down at my ma's i finally read the book wittgenstein's poker, which is built around an incident at cambridge in which, more or less, the great philosopher ludwig wittgenstein menaced the great philosopher karl popper with a fireplace poker at a colloquium, during a dispute over the nature of philosophy. as an intellectual popularization, it is exemplary, and one thing i can say for it, the characterization of difficult philosophical positions - not only w's and p's but bertrand russell's and the logical positivists', and others - is amazingly clear and accurate and even readable by a lay audience: quite the accomplishment.

you may know that i have, in my time, reviled ludwig wittgenstein, and characterized him as the most overrated philosopher in history by a long way. this book confirms my diagnosis in a variety of ways. in particular, the cult of wittgenstein is displayed in all its glorious slavish stupidity: actual graduate students and philosophy professors dressing like him and talking like him, their ultimate question being "what would wittgenstein say?" in other words: not philosophers at all but acolytes in a messianic religious movement. i was taught, i must say, by a couple of these very people - cora diamond and renford bambrough, to name names - and as you might imagine, i went far out of my way to provoke and ridicule them - or rather, provoke them by ridiculing wittgenstein - though they were perfectly nice people. such is the origin of my wittgenstein loathing.

he had terrible effects on people, including his mentor russell. there are astonishing quotations in poker: russell - at the time the foremost logician in the world - said that after dealing with wittgenstein, he could no longer do logic. he felt too stupid. he thought that wittgenstein would re-articulate the bases of logic, for the first time on firm ground etc. the sort of thing he was talking about is embodied in the tractatus logico-philosophicus. but i think this was more about wittgenstein's mesmeric fu manchu superpowers - his gaze went through you like a bullet through a blancmange, changing you forever (for the worse) - than it was actually about his achievements. if you were enumerating the great advances of logic in the 19th and 20th centuries, you would talk about frege, and russell, tarski, godel, perhaps quine, and perhaps kripke on modal logic. but i think no particular solid fundamental result is associated with the tractatus, or indeed with wittgenstein at all. russell was deluded: he was easily the better and more important logician. the only actual achievement in this line that edmonds and eidinow can point to is truth tables. now these are useful, but they are useful only as a convenient way to represent the already-understood content of the logical connectives; they are definitely not a fundamental discovery.

but let me say that i have recovered from my brush with the wittgenstein cult. w died in 1951, and no one is going to be taught by his students any more, and even his students' students are fading. and i feel more distance. the ordinary-language style stuff of the "later w" - above all the philosophical investigations, is - if i want to be honest - very important. "meaning is use," "family resemblance," "language-games," "form of life," "the private language argument": these are important conceptions in philosophy that are still being played out. in my anxiety to destroy an irrational religion, i turned away from a set of important ideas.

now i will still say things like this: w's writings are extremely pretentious and obscurantist attempts to display his own genius. this is a complex matter; they're not obscurantist the way hegel or derrida is obscurantist, by just sinking into impenetrable jargon and extreme syntax. they are in a way deceptively simple. but that doesn't mean you can understand them, really, one factor in the never-ending industry of w-interpretation. as people keep saying in poker, they are "oracular." they're more like the tao te ching than phenomenology of spirit, but my own sense is that w is nowhere near as profound as lao tzu. they are elusive as a way to make you always think there's something you're not quite seeing, an egomaniacal strategy to persuade you that you are stupid in comparison to the author, which worked even on russell. but they are not merely that, and a little real genius shines through the "i-am-a-genius" persona. so i intend to go back and read again.

the debate between wittgenstein and popper was about whether there are any real philosophical problems, or only linguistic puzzles to be untangled (p held that there were philosophical problems). now i think that even an issue this fundamental to philosophy professors could be handled with a bit of a light touch. (certainly weapons won't help you win the argument, though they might help you win the argument, if you get me). in a way, i'm not horribly unhappy however it comes out, and if i could go back there and get a word or poker in edgewise, i would argue that there is no hard-and-fast distinction between genuine problems and linguistic puzzles. look. if you could elucidate the uses of the word 'true' in language-games, or whatever, that would be a way of addressing - a strategy for addressing - the classical problem of truth. i'd just say that the question is partly about language, or is profitably approached, or even ultimately can only be approached, from within language. that doesn't mean it's not a real problem, right?

i like j.l. austin's view: he makes no grand claims about what you can and cannot possibly do: he simply deploys an ordinary-language analysis strategically: it gives some leverage, gives you fresh insights and so on. is there a problem of truth outside language? it's not clear that's a sensible question, which means that you don't really have a position on it one way or another. you could tackle it head-on: here's my theory of truth. or you could tackle it by analyzing uses of words. these are less different than they might appear, and it's hard to tell what might help until you actually see the elucidation. on some construals "what is truth?" and "what is the meaning of the word 'truth'" are the very same question, but in any case they are inextricably intertwined.

as also i've said before, j.l. austin does very much what later w does: but he does it more clearly, and far more wittily. i just wish he'd finished more books.