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).

 

Y.M. on linguistic "playfulness"

On the subject of “Deviations from l’arbitraire du signe”:

There arises the possibility of elevating playfulness to the same kind of pedestal  as economy and clarity, particularly on the strength of linguistic developments where emotional coloration has been achieved  at the expense of economy, or clarity, or both.

-- Yakov Malkiel, “The Inflectional Paradigm”, in W. Lehmann & Y. Malkiel, Directions for Historical Linguistics (1968), p. 32

[For the full essay, to which this is an update, see:

https://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2014/04/die-frohliche-wissenschaft-lo-gai-saber.html ]

Onomatopoeia of the Day: "bataclan"

Among the several targets of the Parisian suicide/killer commandos (Arabic inghimâsiyûn, French kamikazes), the one with the highest casualties was the Bataclan music-hall.   One shred of civilization that we may harvest from the catastrophe, is an explanation of the term.

Bataclan is like the synonymous American shebang or kit and caboodle -- scarcely used outside an idiom (“the whole shebang” / “tout le bataclan”).  Bordas defines the word as “attirail hétéroclite et encombrant”, and compares (one sense of) the word bastringue.   The two sense-components are:  (1) heterogeneous , and (2) comprehensive.  In the former sense, note the idiom inventaire à la Prévert, for a “shoes, and ships, and sealing-wax” sort of list -- that very example (from the 19th-century writer Lewis Carroll) proving that the French poet did not initiate the genre.  In the latter sense, we enjoy the idiom tout le toutime.   Put ‘em together, and you’ve got a bataclan.

~

As for etymology:  It doesn’t really have one, in the proper sense -- nothing that slipped from the lips of Livy will give you a clue to it.  It’s a sort of onomatopeia connoting vigorous confusion:  an anapest with vocalism a - a - a.   Here bata- is a sort of variant of the more popular pata-.  As:  patatras ‘crash!  ka-boom!’; and patata, in et patati et patata ‘yadda yadda yadda’.  You might call out “Patatras!” when someone fait patapouf (comes a cropper).   If someone screws up linguistically rather than kinesthetically, il fait un pataquès .  (In that last, the -s is pronounced;  the word is delocutive in origin, alluding to a tournure populaire involving a faute de liaison :  Je ne sais pas-t-à  qu’est-ce ‘I don’t know whose it is’.)  Wittily, this cranpheme pata-  (cranpheme © WDJ Enterprises, All Rights Reserved, y compris en URSS) has been used to confect that choice vocable, pataphysique, whereof we have often had occasion to avail ourselves.

Cf. further here:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2013/07/frontiers-of-pataphysics.html

~

Finally, an attestation of the term  from a joual-speaking family in Maine, ca. 1967, recounted to me the other day by a colleague.   One day, when she was just seven years old, she was sprawling about in a tomboyish way, which fit ill with her knee-skirt attire.  Her grandmother admonished:  “Tu es bataclan!  Tout à l’air!”  Which is to say:  the fillette thereby afforded a glimpse (to any hypothetical passing gentlemen) of what Gigi (in similar circs) referred to as her ce-que-je-pense, for which she was likewise admonished by her grandmother.  (Tout here meaning ce strictement-rien qui est pourtant le grand (ou minime) secret de l’Ewig-weibliche.)

~

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Clothiers to gentlemen since 1917

~

That style of etymologizing, admitting (for some explicanda) multiple-parentage and a role for “playfulness”, was characteristic of our dear teacher Yakov Malkiel, who taught Romance Philology at Berkeley.  It contrasted with the earlier, earnest, Junggrammatiker-influenced approach, of seeking elaborate (unattested) Vulgar-Latin origins, or (equally unattested) Celtic or Thracian or what-have-you substrata.   For the pioneers, outside the stately structure of classical philology  lay a vacuum;  but it is a creative vacuum, like quantum foam.

[Note:  I wanted to post a photo of the man;  but the Web has become so crowded, it has crowded him out.  An image-search on even

      => yakov malkiel "romance philology" berkeley

brought up a host of unrelated images, but none of the etymologist.]

Die fröhliche Wissenschaft (lo gai saber)

I wish to make a serious argument about the relation of the cosmos, God, and the human purpose.

But I wish to do so in a certan lightsome mood.

-- James Schall, S.J., The Order of Things (2007), p. 60

Ein Universitätslehrer, der sein wenig anmutendes Spezialfach  reichlich mit Witzen zu würzen pflegt [to “sow it with jokes”].

-- Sigmund Freud, Der Witz und seine Beziehung zm Unbewussten (1905 ff)

These could serve as  motto for this site.

~

David Riesman (The Lonely Crowd, 1961)  laments the impairment of the American spirit of playfulness   at the hands of post-Puritan sobersides:  “It may be a long time before the damage done to play during the era depending on inner-direction  can be repaired.”

Richard Rorty writes (Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, II.iv.1):

The spirit of playfulness which seemed about to enter philosophy around 1900  was, however, nipped in the bud.  Just as mathematics had inspired Plato to invent ‘philosophical thinking’, so serious-minded philosophers turned to mathematical logic  for rescue from the exuberant satire of their critics.  The paradigmatic figures in this attempt to recapture the mathematical spirit  were Husserl and Russell.

Here the via mathematica and the via jocosa are counterposed.   Whereas for us, they intertwine  like the rose and the briar.

Thus Gerald Holton, in a review (reprinted in The scientific imagination) of the work of Lewis Mumford:

I was … delighted with Mumford’s … acknowledgement that there is a subjective and qualitative side to the doing of science  which scientists hardly ever talk about, the “intellectual playfulness and aesthetic delight” in scientific work, which can be an enormously important component of scientific motivation.

“Playfulness” was one of the favorite words of the Romance philologist (and my former teacher) Yakov Malkiel -- though you would not have known it to look at that hard-working, ever-professorial man, twice over an exile.   This was evident, not only in his writing style (which, for better or worse, has influenced my own), but in his actual etymological practice.  Certain cruxes of etymology, which had resisted the usual attacks of sound-law philology, he would attempt to explain as the free creation of the human spirit: and indeed, such bodacious onomastic hippogriffs abso-blumin'-lutely do exist.  This, in contrast to the sobersides scholar who would attempt to lautgesetz back to some obscure figment of hypothetical Vulgar Latin, or else claim Celtic or Klingon substrate -- thus missing the joke.

E.g., 

On the subject of “Deviations from l’arbitraire du signe”:

There arises the possibility of elevating playfulness to the same kind of pedestal  as economy and clarity, particularly on the strength of linguistic developments where emotional coloration has been achieved  at the expense of economy, or clarity, or both.

-- Yakov Malkiel, “The Inflectional Paradigm”, in W. Lehmann & Y. Malkiel, Directions for Historical Linguistics (1968), p. 32

O mistress mine ....

It is key to the cognitive style of such thinkers as Richard Feynman;  and not accidentally, as retaining a streak of the child is helpful in leavening fact-impacted thinking.

Again Holton:

As Einstein himself once said, he succeeded  in good part  because he kept asking himself questions concerning space and time  which only children wonder about.

~

The original Provençal gai saber, which seems to lie at the center of a collection of near-equivalents (joyful wisdom, gai savoir), specifically  denoted the art of composing love-poetry in the then-contemporary style, that of the troubadours.  As that art has alas passed from the planet, felled by the effects of the Albigensian Crusade,  we use it (as did Nietzsche et alia) in a wider sense, denoting the desired confluence of homo sapiens and homo ludens.

*

Si cela vous parle,

savourez la série noire

en argot authentique d’Amérique :

http://www.linguasacrapublishing.com/justiceexcerptdivorce.html

*

We have a genuine philosophic eros.  Knowledge excites us.

-- James Schall, S.J., The Order of Things (2007), p. 22

Da nun  in meine Darstellung  mancherlei einfließen wird, was strengen Richtern  unwissenschaftlich erscheinen muß,  so möchte ich dieses  einigermaßen  durch das Zugeständnis entwaffnen, daß dem Ganzen  die Überschrift  Allotria gebühre …

-- Hugo Schuchardt, “Der Individualismus in der Sprachforschung”, in Leo Spitzer, ed., Hugo Schuchardt-Brevier (1921; 2^nd edn. 1928), p. 422

~

The fact that language is used for communication  is no more intrinsic to it  than its use to tell jokes …

-- Norbert Hornstein, Logic as Grammar (1984), p. 119

So far, however, from exalting the raconteur’s art, that passage stems from a practitioner of the singularly humorless Chomskyan Government-and-Binding school;  and means, not to enrich our notion of language with that of humor, but to squeeze it dry  even of semantics.

Cf. Karl Jaberg, Spiel und Scherz in der Sprache (1930).

Linguistic pollution (mise à jour)

[Sept 2011] The media seems so far uncertain, whether the victors in Tunisia’s elections, Ennahda (i.e., Hizb al-Nahda

حزب النهضة 

‘the Renaissance party’) are “moderates” or “Islamists” or both.  But recent remarks of its leader, Rached al-Ghannoochi [pron. RASH-id al-ghan-NOO-shee]  give one pause:

Soufflant le chaud et le froid, il a regretté que les Tunisiens soient devenus «franco-arabes» dans la pratique du langage. «Nous sommes arabes et notre langue c'est la langue arabe», a-t-il martelé. «On est devenu franco-arabe, c'est de la pollution linguistique», a déploré le chef d'Ennahda, reprenant un des thèmes de prédilection du Front islamique du salut en Algérie au début des années quatre-vingt-dix. Formé en Égypte et en Syrie puis exilé vingt ans à Londres, Rached Ghannouchi parle anglais couramment mais ne maîtrise pas le français qui est encore largement pratiqué depuis l'indépendance dans les milieux éduqués tunisiens.

Executive summary:  the Arabic language is polluted by French.

*

Si cela vous parle,

savourez la série noire

en argot authentique d’Amérique :

http://www.linguasacrapublishing.com/justiceexcerptdivorce.html

*

English, of course, has been in this pickle ever since 1066.  Of the three main words in the phrase “the language is polluted by French”, only one is not of French origin -- the word French itself, cognate with Frankish, named for the Germanic tribe, the Franks.  Yet somehow our Saxon tongue manages to hobble along regardless.

The liberal response is to shrug, at most to scold.  Yet notice this vigorous, and to an American probably unexpected response from a reader:

Moi je dis bravo les tunisiens, vous avez une identité, vous avez une culture et vous voulez la garder, c'est tout à votre honneur.
La mondialisation ne vous amènera rien, restez tunisiens de souche, et n'ayez pas honte.
Nous en France on fait l'inverse, et on va même beaucoup plus loin! Etre fier d'être blanc, en France, c'est du racisme ! Admettre qu'on a une histoire chrétienne, c'est injuste. On a même viré Charles Martel de nos bouquins d'histoire, pour pas irriter nos immigrés (tant pis si c'est notre histoire)...
Cette préférence étrangère s'estompera un jour. A aller dans un sens à l'extrême (par intérêt politique principalement, pas par noblesse), vous verrez qu'on basculera dans l'autre sens à l'extrême, et la ca sera écoeurant ...

This is the sort of text which future historians will unearth, shaking their heads, as a sour smoke rises from the embers …

For more on the dimensions of these tensions, click here.

*

Travaillant au noir,

le détective  se trouve aux prises

avec le Saint-Esprit

C’est quoi, le péché irrémissible???

*

~     ~     ~

Further politico-linguistic comments from readers:

Pour ma part je suis plutot favorable à ce genre de mesure, en effet étant Alsacien je me desole de ce que nous parlions ici En Alsace , une langue étrangere à notre culture d'origine, l'allemand et l'alsacien, et qui de facto nous met au chomage en raison des nombreux emplois qui nous échappent au Baden-Württemberg et en Suisse Alémanique, la france n'assurant pas quant à elle sa part de notre développement , trop occupée à nous pomper notre fric.

[NDLR:  The reference is to Alsatia, part of Alsace-Lorraine -- or,  teutonice, Elsaß-Lothringen.  It was long a political football before winding up permanently in French hands.  As my Romance-philology teacher Yakov Malkiel used to sigh, linguistically the situation is quite simple:  Alsatia is German-speaking, Lorraine is French.  They could have split the difference and spared us all a couple of world wars.]

Vive l'anglophonie. Ghannouchi n'est pas un "franalphabète": il passé 25 ans à London.

La Tunisie doit se débarrasser des vestiges de la colonisation:

- remplacer le français par l'anglais.

 

[NDLR:   I assumed this -- from an anglo-named poster -- was meant as a gonzo provocation, tongue in cheek -- or rather, protruding from the lips.  Yet the same sentiment is reiterated more moderately by another poster:]

En tant que tunisien, je suis favorable à la surpression de la langue française de notre système éducatif. Les plus intelligents ont déjà compris que l'anglais est la langue d'avenir. Sincèrement, le français devient un vrai obstacle pour notre avancement et notre ouverture au monde.

Que dire aux 500 000 tunisiens qui vivent en France et aux étudiants qui viennent dans nos grandes écoles ou universités, justement parce qu'ils n'ont pas de pb de langue, ils sont en effet bilingues dans les classes éduquées.

[NDLR: The same remarks apply mutatis mutandis to English:  a world language, and a gift to the world.]

Le français est aussi truffé de mots anglais...

[NDLR:  Far, far less than the other way around.]

Le français est une langue synthétique ( mélange de latin, grec, patois ) à l'orthographe bordélique et grammaire infernale.
l'arabe une langue pure. Ecriture consonnatique normalisée ( on vous fait grace des voyelles ). Grammaire cartésienne.

[NDLR:  We address such questions in the chapter “Thumbnail Sketches of Arabic” in our book, The Semantics of Form in Arabic, in the Mirror of European Languages.  Also available in Arabic translation.]

L'espace tunisien a été phénicien, romain, vandale, byzantin   puis arabe, turque et français. Jusque dans les années 600 et la conquête arabo-musulmane, il fut le phare africain du christiannisme. Tout au long de cette Histoire, une seule constante : le peuple original de la Tunisie, les Berbères, païens longtemps résistants, et leur langue. La seule langue que devraient revendiquer aujourd'hui les Tunisiens pour affirmer leur identité. L'arabe est une langue importée, comme le français.

[NDLR:  This is historically quite true, though to propose Berber (which dialect?) as the sole language of any country, is a reductio ad absurdam of the politique identitaire.]

*

Pour d’autres friandises

de la confiserie 

du docteur Justice,

consultez:

http://www.linguasacrapublishing.com/justice.html

*

[Update 15 VII 2012] More on al-Nahdah:
http://www.lefigaro.fr/international/2012/07/15/01003-20120715ARTFIG00100-tunisie-ennahda-fait-passer-le-pouvoir-avant-l-ideologie.php

[Update 2 December 2013]  On discute beaucoup de ces jours, au Maroc, si l’on devrait évincer l’arabe classique  (الفصحى) dans les écoles, au profit “du” dialectal.    Or, comme avance Omar Saghi, docteur ès sciences politiques, il n’y en a pas qu’un:  la langue populaire diffère de région en région, voire de ville en ville même au dedans des confins du Maroc.

Ici sa conférence

http://www.medi1.com/player/player.php?i=5682442

Chomsky, Freud, and the problem of acolytes

[The current New Yorker  features a clear-eyed, deft, though not really probing  appreciation of the celebrated English psychoanalyst  Adam Phillips, by the reliable Joan Acocella.   Phillips is a sort of Freudian quasi-demi-acolyte-paravail;  in recognition of which, we repost this (updated) essay.]

A word, first, on the audacity of coupling the names of Freud and Chomsky, albeit only in the specific dimension of their relation to acolytes.  Both were/are charismatic men, having attracted brilliant and fervid followers;  but if that were all there was to it, it would be intellectually shallow to group them into a sort of two-person granfalloon.   After all, any two-bit swami or Hollywood celeb  has fervent fans, with attendent defections (stalkers) and what-have-you;  their names do not deserve to be in any way yoked with these.

On the personal level, Freud and Chomsky have in common  extraordinary intelligence, along with extraordinary intellectual bravado.  At the level of theory, both champion something many others find hard to take, and which is built around a core notion of 
(1) a mental primordium, which
(2) is crucially, critically, and mysteriously influenced during your very early years, and which then subsides, and is relatively inflexible thereafter.
(Note:  A slightly less audacious coupling, this of Freud and Holmes, may be consulted here:
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2013/02/freud-and-holmes-updated.html  )
(Our essay may be considered in the spirit of Plutarch's Parallel Lives.)

Consider this heartfelt account, from an orthodox Freudian:

Konrad Lorenz noticed that, if you walk in front of a little chick  at a certain time in the chick’s life, he’ll follow you, and if you do it at other times  he won't;  there’s a particular time when he gets ‘set’.  And we have found out in psychoanalysis that in human development, too, there is a time that is uniquely formative… The Oedipal period -- roughly three-and-a-half to six years -- is like Lorenz standing in front of the chick .. the source of all subsequent adult behaviors.  If you take a person’s adult life -- his love, his work, his hobbies, his ambitions -- they all point back to the Oedipus complex.

-- (quoted in) Janet Malcolm, Psychoanalysis:  The Impossible Profession (1981), p. 158

And:

The prolonged biological helplessness of the human infant  and the contingent vicissitudes of the child-parent relationship  remain of decisive and demonstrable significance  in all optative aspects of human psychology.

-- Leo Stone, The Psychoanalytic Situation (1961), p. 107

(Much in my essays is satirical;  but here  let me drop  all humor whatever, and urgently plead:  Mothers, nurse your babies!  Infant formula delenda est!!)

~

Freud was acutely aware  of the danger that anti-Semitism … could result in … suppression of psychoanalysis,  and he hoped that the adherence of a Swiss Christian of Jung’s stature  could help rescue his movement from this fate. …

Freud needed a ‘son’ no less than Jung needed a ‘father’, but the kind of son Freud wanted  was one who would be willing to defer unconditionally to his authority …

-- Anthony Stevens, Jung: A Very Short Introduction (1994), pp.  20-21

Thus far, the potential conflict -- the set mouse-trap -- is merely generic, without intellectual specificity or interest.   But now we come to the nub, or at least to some substance:

As time passed, Jung’s differences with Freud  became harder to conceal.  Two of Freud’s basic assumptions were unacceptable to him:

(1) that human motivation is exclusively sexual, and

(2) that the unconscious mind is entirely personal and peculiar to the individual.

… Jung believed there lay a deeper layer … the collective unconscious… a dynamic substratum, common to all humanity, on the basis of which  each individual  builds his or her private experience of life.

-- Anthony Stevens, Jung: A Very Short Introduction (1994), p. 22

Now the rift has bite! 

But -- a bite beyond the obvious.  For, in general, there are several parallels between the two great secular Jewish scientific-humanistic innovators, Freud and Chomsky.  But in the specifics of this instance, it is actually Jung, the apostate-to-be, the renegade from Freudianism, who holds a doctrine -- the collective unconscious (cf. and ctr. the “group mind”) inevitably reminiscent of Chomsky’s central doctrine -- far more central than linguists realized at first -- of an innate and universal Language Acquisition Device:  one determinative of each person’s contingent linguistic development, yet not available to direct introspection.

Jung maintained that the incest taboo was primary:  it existed a priori, and was not derived from the father’s prohibition of the boy’s lust for his mother.

-- Anthony Stevens, Jung: A Very Short Introduction (1994), p. 23

Here Jung is surely right;  and here Chomsky is surely right, when he insists that the basic lines of individual language-acquisition  are not dependent  in detail  upon parental or tutorial correction or specific instruction.

*     *     *

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*     *     *

Okay, back to the soap-opera:

Freud admonished him:  “My inclination  is to treat those colleagues who offer resistance [to Freud’s ideas]  exactly as we would treat patients in the same situation.”  Jung was irked by such condescension..

-- Anthony Stevens, Jung: A Very Short Introduction (1994), p. 22

Actually  I would tend to defend Freud here.  Unconsciously to treat recalcitrant colleagues like wayward patients (those who refuse to take their meds, for instance) is -- well  if you wish, condescending, but actually worse than that.   Yet, consciously to adopt -- as a behavioral hypothesis, defeasible in the event -- such an analytic stance, lifts us to a quite different  and little-frequented  realm.

The explicit rift, Stevens informs us, came in 1912, with the publication of Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido;  he quotes a pertly-worded challenge from the younger man to the elder:

“It is a risky business  for an egg to be cleverer than the hen,” Jung wrote to Freud. “Still, what is in the egg  must find the courage to creep out.”

-- Anthony Stevens, Jung: A Very Short Introduction (1994), p. 23

This is delicious.

*

Für psychologisch tiefgreifende Krimis,

in pikanter amerikanischer Mundart,

und christlich gesinnt,

klicken Sie bitte hier:

http://www.linguasacrapublishing.com/justice.html

*

At work, I am perforce required (being after all on the brink of retirement, or else death) to consider the matter of my successor:  Not in any grand sense, but simply, someone to do the job I do, more or less as I do it, which is (as cryptolinguists come to learn) more difficult than it looks.  And if someone were to send me a sassy e-mail along those lines, I would be delighted.  Indeed, I would feel free to retire the next day, knowing that the task was in good hands.

Freud, however, didn’t take it so well.

-- And indeed, rather than expatiate further  on this well-known episode of psycho-socio-intellectual history (anent which  I have no special knowledge or insight at all  -- consult any source :-- Ernest Jones, or even this), it would be well, were I to comment instead, however briefly, upon a matter I know first-hand:  Der Fall  Jakov Malkiel.

Professor Yakov Malkiel was the doyen of Romance Philology in America.  Or rather, in time, he became the doyen of Romance Philology tout court, a shining example of how the Bolsheviks and later the Nazis  did America a great favor  by sending us some of their best.  Malkiel reached us in two steps: first his bourgeous Jewish family fled the Bolshies, only to land in Berlin, where Malkiel earned his doctorate during the, umm, ‘thirties …  Thence he fled to America, initially winding up, with spectacular inappropriateness, in Cowboy Country.  I believe I may have documented all this in an appreciation, based on some tapes I made of interviews with him, published (probably) by the Berkeley Linguistics Society, although I’m uncertain whether it ever actually appeared.  Y.M. specifically forbade a Festschrift.

Anyhow -- while I was a graduate student at UC Berkeley, Malkiel was, not quite my Doktorvater, but one of three who might claim that title, the others being Prof. Charles Fillmore and Prof. Ariel Bloch.  In actuality, none of them really guided my dissertation in the least -- I went very much my own way (so much so, that it helped to foreclose a career, in a field where it does help to belong to a recognized coterie), as you can easily verify here -- but each was, in his own unique way, an inspiration: not so much for the doctoral thesis (Otto Jespersen and -- sic -- Rebecca West, were more determinative here) as for mind in general, and thus life in general.

Once safely out of sagebrush country, YM (as we shall call him, after the pattern of his acolytes) settled-in well in Berkeley.  In his chosen field of Romance Philology, he truly put it on the map, founding and editing a revered journal of that title.   And among the contributors  was a young Spanish professor, of inclinations more philological than literary, who was reportedly (this was before my time there) by way of being considered something of a protégé, named Jerry Craddock.  Things hummed along, until, one day …..

Now, the following incident is something I know only by hearsay (and thus, possibly mis-know).  But the way I heard it,  young Craddock published an article which differed from his senior, Professor Malkiel:  and this, in a way, or on a tone, that the latter considered snide.

Great was the consternation on Olympus, as the gods chose sides.

Into the office of the hapless Craddock  stormed Dan Yakov, a Man of Wrath.  Flinging the offending article onto the cringing Craddock’s desk, he cried -- one word:

     
     “MAAAAAA-GIS-TRI-CIIIDE !!!!!!”

Magistricide !  A word that resonates like swords on Roman cobble-stones --

Magistricide !  An arrow, fledged and fleshed  --

Magistricide ! a j’accuse javelin, flung

straight into that black thing

the paynim calls his heart …

Thereafter YM had no acolyte-in-chief or heir-apparent -- he and Craddock never did make up.   He did have numerous Malkielitas, as they were called -- comely and industrious young women who came and went, doing good work for a time, and never threatening his patriarchal supremacy.

As for Craddock -- He should obviously have left that campus, yet he hung around, hanging on, a figure of pity (of the cross-oneself kind), like Mario Savio, the former free-speech firebrand, who likewise never left Berkeley, but dragged out his life in trembling semi-obscurity, as a warning to the young.

~

YM’s kiboshing of the Festschrift  always struck me as one of his less creditable actions.  But perhaps those who have been around the block (or around the bend)  may better instruct us.

Thus, Sigmund Freud, long a prophet without honor in his own country (or indeed, city),  jibbed  at the prospect of effusive (albeit belated) gushings upon occasion of his seventieth birthday:

Previous birthday celebrations  had been bad enough,  but this was bound to be worse.  At one moment  he considered escaping by immuring himself in a sanatorium for a week, but concluded that would be too cowardly and too unkind to his well-wishers.

-- Ernest Jones, Freud: The Last Phase (1957), p. 122

Even so, upon plea of a heart ailment, “I have managed to suppress a Special Number of the Wiener Medizinische Zeitschrift  which was being planned".
Likewise on the occasion of his eightieth, when he quashed the proposal for a Gedenkbuch or Sammelband.

Such qualms have their hidden wellsprings, and are hard to interpret.  But in 1936 (op. cit., p. 208) Freud learned of a proposed biography by the distinguished German-Jewish writer Arnold Zweig, with whom he had thitherto enjoyed good relations, yet responded with an obscurantist, a near-delirious diatribe, which has some diagnostic value:

Whoever undertakes to write a biography  binds himself to lying, to concealment, to hypocrisy, to flummery  and even to hiding his own lack of understanding, since biographical material is not to be had [sic], and if it were, it could not be used [sic, sic].  Truth is not accessible;  mankind does not deserve it.  And wasn’t Prince Hamlet right  when he asked, who would escape a whipping, if he had his deserts?

These effusions are reported by Freud’s admiring… biographer, Ernest Jones.   And they point towards our old enemy, the Narcissistic Wound.   Honors that arrive late, in the twilight of life, cannot poultice that wound, of which they serve as a reminder.
 

[Update]   And now this, expressed with characteristic vinegar-and-salt by an Oxford outsider-philosopher:

And if there are any who think my work good, let them show their approval of it  by attention to their own.   So, perhaps, I may escape  otherwise than by death  the last humiliation of an aged scholar,  when his juniors conspire to print a volume of essays  and offer it to him  as a sign that they now consider him senile.

-- R. G. Collingwood,  An Autobiography (1939)

~

There is a another parallel between Malkiel-Craddock and Freud-Jung.  The latter pair, ex professio, engaged in a specific hazardous activity for a fraught relationship -- interpreting each other’s dreams.  Do not try this with your spouse or fiancée!

Of all the dreams they analyzed, two were to be critical for their friendship.  The first was one of Freud’s, which Jung did his best to interpret on the basis of only a few associations from Freud.  When Jung pressed him for more, Freud looked rather suspiciously at him, and declined:  “I cannot resk my authority,” he said.  At that moment, commented Jung, he lost it altogether.

-- Anthony Stevens, Jung: A Very Short Introduction (1994)

(Of course, this is only Jung’s account.)

The other was a dream of Jung, which, Freud swiftly decided,  denoted … magistricide, a death-wish against himself from his designated heir.

*     *     *

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Relief for beleaguered Nook lovers!

http://murphybros.blogspot.com/p/read-murphy-on-your-nook.html

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*     *     *

~ ~ ~

Freud broke  not only with his would-be-heir-apparent Jung, but with his important -- his crucial -- early collaborator, Wilhelm Fliess;  broke bitterly.  Nay more:

A similar fate overtook Freud’s relationship with Breuer, Adler, Stekel, Meynert, Silberer, Tausk, and Wilhelm Reich.  Reich developed a psychosis, from which he recovered only temporarily, while Siberer and Tausk  eventually committed suicide.  For Jung, the consequences were almost as dire.

-- Anthony Stevens, Jung: A Very Short Introduction (1994), p. 25

 What we have here  is not the tragedy of Oedipus, but  what we may call a Cronus Complex -- after the god that ate his young, lest they  in their turn  slay him, who had slain his sire.   Eventually he was overthrown by Zeus, his own son.

Saturno devorando a su hijo -- Goya

[Update 12 Nov 2012:

The level of reader interest does not warrant our developing the parallels with Chomsky and his school (or rather: schools).  In any case, the tale has already been exceedingly well told by Randy Harris in The Linguistics Wars (1993). 

So, back to Freud.]

~

Was für Krimi liest wohl Dr. Sigmund Freud?

Schauen Sie mal!

Sigmund Freud und Sherlock Holmes

~

Despite his conscious best efforts, Freud himself left no designated successor;  his first choice for that mantle, Jung, wound up a schismatic.    Though an excellent analyst in her own right, it was largely owing to the default of consanguinity that his daughter Anna (née Freud, morte Freud;  she never married) served as, not so much the reigning caliph, as a successor-placeholder. 

Complicating matters further  was a shift of the geographical center of mass for psychoanalysis, from Mitteleuropa to the Western Hemisphere.   This was a result  partly of the fractiousness of those prickly central-Europeans, which manifested itself very early in the movement  and got worse and worse;  partly from the upheaval of the two World Wars, which spewed so much irreplaceable Kulturgut across the Atlantic and onto our shores;  and partly to a factor which I am unable to evaluate:  Why did the New World (which Freud himself looked down on -- he once remarked that the only good thing to have come of “Columbus’s crime” was the discovery of tobacco) prove such fertile ground for the Freudian spores?   For that, you would have to stretch out the Americas themselves upon the couch.   The fact is, North America provided early and crucial support -- yet not initially from the centers you might imagine (New York, Boston), but rather from Worcester, Massachusetts (a place-name that has not much thriven since, and which may send some of you to your gazetteers) and from Canada, where Ernest Jones (his later meticulous biographer-hagiographer) had taken refuge from British hostility and neglect.   And in later days, the per-capita center-of-mass of orthodox Freudianism  has wound up being … Argentina.

~

With the passing generations, we come to the new and more vexing problem of acolytes of acolytes -- acolytes paravail.

The clearest illustration of this is in Islam.  The Prophet Muhammad (upon whom be peace) died without designating a successor.  Now, the Arabic word for ‘successor’ is khalifah, and it is under this designation that successive figures at the head of the empire-wide Muslim ummah  were known, capriciously anglicized as caliph. 

The first caliph, Abu-Bakr, was an uncontroversial and rather colorless figure, who did not reign long.  Then two more -- and then a truly charismatic successor, Ali, eventually evinced by the upstart Yazid.

At this point the history of Muslimdom splits, according as whether you accept, as a pragmatist, the legitimacy of that succession -- those who do are known as Sunni -- or reject it in favor of a mystical investment of the person of Ali:  these are the Shia.

Things then trundle along for a time, history ticking over, until another conflict arose among the latter group of schismatics, so that now the world enjoys the choice between Twelver Shiites and the more exigent Seveners.

Well.  All this by way of allowing the world-historical searchlight  briefly to sweep the skies, before again alighting upon that doughty, ragged band of psychoanalysts.

Of the many post-Freudian schools that developed, typically named after one or another… not so much caliph as anti-pope …  the Jungian school, the Adlerian, the Reichian, the Kohutian, or the followers of Karen Horney  or Harry Stack Sullivan -- we shall say nothing.  But rather turn our gaze back to the tried-and-true sunnis of Freudianism, those who soldiered on in the master’s shadow, spurning the howls of the apostates.  And this, simply because it has been so brilliantly chronicled by Janet Malcolm, in her series of New Yorker articles, “In the Freud Archives”, later reprinted as a book.

This intrepid journalist had the good fortune to come across a truly colorful character -- a sometimes professor of Sanskrit who somehow managed to swashbuckle his way into the tight closed circle -- the sphincter, in fact -- of orthodox Freudians, and be handed the keys to the crown jewels, the jealously guarded Freud Archives; by name, Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson  (Some of our own pilferings from this treasure-trove  can be inspected here.)  From a literary standpoint, he is a memorable character:  He enters the scene like the magnificent Psmith …  and exits it ignominiously like Ukridge.

One would not have imagined that so unlikely a character could have a sosie simultaneously on the world stage, but indeed he did:  one Peter Swales, an odder bird, with a background, not in Sanskrit (beileibe nicht), but with the Rolling Stones, and otherwise  entirely self-taught.

I originally read the article back in 1983, as it appeared in the magazine;  and was disappointed that, issued in book form over a decade later, it had not been updated or expanded, save for one brief chastened and chastening afterword.   The fact is, after what was really a quite sympathetic portrait  given his various behaviors, Masson turned around and sued her, and the suit dragged on -- slithered on like a serpent -- for many years before being finally dismissed.  Understandably, Ms. Malcolm no longer has any appetite for going back to touch the subject.

Compare Newton, principally re his troubles with Hooke:

Philosophy is such an impertinently litigious Lady, that a man had as good be engaged in lawsuits, as have to do with her.

-- Newman, ed. World of Mathematics (1956), p. 265

I’ll not attempt to summarize her book, since it is short enough as it is, and every line is golden.  

It is supplemented by the author’s other brief but brilliant gem, Psychoanalysis:  the Impossible Profession, likewise originally an article in The New Yorker.   It might seem that In the Freud Archives virtually wrote itself, since she had the good fortune to stumble upon a couple of quite colorful and voluble characters.   But in this more theoretically, less anecdotally focused work, her own contribution is paramount, in both insight and wit.  As:

Hartvig Dahl is the New York Psychoanalytic Institute’s grudging concession to the claims of “pure research”;  he is a sort of shabbas goy to the orthodox membership.

-- Janet Malcolm, Psychoanalysis:  The Impossible Profession (1981), p. 84

She also manages to bring Chomsky in to the mix -- not in an enlightening way, but we quote, since Chomsky has been rather l’Arlésienne of this piece.  Describing the intensive study of a taped analytic session by Dahl and his sidekick, a linguistics Ph.D.:

The tool for the unmasking of these covert communications  was Noam Chomsky’s transformational-generative grammar, in which Virginia Teller was well versed.

-- Janet Malcolm, Psychoanalysis:  The Impossible Profession (1981), p. 84

Umm… no.   Detailed and probing rhetorical and semantic analysis of a text can indeed be fruitful (das weiss ich selbst sogar beruflich), but it has no more to do with TG than with quantum mechanics.

~

Freud’s biographer, and one of the most faithful acolytes of all, writes:

In 1914,  Freud made one of his radical revisions of his views on the structure of the mind, in an important essay  entitled “On Narcissism:  An Introduction”.  It caused some bewilderment among his adherents, until we were able to assimilate its numerous implications.

-- Ernest Jones, Freud: Years of Maturity (1955), p. 302

Jones, speaking as one who had faithfully followed the party line, found this new swerve “disturbing”.

One is immediately reminded of the scene in generative linguistics, from the publication of Chomsky’s “Remarks on Nominalization” on:  repeatedly pulling the rug out  from under the feet of his followers.

~

For an enigma of Dr. Freud,

wrapped in a mystery of Sherlock Holmes,

try this:

The Adventure of the Botanical Monograph

Elementary, my dear Watson ...

~

So:  does Freud fit the picture (as his detractors have claimed, and his defenders denied) of Saturno devorando a sus hijos?

That Freud should repeatedly have felt the need to proclaim that (paraphrasing) “you all have a right to think as you please, and go your own way, without offending me”,  has a flavor (at best) of “He doth protest too much” (and, at worst, of certain beguiling invitations of Stalin).   But a rather more circumstantial perspective is quoted (in translation) by his sympathetic biographer:

“There is another consideration … which makes me specially unfitted for the function of a despotic censor … I do not find it easy to feel my way into alien modes of thought, and I have  as a rule  to wait  until I have found some connection with my meandering ways.  So if you wanted to wait with every new idea until I can endorse it, you would run the risk of getting pretty old.

-- Ernest Jones, Freud: The Last Phase (1957), p. 60

That is wise, and rings true.  Whether Freud was always able to draw on such wisdom, is another matter.

*     *     *

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*     *     *

Whoever was raised upon Marx, or Freud, or Chomsky, and who writes in their wake, is forever looking over his shoulder.   But occasionally -- as indeed with those masters, who after all had, for a time, masters of their own -- there is a clean break with the past, and no looking back.  Thus, rather plaintively, two prominent but non- or indeed extra-Chomskyan American linguists:

Such comment suggests that the recent history of the field  can be described by comparing a known Chomsky  with the inferred content of a Tomb of the Unknown Bloomfieldian.

-- D. Hymes & J. Fought, American Structuralism (1975), p. 127

Weiteres zum Thema/Related posts:
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2012/12/acrimony-among-acolytes.html
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2012/12/the-agony-and-acolyte_28.htm

[Update May 2014]  The co-presence of the names Freud or Chomsky in the title of this essay, is largely accidental.  I happened to have been reading a fair amount about the history of the psychoanalytic movement, with its repeated scissions and loyalty-wars, and was reminded of similar events among those schooled by the Chomsky movement, several of whom I knew personally.  But I intended no substantive comparison between the actual standing or intellectual systems of these two giants of mind.  Yet (in another book, that happens to lie upon my night-table), the philosopher and sociologist Ernest Gellner  does explicitly bring these names into apposition, in the course of his rather abstract meditation -- philosophical and sociological, more than really depth-psychological -- upon the history of Freudianism as an intellectual and social phenomenon.  Gellner counts himself among the admirers of the Cantabridgian linguist, and the detractors of the Viennese physician, whom he compares thus:

The point which Chomsky made in his celebrated critique of behaviourism -- that the stimulus-response model, when applied to linguistic competence, works only if one retrospectively invents the stimuli required to account for the given response -- applies with at least as great a force  to this aspect of Freudianism.

-- Ernest Gellner, The Psychoanalytic Movement (1985; 2^nd edn. 1993), p.  107

[Update]  The converse of an acolyte is an intellectual ancestor.  Here a historian, and admirer of Freud, notices an anomaly:

One of the difficulties in placing Freud precisely within the community of scientists  stems from his unmatched eminence as a founder.  No other innovator -- not Copernicus or Galileo, not Newton or Darwin or Einstein -- had so few direct ancestors.

-- Peter Gay, The Freud Reader (1989), p. xx

[Update 11 juin 2014]  How sharper than a serpent's tooth ...

An update to the incident reported here:

  

Le président d'honneur du FN, qui multiplie les piques à l'encontre de sa fille

Jean-Marie Le Pen se vengera-t-il du parricide politique dont il se dit «victime» après ses propos invitant à «une fournée» d'artistes? Interrogé par Le Scan, le président d'honneur du Front national assure qu'il «prendra ses responsabilités et donnera ses instructions» lors du prochain congrès du parti.

http://www.lefigaro.fr/politique/le-scan/citations/2014/06/10/25002-20140610ARTFIG00353-sans-nouvelles-de-sa-fille-jean-marie-le-pen-entre-en-resistance.php

[Misc]

Concerning the strained relations between two premier Dutch historians:

How can we account for Jan Romein’s continued view of Huizinga as his imperfect but revered mentor? … Is this not a nearly classical oedipal relationship?  The intellectual son  slays his revered intellectual father -- his Doctorvater ….

-- Harry Marks, introduction to Jan Romein, The Watershed of Two Eras:  Europe in 1900 (1967, Eng. transl. 1978), p. xxiv

For a portrait of the acolyte situation of Wittgenstein and the Wiener Kreis, try this:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2025/11/elective-acolytes.html