Michael Nedo

Michael Nedo talking to Alan Macfarlane about Ludwig Wittgenstein 17th February 2017

2017 0:05:12 At the very beginning of my studies I was doing mathematics; I received a rather generous scholarship in Germany and part of this scholarship requested all the newly-elected ones to join together in the long vacation on a topic so you would learn how academic work actually worked; it was a general topic and then groups were formed to discuss certain aspects of the topic; at my time it was Christianity or theology and atheism and I joined the atheists because I expected it to be intellectually more rewarding; but I had to read a terrible book, which was the high price I paid, which was by Bertrand Russell Why I am not a Christian; in this book which under normal circumstances I would never have read more than ten pages, there were one or two quotes by Wittgenstein of whom I had never heard; they were so wonderful, like precious stones in a whole lot of mud, that I thought I must read him; that is how it all started; that was in 1962; I continued doing first mathematics, then a second degree in physics, and a then a third degree in zoology, but in all my studies in sciences my main interest was what one could call a poetic one, namely the underlying description of formal explanations; my view and aspect was more that of Faraday than of Maxwell, even though I am a great admirer of Maxwell; during all these years I was reading more and more Wittgenstein and it became clear that the publications of his writings were full of mistakes; we had no access to the originals but there were clear indications it could not have been like that; I started a correspondence with one of the editors and one of the heirs of Wittgenstein, Rush Rhees, and he had to admit that wherever I pointed out to a possible mistake it was a mistake; so he developed a kind of trust and eventually my friends in a circle reading Wittgenstein had an idea, which was fashionable at the time, to produce a pirated edition; that was at the time when Wittgenstein's manuscripts had become available as a microfilm, the so-called Cornell film which was in 1972; I was not a great admirer of pirated editions so I said that it should be done seriously and that I would talk to Wittgenstein's heirs; that was how I came to Cambridge in 1973; the heirs agreed that the editions which they had produced were problematic and could be done better, but did not believe it could be done as Wittgenstein's writings were so complicated; I saw them a year later in 1974 and they agreed that I should do such an edition if I took responsibility; but I had a job in the Max Planck Society in Thüringen and I didn't want to give up my work in zoology; I agreed to take on the responsibility as long as I could continue my work as a scientist and I started looking for funding; finally I found rather generous funding from the Thyssen Foundation; as soon as I had funding and the project started; then something very strange happened which I might have been able to foresee, but didn't; my friends and colleagues who were not scientists but from philosophy and the humanities turned from friends to foes; each one had a different idea about what an edition should look like; their main interest in editing Wittgenstein was to use Wittgenstein as a sort of big ship on which they could load their own ideas in the form of footnotes; but I had agreed with Wittgenstein's heirs that we would produce a non-commented edition with no learned commentary; eventually all my former friends and friendships fell apart and I had to decide whether to give up the project or give up my work as a scientist; I chose the latter; whether that was wise or not I do not know but I am still convinced that Wittgenstein's writings are the most important of our time

5:50:10 I should have been able to have seen this beforehand; if I had looked at the secondary literature on Wittgenstein, and there was already a great deal as he was the philosopher that philosophers studied and wrote about; if I had read the literature I would have realized the bitchiness, the incompetence, the desire to become the true apostle of Wittgenstein, and that was something that had already started in his lifetime, that people were presenting themselves as true apostles, presenting the true gospel; Wittgenstein hated it and he said about such people that they showed you a stolen bunch of keys but don't know which doors they opened; that is probably the undercurrent of the difficulties I entered into by editing Wittgenstein; the interesting thing is as I do not use any learned commentary I would have thought they would leave me alone; but as it seems that as I concentrate on what he has actually written, presenting his writings very precisely and truthfully, they show themselves as being cheats, and that does not make friends; they say certain things that Wittgenstein had said and meant which are clearly wrong; a great deal of the secondary literature are by people who present themselves as being the only ones who have access to the true material, so people have to listen to them; it is a bit like in the old days when the Scriptures were presented by a small elite before Protestantism

8:18:14 Wittgenstein wrote almost all his philosophy in German; I come from a very strange part of Germany which has had all sorts of ownership; it was even once part of Hungary but is now part of Germany; German is not my mother-tongue but I learnt it at the age of four when I was sent to school and I immediately fell in love with the German language; my mother-tongue is an ancient Slavonic language called Sorbish or Wendish, a very strange language with a very small vocabulary but a very rich and complex set of forms; it is basically a poetic language; the translations of Wittgenstein, like Elizabeth Anscombe's, which were done with the best of intentions are unfortunately rather misleading; I shall give an example from Anscombe's translation; there is a key point in the book; the book begins with about a hundred examples of model theories describing language and the function of language, and he shows for each of them, beginning with Augustine and ending with his own from the Tractatus, that they do not work and why and how they do not work; after these examples he makes a kind of turning in his point of view and he argues but how is it, can we negotiate stringency away from logic, wouldn't logic fall apart if we do that; he continues further that this is not the point; we have to turn our whole point of view around our actual need as the turning point; Elizabeth translated this as we have to turn around our whole examination, and examination is not the same thing as a point of view; an examination is comparing an established knowledge to a questionable one; but turning my point of view is not relating to any established knowledge or structure whatsoever; these tiny mistakes lead to all sorts of misunderstandings; for instance, at the end of his Tractatus Wittgenstein compares the sentences of his books once they have been understood as being nonsensical; out of this the unfortunate translation of "nonsensical" as "nonsense", a whole theory of understanding Wittgenstein has developed; it runs under the name "the new Wittgenstein", but that is based on a misunderstanding; they believe that Wittgenstein did actually write "nonsense sentences" which he did not; what he means by "nonsensical" is - if you are trying to knit a pullover and your cat messes up your wool if you want to continue your knitting you have to disentangle the wool, which is a complicated process; it is necessary otherwise you can't continue knitting; once you have finished disentangling the wool this complicated task has lost it's meaning because now you can continue knitting - in that sense he uses this term, and it has nothing to do with "nonsense"; so there are many examples which lead to serious misunderstandings through the translation

13:20:18 It is not easy to answer why I think Wittgenstein is great but I shall have a go; our world is determined by science; science is based on what we call laws of nature, all laws; now such a thing as a law of nature does not exist, it would only be accessible to someone who could see the world from outside the world; that is only given to a god and not a man; these laws are rules made by man, and even if these rules have be made with the best intentions, by strictly following the rules and not caring about any other aspect it can get seriously wrong; a bit like when Edward Teller argued that the nuclear bomb was not a problem, it is neither good nor evil, it has no moral implication, as it has come about by the strict application of science; now if you strictly apply something which is incomplete and possibly also misleading you will end up in disaster; in that sense you could compare Wittgenstein to a picture which Lessing produced in a short text called 'Educating Mankind'; he makes a comparison between an elementary book and being responsible for what you do; he says that the elementary book is necessary for the child who doesn't understand, to tell the child what it should and should not do; in order to make the child follow these rules, you supplement the rules with rewards and punishments; now this type of book is meaningful to a certain part of a person's life, but once the child has outgrown this to keep the child with such type of book will end up in disaster; that is in my view what science represents today, because many of the problems we are having are explained by irresponsible politicians, industrialists etc.; that is true to a degree, but they do not describe the world to understand the world, they use the description of science; you cannot say that scientists are malicious so there must be something else which is going wrong; in that sense you could say that Wittgenstein's philosophy is a philosophy which has all the qualifications to move men away from the elementary book to the individual responsibility of each one in this world, a bit like resembling the transition from the Old Testament to the New Testament though that is a rather daring comparison; Lessing said that a better pedagogue had to come to take the elementary schoolbook from the child that had outgrown it, then the sentence follows: "Jesus came"

18:03:13 On the book Wittgenstein's Poker, my view is that they left out the essential point which is that Wittgenstein wrote the book entitled 'Tractatus' in English, which unfortunately does not convey the German title, Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung ; an abhandlung is a treatise that is a description under a precondition, a prejudgement, and the title indicates that this is logical and philosophical; this book originally had an enormous impact in the German-speaking world where it was circulated as a pirated print, as Wittgenstein called it, in a paper by a chemist called Wilhelm Ostwald called Annalen der Naturphilosophie; it had an enormous impact in Vienna in particular, in the so-called Vienna Circle; what is important in this context is that in Austria in particular there were quite a number of books/texts written with the criterion "logical"; there was Husserl, Carnap, Popper, Wittgenstein and many others; the important element of the logical in the Austrian scholarly writing was that it was aimed at breaking the education monopoly of the Catholic Church, so to replace the ideology of the Catholic Church by logic; that was the intention, the movement, but that was a serious misunderstanding for Wittgenstein's text; it was certainly true for Popper and for Carnap; at the same time there was a fairly similar movement in England but relating to the specifics of English society and culture, and that was basic English; that was an aim to break the education monopoly of the upper classes; in Germany there was a movement which was even stranger which was that the educated Germans felt that German nationalism might turn into a problem; as they saw German nationalism manifested in the German language, they invented these universal languages such as Esperanto and the like; it is quite fascinating as it all happened at the same time in the 1920s 30s; the writers of Wittgenstein's Poker made no reference to the importance of logic, of the logical, in his first book the Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung; the second point is that they stressed the Jewishness of both Wittgenstein and Popper; they both were of Jewish descent but neither of them saw themselves as being Jewish; Wittgenstein was not aware of his Jewish roots until the 1930s, and Popper, even after the war when he was asked to contribute to Jewish societies etc. constantly refused; only when he was asked to participate on a book on Freud, Einstein and Popper was he happy; so the Jewishness was not an issue for those two, and if it was an issue it was one of upper class and lower class; the Wittgenstein family belonged to the upper class in Austria and the Popper family came from the fallen middle class; that never really creates a great deal of understanding and sympathy, but had nothing to do with Jewishness in the first instance; in their research into what really had happened they were more interested in the aspects of journalistic interest than actually had happened; they reported quite truthfully the diverse memoirs of what had happened, that it was by no means clear that there was such an event, but they could have started off with a rather clear and factual statement that the kind of poker that was used, not only in this College but in all the Cambridge colleges, namely a piece of steel, could not be held by the handle when the tip was red-hot; it is not possible so that certainly had not happened; the second thing is that they all went to the room with them; the room is so small and there were about thirty people; with thirty people in such a tiny room you simply could not have had a fire, they would have all suffocated in it; but the story was too good; I have known Popper quite well, and we became relatively good friends in the end; in the beginning he was fairly hostile as I was admiring Wittgenstein, but in the end he said to me that maybe he might not have remembered the story about the poker correctly; I believe that this story told by Popper was like a joke that springs to mind after you have left the party