For the inimitable Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic Slavoj Žižek, jokes are amusing stories that offer a shortcut to philosophical insight. Indeed, he’s published a book of them. His preface…
Instead of Introduction: The Role of Jokes in the Becoming-Man of the Ape
One of the popular myths of the late Communist regimes in Eastern Europe was that there was a department of the secret police whose function was (not to collect, but) to invent and put in circulation political jokes against the regime and its representatives, as they were aware of jokes’ positive stabilizing function (political jokes offer to ordinary people an easy and tolerable way to blow off steam, easing their frustrations). Attractive as it is, this myth ignores a rarely mentioned but nonetheless crucial feature of jokes: they never seem to have an author, as if the question “who is the author of this joke?” were an impossible one. Jokes are originally “told,” they are always-already “heard” (recall the proverbial “Did you hear that joke about …?”).
Therein resides their mystery: they are idiosyncratic, they stand for the unique creativity of language, but are nonetheless “collective,” anonymous, authorless, all of a sudden here out of nowhere. The idea that there has to be an author of a joke is properly paranoiac: it means that there has to be an “Other of the Other,” of the anonymous symbolic order, as if the very unfathomable contingent generative power of language has to be personalized, located into an agent who controls it and secretly pulls the strings. This is why, from the theological perspective, God is the ultimate jokester. This is the thesis of Isaac Asimov’s charming short story “Jokester,” about a group of historians of language who, in order to support the hypothesis that God created man out of apes by telling them a joke (he told apes who, up to that moment, were merely exchanging animal signs, the first joke that gave birth to spirit), try to reconstruct this joke, the “mother of all jokes.” (Incidentally, for a member of the Judeo-Christian tradition, this work is superfluous, since we all know what this joke was: “Do not eat from the tree of knowledge!” — the first prohibition that clearly is a joke, a perplexing temptation whose point is not clear.)…
Two examples:
In an old joke from the defunct German Democratic Republic, a German worker gets a job in Siberia; aware of how all mail will be read by censors, he tells his friends: “Let’s establish a code: if a letter you will get from me is written in ordinary blue ink, it is true; if it is written in red ink, it is false.” After a month, his friends get the first letter, written in blue ink: “Everything is wonderful here: stores are full, food is abundant, apartments are large and properly heated, movie theaters show films from the West, there are many beautiful girls ready for an affair — the only thing unavailable is red ink.”
And is this not our situation till now? We have all the freedoms one wants — the only thing missing is the “red ink”: We “feel free” because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom. What this lack of red ink means is that, today, all the main terms we use to designate the present conflict — “war on terror,” “democracy and freedom,” “human rights,” etc. — are false terms, mystifying our perception of the situation instead of allowing us to think it. The task today is to give the protesters red ink…
There is an old Jewish joke, loved by Derrida, about a group of Jews in a synagogue publicly admitting their nullity in the eyes of God. First, a rabbi stands up and says: “O God, I know I am worthless. I am nothing!” After he has finished, a rich businessman stands up and says, beating himself on the chest: “O God, I am also worthless, obsessed with material wealth. I am nothing!” After this spectacle, a poor ordinary Jew also stands up and also proclaims: “O God, I am nothing.” The rich businessman kicks the rabbi and whispers in his ear with scorn: “What insolence! Who is that guy who dares to claim that he is nothing too!”…
As we chuckle, we might send one-line birthday greetings to Shecky Greene (Fred Sheldon Greenfield); he was born on this date in 1926. A comedian and actor, he was known for his nightclub performances in Las Vegas, where he became a headliner in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. He appeared in several films, including Tony Rome; History of the World, Part I; and Splash, and guest-starred on such television shows as Love, American Style and Combat!, and later Laverne & Shirley and Mad About You.
Best remembered for his stand-up, Greene was adored by audiences and revered by his fellow entertainers (including Bob Hope, Johnny Carson, and, most famously, Frank Sinatra, who hand-picked him as his opening act for a stretch).
The Doctor gave a man six months to live. The man couldn’t pay his bill so the doctor gave him another six months.
A drunk was in front of a judge. The judge says, “You’ve been brought here for drinking.” The drunk says “Okay, let’s get started.”
A man called his mother in Florida “Mom, how are you?” ” Not too good,” said the mother. “I’ve been very weak.” The son said, “Why are you so weak?” She said, “Because I haven’t eaten in 38 days.” The son said, “That’s terrible. Why haven’t you eaten in 38 days?” The mother answered,”Because I didn’t want my mouth to be filled with food if you should call.”
In order to bridge the yawning gulf between the humanities and the sciences, Gordon Gillespie suggests, we must turn to an unexpected field: mathematics…
In 1959, the English writer and physicist C P Snow delivered the esteemed Rede Lecture at the University of Cambridge [a talk now known as “The Two Cultures,” see here]. Regaled with champagne and Marmite sandwiches, the audience had no idea that they were about to be read the riot act. Snow diagnosed a rift of mutual ignorance in the intellectual world of the West. On the one hand were the ‘literary intellectuals’ (of the humanities) and on the other the (natural) ‘scientists’: the much-discussed ‘two cultures’. Snow substantiated his diagnosis with anecdotes of respected literary intellectuals who complained about the illiteracy of the scientists but who themselves had never heard of such a fundamental statement as the second law of thermodynamics. And he told of brilliant scientific minds who might know a lot about the second law but were barely up to the task of reading Charles Dickens, let alone an ‘esoteric, tangled and dubiously rewarding writer … like Rainer Maria Rilke.’
Sixty-plus years after Snow’s diatribe, the rift has hardly narrowed. Off the record, most natural scientists still consider the humanities to be a pseudo-science that lacks elementary epistemic standards. In a 2016 talk, the renowned theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli lamented ‘the current anti-philosophical ideology’. And he quoted eminent colleagues such as the Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg, Stephen Hawking and Neil deGrasse Tyson, who agreed that ‘philosophy is dead’ and that only the natural sciences could explain how the world works, not ‘what you can deduce from your armchair’. Meanwhile, many humanities scholars see scientists as pedantic surveyors of nature, who may produce practical and useful results, but are blind to the truly deep insights about the workings of the (cultural) world. In his best-selling book The Fate of Rome (2017), Kyle Harper convincingly showed that a changing climate and diseases were major factors contributing to the final fall of the Roman Empire. The majority of Harper’s fellow historians had simply neglected such factors up to then; they had instead focused solely on the cultural, political and socioeconomic ones…
The divide between the two cultures is not just an academic affair. It is, more importantly, about two opposing views on the fundamental connection between mind and nature. According to one view, nature is governed by an all-encompassing system of laws. This image underlies the explanatory paradigm of causal determination by elementary forces. As physics became the leading science in the 19th century, the causal paradigm was more and more seen as the universal form of explanation. Nothing real fell outside its purview. According to this view, every phenomenon can be explained by a more or less complex causal chain (or web), the links of which can, in turn, be traced back, in principle, to basic natural forces. Anything – including any aspect of the human mind – that eludes this explanatory paradigm is simply not part of the real world, just like the ‘omens’ of superstition or the ‘astral projections’ of astrology.
On the opposing view, the human mind – be it that of individuals or collectives – can very well be regarded separately from its physical foundations. Of course, it is conceded that the mind cannot work without the brain, so it is not entirely independent of natural forces and their dynamics. But events of cultural significance can be explained as effects of very different kinds of causes, namely psychological and social, that operate in a sphere quite separate from that of the natural forces.
These divergent understandings underpin the worldviews of each culture. Naive realists – primarily natural scientists – like to point out that nature existed long before humankind. Nature is ordered according to laws that operate regardless of whether or not humans are around to observe. So the natural order of the world must be predetermined independently of the human mind. Conversely, naive idealists – including social constructivists, mostly encountered in the humanities – insist that all order is conceptual order, which is based solely on individual or collective thought. As such, order is not only not independent of the human mind, it’s also ambiguous, just as the human mind is ambiguous in its diverse cultural manifestations.
The clash of cultures between the humanities and the natural sciences is reignited over and over because of two images that portray the interrelationship of mind and nature very differently. To achieve peace between the two cultures, we need to overcome both views. We must recognise that the natural and the mental order of things go hand in hand. Neither can be fully understood without the other. And neither can be traced back to the other…
… The best mediator of a conciliatory view that avoids the mistake of the naive realist and the naive idealist is mathematics. Mathematics gives us shining proof that understanding some aspect of the world does not always come down to uncovering some intricate causal web, not even in principle. Determination is not explanation. And mathematics, rightly understood, demonstrates this in a manner that lets us clearly see the mutual dependency of mind and nature.
For mathematical explanations are structural, not causal. Mathematics lets us understand aspects of the world that are just as real as the Northern Lights or people’s behaviour, but are not effects of any causes. The distinction between causal and structural forms of explanation will become clearer in due course. For a start, take this example. Think of a dying father who wants to pass on his one possession, a herd of 17 goats, evenly to his three sons. He can’t do so. This is not the case because some hidden physical or psychological forces hinder any such action. The reason is simply that 17 is a prime number, so not divisible by three…
… In his ‘two cultures’ speech, Snow located mathematics clearly in the camp of the sciences. But… mathematics doesn’t adhere to the explanatory paradigm of causal determination. This distinguishes it from the natural sciences. Nevertheless, mathematics tells us a lot about nature. According to Kant, it does so because it tells us a lot about the human mind. Mind and nature are inseparable facets of the world we inhabit and conceive. So, why should the humanities not also count as a science? They can tell us just as much about that one world on a fundamental level as the natural sciences. Mathematics demonstrates this clearly…
… Mathematics undermines the causal explanatory paradigm not only in its natural scientific manifestations, but also in its uses in the humanities. We give explanations for a wide variety of phenomena by hidden causes way too often and way too fast, where the simple admission to having no explanation would not only be more honest, but also wiser. Wittgenstein spoke of the disease of wanting to explain. This disease shows itself not just in our private everyday exchanges and in the usual public debates, but also in scholarly discourse of the humanities. When confronted with individual or collective human thinking and behaviour, it is tempting to assume just a few underlying factors responsible for the thinking and behaviour. But, more often than not, there really is no such neat, analysable set of factors. Instead, there is a vast number of natural, psychological and societal factors that are all equally relevant for the emergence of the phenomenon one wants to explain. Perhaps a high-end computer could incorporate all these factors in a grand simulation. But a simulation is not an explanation. A simulation allows us to predict, but it doesn’t let us understand.
The aim of the humanities should not be to identify causes for every phenomenon they investigate. The rise and fall of empires, the economic and social ramifications of significant technological innovations, the cultural impact of great works of art are often products of irreducibly complex, chaotic processes. In such cases, trying to mimic the natural sciences by stipulating some major determining factors is a futile and misleading endeavour.
But mathematics shows that beyond the causal chaos there can be order of a different kind. The central limit theorem lets us see and explain a common regularity in a wide range of causally very different, but equally complex, natural processes. With this and many other examples of structural mathematical explanations of phenomena in the realm of the natural sciences in mind, it seems plausible that mathematical, or mathematically inspired, abstraction can also have fruitful applications in the humanities.
This is by no means meant to promote an uncritical imitation of mathematics in the humanities and social sciences. (The overabundance of simplistic econometric models, for instance, is a huge warning sign.) Rather, it is meant to motivate scholars in these fields to reflect more upon where and when causal explanations make sense. Complexity can’t always be reduced to a graspable causal explanation, or narrative. To the contrary, often the most enlightening enquiries are not those that propose new factors as the true explainers, but those that show by meticulous analysis that far more factors are crucially in play than previously thought. This, in turn, should motivate scholars to seek aspects of their subject of interest beyond causality that are both relevant and amenable to structural forms of explanation. Besides probability theory, chaos theoretical methods and game theory come to mind as mathematical sub-disciplines with potentially fruitful applications in this regard.
However, the main point of our discussion is not that mathematical applications in the humanities might bridge the gap between the natural sciences and the humanities. The point is that mathematics, not really belonging to either camp, shows them to be on an equal footing from the start. The natural scientific paradigm of explanation is not the role model any respectable form of enquiry has to follow. Mathematics shows that natural causes can’t explain every phenomenon, not even every natural phenomenon and not even in principle. So, there is no need for the humanities, the ‘sciences of the mind’, to always strive for explanations by causes that can be ‘reduced’ to more elementary, natural forces. Moreover, mathematics shows that causality, of any kind, is not the only possible basis on which any form of explanation ultimately has to stand. Take for example the semantic relationships between many of our utterances. It is not at all clear that these can be explained in terms of psychological causes, or any other causes. It is not unreasonable to believe that the world is irreducibly structured, in part, by semantic relations, just as it is structured by probabilistic relations…
… The divide between the natural sciences and the humanities does not stem from the supposed fact that only those mental phenomena are real that are explainable in natural-scientific terms. Nor is the divide due to some extra-natural mental order, determined by causal relationships of a very different kind than those studied in the natural sciences. The mental world and the physical world are one and the same world, and the respective sciences deal with different aspects of this one world. Properly understood, insofar as they deal with the same phenomena, they do not provide competing but complementary descriptions of these phenomena.
Mathematics provides the most impressive proof that a true understanding of the world goes beyond the discovery of causal relationships – whether they are constituted by natural or cultural forces. It is worth taking a closer look at this proof. For it outlines the bond that connects mind and nature in particularly bright colours. Kant understood this bond as a ‘transcendental’ one. The late Wittgenstein, on the other hand, demonstrated its anchoring in language – not in the sense of a purely verbal and written practice, but in the sense of a comprehensive practice of actions the mental and bodily elements of which cannot be neatly separated. In the words of Wittgenstein, ‘commanding, questioning, recounting, chatting are as much a part of our natural history as walking, eating, drinking, and playing.’
Mathematics too is part of this practice. As such, like every science, it is inseparably rooted in both nature and the human mind. Unlike the other sciences, this dual rootedness is obvious in the case of mathematics. One only has to see where it resides: beyond causality.
* C. P. Snow, The Two Culturesand the Scientific Revolution
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As we come together, we might send carefully calculated birthday greetings to a man with a foot in each culture: Frank Plumpton Ramsey; he was born on this date in 1903. A philosopher, mathematician, and economist, he made major contributions to all three fields before his death (at the age of 26) on this date in 1930.
While he is probably best remembered as a mathematician and logician and as Wittgenstein’s friend and translator, he wrote three paper in economics: on subjective probability and utility (a response to Keynes, 1926), on optimal taxation (1927, described by Joseph E. Stiglitz as “a landmark in the economics of public finance”), and optimal economic growth (1928; hailed by Keynes as “”one of the most remarkable contributions to mathematical economics ever made”). The economist Paul Samuelson described them in 1970 as “three great legacies – legacies that were for the most part mere by-products of his major interest in the foundations of mathematics and knowledge.”
In 1884, William James began his celebrated essay “The Dilemma of Determinism” by begging his readers’ indulgence: “A common opinion prevails that the juice has ages ago been pressed out of the free-will controversy, and that no new champion can do more than warm up stale arguments which everyone has heard.” James persisted and rendered the subject very juicy, as he always did. But if the topic appeared exhausted to most people then, surely a hundred and forty years later there can’t be anything new to say. Whole new fields of physics, biology, mathematics, and medicine have been invented—surely this ancient philosophical question doesn’t still interest anyone?
Indeed, it does; it retains for many what James called “the most momentous importance.” Like other hardy perennials—the objectivity of “good”; the universality of truth; the existence of human nature and its telos—it continues to fascinate philosophers and laypersons, who agree only that the stakes are enormous: “our very humanity,” many of them insist.
Why so momentous? Skepticism about free will is said to produce two disastrous but opposed states of mind. The first is apathy: We are bound to be so demoralized by the conviction that nothing is up to us, that we are not the captains of our fate, that we need no longer get out of bed. The other is frenzy: We will be so exhilarated by our liberation from responsibility and guilt that we will run amok, like Dostoevsky’s imagined atheist, who concludes that if God does not exist, everything is permitted.
Note that it is not the absence of free will but only the absence of belief in free will that is said to have these baneful effects. People who never give the subject a thought are neither apathetic nor frenetic, at least not for these reasons. Should we just stop thinking about the whole question?
For twenty-five hundred years, no generation has succeeded in doing that: So we may as well wade in. What is free will? It is the capacity to make uncaused choices. This does not mean that nothing causes my choice—it means that I do. But surely something has caused me to be the person who makes that choice. And doesn’t whatever causes me to be the person I am also cause the choices I make?…
[Scialabba succinctly explicates Sapolsky’s and Mitchell’s (each, estimable) arguments…]
… But are beliefs about free will really the point here? Judges, whether or not they believe in free will, should take more cognizance of mitigating circumstances than they do now. A baby damaged by prenatal cocaine exposure who grows up to be an addict and petty thief deserves mercy; a billionaire whose tax evasion robs his fellow citizens of tens of millions of dollars deserves none. But no philosophical convictions are needed to arrive at these conclusions, only humanity and good sense.
And whether or not we have free will, isn’t punishment also justified as deterrence? Surely, the prospect of a long stretch in prison (or quarantine) would give pause to at least some murderers, rapists, and persons scheming to overturn a fair presidential election? And beyond that, punishment serves as a public affirmation of the values of a family or society. We are embodied beings: Values cannot only be preached; they must sometimes be enforced.
At a certain point, one may ask, what is really at stake in this debate? Sapolsky appears to harbor no metaphysical designs on readers; he spins his intricate, ingenious causal webs only, in the end, to enlarge our sympathy for life’s failures. Mitchell does seem to have a humanity-affirming philosophical agenda. “You are the type of thing that can take action, that can make decisions, that can be a causal force in the world: You are an agent,” he often reminds the reader, implying that these are things a scientific materialist must, in strict logic, deny. But I strongly doubt that any scientific materialist anywhere in the multiverse would deny that she can take action, make decisions, or be a causal force, or that she is an agent, or does things for reasons. She might, though, think that all her choices are caused, which, Sapolsky would say, is perfectly compatible with taking actions, making decisions, being a causal force, or acting for reasons. Elsewhere, Mitchell warns readers not to believe anyone (presumably the insidious scientific materialist) who suggests that we are merely “a collection of atoms pushed around by the laws of physics.” To which our scientific materialist might reply that we are indeed very highly organized collections of atoms, molecules, nerves, muscles, and hundreds of other components, pushed and pulled by the laws of physics, chemistry, biology, neuroscience, psychology, sociology, economics, and politics, along with intimations from philosophy, history, and art, and constantly adjusting to and modifying those influences from a center that is provisionally but not permanently stable. This, she would say, is how one can be an agent without free will.
With what I hope is due deference, I humbly disagree with both Sapolsky and Mitchell, and even with my deeply revered William James. Perhaps the question of free will is not so momentous. Philosophers have been debating about it for thousands of years, Mitchell observes. “That these debates continue today with unabated fervor tells you that they have not yet resolved the issue.” Indeed, they haven’t. Perhaps they should take a break. Perhaps it is a controversy without consequences. Perhaps whether we are free or fated, morality and politics, science and medicine, art and literature will all go their merry or melancholy ways, unaffected.
Notwithstanding Sapolsky’s hopes and Mitchell’s fears, whatever we decide about free will, the world—even the moral world—will look the same afterward as before. This, along with our millennia-long failure to make appreciable, or any, progress toward an answer, suggests that we are in the presence of a pseudoproblem. James himself, in “The Will to Believe,” written a dozen years after he defended free will in “The Dilemma of Determinism,” conceded that “free will and simple wishing do seem, in the matter of our credences, to be only fifth wheels to the coach.” The moral and political worlds run—to the extent they run at all—on generosity and imagination, mother wit and sympathetic understanding. These can answer all our questions about moral responsibility and moral obligation without our having to solve the insoluble conundrums of free will.
As we wrestle with responsibility, we might spare a thought for Henri-Louis Bergson; he died on this date in 1941. A philosopher especially influential in the first half of the 20th Century, Bergson convinced many of the primacy of immediate experience and intuition over rationalism and science for the understanding of reality…. many, but not Wittgenstein, Russell, Moore, nor Santayana, who thought that he willfully misunderstood the scientific method in order to justify his “projection of subjectivity onto the physical world.” Still, in 1927 Bergson won the Nobel Prize (in Literature); and in 1930, received France’s highest honor, the Grand-Croix de la Legion d’honneur.
Bergson’s influence waned mightily later in the century. To the extent that there’s been a bit of a resurgence of interest, it’s largely the result, in philosophical circles, of Gilles Deleuze’s appropriation of Bergson’s concept of “mulitplicity” and his treatment of duration, which Deleuze used in his critique of Hegel’s dialectic, and in the religious and spiritualist studies communities, of Bergson’s seeming embrace of the concept of an overriding/underlying consciousness in which humans participate.
Indeed, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, Bergson’s doctoral thesis, first published in 1889, dealt explicitly with the question we’re considering, which Bergson argued is merely a common confusion among philosophers caused by an illegitimate translation of the unextended into the extended– the introduction of his theory of duration.
Wisdom for the exquisite Existential Comics (“A philosophy comic about the inevitable anguish of living a brief life in an absurd world. Also jokes.”)…
Frege was an early philosopher of language, who formulated a theory of semantics that largely had to do with how we form truth propositions about the world. His theories were enormously influential for people like Russel, Carnap, and even Wittgenstein early in his career. They all recognized that the languages we use are ambiguous, so making exact determinations was always difficult. Most of them were logicians and mathematicians, and wanted to render ordinary language as exact and precise as mathematical language, so we could go about doing empirical science with perfect clarity. Russell, Carnap, and others even vowed to create an exact scientific language (narrator: “they didn’t create an exact scientific language”).
Later on, Wittgenstein and other philosophers such as J.L. Austin came to believe that a fundamental mistake was made about the nature of language itself. Language, they thought, doesn’t pick out truth propositions about the world at all. Speech acts were fundamentally no different than other actions, and were merely used in social situations to bring about certain effects. For example, in asking for a sandwich to be passed across the table, we do not pick out a certain set of facts about the world, we only utter the words with the expectations that it will cause certain behavior in others. Learning what is and isn’t a sandwich is more like learning the rules of a game than making declarations about what exists in the world, so for Wittgenstein, what is or isn’t a sandwich depends only on the success or failure of the word “sandwich” in a social context, regardless of what actual physical properties a sandwich has in common with, say, a hotdog.
As we add mayonnaise, we might send thoughtful birthday greetings to Norbert Wiener; he was born on this date in 1894. A computer scientist, mathematician, and philosopher, Wiener is considered the originator of cybernetics, the science of communication as it relates to living things and machines– a field that has had implications for implications for a wide variety of fields, including engineering, systems control, computer science, biology, neuroscience, and philosophy. (Wiener credited Leibniz as the “patron saint of cybernetics.)
His work heavily influenced computer pioneer John von Neumann, information theorist ClaudeShannon, anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, and many others. Wiener was one of the first to theorize that all intelligent behavior was the result of feedback mechanisms and could possibly be simulated by machines– an important early step towards the development of modern artificial intelligence.
Further, in a fashion, to yesterday’s post: the estimable Damion Searls argues for a literary approach to translating rigorous philosophical texts…
Ludwig Wittgenstein’s [here] Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is a book with an aura. His name, let’s admit it, is already a vibe; the title sets an extremely highbrow tone; the paragraphs are all numbered, promising a very impressive logical rigor, even if questions linger. (Is 6.2322 really exactly one level more primary than 5.47321? What does “3.001” mean since there’s no 3.0 or 3.00?) And then the text itself has a kind of cryptic grandeur, awe-inspiring opacity, Olympian disregard for normal human understanding that gives us what we expect, what we want, from such an iconic philosopher. It’s an exciting challenge. A lot of the reason why the book has been so widely read in the century since its English publication in 1922, by philosophers and philosophy students and nonphilosophers alike, is how it makes its readers feel.
Several similarly forbidding-yet-thereby-thrilling books were published in English that same year—T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land; James Joyce’s Ulysses—but unlike those, the Tractatus was a translation, and the question arises how much of its style was a byproduct of bringing it into English. The book’s title did not come from Wittgenstein: it was an esoteric pun on Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus from 1670, suggested by G. E. Moore, the Cambridge philosopher who was the fourth most important figure in getting the book into English, after the credited translator C. K. Ogden, the actual translator Frank Ramsey [here], and Bertrand Russell [here]. Wittgenstein’s own German title was the far more humble and straightforward Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung, something like Essay on Logic and Philosophy. Russell’s introduction, included in the first edition and every subsequent one until this one, firmly placed the book in the context of technical academic philosophy. And the book’s language in English was simply not at all like Wittgenstein’s forceful, earnest, fluid, subtle German.
Yet the book in English is what it is; should it just stay that way? This same debate came up around the retranslation of yet another iconic book from 1922: C. K. Scott Moncrieff’s translation of Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way. He too completely changed the title (from Proust’s In Search of Lost Time to the Shakespeare quote Remembrance of Things Past); he too created an English-language voice, lush and purple, that wasn’t the original’s. And yet his writing was what generations of English-language Proust readers knew and loved; his translation was modified slightly over the years but largely preserved; when Lydia Davis came along with a new translation faithful to other aspects of the original, such as Proust’s analytical rigor, many readers didn’t care whether or not her version was more like the real Proust—Scott Moncrieff’s Proust was the real thing as far as they were concerned.
The situation with the Tractatus is clearer and less debatable, for two reasons. First, the earlier translations are more deeply flawed than Scott Moncrieff’s Proust ever was. Second and perhaps more important, Wittgenstein’s book is explicitly about the relationships between language and thought, between language and the world, making it imperative to get these relationships right in translation. And so I have retranslated the book, paying special attention to where the assumptions of typical academic philosophy translation would lead us away from expressing Wittgenstein’s thought in English. Implicitly, I am making the case for a certain kind of approach that is generally called “literary”—attentive to emotional nuances, subtle connotations, and expressive power—even when translating rigorous philosophical texts…
* The equally estimable Emily Wilson, paraphrasing Searls
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As we emphasize essence, we might spare a thought for the creator of the inspiration of the title of Wittgenstein’s work, Baruch Spinoza; he died on this date in 1677. One of the foremost thinkers of the Age of Reason, he was a philosopher who contributed to nearly every area of philosophical discourse, including metaphysics, epistemology, political philosophy, ethics, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of science. His rationalism and determinism put him in opposition to Descartes and helped lay the foundation for The Enlightenment; his pantheistic views led to his excommunication from the Jewish community in Amsterdam.
As men’s habits of mind differ, so that some more readily embrace one form of faith, some another, for what moves one to pray may move another to scoff, I conclude … that everyone should be free to choose for himself the foundations of his creed, and that faith should be judged only by its fruits; each would then obey God freely with his whole heart, while nothing would be publicly honored save justice and charity.
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