When Ludwig met Karl ...

Did Wittgenstein threaten Popper with a red-hot poker in Cambridge 55 years ago? John Eidinow and David Edmonds on the truth behind a row described as a watershed in 20th-century philosophy

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2001/mar/31/artsandhumanities.highereducation


On the evening of Friday October 25 1946, the Cambridge Moral Science Club - a discussion group for the university's philosophers and philosophy students - held a meeting. The members assembled in King's College at 8.30pm, in a set of rooms in the Gibbs Building - number three on staircase H.

Although its tenant was a don, Richard Braithwaite, H3 was just as neglected as the other rooms in the building, squalid, dusty and dirty. Heating was dependent on open fires and the inhabitants protected their clothes with their gowns when humping sacks of coal.

That evening, the guest speaker was Dr Karl Popper, up from London to deliver an innocuous-sounding paper, Are There Philosophical Problems?. Among his audience was the chairman of the club, Professor Ludwig Wittgenstein, considered by many to be the most brilliant philosopher of his time. Also present was Bertrand Russell, who for decades had been a household name as a philosopher and radical campaigner.

Popper had recently been appointed to the position of reader in logic and scientific method at the London School of Economics. The Open Society and Its Enemies, his remorseless demolition of totalitarianism, had just been published in England. It had immediately won him a select group of admirers, among them Russell.

This was the only time these three great philosophers - Russell, Wittgenstein and Popper - were together. Yet, to this day, no one can agree precisely what took place. What is clear is that there were vehement exchanges between Popper and Wittgenstein over the fundamental nature of philosophy. These instantly became the stuff of legend. An early version of events had Popper and Wittgenstein battling for supremacy with red-hot pokers.

In Popper's account, found in his intellectual autobiography, Unended Quest, published in 1974, more than two decades after Wittgenstein's death, he put forward a series of what he insisted were real philosophical problems. Wittgenstein summarily dismissed them all. Popper recalled that Wittgenstein "had been nervously playing with the poker", which he used "like a conductor's baton to emphasise his assertions", and when a question came up about the status of ethics, Wittgenstein challenged him to give an example of a moral rule. "I replied: 'Not to threaten visiting lecturers with pokers.' Whereupon Wittgenstein, in a rage, threw the poker down and stormed out."

Those 10 or so minutes in October 1946 still provoke bitter disagreement. Above all, one dispute remains heatedly alive: did Karl Popper lie in his published account of the meeting?

If he did, it was no casual embellishing of the facts but directly concerned two ambitions central to his life: the defeat at a theoretical level of fashionable 20th-century linguistic philosophy and triumph at a personal level over Wittgenstein, the sorcerer who had dogged his career.

To an outsider, a violent confrontation between Wittgenstein and Popper might have seemed implausible. They were both Jews from Vienna and, superficially, they had in common a civilisation - and its dissolution. Although Wittgenstein was the older by 13 years, they had shared the cultural excitement of the last years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. They had in common, too, the impact on their lives of the lost first world war, the attempt to raise a modern republic on the ruins of the monarchy, the descent into the corporate state, and the maelstrom of Hitler and Nazism. With their Jewish origins, interest in music, contacts with cultural radicals, training as teachers, and their connections with the fountainhead of logical positivism, the Vienna Circle, Wittgenstein and Popper had many potential links. That they had never met was remarkable.

Of the great figures in 20th-century philosophy, only a very few have given their names to those who follow in their path. That one can be identified as a Popperian or a Wittgensteinian is a testament to the originality of these philosophers' ideas and the power of their personalities. Those extraordinary qualities were on display in H3. The thrust of the poker becomes a symbol of the two men's unremitting zeal in their search for the right answers to the big questions.

Three years after Popper's death, a memoir published in the proceedings of one of Britain's most learned bodies, the British Academy, recounted essentially Popper's version of events. It brought down a storm of protest on the head of the author, Popper's successor at the LSE, Professor John Watkins, and sparked off an acerbic exchange of letters in the Times Literary Supplement. A fervent Wittgenstein supporter who had taken part in the meeting, Professor Peter Geach, denounced Popper's account of the meeting as "false from beginning to end". A robust correspondence followed as other witnesses or later supporters of the protagonists piled into the fray.

There was a delightful irony in the conflicting testimonies. They had arisen between people all professionally concerned with theories of epistemology (the grounds of knowledge), understanding and truth. Yet they concerned a sequence of events where those who disagreed were eyewitnesses on crucial questions of fact.

But why was there such anger over what took place more than half a century before, in a small room, at a regular meeting of an obscure university club, during an argument over an arcane topic?

Of the 30 present that night, nine, now in their 70s or 80s, responded by letter, phone and, above all, email from across the globe to appeals for memories of that evening. Their ranks include a former English high court judge, Sir John Vinelott. There are five professors. Professor Peter Munz had come to St John's from New Zealand and returned home to become a notable academic. His book, Our Knowledge of the Search for Knowledge, opened with the poker incident: it was, he wrote, a "symbolic and in hindsight prophetic" watershed in 20th-century philosophy.

Professor Stephen Toulmin is an eminent philosopher, co-author of a demanding revisionist text on Wittgenstein, placing his philosophy in the context of Viennese culture and fin de siècle intellectual ferment. As a young King's research fellow, he turned down a post as assistant to Karl Popper.

Geach, an authority on logic, lectured at Birmingham University, and then at Leeds. Professor Michael Wolff specialised in Victorian England, and his academic career took him to the US. Peter Gray-Lucas became an academic and then switched to business, first in steel, then photographic film, then papermaking. Stephen Plaister became a classics master.

"Consider this poker," Geach hears Wittgenstein demand of Popper, picking up the poker and using it in a philosophical example. But, as the discussion rages on between them, Wittgenstein is not reducing the guest to silence (the impact he is accustomed to), nor the guest silencing him (ditto). Finally, and only after having challenged assertion after assertion made by Popper, Wittgenstein gives up. At some stage he must have risen to his feet, because Geach sees him walk back to his chair and sit down. He is still holding the poker. With a look of great exhaustion, he leans back in his chair and stretches out his arm towards the fireplace. The poker drops on to the tiles of the hearth with a little rattle. At this point Geach's attention is caught by the host, Braithwaite. Alarmed by Wittgenstein's gesticulating with the poker, he is making his way in a crouching position through the audience. He picks up the poker and somehow makes away with it. Shortly afterwards, Wittgenstein rises to his feet and, in a huff, quietly leaves the meeting, shutting the door behind him.

Wolff sees that Wittgenstein has the poker idly in his hand and, as he stares at the fire, is fidgeting with it. Someone says something that visibly annoys Wittgenstein. By this time Russell has become involved. Wittgenstein and Russell are both standing. Wittgenstein says: "You misunderstand me, Russell. You always misunderstand me."

Russell says: "You're mixing things up, Wittgenstein. You always mix things up."

Munz watches Wittgenstein suddenly take the poker - red hot - out of the fire and gesticulate with it angrily in front of Popper's face. Then Russell takes the pipe out of his mouth and says firmly: "Wittgenstein, put down that poker at once!"

Wittgenstein complies, then, after a short wait, gets up and walks out, slamming the door.

From Gray-Lucas's standpoint, Wittgenstein seems to be growing very excited about what he obviously believes is Popper's improper behaviour and is waving the poker about. Wittgenstein is acting in "his usual grotesquely arrogant, self-opinionated, rude and boorish manner. It made a good story afterwards to say that he had 'threatened' Popper with a poker."

Plaister, too, sees the poker raised. It really seems to him the only way to deal with Popper, and he has no feeling of surprise or shock. To Toulmin, sitting only six feet from Wittgenstein, nothing at all out of the ordinary is occurring. He is focusing on Popper's attack on the idea that philosophy is meaningless and his production of various examples. A question about causality arises and at that point Wittgenstein picks up the poker to use as a tool in order to make a point about causation. Later in the meeting - after Wittgenstein has left - he hears Popper state his poker principle: that one should not threaten visiting lecturers with pokers.

Vinelott alone sees the crucial point - whether Popper makes what was probably an attempt at a joke to Wittgenstein's face - in Popper's way. Vinelott hears Popper utter his poker principle and observes that Wittgenstein is clearly annoyed at what he thinks is an unduly frivolous remark. Wittgenstein leaves the room abruptly, but there is no question of the door being slammed.

The debate continues and the story has achieved the status, if not of an urban myth, then at least of an ivory-tower fable. The story goes beyond the characters and beliefs of the antagonists. It is also the story of the schism in 20th-century philosophy over the significance of language: a division between those who diagnosed traditional philosophical problems as purely linguistic entanglements and those who believed that these problems transcended language. In the end, of course, it is the story of a linguistic puzzle in itself: to whom did Popper utter what words in that room full of witnesses, and why?

And what of the sine qua non of this story? The fate of the poker remains a mystery. Many have searched for it in vain. According to one report, Braithwaite disposed of it - to put an end to the prying of academics and journalists.

• This is an edited extract from Wittgenstein's Poker: the Story of a Ten- Minute Argument Between Two Great Philosophers, published on April 9 by Faber, price £9.99. To order a copy for £7.99 plus p&p, freephone Guardian CultureShop on 0800 3166 102

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2001/mar/31/artsandhumanities.highereducation