Reviews for Language and Solitude: Wittgenstein, Malinowski and the Habsburg Dilemma

The average rating for Language and Solitude: Wittgenstein, Malinowski and the Habsburg Dilemma based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-03-06 00:00:00 Tommy Wood A couple years ago I tried reading the Philosophical Investigations and remember being disappointed. I had the impression of a mind continually strangling itself exactly at the point where it ought to start thinking. Wittgenstein famously was not very well-read in the history of philosophy. This relative ignorance has become part of his legend: rather than be burdened by what everyone else had to say on the subject, he was able to cut directly to the actual problems of philosophy. At one time I found this very appealing, and no doubt it's true that excessive learning can lead to stale pedantry, an inversion of the real priorities of thought. Nonetheless, I now think erudition is an indispensable part of philosophy. The fact is there's really no escaping our tradition. If we lack a deep understanding of it we are bound to unconsciously fall prey to its prejudices. Thus in the end I think Wittgenstein's lack of learning was really a liability. He simply didn't go as a deep as other great twentieth century philosophers. And yet he's undoubtedly the most revered thinker of the past hundred years. An aura of awe surrounds practically everything he said or did. This awe cuts across different schools of philosophy, and outside philosophy itself, to art and literature. Partly it's justified: Wittgenstein was a brilliant man, with a mysterious personality, and a seductive, highly quotable prose style. At the same time for me it's refreshing to find an extremely intelligent author who's willing to puncture this awe. Ernest Gellner devoted a large part of his intellectual career to being the anti-Wittgenstein, starting with his very first book Words and Things published in 1959 (a fun bit of trivia: this book was the reason Foucault's Les Mots et les Choses needed a new name in English, thus becoming The Order of Things). Published posthumously in 1998, Language and Solitude was Gellner's last book (and also just happens to be the first I've read). In many ways a curious work, it's a genre is not always clear. It begins with a discussion of the fundamental dichotomies of western thought since the enlightenment. On the one hand, we have the atomistic worldview of the isolated individual; on the the other, the collective world of culture and tradition. Or else, we could speak of romanticism vs. positivism, or even language vs. solitude. From there, oddly enough, the book becomes an account of the decline and fall of the Habsburg empire. Gellner tells this story through intellectual portraiture, taking Wittgenstein as the embodiment of the dilemmas of a decadent civilization. Wittgenstein of course had not one but two philosophies; the first one laid out in the Tractatus, the second in the Philosopher Investigations and other later writings. Gellner claims that the two philosophies correspond to the basic polarities of western thought. In his first phase, with the Tractatus, Wittgenstein formulated an extreme version atomistic/empiricist view; he then found this to be inadequate and went over to the other extreme, declaring there was no truth outside language and culture. Gellner argues that W was never able to tolerate any ambiguity or mediation between the two views; he was an all-or-nothing thinker. Gellner thus has to bring in Malinowski to give an example of how these polarities can be combined. An empiricist in terms of method (credited with inventing anthropological fieldwork), Malinowski nonetheless developed a non-atomisitic, holistic conception of culture. Gellner's reading of the Tractatus is wonderful. He has a fine sense of both the philosophical nuances and the human drama of that work. His discussion of the later Wittgenstein is perhaps overly dismissive (even to a non-Wittgensteinian). He doesn't hide his contempt for the vapidness of ordinary language philosophy. However, I'm willing to tolerate the man's crankiness simply for the range and originality of his thought. Gellner was polymath intellectual who wasn't afraid to be polemical, and I hope to keep reading him.

Review # 2 was written on 2010-08-03 00:00:00 Natalie Tedford 100x better than the pompous Stephen Toulmin book we all read (or told one another we read) in the 70s about Vienna and Wittgenstein, this is Gellner's last completed book, which somehow I was unaware of. Gellner's thesis is that there is a dichotomy between left and right; and also between rationalists and romanticists - which cuts across left and right - there are rightwing rationalists and romanticists and leftwing ditto and ditto. However in the last 50 years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the regime consisted of a few rationalists - often Jewish and other highly educated believers in science and the dispassionate bureaucratic empire - surrounded by romantics on all sides, who believed in their national/folkish/communal destiny as Hungarians, Czechs, Slovenes, etc. Ironic for the Jews, who elsewhere in Europe tended to be left-wing Romantics, because the definition of national identity in these pre-Versailles days tended to be - well, let's get rid of the Jews and those who remain will be the pure stock of Ruritanians (in Gellner's standard joke about the nationalities). (There is a wonderful moment in Peter Drucker's memoirs when he tells a story of Franz Josef pleading with - perhaps his father? - a valued civil servant, to oblige him by just going through a baptismal ceremony - it can be in the middle of the night, no one will see - because, "you see, Herr Drucker, I am supposed to be running a Holy Roman empire." This explains Wittgenstein's two phases of philosophy - one completely rationalist and reductive (the Tractatus), growing out of his youth as an unusually brave soldier of the Emperor; the second completely contradicting the first, in the Philosophical Investigations, in which he goes all Romantic/folky/community. I can't wait to see what happens with Malinowski, can you? Sorry to leave you hanging like this...