, Part of My Life (1977),
p. 120.)
In the same memoir, the mild-mannered Ayer recounts the brusque
reception that met Waismann, who had so long sedulously served Wittgenstein,
when they later became colleagues at Cambridge University:
Waismann was Jewish, and when
Vienna fell to the Germans he fled
with his family to England.
He went to Cambridge, which was willing to accept him, but Wittgenstein
did not desire that what he regarded as a deceptive echo of his own
thought should be audible in the
same university, and therefore announced that anyone who attended Waismann’s lectures would not be allowed to come to his.
-- A.J. Ayer, Part of My Life
(1977), p. 132
Horresco referens, but such petty and revanchist behavior
reminds me of Tr*mp.
~
The incomparable logician Kurt Gödel played a notably honorable role in this
Kreis of often quarrelsome prima donnas. While faithfully attending their gatherings, he was
content so remain modestly in the background, and be taken for a subaltern, while all the time excogitating, leading to work more important more
lasting than anything any of the others in the Kreis would accomplish. Again, let the portraitist tell it:
Although almost all Circle members
became convinced that, drawing on Wittgenstein and Ramsey, they had solved the
problems of mathematics -- that mathematical truths were a type of tautology --
Gödel had sat quietly at Circle meetings
without believing a word of this.
He was a mathematical Platonist.
-- David Edmonds, The Murder of Professor Schlick (2020), p. 148
Those affordances of the Circle, and of Wittgenstein in
particular, were worse than useless: positively stultifying for the practice of
mathematics. [For our essays on
the subject, consult
=> https://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/search/label/Platonism
]
As for the excesses of acolytism, Gödel kept a level head:
While Schlick and Weismann revered
Wittgenstein, Gödel was among several
bemused by the cult-like deference he inspired in his acolytes. … [And
later, when Wittgenstein reigned at Cambridge:] Many students became disciles -- who, like Waismann in
Vienna, subconsciously came to mimic his mannerisms.
-- ibid, p. 149, 247
The socio-historian and polemicist Ernest Gellner provides a glimpse of the Cambridge
period of Wittgenstein’s ascendency.
There grew up
… the first set of ‘companions of
the prophet’. Initially, there was
a small, carefully vetted, conventicle
of devotees in Cambridge, in the years preceding the Second World War. … But
the movement grew …
Maor premise: all cultural cocoons, all forms of
life, are valid and self-sufficient, and Wittgenstein has shown this to be the
case. Minor premise, never spelt
out or discussed, but operationallly taken for granted: only our cocoon is of any interest. …
Entry to Wittgenstein’s seminar was restricted at the master’s whim, and the
ideas circulated in privately-copied typescripts which Wittgenstein himself
refused to have published. This
esotericism greatly enhanced the appeal of the ideas, which were treated as a
major revelation by the adepts.
-- Ernest Gellner, Language and
Solitude (posthum. 1998), pp. 160-165
(Parallels from the history of linguistics during the Chomsky years, could be
adduced…)
~ ~
~
Let it not be supposed that the field of philosophy is at
all atypical among academic
specialties, as regards such interpersonal rugosities. Parallels from the history of
linguistics during the Chomsky
years, could be adduced. As, the
mathematician Mark Kac, father of the linguist Michael Kac, remarks in his
memoir:
Linguistics is a strange field,
full of cliques and fiefdoms, each fiercely attached to its staked-out
territory, and consumed with enmity toward the others.
-- Mark Kac, Enigmas of Chance
(1985), p. 107
For an extended look at academic acolyte relations, pour yourself
a brandy and relax with these:
=> http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2013/02/chomsky-freud-and-problem-of-acolytes.html
and its appendix
=> https://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2012/12/the-agony-and-acolyte_28.html
These include anecdotes about my fondly former Berkeley Doktorvater in Rom. Phil.,
Professor Yakov Malkiel, including portraits of the (pro tem) Malkielitas, and one (canceled) Malkielito. One will detect, in the telling, a
Nabokovian tone; which is only
just, as the Malkiel family and the Nabokov clan were BFFs in Berlin, back in the ‘30’s (while it lasted).
