on Wittgenstein, Whitehead, Russell, Hemingway

“Described by Bertrand Russell as ‘the most perfect example I have ever known of genius as traditionally conceived, passionate, profound, intense, and dominating,’ Wittgenstein is considered by many to be the greatest philosopher of the 20th century.”

(This comes from the top of the Wittgenstein entry on Wikipedia.)

For a proof of the fact that genius need not always be describable as “intense, and dominating,” we need look no further than Alfred North Whitehead, Russell’s own collaborator. Russell was clearly more impressed by Wittgenstein, whereas I and many others are more impressed by Whitehead at the end of the day (and at the beginning and middle of the day, for that matter).

Certainly Whitehead was a somewhat dull human character compared with Wittgenstein– but so are most of us. And when you read the conversations with Whitehead, he was quite a bit more vivid in conversation than in prose.

For what it’s worth, Gertrude Stein said she had only known three geniuses in her life: Picasso, Whitehead, and herself.

But what I was trying to get at is that the “intense, and dominating” personality is quite frequently overestimated as to its intellectual depth. Being the dominant personality in any group is a key leadership skill, but not always a key intellectual one. Shakespeare, for instance, doesn’t seem to have met the description at all, and neither did Kant. And Hegel even less so, with his mumbling circumlocutions and soporific dinner table conversation. And there you have several of your greatest modern intellects, none of them “intense, and dominating” at all.

At times I enjoy Russell’s clarity, but I don’t find him especially impressive when grouped with some of the more insightful twentieth century figures. And furthermore, Russell gave possibly the worst acceptance speech in the history of the Nobel Prize for Literature (which he had no business winning in the first place). Some of the others were bad –I spent a day skimming through them once– but at least most of them were short. Russell had no sense of occasion whatsoever, and simply went ahead and did many pages of Bertrand Russell shtick. All the crowd really wants at a time like that are a few inspiring generalities, and brief ones. Instead, Russell made it into the Bertrand Russell show: not out of egomania, but because he simply didn’t know any better.

By contrast, Ernest Hemingway (not one of my heroes) had the nicest Nobel speech I saw– a classic, even. It was delivered in absentia by the U.S. Ambassador, due to illness. It was concise, moving, insightful, and so brief that it can be pasted here in full. This is all anyone should aim for in an acceptance speech:

«Having no facility for speech-making and no command of oratory nor any domination of rhetoric, I wish to thank the administrators of the generosity of Alfred Nobel for this Prize.

No writer who knows the great writers who did not receive the Prize can accept it other than with humility. There is no need to list these writers. Everyone here may make his own list according to his knowledge and his conscience.

It would be impossible for me to ask the Ambassador of my country to read a speech in which a writer said all of the things which are in his heart. Things may not be immediately discernible in what a man writes, and in this sometimes he is fortunate; but eventually they are quite clear and by these and the degree of alchemy that he possesses he will endure or be forgotten.

Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer’s loneliness but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.

For a true writer each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed.

How simple the writing of literature would be if it were only necessary to write in another way what has been well written. It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him.

I have spoken too long for a writer. A writer should write what he has to say and not speak it. Again I thank you.»