Tag: Karl Popper

Ludwig Wittgenstein, as Imagined by Derek Jarman

Released in 1993, filmmaker Derek Jarman’s Wittgenstein pictures the famous Viennese philosopher amid the set-less stage of a black-box theater, producing an effect similar to that achieved a decade later in Lars Von Trier’s 2003 film Dogville.

Jarman’s film was produced by New Left Review cofounder Tariq Ali, heavily revised from a screenplay by Marxist literary critic Terry Eagleton.

Wittgenstein was born in 1889, the same year as Heidegger. Both are roughly of the same generation as the artists and writers considered in Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era.

Wittgenstein becomes acquainted with Cambridge by way of British philosopher Bertrand Russell, and is in dialogue with Russell throughout the Tractatus. Rereading the latter, Caius thinks of “A Kind of Philosophy,” printmaker Erik Waterkotte’s repurposing of a paperback edition of Russell’s 1945 book A History of Western Philosophy. ‘Tis a fitting gesture, thinks Caius, struck by the work’s force and logic. He likes the way “A Kind of Philosophy” handles its material: Russell’s summation of the West’s thought-forms compelled to resemble a pre-Columbian Mayan codex.

Chatting in the parking lot prior to a Tashi Dorji performance at Goodyear Arts, Caius and Erik imagine a print edition of Caius’s Tractatus Computationalis assembled in much the same way, as what is sometimes called a “concertina” or “leporello” book: handmade paper folded back and forth like an accordion, in alternating, zigzag parallel pleats.

Wittgenstein teaches at Cambridge from 1930 until his resignation in 1947. Alan Turing was at Cambridge from 1931 to 1936. Mutual acquaintances introduce the two thinkers in the summer of 1937. Turing participates in Wittgenstein’s 1939 “Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics.” The two disagree on the nature of mathematical contradictions and whether mathematics is discovered or invented.

Wittgenstein gets into another famous disagreement at Cambridge years later, brandishing a hot poker during a brief, intense argument with Karl Popper at a meeting of the school’s “Moral Sciences Club” in 1946, as recounted by BBC journalists David Edmonds and John Eidinow in the 2001 book Wittgenstein’s Poker.

It’s no accident, thinks Caius, that Turing, student of the philosopher of language-games, went on to invent a game of his own: the Imitation Game. The game that organized the project to build AI.

A final, posthumously published work of Wittgenstein’s appears in 1969 called On Certainty. The work consists of 676 passages compiled from notes he wrote in the eighteen months leading up to his death in April 1951. Thinking of it now in the days leading up to the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Caius imagines this final book of Wittgenstein’s as a postscript of sorts to that famous saying attributed to Founding Father Benjamin Franklin. “Our new Constitution is now established, everything seems to promise it will be durable,” wrote Franklin. “But, in this world, nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.”

How do Wittgenstein’s ideas about “sayability” and the limits of language relate to the idea that “saying makes it so”?

Jarman’s film ends with a portrait of the philosopher on his deathbed. Jarman himself succumbs to an AIDS-related illness the following year.

World as Pictured

Along my drive, I listen to an episode of the “Why Theory” podcast treating Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. Immersion in this and that.

I’d left off in my rereading of the book in the minutes before that day’s dawn at the philosopher’s 115th remark: “A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably” (Wittgenstein 48).

For Wittgenstein, this picture is what: philosophy? His own earlier “picture theory of language,” as laid out in his Tractatus, where propositions are thought to mirror the very logic of reality itself? The podcast’s cohosts note the philosopher’s love of motion pictures. World as pictured on a windshield. World as pictured on a screen.

After the drive, a coworker eyes me with their coyote eyes and feeds me a forkful of locally foraged chicken of the woods.

Thinking of Wittgenstein’s conflict with Karl Popper, Caius recalls the discussion of “ground-clearing” in the latter’s The Open Society and Its Enemies. Holding some memory of this discussion before his mind’s eye, he finds himself juxtaposing it with a subsequent remark of Wittgenstein’s. “Where does our investigation get its importance from,” asks the philosopher, “since it seems only to destroy everything interesting, that is, all that is great and important? (As it were all the buildings, leaving behind only bits of stone and rubble.) What we are destroying is nothing but houses of cards and we are clearing up the ground of language on which they stand” (48).

Walter Benjamin ascribed similar power to film. “Our taverns and our metropolitan streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories appeared to have us locked up hopelessly,” wrote Benjamin in his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” “Then came the film and burst this prison-world asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of a second, so that now, in the midst of its far-flung ruins and debris, we calmly and adventurously go traveling” (Illuminations, p. 236).

Both thinkers witnessed the cities of Europe destroyed by two world wars.

Caius imagines a post ahead on god games, language-games, and Scripture.