Category: Thought

Wittgenstein’s Vienna and the Approach to his Tractatus

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Austrian-born British philosopher, “perhaps the most perfect example I have ever known of genius as traditionally conceived, passionate, profound, intense, and dominating” (Bertrand Russell), was a master logician who studied under Frege and Russell before, like any great apprentice, overcoming them in one fell linguistic swoop with his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

In that work he put to bed all the codswallop about metaphysics and morals, ethics and eschatology, which had bedevilled philosophy for centuries, nay, millennia, with his canonical “whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” and his dismissal of all the above as nonsense. Wittgenstein was a knife that cut away all the gristle. All that mattered was logic, cold and hard.

But is that what he was really about? Is that what the Tractatus was really about?

This slender book, first published in 1921 and now out of copyright, has started recently reappearing in a flurry of new translations in English, one of which has prompted me to write to you today. But much more than the book, the main subject is the approach to the book. Is it really, with its crystalline numbered tree structure, a structured work of logic alone, or is there reason to think there is more to it?

The introduction to my edition, and what it passes over

I first wrote about Wittgenstein the man after reading Ray Monk’s biography, but could not make my way through any of his actual works. It was all too alien to me. Now I have finally gone through the Tractatus in the new OUP translation made by Michael Beaney, who to judge from his various distinguished positions is extremely successful in his field of study. In fact, the book is more introduction than Wittgenstein, with a long traditional introduction and then a long note on the text, explaining the publication history of the work, and finally the seventy pages of the Tractatus itself, followed by an annex with simplified “tree-structure” of the propositions, notes and glossary.

Beaney talks a lot about logic and the influence on Wittgenstein of Russell and Frege, two titans of funny letters and mathematical squiggles. He mentions contemporary scientists Boltzmann and Hertz and the philosopher Schopenhauer as other influences, whilst giving an indication of in what this influence consisted, at least in his opinion. But there is something funny in this, even to one little versed in philosophy. Schopenhauer, for example, this arch pessimist, is reduced to a reaction to Kant and his understanding of sensory and rational experience. Pessimism, in Beaney’s reading of influence, or the ethics which followed on from Schopenhauer’s vision of the world, does not get a look in.

This is the first hint of dissatisfaction, but there is more to come. The account of the sixth section of the Tractatus, which Wittgenstein wrote after the experience front line action in the First World War, is merely the part that “gave Wittgenstein the most trouble.” The trouble, however, is logical for Beaney. The statements on ethics and the meaning of life and human happiness, are given a single paragraph in his account. They do not appear to be important, more aberrations to be passed over in relative silence.

Yet is this man just a genius of logic?

Bertrand Russell, finally meeting Wittgenstein after the war where he had fought bravely before ending up in Italian prisoner-of-war camp, wrote home to complain of him: “He has become a complete mystic. He reads people like Kierkegaard and [German mystic religious writer] Angelus Silesius, he seriously contemplates becoming a monk.” The remark is quoted by Beaney, but only in the context of Wittgenstein’s attempts to get the Tractatus published. Another famous letter, to Ludwig von Ficker, a publisher, is also introduced in a way that suggests we must assume it is of no importance at all to understanding the book:

“it will probably be a help to you if I write a few words about my book. You see, I am quite sure that you won’t get all that much out of reading it. Because you won’t understand it; it’s subject matter will seem quite alien to you. But it isn’t really alien to you, because the book’s point is an ethical one. I once meant to include in the preface a sentence which is not in fact there now but which I will write out for you here, because it will perhaps be a key to the work for you. What I meant to write, then, was this: My work consists of two parts: the one presented here plus all that I have not written. And it is precisely this second part that is the important one. My book draws limits to the sphere of the ethical from the inside as it were, and I am convinced that this is the ONLY rigorous way of drawing those limits”

During the war, Wittgenstein carried around a copy of Tolstoy’s The Gospel in Brief, which he said “saved” his life. His fellow soldiers even took to calling him “the man with the Gospels.” He disliked Russell’s introduction to the Tractatus, which was necessary for the work to be published in English, saying that Russell had misunderstood him. This misunderstanding seemed only to increase with time. Russell thought the later Wittgenstein had squandered his talents completely.

Other things about Wittgenstein’s behaviour seem odd. I remember from Monk’s biography how Wittgenstein would go into Russell’s chambers at Cambridge late at night and pace around, saying that he would kill himself once he left, thinking and pacing for hours at a time until he resolved whatever was bothering him. And when he met the men who became the Vienna Circle of logical positivists, he shocked them by reading them poetry and recommending someone as “illogical” as Heidegger. In short, Wittgenstein himself, in his living, seemed anything but a merely logical genius. He seemed animated by another force. And if the man was animated by another force, is it not likely that his first work was animated by another force too? 

Wittgenstein’s Vienna

I bought this book, by Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin, back when I first thought I would read Wittgenstein. It has proven the work which has most helped me to engage with the Tractatus, far more than Beaney’s introduction or any other which I have read, which is funny given that the Tractatus is scarcely quoted here, and Wittgenstein is part of the shadows, certainly not the main act like the title might imply. But the arguments in the work are convincing. Wittgenstein, as part of his journey to the Tractatus, contacted the eminent philosophers Frege and Russell. But why did he do this? Janik and Toulmin argue that Wittgenstein was already engaged with some problems – for why else would he reach out? And that after meeting the logicians, he was given a set of tools that let him resolve them. But logic was never the main thing. It was just the means to another end.

Wittgenstein’s Vienna is an attempt, circumstantially we might say, to consider what these problems were. Vienna was an extraordinary place in the early 1900s, with Freud and Schoenberg and Schnitzler and Hofmannsthal, to name just a few of the leading literary and cultural lights. To their number Janik and Toulmin add others of whom I was less aware, like the architect Adolf Loos, and most importantly to their argument, the firebrand writer Karl Kraus. Through depicting the state of intellectual upheaval in Vienna at this time, and all its components, they lead us to see that the Tractatus was not a link in a logical chain, but rather a response to a problem that was at the time particularly Viennese.

They have, perhaps, some good reason for this. Professor von Wright, Wittgenstein’s literary executor, said to them that the two most important facts about Wittgenstein were that he was Viennese, and that he was an engineer with a thorough knowledge of physics. Both of these flow into Janik and Toulmin’s analysis, and both lead to a very different picture of the Tractatus to the one we might be used to.

Context: The Proving Ground for World Destruction

It was the Viennese writer, Karl Kraus, who called the city the “Proving Ground for World Destruction”. And it is he who looms large as one of the central influences on the milieu that a young Ludwig Wittgenstein grew up in. Vienna, towards the end of the Habsburg Empire, was a place that produced some of the most brilliant art and philosophy that we have – and for its time, some of the most experimental, most modernist. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Sigmund Freud, Arthur Schnitzler, Georg Trakl, Rainer Maria Rilke, are just some of these names which have in one way or another made their mark on culture, and often been featured here on the blog. But as so often happens with great art, much of that was produced in response to its environment, rather than thanks to it, as the hostile forces artists experienced in their daily lives were rejected and transformed in works of art.

Vienna at this time was a place where the gulf between appearance and reality was as great as it has perhaps ever been anywhere. The “City of Dreams” shone with palaces and parks, it seethed with its rapidly growing population – it quadrupled in size over about fifty years, without growing its city limits nearly so much – and its multinational, multiethnic population, led by a benevolent sovereign, lived according to the great values of that land: reason, order, disciplined conformity to good taste. Some families had done well, like the Wittgensteins, who through canny business decisions had risen to become some of the richest people in Europe. But many more people found themselves trapped in accommodation far too small for them, unable to feed themselves on puny wages.

Ethnic harmony was a lie that was increasingly hard to paper over, and antisemitism was shifting from an unfortunately common personal conviction to a political programme. The lights that the city shone with were not often electric, because the Emperor Franz Joseph plugged any hole that modernity might seep through, keeping the toilets in the palaces without modern plumbing, and the lights running on gas. Like the Russian Empire at that time, society was rigid to the extreme and taboos were rigorously enforced. It seems no surprise that Freud should have his first successes here, working with women who felt things they were not allowed to feel, and had no way of managing those feelings. For a literary response to female sexuality, we need look no further than Schnitzler’s Fräulein Else, one of my favourite works of the period.

What was said and what wasn’t, what was unimportant and what was, were completely out of order. If in people’s personal lives this led to the rise of psychoanalysis and associated topics – Alfred Adler discovered the “inferiority complex” while in Vienna – in the arts this led to what we might call a crisis of representation. Perhaps this was most obvious in the case of Hugo von Hofmannsthal, some of whose poetry I’ve previously translated here. The enfant terrible of Austrian letters suddenly discovered, after a few years of effortless brilliant poems, that he had “lost completely the ability to think or speak of anything coherently”. This much he wrote in his fictional Letter of Lord Chandos, where he talks about words failing him. It is not that he cannot write, it is that words cannot express what he wishes they could. In short, he can only write – now in prose – of his inability to write and other things. But not of what is higher.

This inability or unwillingness to express things was not just the case with Hofmannsthal. In architecture, Adolf Loos created buildings that were extremely stripped down, with a huge shift away from ornamentation. Schoenberg in music was doing something similar, as were the first non-representational, abstract painters. All of them took inspiration from Kraus, who had a strong sense of mission and morality. In his works he was constantly taking to task politicians and intellectuals for using language badly, often by simply repeating their words back to them. One of the pranks he used to play was sending in fictitious letters to newspapers, claiming to be an expert in a given field (e.g. metallurgy) and watching as they included his deliberate fantasy, without daring to challenge it.

Kraus saw a person’s language as reflecting her morality. In other words, he adopted a holistic view of a human being, where everything can and must be judged together. We can see this in an aphorism of his: “Worthy opinions are valueless; it depends on whose opinions they are.” Kraus was well aware of the emptiness – or in some sense, performativeness – of many of the words and speeches his contemporaries made out of social decorum. His ideal, meanwhile, was a kind of authenticity, where action and speech and person were united. In this he reflected a growing interest in the works of Kierkegaard, and the intellectual dominance of Schopenhauer during this time.

Just as Tolstoy discovered Schopenhauer when writing Anna Karenina, leading him to see the world as full of frustrated desires we had little control over, so too did the Viennese around the turn of the century, where the philosopher was massively in vogue. In his rejection of the external world as controlled by will, and his emphasis on internality, he appealed to intellectuals who found Vienna more fake than real. He was joined by Kierkegaard, who also re-emerged out of obscurity in an environment where authenticity appeared to people like Kraus as the overriding ethical impulse, society be damned.

This crisis of representation and being in the world was not just limited to the arts. In the sciences and philosophy, people like Hertz, Boltzmann, and Mach were also considering questions about what could or should be said and shown. Take this statement of Hertz’s: “When these painful contradictions are removed, the question as to the nature of force will not have been answered; but our minds, no longer vexed, will cease to ask illegitimate questions.” He had been discussing the idea of “force”, which seems harder to pin down the more you think about it. But the conclusion he came to was remarkably similar to the one Wittgenstein himself had to the problems of life – the solution is not the answer to the question, but the end of the questioning:

6.521 The solution to the problem of life is found in the vanishing of the problem.

               (Is this not the reason why those to whom the meaning of life became clear after prolonged doubt, could not then say in what this meaning consisted?)

The young Ludwig Wittgenstein grew up in the heart of this culture. As one of the richest families in Austria, his home was filled with artists and cultural figures – as was only proper. Many of his siblings had great artistic talents, especially musically. There were also several suicides among his brothers, and as noted above Ludwig regularly spoke of such an end for himself. He hoped to become an aeronautical engineer, first studying in Manchester before being overtaken by philosophy. This led him to Frege, and thence to Bertrand Russell. Janik and Toulmin argue that Wittgenstein turned to them because he was already vexed by questions of representation that he naturally encountered, growing up in Vienna, about what could and couldn’t be said and how to think about ethics, and thought logic might help him sort all of this out. Logic was merely a means to solve that all-important (for some) question – how should I live?

The Evidence Does Not Quite Add Up

The evidence for Janik and Toulmin’s view is, they readily acknowledge, circumstantial. Their book, far better than I could, explores the way this crisis penetrated every aspect of Viennese society, so that Wittgenstein simply could not have avoided it. At the same time, we know how the Tractatus was actually written, and the chronology seems wrong. Wittgenstein’s interest in ethics and mysticism seems, or at least the point where it becomes part of the Tractatus, to have come from his experience fighting in the first World War.

Wittgenstein was already odd – for example, he had a superstitious idea that he was soon to die. But it seems that the focus on ethics and God came a little later, when death and he became closely acquainted. “What do I know of God and the purpose of my life?” He wrote in his diary, after the beginning of a particularly brutal offensive on the Eastern Front. It was then that he wrote much of the sixth section of the Tractatus, where he discusses ethics and meaning and what cannot ultimately be spoken. With that said, Russell, meeting Wittgenstein after the war for the first time and finding him a complete “mystic”, also blames William James and Wittgenstein’s experience living and working alone in Norway just before the war.

Conclusion

Yet all this is not particularly important, either way. Wittgenstein’s Vienna cannot conclusively prove that Wittgenstein was concerned with questions about the sayable and authenticity before he met Russell and Frege, but it can certainly show that these were the questions he would not have been able to avoid as a young man surrounded by the culture of his native city. It seems obvious to me, based on my knowledge of Wittgenstein’s life and the genesis of the Tractatus, that these questions of ethics and representability certainly became important to him, probably more important than the rest of the book. And they are what is most important to me, reading the book now.

One slightly mean aside in the book which I nevertheless find myself nodding to, is the suggestion that we in the UK and US undoubtedly understood Wittgenstein very poorly. The cultural shock of this man who was concerned with ethics and life with a passion that in Britain we have rarely allowed ourselves to experience, meant that we almost certainly corralled him into appearing as a figure he was not in reality. Just as in Russia, in Vienna people were taking seriously problems that we have struggled even to see as problems. And rather than see them as problems, we prefer to dismiss them as ravings and madness. Much to our discredit as human beings and inhabitants of this world.

Having read through the book in English now, I am returning to it in the German original. I expect it will take me a long time to understand the Tractatus properly. But I am not trying to understand the logic; at least that is not my primary goal. Instead, I am trying to understand the soul the work contains, and the fire that inspired it. Still, that seems a more worthy aim than merely running around in circles calling things nonsense and tautologies, thinking I am the cleverest fellow in the room.

Max Weber against Tolstoy – “Science as Vocation”

Max Weber was a German sociologist who is best known for his work The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, which argued that it was the influence of Protestantism which made the great victors of capitalism and industrialism – the US, Great Britain, and Germany – succeed in a way that the major Catholic powers, such as Spain, the Austrian Empire and later Italy, did not. Many of us also read his two lectures, “Science as Vocation” (“Wissenschaft als Beruf”) and “Politics as Vocation”, which are often published together. I first read the former, which is our subject today, at Cambridge as part of a paper on German thought, and must have read it several times since then. In fact, this is not even my first attempt at writing on it here. It is a work that has become more exciting as I have grown.

The translations for quotes come from the NYRB version of the Vocation Lectures, where this essay is translated by Damion Searls as “The Scholar’s Work”. I prefer “Science as Vocation” because of the more religious connotations of “vocation” compared to work, something which is even discussed in the introduction (!); however, I admit that “scholar’s” is more suitable than “science”, given that Weber is talking about all systematic pursuits of knowledge, not just beakers and test tubes. Either way, this is the only complaint I have about the translation.

Context

Weber was invited to give the first of his lectures on November 7th, 1917, by a group of students. By this point Germany’s war effort was beginning to flag. A food shortage was ongoing, and victory already appeared an unlikely outcome. Wars – especially the great wars of the 19th and 20th centuries – traditionally offered the warring populations a huge amount of meaning at their outset, as feelings of patriotism swelled. But in defeat the opposite happened, as all meaning was torn away. We might see something of this as an explanation for why Weber deals with meaning, because that is as much the topic of “Science as Vocation” as are the practicalities of being an academic.

An Unexpectedly Practical Introduction

We modern readers mostly read “Science as Vocation” because of the idea of “disenchantment” that Weber first speaks of here, but like Weber’s student audience we will be disappointed by what we hear when we begin to read. The essay starts with a very practical, earthy discussion of the differences between American and German academic systems. In the German system at the time for most academics there was no salary; instead, they received money from the students attending their lectures. At the same time, they had no free choice of lecture topic, because the most popular topics were granted to the more senior staff members – which naturally dampened still further their income.

In the US, meanwhile, one receives a very small salary as an assistant, and is swamped with work while more senior academics spend their time researching or reclining in their armchairs. The American can be fired for failing to secure sufficient attendance, while his German equivalent cannot be – though the latter can starve to death, which is its own problem. Promotion is often through connections, rather than skill, which means that the whole academic world is fairly disheartening to its inhabitants. Weber further reminds us that the skills needed “to be both a good scholar and a good teacher” are often quite discrete and unevenly distributed. As lectures were how universities decided whether an academic was worth keeping, this was not ideal.

Innovation, also, is not a thing that necessarily fills a lecture hall. If anything, it turns people away. Instead, “superficial qualities: the teacher’s personality, even his tone of voice” are what bring people to the lecture halls. Today, perhaps, we have an opposite situation, where the only thing that matters is the number of citations an academic has. This too brings its own problems, and is not necessarily a good metric for judging an academic’s value. Weber finalises his unencouraging tour of academic life by noting the constant and growing specialisation of academia, which is also often unattractive to those in search of knowledge and who wish to compass all knowledge with a spectacular breakthrough.

So, Who Should Be a Scholar?

Weber’s introduction lets him move on to answer the question of who should be a scholar, and who not. Certainly nobody bothered by the above should enter academia. Instead, one must have passion – “this strange intoxication, mocked by all who do not share it”. This is because “nothing is humanly worth doing except what someone can do with passion.” But beyond passion, one needs to work hard, and one needs inspiration too. Without passion, one cannot do the task; without the others, one cannot succeed at it. Weber is keen to emphasise that the importance of passion goes beyond just academic work. “A real personality is nothing other than a capacity to experience life authentically.” In other words, having a personality means being passionate about life.

The scholar must be passionate – “wholly devoted” – to what he or she studies. Only this passion can grant dignity in the face of the inevitable injustices of the world. And only passion for the work can make the work possible, given the next problem, which is the challenge of its limited meaningfulness.

The Meaning of Scholarship

It is a common human longing to wish to make a mark. Yet scholarship, in Weber’s view, will not reward us if that is what is our only motivation. This is because “scholarship, unlike any other cultural endeavour, is subjected to – dedicated to – its own obsolescence.” Each discovery wants to vanish under weight of each subsequent discovery, and even those of us with a background in the humanities will have noticed we read the more recent critics over the older ones, even if the object of the criticism is a thousand years old. If academic scholarship is merely an infinite sequence of discoveries endlessly replacing each other, then the value of an individual discovery is infinitely small – that is to say, it has no value at all.

Weber extends this idea with respect to progress in general, in what is an uncomfortable truth for those of us who have never stopped to consider progress as we strive for it. “In the context of modern civilization, with its theoretically infinite “progress”, an individual’s life necessarily lacks any ultimate purpose. Here is always another step to take on the path of progress; no one dies at the peak or end of his journey, because the path continues into infinity.” Tolstoy, Weber notes, was afflicted with this realisation around the time he was writing Anna Karenina. The thought gradually destroyed the meaning of his existence, and it was only through religion that Tolstoy was able to save himself. More on this later.

Disenchantment

The problem of meaninglessness is where Weber’s famous disenchantment comes in. Our world is rationalised and intellectualised to the extreme. What this means is that anything that we wish to know, we can know it. I may not know how a plane flies, but I know that I can discover it. The world in such an age has no mysteries, because all “can be mastered through calculation.” This idea of solving these mysteries becomes an obsession with us. But because there are an infinite number of mysteries, this obsession quickly comes to destroy us. We cannot meaningfully change the number of remaining mysteries, so we are left only with a kind of disappointment in our lack of impact and in the lack of magic the world has left for us.

Weber contrasts this view of life with a more ancient, cyclical one. Abraham, “or indeed any farmer from a bygone age”, did not search in the same way as we do. When he died, “his life had given him whatever it had to offer, in terms of meaning too.” He could die satisfied, because he accepted the magic of the world, rather than being disappointed by what remained to be done. Abraham’s death “in a good old age, an old man, and full of years” [Genesis 25:8] can be contrasted with Weber’s description of the death that meets us today, a person who might become “tired of life”, but can never be “fulfilled by it”:

“Not only does he get wind of merely a tiny fraction of all the new ideas that intellectual life continuously produces, but even those ideas are merely provisional, never definitive. As a result, death is simply pointless for him. And so too is life as such in our culture, which in its meaningless “progression” stamps death with its own meaninglessness.”

This is rather depressing stuff. The rest of the lecture is Weber trying to understand the full extent of what this disenchantment means, and what scholarship might have to do with solving the problems that it poses.

How Disenchantment Came About

Science did not always lead to disenchantment; the problem is that it can never now lead to anything but disenchantment, for Weber. The great tools of learning – the concept and the controlled experiment, once were trees that showed little signs of producing fruits that might rot. For Renaissance artists, chief among them Leonardo da Vinci, learning and systematic knowledge were “the path to true art”; later religious thinkers saw science as a way of finding traces of God’s presence – the argument of intelligent design, where the complexity of the universe is evidence of a higher creator.

Systematic and rationalistic thinking, however, have now reached a point where the above arguments do not and cannot work. They cannot bring happiness, for the reasons Tolstoy notes. They cannot prove God, because we now know (more than Weber did) about the extent to which our universe is random. In fact, what Weber finds as being the use of science is much less fun – “if science can do anything, it is precisely to uproot and destroy the belief that the world has any such thing as a “meaning””.

Tolstoy’s Questions, Weber’s Answers

“Science is meaningless, because it provides no answer for the only question that matters: “What should we do? How should we live?” Tolstoy could see enough to destroy the false meanings of the world – in money, power, progress. But he longed for something to replace them, and rejected science and such thinking when it could not provide him with this. In the end, he turned to the peasants. He saw in the strength of their religious beliefs a kind of proof of their truthfulness, and used that to help him construct a new vision of Christianity, which worked well enough for him, but which mostly appears a little silly to the rest of us.

Weber does not deny the truth of Tolstoy’s complaint. But he does not consider it important, because it is an attack that is unjust. For Weber, this is because Tolstoy is blind to the assumptions underpinning science and systematic thinking more broadly. Weber notes that without these assumptions, we cannot do science at all. And the assumption that is most important is that science is worthwhile. We cannot be an academic if we do not consider our work meaningful, or certainly not a happy one.

Science does not deal with questions of worth. If we do it, we say that it is worthwhile. If we reject it, it may be because we consider it valueless or wrong. But the questions that natural sciences answer, for example, are “what should we do if we want to use the techniques at our disposal to control life?”, and not “whether we should control life through technology, whether we want to, and whether it’s ultimately meaningful to do so.” The questions of value are out of bounds. This is as true about legal studies or medicine as it is about natural sciences. To question the value of such things is already to do something other than them – it is, if we feel like calling it that, to philosophise.

This distinction is important when we get on to political matters in particular. Studying politics is not the same thing as discussing the value of this or that party or person, in Weber’s view. It is about understanding the structures and realities, without judging them. He takes a harsh view of those professors (and this ties back to the introduction about the practice of teaching) who preach from the lectern. They are abusing their power to talk in an environment where they cannot be talked-back-to, and not sharing their knowledge. They are being – and here is one of Weber’s own values – “irresponsible.”

Questions of Worth

If science cannot tell us how to live, how then are we to live? There are two important answers given by Weber. The first, which we must acknowledge, is that there can be no universal meaning any longer. Once, religion could be that, but no more. It cannot be so again, not after Darwin and the “Death of God.” Weber knew that his listeners, the students, wanted prophets. But “this prophet, so longed for by so many in the younger generation, does not exist and will never come in the full force of his meaning.” The offerings of the National Socialists and the Soviets deserve nothing besides condemnation for trying to delude us into thinking otherwise. They are attractive, because prophets (and ideologues) save us from having to think for ourselves. But to let them lead us is to demonstrate a terrible dereliction of personal duty and awareness.

Where does this leave religion? We might assume that Weber would be as critical towards it as he is towards the nascent ideologies of his age. But for the person of private religious inclination, he is more conciliatory. Everything comes down to a choice. If the religious person chooses to believe in miracles, then this comes from its own assumptions, just as the scientific explanation for things like the parting of the Red Sea rests on its own assumptions. They will contradict each other, but neither can invalidate the other within its own system. Weber’s problem is when such views are designated as universal or exclusively true, when they most manifestly are not. Whether this is done by a religious fundamentalist, a communist, or someone else, all are making a mistake.

Value Pluralism and Choices

With no universal truth, Weber describes the ultimate values of individuals as being “in irresolvable conflict.” The classic example is wanting absolute freedom and absolute security – which we all, in theory, desire. One must compromise, but each person draws their dividing line in a different space. How do we choose? Weber will be no prophet for us. “It is up to the individual to decide which is God and which is the devil for him. And that is how it goes with every other decision about how to conduct one’s life.”

Yet academic knowledge and study absolutely have a role to play in this, even if we do not find our meaning through them. This is because they offer us a toolkit for being responsible with our choices. Logical, rigorous thinking gives us the ability to understand the choices that we make and to follow them properly. If we are rigorous, we know what follows on from a given view. If we do not like it, we cannot lie to ourselves about it, but we can change our view accordingly. Essentially, “we can force, or at least help, an individual to reckon with the ultimate meaning of his own actions.” This ultimate meaning and sense of the consequences of a line of thought forces us to be responsible. It deprives extreme viewpoints of much of the support that they gain by having deliberately vague means and ends.

In this, I am reminded a little of Orwell’s essay on “Politics and the English Language”, which I compared with Simone Weil’s thoughts on the topic a few months ago. Orwell saw clearly that many sympathisers of the Soviet regime were willing to use language to avoid the responsibility of saying that they supported its actions. Weber cannot say, within Science as Vocation, that the Gulag system is universally wrong. But if intellectuals were sufficiently honest about what their beliefs meant – locking political opponents away is justified because it serves the great good of the movement – then their ideologies would have fewer supporters in practice, and hence much less power.

Conclusion: Decisions, Decisions

Ultimately, we might say that “Science as Vocation” is quite simple in its argument. We have to decide what is meaningful for us, and the value of scholarship and learning in this context is that it teaches us to clarity and method so that we can make responsible, albeit necessarily conflicting choices, about what to value in our lives. It is a painful work because it denies the possibility of a unifying, general meaning of the sort that prophets and ideologues offer. But it is not so pessimistic as it seems, for it leaves open religious belief and the valuing of enquiry in and of itself, should we choose such paths.

Tolstoy was unable to accept the lack of a universal value. He tried to convince himself that the peasants were the bearers of it and that mere snobbery had kept the philosophers from discovering this truth. Alas, this was just his truth, his choice, which he desperately clung to, but which kept him alive, as all those truths we truly let ourselves believe in do. As for us, we have to live, and live with our choices and our own beliefs. Where Weber shines in this piece, for me, is in three things – the clarity of his destruction of progress or science as sources of meaning, his insistence upon integrity, and in his arguments for the value of rational thinking in making responsibility and responsible choices possible.

It may not be what we want to hear. But it has to be enough.

Simone Weil vs George Orwell on political language

Around the time of the Second World War, both Simone Weil and George Orwell were lamenting the misuse of language. At first glance, this is not altogether remarkable, for criticisms about language’s mistreatment seem constant throughout history. However, both Orwell in “Politics and the English Language” and Weil in “The Power of Words” are writing with a certain heightened seriousness that we can argue is lacking in previous laments over language’s decline. Surrounded by war in a century where possibilities for slaughter were fast proving limitless, understanding how language could contribute to bloodshed was of paramount importance. As a result, the writers go beyond that standard argument we may already be familiar with – that sloppiness in language indicates and produces sloppiness of thought.  

No, their goal was loftier than that. As Weil put it, “To clarify thought, to discredit the intrinsically meaningless words, and to define the use of others by precise analysis – to do this, strange though it may appear, might be a way of saving lives.”

Orwell

Of the two, it is Orwell whose essay is more practical. Many of us read “Politics and the English Language” today as a kind of guide to decent prose style. That was what prompted me first to glance at it a few years ago. Orwell begins his piece with a series of examples of bad, careless prose. From these he identifies a few common elements – “staleness of imagery” and “lack of precision” chief among them. He goes into detail, noting problems like pretentious, often Latinate diction; the use of meaningless words in art criticism; needlessly complicated language (generally when we use compounds when a single verb will do); and finally, the dying metaphor – the metaphor which by its familiarity has all the impact of a fish’s flailing upon the whaler’s deck. Orwell then follows up his criticisms by ending with a list of advice that you feel you ought to pin onto your fridge door:

i. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

ii. Never use a long word where a short one will do.

iii. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

iv. Never use the passive where you can use the active.

v. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

vi. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

“Politics and the English Language” was published just after the end of the Second World War. It lacks some of the urgency of Weil’s essay, which was written when she returned from the Spanish Civil War, where she had been volunteering with the anarchists. For Weil, that war was obviously a prelude of the horrors to come – horrors she might prevent, if only she reached the right people with her voice. Orwell, meanwhile, has the resignation of an older man – he was already in his forties, while Weil was my age (twenty-five) when she wrote her essay. Though Orwell’s criticism of bad writing listed above is important, there is an attack on political writing in particular that I consider far more crucial than the sloppiness of aged professors and arts critics.

It is this part of Orwell’s piece that we can read fruitfully next to Weil’s. Orwell’s main problem with political writing is that it uses meaningless words, or at the very least words that have been emptied as much of their meaning as possible. “The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’.” Even “democracy” has no meaning, Orwell notes, except as a thing that is desirable, and hence a thing you use to describe what you personally want.

This meaningless has the result that “words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different”. By saying he acts for democracy, a general launching a coup can gather the support of an unthinking population at large, while his real goal is the consolidation of his own power. I say unthinking, because such actions rely on a reflex – the reflexive view that democracy is good, and hence those who claim to act in its name must deserve our support.

Meaningless words allow for reflexive action, while another tool we often use, consciously or not, is abstract language. By replacing specifics with euphemisms or vague terminology, we numb our listeners to the real content hidden behind the words. For “Purges”, read the systematic arbitrary imprisonment and murder of our enemies without fair trial; for “liquidation,” read “murder”; and to give a more modern example, for “special military operation” read “war”. Orwell notes that the key element of such language is that it lets us to “name things without calling up mental pictures of them.” In Orwell’s time, most political writing gladly abused this kind of language – and it wasn’t all fascists and communists’ doing. After all, we were still “pacifying” and “bringing civilization” to the colonies at this time in the Allied world, a great hypocrisy Weil is very critical of as well.

For Orwell, “Political writing is bad writing” because political writing demands this kind of numbing language. “Orthodoxy, of whatever colour, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style.” The point of most pamphlets is not to persuade, but to set light emotions that have already been charged by a tensed time, while keeping the mind itself dormant. Writers do this by repeating language that identifies the enemy and identifies our own group. Hence “democracy”, or “communism”, or “fascism”, or “dogs”, or “rats” in Orwell’s time. In our own day we might read “woke” or “leftists” or “alt-right” in the same, utterly meaningless way. Such language, emptied of meaning, and packed with group-associations, dehumanises people and also makes concepts unreal. By never defining “woke” or “fascist” seriously, there is no way to understand any associated political programmes in a way that might leave a space open for compromise and finding common ground.

To conclude, we can say that Orwell’s essay argues our goal must be clear language, because clear language is sincere and comprehensible. And because it lacks the evasiveness built into the abstract and the meaningless, it forces us to stay within acceptable moral boundaries in our politics. “We must murder our political opponents to ensure we maintain power” is only rarely a phrase that we can actually say without opposition. If we all actually aimed at sincerity of prose and voice, we would never end up in those rare situations in which such language can go unopposed at all.

Weil

Orwell’s arguments are straightforward and sensible. Clear language is honest language, and honest language keeps our politics in good bounds. Bad language allows for dangerous suggestions, whether we mean for this or not. Weil, however, goes more directly into why meaningless language in particular (words like “fascist” and “communist” and “woke” in their regular usage) is outright dangerous. She is explicit where Orwell only hints at the benefits of clear language, when she says that clear language can potentially save lives.

This is because Weil’s topic, in “The Power of Words”, is language and war. Specifically, it is about the language we use to justify wars. Here we come back to the problem of meaningless language that Orwell spoke of. Weil notes that our modern wars “are conflicts with no definable objective”, a type of conflict that is inevitably most bitter. I imagine many of us would disagree with Weil instinctively. The most obvious example of a war that has a definable objective is Allies’ participation in the Second World War. But now, think of any other war, and the matter becomes much more difficult. We all know that in the case of the Great War the sides “sleepwalked” into the conflict. You can possibly think of some other examples to confirm or deny this, but what is interesting are the arguments Weil makes about the consequences of meaningless war goals.

In any war where the goals are defined, it is possible to “weight the value of the stake against the probable cost of the struggle and decide how great an effort it justifies.” This serves a preventative purpose, as when we define goals in this way, we find that war rarely if ever proves a worthwhile activity. But more important than preventing war, clear goals allow for ending it by making a compromise between the sides’ goals possible. Alternatively, in a meaningless war, “there is no longer any common measure or proportion”, and thus a compromise is impossible – including with ourselves, about the worthiness of fighting at all.

No war can be entirely meaningless but the meaning that fills a meaningless war is an extremely dangerous one. The only possible meaning for a meaningless war is the cost of it, in other words the sacrifices and pains it has demanded. This is unavoidable, except by having a real goal, and it results in wars that are self-perpetuating, and last until both nations are utterly ruined. In such a war, the argument “the dead do not wish it”, cannot be fought against, because there are no real objectives to measure the necessary future sacrifices with. And so, we fight, we die, and we water the grass with our blood.

The Trojan War, over Helen, is an example of a meaningless conflict. Helen was just a symbol, and like a chalice filling with blood she gained her meaning as men died for her. But in Weil’s world, “the role of Helen is played by words with capital letters.” Words like fascist or communist have limited meanings except to identify, as noted above, an in-group and an out-group. This prevents the limited practical differences between the totalitarian regimes of the USSR and Hitler’s Germany, for example, from being an obstacle to them declaring each other mortal enemies. The capitalisation of such words takes away any practical meaning to them and thus the concreteness that, again, might allow compromise. 

These meaningless words which serve only to create the conditions for bloodshed are not limited to those hefty ideological words, though. “National interest” and “national security” are other examples of words whose meaning appears neutral, but which under Weil’s gaze reveal themselves to be primarily about securing the resources to succeed in war. Because success in any potential war is based on ensuring that others do not succeed, national interest inevitably leads to national conflict, and compromises are impossible where there can be only success and failure.

A binary choice, victory or defeat, success, or failure, are the rails which these abstract, capitalised words force us to travel along. For Weil, this is insanity. Everything, for her, lies upon a spectrum. This is the way of thinking which she wants us to adopt in our own lives. When there are no absolutes, distinctions can always be drawn, and ground shifted between positions to allow for a compromise.

By contrast, once we think only in isms and absolutes, murder appears permissible. When we cannot kill capitalism, for it is too abstract to wound with blade or bomb, we decide to kill capitalists instead. Everything soon becomes justifiable when the goal is an ill-defined victory. What shocks Weil is the way that human beings seemingly will choose death and violence over actually interrogating the meaning of the words that they are using to justify the most barbarous acts: “apparently it is easier to kill, and even to die, than to ask ourselves a few quite simple questions.” It is disappointing that this really does seem to be the case.

Similarities and Differences

Both Orwell and Weil in these essays take language as their topic, and they follow a well-travelled path in deploring contemporary language’s lack of clarity. Orwell focuses on how abstract and vague language numbs us to potentially horrific facts, ultimately allowing us to tolerate the intolerable – colonialism, totalitarianism, and so on. Weil is less interested in giving writing advice. The words that are her enemies in “The Power of Words” are not just words on the page, or even words in speeches, but words in the mind. Given capital letters and made abstractions, they carry us into conflicts that we cannot end because they brook no compromise by denying common ground or any sense of measurement and limit.

Orwell’s call in “Politics and the English Language” is primarily to write better, so that we might think better and avoid bad positions; Weil demands instead that we interrogate what we believe and set ourselves up to think according to “the ideas of limit, measure, degree, proportion, relation, comparison, contingency, interdependence, interrelation of means and ends”. Both writers’ messages are important, but Weil’s one is the more urgent and more lofty.

It will not have escaped readers’ notice that there is a hot war going on at the time of writing, and plenty of internal conflict closer to home for those who live outside the combatants’ lands. These two essays provide guidance about the ways that language plays into creating and sustain such violent divisions, whether they are physical or still as yet merely verbal. That clarity is a virtue is undeniable. And Orwell’s essay is such a joy to read that everyone should study it as a model for effective prose.

But Weil’s essay, to my mind, is the more important at the present time. The ongoing war is for one side utterly meaningless, and for the other in danger of becoming abstracted in the way Weil warns against. It is easy, when suffering greatly, to make sacrifice one’s argument for continuing battle. But this makes compromise impossible and thus anything except a peace reached through exhaustion. That is not to deny that the one side’s stated goals are reasonable and generally moral. But there must be a limit to the cost we are willing to put in for that victory, no matter how moral or even just that victory may be. By losing sight of Weil’s ideas of boundaries and proportion, we can fall into a situation where inertia and the blood already clogging the trenches are preventing the thing that is almost certainly most worthwhile of all: peace.