Wittgenstein’s Poker
David Edmonds & John Eidinow
Ludwig Wittgenstein is one of those singular figures of history who seems to exist in a category all his own. This book contains a definitive investigation into perhaps the most famous of his encounters. It concerns a heated debate between Wittgenstein and fellow philosopher, Karl Popper, in which the two passionate thinkers came down so diametrically opposed on a philosophical matter, that Wittgenstein at one point or another grabbed a fire poker out of a fireplace and “threatened” Popper with it… Or was he just using it to illustrate a point rather forcefully? Humorously, in a debate witnessed by a room full of philosophers, no one could agree on the simple facts of what exactly took place that evening. Edmonds and Eidinow’s work is a book length investigation of this mystery, and of the milieu and unique cultural moment of two great thinkers. I particularly appreciate the ample cultural context we receive about the interwar period in Europe, an era of passionate thought, science, and artistry, but full of tragedy, and despair.
We find in Wittgenstein a man deeply out of sync with his own times, who nonetheless managed to win the admiration of a whole era of philosophers whose thought was in its core identity, deeply opposed his ideas. Wittgenstein fundamentally distrusted the scientism and logical positivism of his era. Yet, somehow, he existed within the very same august halls of the Vienna Circle and in Cambridge where this school of thought thrived.
This book is a great introduction to analytic philosophy and the matters it is concerned with. These questions and the approach are far more technical and abstract than what I suspect most persons think of when they imagine a philosopher at work, but Edmonds and Eidinow make it accessible to the rest of us.
Is it possible to have an actual infinity, or is it just a mathematical concept? Is our perception of time objective or subjective? Is our sense of existing grounded in external reality or in our internal sense of self? An analytic philosopher is always concerned with the precision of language, in properly defining one’s terms, and in the formal construction of propositions, arguments, and conclusions.
This precision can be alienating and difficult to follow for a lay person. From my own perspective, despite its rigor, I have noticed that the approach seems to lack the rhetorical power of other schools of thought. Most analytic philosophers, however renowned in their field, rarely break into popular consciousness, and the application of their techniques in general conversation will often find you met with blank stares.
Perhaps this was a small part of what made Wittgenstein question the values of this endeavor. In many ways his views on language foreshadow the coming Post-Modern era of thought that questions whether or not it is possible to ascertain any objective reading of a text. Yet Wittgenstein remains distinct from these later thinkers, for he would likely have been reticent to accept the Post-Modernists’ moral conclusions.
Over the course of this investigation, the poker incident grows beyond a mere workplace drama, into a nearly mythic tale that mirrors the very dilemmas the philosophers sought to unravel. It’s answer and resolution at times appear as insolvable as the philosophical problems that troubled the minds of its participants.
Man’s Search for Meaning
Viktor Frankl
Frankl’s book is a classic firsthand examination of the state of man’s soul in the most dire of circumstances: the Holocaust. I would have an easier time recommending this book than its Russian equivalent, Gulag Archipelago, due to the former’s brevity, and our general familiarity with the Holocaust in the West. Frankl and Solzhenitsyn’s works are not interchangeable, for there we find that the two most horrible prison systems in our memory; The Nazi concentration camps and the Soviet Gulags have horrors that try the human psyche in unique ways.
In the concentration camps death was a certainty, not a high probability. No “rehabilitation” was possible. One had no sentence, no name, and no prospective release date. Camp’s purpose was to kill you; if you could not work, then today; if you could, then slowly over time. No release was ever proscribed. This produced an utter hopelessness and despair in the camp inmates that I never saw described to the same degree in Solzhenitsyn. The latter describes a strange and paradoxical freedom, where, for the first time in their lives, they found kindred spirits with whom one could talk freely about all the important things of the world for the first time. But despite this strange freedom and unexpected joy which Solzhenitsyn found in Gulag, it would not do to omit mention of its unique terrors. Where, even in prison, one was still not safe from the ears of informers, or from the general criminal populace that was free to rob and abuse political prisoners with impunity. The prime characteristic of the Soviet system is that of a cruel, bureaucratic indifference. It arises from the sheer laziness, self-interest, and incompetence characteristic of all top-heavy governmental systems. Your prison buses only seat twenty prisoners? Why not just cram in fifty? What difference does it make? They are prisoners, and enemies of the state.
Both Frankl and Solzhenitsyn do not leave us purely in the mud and despair. For in the unending assault on the body, they both, in their own ways, perceived the need for spiritual transcendence of the circumstances, or to die in despair as millions of their compatriots did. Frankl’s short book is as convincing a theodicy as I have ever read. A sobering, necessary read.
Purity of the Heart is the Will One Thing
Soren Kierkegaard
I find Kierkegaard rather difficult to read, the manner that he develops an idea is perpetually hard to follow for me so that my attention strays regularly. Despite this I find his work to have moments of profound clarity and insight, but it is of the sort that resists any simple summary of what he is aiming toward. His thinking in the modern sense usually gets distilled down to the simple idea of “the leap of faith” but of course, we should not expect an entire body of work to be reducible to a single catchphrase.
Broadly speaking, in this book, Kierkegaard is developing the idea of how one’s notions, one’s moods, and attitudes change over time. The same words can be said by a youth and an old man and have a world of different meaning between them. It is not simply what is said, but the attitude of the heart, and the time of one’s life, that constitutes the substance of a thought. This fickleness of conviction makes it difficult to “will one thing.” For how can you guarantee that which you will today, you shall will tomorrow? I am reminded of A Roadside Picnic and of Andrei Tarkovsky’s film, Stalker, in which the protagonist travels to a forbidden, secret place, a room in which one’s innermost wish can be granted. Only the innermost wish — and who can know what that is?
Dominion
Tom Holland, the renowned English Historian, (not the other guy!)
Why are things the way that they are? How did our society arrive at this point? Where are we in the course of history? Any thinking person must ask these foundational questions. Questions as broad and far reaching as this are what Holland ponders in Dominion. The modern focus, and disparity of opinions, on matters like sexual mores obscure the foundational moral structure that few would think to reject: the deep-seated intuition of the value of charity; the nobility of persecuted exceeding that of the persecutor; the profound sense of the transcendent value of each and every human being. Holland’s project is no less than to trace the origins of these moral beliefs and their development over the millennia, and he does not find them to arise arbitrarily. Though a nonbeliever himself, he finds in Christianity an engine of social change, powerful and all transforming, yet now so ubiquitous in it’s dominion, as to now be invisible. This claim may strike some as something of an imposition. However, I think it is precisely such a person who would benefit most from Holland’s work. We are after all, nested in multiple layers of reality, be they social, technological, physical, and spiritual. We should not consider our moral beliefs to be the mere makings of our individual psyche. This book is, furthermore, no Christian propaganda text. He does not shy away from describing the numerous religious wars and acts of violence that so harry the human story. His reliance on firsthand account makes this a novelesque read, rather than a mere textbook recounting of history. I cannot help but suspect that any thinking adult in the Western world could benefit from reading this book.
Streams of Living Water
Richard Foster
If Dominion is the thirty-thousand-foot view of Christendom, then Streams of Living Water makes for an excellent eye level companion piece. This book helped illustrate to me how disconnected we moderns are from the actual personalities of Christian history. It seems perpetually in vogue to lambast the sorted past of Christianity as replete with violence, judgement, and fear mongering. But in Streams of Living Water, Richard Foster provides us with wonderful firsthand accounts of remarkable persons across the last two millennia, who took Christ’s words, not just into their hearts, but into foot, and hand, and deed. That names like John Woolman, Dorothy Day, William Seymour, and Phoebe Palmer are scarcely remembered is no fault of the secular world, but the fault of modern Christian forgetfulness.
I suspect this book would be of great encouragement to struggling believers of my own generation, who often find themselves sorely lacking for any role models or heroes in our traditions. In our own era, virtually all strike us as corrupted to one degree or another by lusts or greeds of varying kinds and lead us to doubt whether or not there is, or ever has been, a fruit of the spirit to speak of. Richard Foster helps us to remember what it looks like see the Christian life lived well and fully embodied in charity, community, and self-sacrifice.
All the Kremlin’s Men
Mikhail Zygar
My brother shared this book with me as we have both been following the war in Ukraine rather closely. All the Kremlin’s Men can be considered essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand the inner workings of Putin’s government. Zygar makes use of unprecedented access to sources inside the Kremlin to gain firsthand accounts of Putin’s rise to, and retention of, power that we in the West have only been able to speculate about. There are important revelations to be found within regarding key moments in the relationship between the United States and Russia in the early 2000s, when things looked to be going in a positive direction from the outside. Putin’s skill at manipulating his contemporaries, G.W. Bush, and Prime Minister Tony Blair is chilling and frustrating.
It is equal parts tragic and informative to learn how often the intentions of both West and East go on to be serially misinterpreted and misread by the other. Finally, even despite our dysfunctional, and sensational media in the west, we learn to be almost thankful by comparison to the state of affairs in Russia. Where its government’s permanent, intractable fear of embarrassment produces an iron grip over all public press and dissent. For anyone who has read Gulag Archipelago, the Zygar’s account of the techniques of the Kremlin will ring as tragically familiar.
Report on the Shroud of Turin
Dr. John H. Heller
The Shroud of Turin is one of those things that exists at the very edge of reality. Is this the authentic burial shroud of Christ, or a medieval forgery? The data resists easy answers for all who are willing to look closely. But to answer this question was the goal of the Shroud of Turin Research Project, of which John H. Heller was an original member. Over several exhausting days, the team was granted an extremely rare opportunity to collect samples and take scientific photographs of the Shroud, and to run a battery of tests on its chemical and physical properties in effort to understand how the image on the Shroud was made.
One cannot come away from this book doubting the bona-fides of scientists; top of their fields in computer science, chemistry, and physics, with some members even taking time off from their responsibilities of building satellites at JPL and NASA to join the project. Nor do we question their motives; a team comprised members of a wide variety of religions backgrounds and denominations; their aims and purposes explicitly scientific, not hoping for any particular outcome. Indeed, Protestant members of the team often viewed the Shroud not as a possible proof for Christianity writ-large, but as a mere Catholic relic to be ignored, and it was only due to their professional interests was scientists that the Shroud aroused their interests. And the Shroud is fascinating. Heller’s excitement is infectious; his account is fastidious in its scientific detail, yet never dragging, or growing too obscure. It reads more like a mystery novel than a scientific text. As for the results, I shall not reproduce them here. They are worth reading in full to comprehend their implications.
Return from the Stars
Stanislaw Lem
Return from the Stars was one of the books I picked up on a whim when I visited Chamblin Bookmine last year (featured in the photo of the 2021 edition of this article.) It is a dizzying tale of an astronaut returning to Earth after centuries of space travel due to relativity. The world he returns to is utterly alien to him, and equally alienating to his soul. It is a remarkably distant, original vision of a potential future Earth. This was refreshing to me; I have noticed that science fiction feels stuck in a rut these days. We are having a hard time looking past the Cyberpunk near-future of Blade Runner and similar works that have such a powerful aesthetic vision as to block out all other possibilities. But Return from the Stars, written in 1961, does not have this problem. This world is full of screens and simulations, as is our own, but life is still more embodied and physical in Lem’s vision of the future.
Here, life takes place within massive, glass cities surrounded by screens that emulate sunlight, superlative weather, and sensational vistas. Our own is more prosaic, where we voluntarily confine ourselves to our Netflix boxes that we call homes. But we can scarcely call Lem’s ideas far-fetched. I thought as much about one aspect of the story: the idea of spray-on clothes that one shapes and forms at will with an aerosol can. Not two weeks after finishing this novel, the world was greeted by this stunt.
Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven
John Eliot Gardiner
John Eliot Gardiner manages to demystify the world of Johan Sebastian Bach, a time and place far from the present conscious, and lacking to my knowledge, even a definitive cinematic portrayal. It is an era that a person of my disposition can easily idealize if uncareful, but Gardiner does not make that mistake. His treatment of Bach and his milieu is fair. Bach’s era is recognizably human, like each other, with its shares of petty squabbles, materialism, and pride, and this does not exclude the man himself. It is a necessary reminder of the humanity of a figure so luminary. Perhaps this goes even further to compound the mystery of how Mr. Bach managed, on an unfathomably tight schedule, and with a fairly indifferent audience, to compose such a deep catalogue of masterworks. Here, Gardiner’s erudition is of great value. Both a supremely accomplished conductor and historian, he is the perfect figure to offer us insights into Bach’s intentions and into the Baroque realm which grows more arcane with each year. His body of literary, philosophical, and theological reference leaves many an enticing thread to pull on for future research.
The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Audiobook)
Joseph Campbell
The thought of Joseph Campbell dominates the landscape of Hollywood screenwriting theory. Despite this, I find it rare to encounter anyone well acquainted with his writing directly. More often we encounter Campbell in his distilled forms, like in Christopher Vogler’s The Writer’s Journey, or more recently, Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat. There is reason for this. Campbell is dense, and his concerns are not explicitly about screenwriting. It has been the work of the last few decades for screenwriters to ponder over Campbell and discern how his ideas are relevant to screenwriting. These works, perhaps even more so than Campbell’s original, have been so successful as to form the virtual bedrock of terminology in screenwriting. The examples of its implementation range from Lion King to Star Wars to Wonder Woman. But that Campbell forms such an unquestioned and ubiquitous foundation for screenwriting gives me some pause, and I felt I needed to make the deep dive myself to improve my views on the matter.
The Hero With a Thousand Faces is his foremost book explaining what writers call The Hero’s Journey and what Campbell considered the original “monomyth” behind all world religion, and a process by which a human matures. His project is universal, the desire to show the commonalities in all traditional legends and religious stories; a cycle of psychological development that begins with a step into the outside world, culminates in a tragic death or defeat, followed by a subsequent rebirth and transcendence of the original state. Although his argument is fairly convincing, one may doubt where its edges lie. For Campbell is our guide through the wide variety of cultures and traditions that he draws to our attention, and as our narrator, we who are more ignorant, cannot know what he chooses to omit or alter for his own purposes. Campbell himself is aware of this problem. In the very opening chapter, he anticipates one of the chief criticisms that his work will receive.
“Perhaps it will be objected that in bringing out the correspondences, I have overlooked the differences between the various oriental and occidental, modern, ancient, and primitive traditions… There are of course differences between the numerous mythologies and religions of mankind, but this is a book about the similarities, and once these are understood, the differences will be found to be much less great than is popularly and politically supposed.”
I am not sure if Campbell’s knowing embrace of his favored frame protects him from the damage done to his argument in the final evaluation. I suspect that much discussion regarding the value of Campbell’s work shall center around this question. Just how important are the differences and similarities between the world religions? But that I am inclined to disagree with Campbell hardly makes his insights along the way appear valueless to me.
As this is only my first venture into Campbell, I am far from ready to offer much more of my own thoughts, or to have a nuanced position on Campbell’s value to screenwriting. But I am certain that screenwriters interested in Joseph Campbell should venture boldly to the source and not be intimidated by his dense prose. For even if not all can be grasped in one reading, what is will be of greater value than a mere distillation.
The past recedes from us with increasing velocity. In its place are its modern reproductions, distillations, and the various, soon to be, AI generated simulacra of experience. We will either learn to encounter the original thinkers in their own words, and in their own times, as often as possible, or face the tyrannical flattening of all that texture and coloration into that which merely serves our short sighted interest.
— Bryan