The Night in Question

One chilly October evening in 1946, a group of Cambridge philosophers and students gathered for the weekly meeting of the Moral Science Club. They were to hear a paper by Karl Popper. Among those present was Bertrand Russell, an admirer of Popper’s recently published “The Open Society and Its Enemies”; then in his 70s, Russell had helped Popper earlier in his career. Also present, and presiding, was another Russell protege: Ludwig Wittgenstein, arguably the most brilliant and unarguably the most exciting and influential philosopher of his time. Popper later admitted going to Cambridge expressly to challenge Wittgenstein over the direction in which he was taking contemporary philosophy.

He succeeded too well: Wittgenstein stormed out after only 10 minutes, but not before denouncing Popper’s ideas and brandishing a poker at him. According to whose version you believe--and the delightful “Wittgenstein’s Poker” offers several--the poker was red-hot or cool; Wittgenstein used it to threaten Popper or was merely toying with it; he threw it down in anger or he didn’t.

Readers are also invited to decide whether it’s true, as Popper and others recalled, that Wittgenstein’s exit was prompted by a clever, climactic retort. When Wittgenstein demanded that Popper cite a valid instance of a moral principle, Popper replied, “Not to threaten visiting lecturers with pokers.” It was all Wittgenstein could bear: The great interrupter and dominator of every philosophical conversation in the first half of the 20th century, accustomed to acolytes, adored even by his seniors, charged out.

David Edmonds and John Eidinow are not philosophers but BBC journalists who have written an engaging and accessible book about a charged moment in the history of ideas. They succeed splendidly in convincing us that the night’s events--remembered, misremembered and angrily debated by eyewitnesses and researchers since--were a kind of high-cultural watershed, and the clash between Wittgenstein and Popper has the glamour of a small epic.

Provoked by the horrors of totalitarianism, right and left, Popper had written his “Open Society” as a critique of absolutist thought from Plato to the present. It was a rear guard action on behalf of the humanistic, morally engaged tradition in philosophy against the rise of the newer, purely analytic movement in which Wittgenstein was preeminent. In his triumph, Wittgenstein gave birth to much that he would never have endorsed: the fashionable view, for instance, that language is only a self-referential game, that it can never be used to probe or understand the world we live in or the lives we live. “Deconstruction” of truth claims in science or history, as well as the postmodern ambivalence toward commitment, moral or otherwise, can all convincingly be traced to his influence.

As individuals, the two antagonists could not have been more different: Wittgenstein was vivid, aggressive, charismatic; Popper, though equally fierce in argument, was ordinary in person, entirely lacking his opponent’s subversive charm. Later, nothing would so mark their differences as the way they responded to the Nazi takeover of Austria in 1938. Popper fled with his family, while Wittgenstein, already out of the country, used his immense inherited fortune to negotiate with the new regime for the protection of two sisters who refused to leave. He was successful. The order granting them a change of status was personally given by Hitler.

But what of Popper’s topic on that night: “Are There Philosophical Problems?” Why was so much at stake in the obvious-sounding question? Another way of phrasing it would have been: Are philosophical problems real? Or, as Wittgenstein argued, are they just language games, puzzles to be solved by sorting out the words we use when speaking to one another?

For Popper, questions such as “How do we acquire knowledge?,” “How do we tell right from wrong?” or “How ought we to be governed?” were not only discussable but urgent, even if not susceptible to definite answers. For Wittgenstein, to ask these questions was, in a famous phrase, to allow our intelligence to be “bewitched by language.” He held that curing our minds of linguistic bewitchment was philosophy’s sole task, and two succeeding generations of philosophers, bewitched perhaps by Wittgenstein, have agreed. Meanwhile Popper’s influence has been in eclipse.

But this engrossing book should do something to restore a wider awareness of Popper. In the book’s final chapters, after offering their own well-sifted conjectures about what “really happened” that night, Edmond and Eidinow assess the legacies of the two philosophers. Writing well before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, they hazard a guess that world events might reverse the decline of Popper’s reputation. They also suggest that Wittgenstein’s brilliant but non-nourishing consignment of philosophy to self-conscious irrelevance will not continue to wear well.

Of course, we are left on our own to decide the winner, but “Wittgenstein’s Poker” suggests that ideas matter in the real world--the topic behind the topic--and can no longer be dispelled by waving a poker.

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John Romano is a TV and film writer and a former English instructor at Columbia University.