Wittgenstein’s Poker
David Edmonds and John Eidinow
Ecco/HarperCollins. Paperback. 340 pages

A reconstruction of the historical and philosophical contexts of the legendary encounter between Karl Popper and Ludwig Wittgenstein on October 25th, 1946, at the Cambridge Moral Science Club, this book makes for some fascinating reading–especially for those intrigued–as I am–by the enigmatic Wittgenstein. Though he has always been a problematic figure for me, it must be said that Wittgenstein comes across in this telling in even darker shades than other biographers have painted him, especially in his attempts–at first successful–in buying off the Nazis so that the Jewish origins of his family would be overlooked. The sad truth emerges that Wittgenstein himself was anti-Semitic–although, as in all things pertaining to him–even this is complicated and perhaps not as it seems.

When I first heard of this enounter between the lion-like Wittgenstein and the retiring Karl Popper, I at first envisioned Popper as the sacrificial lamb, but as Edmonds and Eidinow make abundantly clear, the philosopher of the Open Society was himself a brilliant bully when it came to argument. So the stage is set, the event takes place, and yet another avenue opens up for exploration–that of the fallibility of human memory. The book, it seems, was suggested by a series of letters penned by those who were present as students when the poker event took place and which were originally published in the Times Literary Supplement in 1998. They illustrate how different even the basic contours of a story can be when viewed in hindsight and how human memory can be distorted by wish fulfillment. Certainly Karl Popper’s memory of the encounter as recounted in his memoires appears to have been liberally distorted in his favor when he awarded himself the “victory” in the debate. Or not. All we can be sure of is that that unique moment in time with Wittgenstein and Popper seething at each other while Bertrand Russell looks on has become yet another myth of the 20th century–a moment as numinous as J. Robert Oppenheimer’s meeting with that general whose name I can’t now remember, or John Cage sitting silently in front of a piano in a concert hall at about the same time that I learned to bounce a ball.