Elective Acolytes

 

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.)

Ryle appears later to have some regrets about those good-offices:

 

Ryle had met  and got along with  Schlick, but his encounters with Wittgenstein left him with serious reservations.  This was evidently a man who needed acolytes, not colleagues;  someone always on the brink of an explosion,  too quick to divide the world into the saved and the damned.

-- Nikhil Krishnan, A Terribly Serious Adventure:  Philosophy at Oxford  1900-1960, p. 54)

 

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).

 

Varieties of Religious Indifference

Here we address no matters of faith, but merely clarify the philosophical terminology.  This is not theology;  this is lexicography.

Theism:   Behind or beyond or standing over the real world (both visible and invisible), there stands a larger pattern, one facet of which we could recognize as a consciousness.

If nothing is added to this minimal stipulation -- especially, if any such additions are denied -- such theism is known as Deism.   As more is added, you get the Abrahamic faiths.  (The distinction between Deism and full Theism is important to, say, Christianity, but not to philosophy as such.)

Atheism:  the denial of this.

Distinguished from this last, by those who are careful with words, is:

Agnosticism:  a wait-and-see stance.

These are the traditional termini;  yet, for the modern panoply of unbelief, more terms are needs;  which, as a licensced wordsmith, we duly coin. 

Thus, Stephen Schwartz, discussing the celebrated English serial-divorcé A.J. Ayer (he also played a philosopher on TV) writes (A Brief Introduction to Analytic Philosophy, 2012, p. 63):

Ayer insisted that he was not an atheist, because an atheist denies the existence of God, which of course Ayer claimed  was just as meaningless as asserting the existence of God.

This (philosophically sophomoric) position we may dub Ontological A-Theism, or (in a snappy style  suitable for headlines) Ayerism.

And here, you may aver, our spade is turned;  the bottom of the barrel has been sounded.

But alas:  there exists a sub-level, even below this -- lower than the paltering of Ayerism (which was fashionably in line with dismissing centuries or rather millennia of human enquiry as philosophically “meaningless”), there is the kind of mind that does not even realize that there is anything to be asserted or denied or artfully dodged.  Traditional terms for this are Indifferentism or  Adiaphorism (which latter word will set you back a fittybone).  But for a more contemporaneously accessible designation, we might dub this  WalMartism:  the attitude of those whose inquisitive spirit  rises no higher  than to wonder what is on sale at the Mall.

Notes towards an eventual essay on Causality

The word “cause”    is an altar

to an unknown god

-- Wm. James

 

[Over the years, I have built up a file of many hundreds of pages, consisting of juicy quotes on various topics, raw materials for many a book and essay.  However, the publishing landscape being what it is, these have long lain fallow.  In all likelihood, the Reaper will be requiring an audience before all this grist can be milled.   A shame for it all simply to lie there, where the worm doth bore and the mice do gnaw.  So herewith a tiny sampling, as hostages to fortune, and a goad to the Muse.]

Let’s start things off with a quotation that sets matters in the perspective of a mystery.

Abraham Pais, a physicist and friend of Einstein, on the very first page of his technically-dense biography of Einstein (Subtle is the Lord), mentions a poser that motivated him to write the book:

I wondered once again about the question, Why does this man, who contributed so incomparably much to the creation of modern physics, remain so attached to the nineteenth-century view of causality.

We shan’t answer this here, but for now we'll merely offer a bouquet of quotes illustrating thoughts about causality, down the ages.

(1) Causality in general

Chaucer, Tale of Melibeus (following Aristotle):
"The wrong that thou hast received  hath certain causes, which that clerks clepen Oriens and Efficiens, and Causa longinqua and Causa propinqua; this is to seyn, the fer cause and the ny cause.  The fer cause is almighty God, that is cause of all things.  The neer cause is thy three enemies.  The cause accidental was hate.  The cause material been the five wounds of thy daughter. The cause formal is the manner of their working, that broughten ladders for to slay thy daughter …"

David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), p.75: "He could not pronounce that the one event was connected: but only that it was conjoined with the other."   (cf., later, “synchronicity”)

David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748, 1777), p. 76:
"We may define a cause to be an object, followed by another, and where all the objects similar to the first  are followed by objects similar to the second.  Or in other words where, if the first object had not been, the second never had existed." 

These are not in fact equivalent formulations.  The first is too broad, and would apply to prefaces and books.  The second would not apply to these, as there exist books without prefaces.

Hermann Paul, Prinzipien der Sprachgeschichte (1880, 5^th edn. 1920), p. 24: "Denn zwischen Abstraktionen gibt es überhaupt keinen Kausalnexus, sondern nur zwischen realen Objekten und Tatsachen."

Ward & Waller, eds. The Cambridge History of English Literature, vol. I:  From the Beginnings to the Cycles of Romance (1907), emphasizing intralingual change rather than French influence:

The differences between the grammar of Old English  and that of the English of Chaucer’s day must be ascribed to internal agencies.

"The law of causality, like much that passes muster among philosophers, is a relic of a bygone age, surviving, like the monarchy, only because it is erroneously supposed to do no harm."
Bertrand Russell, "On the Notion of Cause" (1912).

P.A.M. Dirac, The Principles of Quantum Mechanics (1930; 4^th edn. 1958), p. 4:

We must revise our ideas of causality.  Causality applies only to a system which is left undisturbed.  If a system is small, we cannot observe it  without producing a serious disturbance  and hence we cannot expect to find any causal connexion between the results of our observations.  Causality will still be assumed to apply to undisturbed systems.

Robert Lindsay & Henry Margenau, Foundations of Physics (1936), p. 522:

That many miracles have allegedly been predicted, is hardly sufficient to reconcile their occurrence with the causality postulate.  We conclude:  The positivistic formulation, with its main emphasis upon human ability to know, does not express the nucleus of what is understood by causality.

As to what does express this nucleus (they go on), it is somewhat surprising to the average man on the omnibus:

Consistency of nature, i.e. causality, may be characterized by saying: The differential equations  in terms of which nature is described,  do not contain explicit functions of the time.

This is followed by more technical observations concerning “impressed forces”, and closed vs. open systems.

Mark Sullivan, Our Times VI (1939), p. 74: "I doubt whether a nomination for the Presidency (or anything else) ever merely 'happens', always it must be brought about  and always somebody must play the part of bringer-about."

A. D’Abro, The Rise of the New Physics (1939), vol. II, p. 944:

When Planck advanced his quantum theory of equilibrium radiation, science was confronted with a doctrine in which the succession of events  was not continuous, and in which  causal relations between successive events  were not specifically asserted.  The highly speculative nature of Planck’s ideas  prevented them from receiving immediate acceptance;  but around the year 1907, the remarkable successes of Planck’s theory in other realms of physics  silenced all opposition, and from then on  serious doubts were cast on the validity of rigorous causality in physical science.

Nonlinearity entails noncausality … Causality is a first approximation … a linear approximation to determinism.

Mario Bunge, Causality and Modern Science (1959, 1963).  He traces the ancestry of this insight to Bridgeman, The Logic of Modern Physics (1927).

A.J. Ayer, Scientific American, Oct 1965: "Even in a field in which causal laws are well established, there is often a certain looseness in the way they fit the facts. … These slight deviations are not held to be significant; they are ascribed to errors of observation.
            'Errors of observation', however, is here a term of art.  Apart from the existence of the deviations, there is usually no reason to suppose that any errors have occurred.  Now, I think it possible that this looseness of the fit  cannot be wholely eliminated; in other words, that there are limits to the precision with which the course of nature can be prospectively charted." This margin then is "in the hands of chance."

Resnick & Halliday, Physics (1966), p. 87:
"If one of the two forces involved in the interaction between two bodies is called an 'action' force, the other is called the 'reaction' force.  Either force may be considered the 'action' and the other the 'reaction'.  Cause and effect is not implied here, but a mutual simultaneous interaction is implied."

Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen,  The Entropy Law and the Economic Process (1971), p. 171:

John von Neumann even argued [in Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics (1955)] that this cause-effect link “has certainly no other cause than the ‘law of large numbers’”, the justification being that “the apparent causal order of the world in the large … is completely independent of whether the natural laws governing the elementary processes are causal or not.”

Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen,  The Entropy Law and the Economic Process (1971), p. 175f:

The point shines in Planck’s statement  that the principle of causality “is neither correct nor incorrect;  it is a heuristic principle; … it is the most valuable pointer that we possess … to find a path through the confusion of events.  … [Yet] Planck, after recognizing that causality is only a heuristic principle, let his inner convictions  sweep him away, and, without any ado, proclaimed that causality is “an almighty law  which governs the world”.

Without attempting to proselytize, let us merely here mention the Christian view that, indeed, an almighty law does govern the world, but that the relative ‘causal’ and ‘a-causal’ portions  remain to be determined. -- And notice the scheme of C.S. Lewis, whereby the Natural is wholly given over to the causal, whereas the a-causal (in the Newtonian/Laplacian sense) is confined to the Supernatural and… the Subnatural (the quantum).

Peter Geach, in Reason and Argument (1976, p. 3), urges "a threefold distinction: motives for belief, reasons for belief, causes of belief."

Mario Bunge, preface (1979) to third edition of Causality and Modern Science (1959; 1963):
Positivism had always denounced causality as a myth. … Causalism, the view that all relations among events except the purely spatio-temporal are causal, is surely untenable.

Ralph Grishman, Computational Linguistics (1986), p. 92: "the usual use of 'if A then B', which conveys some causal connections between A and B – so-called strict implication rather than material implication."

Gerd Gigerenzer et al, The Empire of Chance (1989), p. 71: "Such variation could mask the effects of the agencies under investigation." (agency = causal factor)

Gigerenzer et al, The Empire of Chance (1989), p.84: "To be a cause  generally means to make a difference."

Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (1990), p. 123:
“The element in phrenological theory that mattered to statisticians  was that it created an argument to separate a penchant  from a determining factor.  The old slogan of Leibniz, ‘inclines without necessitating’, was given new application.”

Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (1990), p. 130:
“Engel had argued: we have statistical regularity, but not law, hence no causes acting on individuals to determine suicides.”

Dagegen Wagner:

“Statistical homogeneity … can result only from causation.  No law can apply to an ensemble   unless there is a set of (deterministic) laws applying to the individuals.”

Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (1990), p. 188:
“Pearson … testified to the correlation between the taming of chance  and the elimination of ordinary causality.”

17 XI 01 NYTimes: "Since Sept. 11, few phrases have become as familiar as "root causes." Forthright condemnations of the attacks have often been accompanied by assertions that, ultimately, the "root causes" of terror must also be addressed."

Steven Pinker,  The Blank Slate (2002), p. 32:

Behavior appears to have a different kind of trigger than other physical events.  Ordinary events have causes, but human behavior has reasons.

[continued here]