Tuesday
The invaluable website Literary Hub has alerted me to a fascinating article about how American hardboiled detective fiction inspired and influenced the man some consider as the 20th century’s greatest philosopher. Who knew that Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler would figure into Ludwig Wittgenstein’s groundbreaking theories about philosophy and language?
According to Philip K. Zimmerman in CrimeReads, “During the last two decades of his life, Wittgenstein read such fiction compulsively.” Zimmerman then lays out how both Wittgenstein’s theories and his very identity as a philosopher drew strength from what most people of the time regarded as pulp fiction.
Zimmerman sums up Wittgenstein’s philosophic concerns as follows:
Wittgenstein’s central question, the conundrum that haunted him throughout his life, was what can and cannot be said. With time his position on this question changed, but even at his most expansive, he remained skeptical about the ability of words to capture, or even explore, universal truths—precisely what most philosophers believe their words to be doing. The young Wittgenstein thought it was impossible to say anything truly meaningful about God, the soul, ethics, the nature of being or virtually any of the other subjects that philosophers go on about. His claim was not that these things don’t exist but merely that words can’t touch them.
Here, a tragedy looms. It appears we’re being asked to accept that the most profound dimensions of our experience—more or less all the things that make life tolerable—are incommunicable, that as soon as we have the guts to admit the truth about language, the door locks on our cage of existential solitude. But happily (if that’s the word I’m looking for), Wittgenstein continued to believe in ways of showing what cannot be directly said and of understanding what cannot be directly thought. By arranging our ideas correctly, we reveal the ineffable connections between them; by looking at the world in a certain way, we permit its true nature to show through. In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein calls this “the mystical”: a communication beyond the articulable and an understanding beyond the limits of reality. Because mysticism also cannot be spoken of, it occupies very little space in the Tractatus, yet in a sense it is what the whole book is about. By delimiting language, Wittgenstein hoped to open us up to what lies beyond it.
Zimmerman connects this with hardboiled fiction in that the latter also communicates indirectly. If a sense of dread pervades, say, Chandler’s The Big Sleep, it is because the menace is never explicitly laid out but only hinted at. Zimmerman identifies the genre’s minimalism as key:
The hardboiled style is highly adept at the magic trick of saying without actually saying, of using indirect means such as tone and mood, atmosphere and scene, symbolism and choice of detail to conjure up an understanding, or simply a feeling, that is all the stronger, and perhaps all the truer, for never being stated explicitly.
Hardboiled detective fiction is hardly the only narrative form that operates in this way. Joseph Conrad and Henry James come immediately to mind as authors who permit the true nature of the world to shine through without explicitly naming it. Zimmerman, however, says that Wittgenstein wasn’t only attracted to the genre’s indirect style. He identified with the hardboiled detectives themselves.
To explain why, Zimmerman goes into the history of crime fiction and how it evolved from the soft-boiled detective fiction of Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle to the hard edge of the Americans. In the former, the detective looks for patterns in the evidence before propounding, often in a comfortable setting, a theory that connects all the dots. This, Zimmerman notes, is how classical philosophy operated before Wittgenstein radically broke from it.
Early in his career, he notes, Wittgetstein did what other philosophers did:
During that time, he was one of several philosophers trying to analyze our knowledge of the world down to its most basic parts, an approach to philosophy known as logical atomism. One of the central ambitions of logical atomism was to construct an absolute theory of meaning, one that would explain with mathematical precision just how the elementary units of meaning, namely words and propositions, relate to their ostensible objects, namely things and states of affairs. The Tractatus is perhaps the work that best succeeds in taking this strand of logical atomism to its logical conclusions—and, for the same reason, perhaps also the work that best demonstrates how unsatisfactory such an approach to language ultimately is. The theory of meaning put forth in the Tractatus is, to put it mildly, somewhat narrow. As Wittgenstein points out, the book itself, if judged by its own ruthless standards, is largely meaningless.
Wittgenstein needed Hammett, Chandler, Mickey Spillane and others to give him the courage to break with this model. Instead of an armchair detective a la Dupin and Holmes, he became philosophy’s equivalent of the street-smart private eye. Zimmerman uses Hammett’s introduction to The Maltese Falcon to elaborate:
Rejecting the detective as master logician, perhaps best embodied by Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin, these writers [Hammett, Carroll John Daly] developed a more naturalistic, pragmatic type of hero who distrusts abstractions and solves crimes instead with a blend of street smarts, gut instinct and the occasional right hook to the jaw: a figure we now recognize immediately as the hardboiled detective.
Hardboiled investigations proceed not by logical links between clues but from scene to scene and suspect to suspect. Formal reasoning rarely has much to contribute. Questions are posed and solved—or not solved—by messier, more tentative, ultimately more human rules of play. In his 1934 introduction to The Maltese Falcon, Hammett, who himself had been a Pinkerton detective, described how Sam Spade differed from his famous predecessors: “Spade has no original […] For your private detective does not […] want to be an erudite solver of riddles in the Sherlock Holmes manner; he wants to be a hard and shifty fellow, able to take care of himself in any situation, able to get the best of anybody he comes in contact with […]”
That a crime has been committed, Hammett knew, does not necessarily mean that a plan has been carried out. Plotting and scheming are things people usually do in response to a crime, not in preparation for one. And since most crimes are not clean in the first place, their solutions probably aren’t either. To search for logic in a murder case is to expect to find what was likely never there.
Zimmerman then spells out the parallel:
Wittgenstein wanted to slash through the Gordian knot of logical analysis, rescuing language from its abstract philosophical uses and restoring it to its natural functions. The hardboiled writers, meanwhile, were hard at work extricating the detective from the airless realm of riddles and reinjecting him or her into social reality, seedy underbelly and all.
Wittgenstein did eventually develop a method for his new philosophy. The key insight was that language is not a logical system of denotation after all. Rather, language is a form of social behavior—a set of conventions and nothing more…
This view radically depreciates supposedly philosophical language (which Wittgenstein continued to believe was mostly nonsense) and radically appreciates everyday speech. The philosopher achieves clarity, Wittgenstein now believed, by discarding generalizations and focusing instead on concrete circumstances.
Zimmerman has fun applying the hardboiled analogy to a philosopher who seems as far removed as possible from the grimy streets of southern California:
The Continental Op never solved a crime by abstraction. He took to the streets, diving headfirst into the flow. He cracked cases not by steps in logic but by steps on the pavement. Similarly, we can take Wittgenstein to be saying that philosophers have gone wrong by adopting the method of the armchair detective, who solves the mystery at a distance and because of that distance….Wittgenstein’s new philosophy embraced closeness, challenging philosophers to finally get up from their armchairs, so to speak, and hit the streets. It was in this fundamentally hardboiled sense that he called his late masterpiece the Philosophical Investigations.
Explaining why Wittgenstein would identify with the Continental Op, Zimmerman points out that the fiction we love allows us to occupy our deepest selves. At his core, he says, Wittgenstein was a hardboiled philosopher:
And in fact the hardboiled hero is a model he embodied with admirable consistency, in his own intellectual way. Sangfroid, indifference to popular opinion, contempt for authority, unflinching determination to face our human limits—these were all hallmarks of his personal style. Wittgenstein, we might say, was a hardboiled thinker. Like a hardboiled hero, he was obsessed by right and wrong but only on his own terms, and he refused to preach about it. Like a hardboiled hero, when faced with the choice between misunderstanding and silence, he chose silence. His primary loyalty was to himself and his work—which in the final analysis were the same thing.
In this description, I think of Sam Spade explaining to Brigit O’Shaughnessy why he’s turning in for the murder of his partner, even though he loves her:
Spade pulled his hand out of hers. He no longer either smiled or grimaced. His wet yellow face was set hard and deeply lined. His eyes burned madly. He said: “Listen. This isn’t a damned bit of good. You’ll never understand me, but I’ll try once more and then we’ll give it up. Listen. When a man’s partner is killed he’s supposed to do something about it. It doesn’t make any difference what you thought of him. He was your partner and you’re supposed to do something about it. Then it happens we were in the detective business. Well, when one of your organization gets killed it’s bad business to let the killer get away with it. It’s bad all around–bad for that one organization, bad for every detective everywhere. Third, I’m a detective and expecting me to run criminals down and then let them go free is like asking a dog to catch a rabbit and let it go. It can be done, all right, and sometimes it is done, but it’s not the natural thing
When a philosopher is searching for the truth, he or she has got to follow it to the end. If he or she doesn’t, it’s bad for every philosophers everywhere. Asking a philosopher to let go of the search is like asking a dog to catch a rabbit and let it go. It can be done, all right, and sometimes it is done, but it’s not the philosophic thing.