From A Swedish Point of View

Abstract

92 Reviews FROM A SWEDISH POINT OF VIEW STEFAN ANDERSSON Bredgaran 17B 222 21 Lund, Sweden SANDERSS@CHASS.UTORONTO.CA Gunnar Fredriksson. Wittgenstein. Stockholm: Albert Bonniers Forlag, 1993. Pp. 274. 60 kronor. Svante N?rdin. Fi~osofernas Krig [The Philosopher's War: European Philosophy dunng the FIrst World War]. Nora: Bokforlaget Nya Doxa, 1998. Pp. 265. 170 kronor. Bertrand Rus~ell pl.ays an i:npor~ant ~art in. Gunnar Fredriksson's book about LudWIg Wlttgenstem; thIS reVIew w111 concentrate on what the author has to say about their relationship. Fredriksson wrote a book about Ru~sell i~ 1984 called Bertrand Russell,' en intellektuell i politiken, which I re~Iewed l.n Russell (n.s. 5 [1985]). In it he showed that he is no stranger to phl1osophlcal thought. Fredriksson studied philosophy at Lund University and at Oxford in the early '60S, when he met Russell and had an interview with him. Instead of pursuing an academic career, Fredriksson went into journalism.. ~e wrote a book in 1962 called Det politiska spraket [The Language of PolltIcs] that has become something of a minor classic in its field in Sweden. Twenty years later he wrote a book about Joseph Conrad, and after the book about Wittgenstein one about Arthur Schopenhauer. Fredriksson is a rare phenomenon in Swedish cultural journalism. His book about Wittgenst~inshows that he is capable ofexplaining complicated philosophical problems In a way that a non-specialist can understand. Reviews 93 Fredriksson keeps emphasizing that much of what Wittgenstein wrote should be considered as mystical poetry rather than as attempts to solve philosophical problems in the traditional sense. In Wittgenstein's thinking there is an important connection between logic, ethics and mysticism; what they amount to cannot be said--it can only show itself Fredriksson claims that Russell never really understood the importance of this distinction between what can be said about the world and what can only be shown. I think Russell understood what Wittgenstein was trying to say. He realized that if Wittgenstein was right, much of what he himself had written was an attempt to say the unsayable. Instead of allowing different hierarchies of language and thus opening up the possibility of an infinite progress, Wittgenstein outlawed all levels of metalanguages. Russell preferred some kind of type theory and meta-talk to silence and did not think that Wittgenstein's solution to the problem of the relationship between language and reality was valid. He thought there was something paradoxical in Wittgenstein's theory, since he had succeeded in saying quite a lot about what cannot be talked about. When they met after the First World War Russell thought,that Wittgenstein had turned into a "complete mystic". It's hard to say exactly what Russell had in mind when he referred to Wittgenstein as "a mystic", but it must have been a somewhat different kind of mysticism than the one Russell had outlined in his essay "Mysticism and Logic", where he gives it four defining characteristics (a special way of knowing, the unity of the world, the unreality of time and of evil) that in parts fit well with his chosen examples of Parmenides, Heraclitus, Plato, Spinoza, Hegel and Bergson, but would not fit well with Wittgenstein except for some parallels with Spinoza's views. I have written about the difference between Wittgenstein and Russell's mysticism earlier (Russell, n.s. 18 [1998]) and will not repeat that discussion except by emphasizing some similarities in their different approaches. Neither of them saw traditional Christian mysticism as an answer to their questions about God and the meaning of life, but neither of them could totally free himself from the anthropomorphism of Christian theology. The major difference was that while Wittgenstein kept struggling with religious and existential questions, trying to find ways of somehow expressing his deepest insights, Russell did not have much more to say about his mysticism after 1914 and instead did what he could to create a more peacefUl and loving world. Mysticism and the importance of seeing Wittgenstein as a literary writer, a poet and a mystic rather than a traditional philosopher, run through Fredriksson's book. He has many interesting comments to make. The...