Did You Hear the One About the Philosopher and the Actress?

The Philosopher and the Actress: 

Wittgenstein & Raquel Welch 

  

I. 

 

According to the Google AI assistant, Ludwig Wittgenstein was an austere and reclusive Austro-British philosopher who did not know and never met the Hollywood sex symbol and actress Raquel Welch. 

 

Not only did they move in completely different social and professional circles, but Wittgenstein died in Cambridge, in 1951, aged sixty-two, when Miss Welch would have been an eleven-year-old child living in California with her parents.    

 

But even if they didn't cross paths in what passes for the actual world, perhaps their lives were entangled at some weird quantum level. At any rate, I can think of a parallel incident involving the same tool that allows us to make a connection between these two individuals ...

 

 

II. 

 

Many younger readers, having grown up in a world of central heating, will probably never have warmed themselves before a real fire place; never watched smoke sucked up a chimney, never emptied an ashpan, never filled a coal scuttle, or handled the various other tools that one needs to maintain a good fire, such as a long metal poker, designed to safely adjust and break up the burning logs or red hot lumps of coal so as to improve airflow. 

One person who did know how to handle a poker - though not always in the manner intended - was Herr Wittgenstein and even many non-philosophers will be familiar with the astonishing confrontation with Karl Popper at the Cambridge University Moral Sciences Club, in October 1946. 

 

Arguing over whether there existed substantial problems in philosophy, or merely linguistic puzzles, things grew increasingly heated when Wittgenstein began to wave a poker around to make his case, at one point thrusting it in Popper's direction and challenging him to give an example of a moral rule. 

 

According to Popper, he calmly stood his ground and replied: 'One should not threaten visiting lecturers with a poker.' Infuriated by this mocking response, Wittgenstein - and again we rely on Popper's account of the incident - threw down the poker and stormed out of the room [1].     

 

 

III. 

 

Interestingly, Raquel Welch also knew how to handle a poker with violent intent ...

 

According to a recent documentary [2], Welch once threatened her father - an aeronautical engineer from La Paz, Bolivia, of Spanish descent - with said implement during a family argument around the dinner table in which he had thrown a glass of milk in the face of her mother. 

 

She was sixteen at the time and sick of her father's tyrannical behaviour towards her and her mother and this incident - in which he backed down and backed away - changed their relationship forever as well as the dynamic of the household. Thus, it was a defining (and empowering) moment for her [3]. 

 

And whilst Popper may have a point - one should probably not threaten visiting professors with a poker - I feel that the young Miss Welch (or Raquel Tejada, as she was known at this time) was justified in standing up to a bully who had humiliated and sought to intimidate her mother on many occasions over many years.   

 

In brief: violent and abusive husbands and fathers deserve to get their comeuppance.  

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Whether Popper's account is strictly accurate - or is dramatised for comic effect - is debatable. The most comprehensive account of this confrontation can be found in the best-selling book by David Edmonds and John Eidenow; Wittgenstein's Poker: The story of a ten-minute argument between two great philosophers (Faber & Faber, 2001).  

      Readers might also like to know that an animated short film entitled Wittgenstein's Poker is currently in post-production, directed by Christian De Vita, written by Casey Cohen, David Edmonds and John Eidenow, starring Brian Cox (as Bertie Russell), Richard E. Grant (as Wittgenstein) and Karl Markovics (as Popper): click here for details, or to lend support via Kickstarter, click here. 

 

[2] I Am Raquel Welch (dir. Olivia Cheng, 2025), is a feature documentary (produced by Network Entertainment) which explores her life and legacy. To watch a trailer on mubi.com, click here. 

 

[3] Those wishing to know more should see Welch's 2010 memoir, Beyond the Cleavage (Weinstein Books), in which she provides an account of this incident with her father and a poker that she gripped with both hands. 

 

Reflections on Wittgenstein's Rhino

Albrecht Dürer: The Rhinoceros (1515)

Even many non-philosophers know two stories concerning Wittgenstein's time at Cambridge: the first, an amusing confrontation with Karl Popper in October 1946 involving a poker, was the subject of a best-selling book by David Edmonds and John Eidinow; the second, an encounter between Bertrand Russell and his young Austrian student thirty-five years earlier, involving a discussion that centred on the question of whether or not there was a rhinoceros in the room ...

In brief, Russell wanted Wittgenstein to concede that we can have empirical knowledge of the world by admitting that there was, in fact, no rhino present. But the latter refused to do so - even after Russell amusingly began looking for the beast under the desk to no avail. Whilst Wittgenstein may have had a point, one can't help thinking he was, in this instance (as in others), being a bit of a dick.

Indeed, I'm not sure I understand the point he's trying to make or why he can't simply accept the factual non-presence of the rhino, given that in his early work he maintains that only such propositions can legitimately be asserted. But then, my understanding of Wittgenstein's thinking is limited (and probably inaccurate) due to its having been shaped primarily by drunken discussions in the Barley Mow pub many years ago.        

At this very early stage in their relationship, Russell worried that Wittgenstein was a crank, rather than a philosophical genius. I can imagine how he felt, for I experience the same concern whenever I correspond with a friend of mine, let's call him Mr X, who also likes to deny - or at least contest - the propositions of natural science and refuse to accept that there is a mind-independent reality about which we can speak with confidence.

For Mr X, the world consists neither of facts nor of things, but only of interpretations and all descriptions are essentially metaphorical. He thus posits a daemonic ontology that is mytho-poetic rather than material-scientific in character. Rather than agree there was no rhino in the room, Mr X would sooner insist on its invisibility, or point out that imaginary objects are also real even if physically not present as actual entities; thus his (psycho) logical belief also in supernatural beings.

For Mr X, as for Wittgenstein (though for different reasons), Russell's seemingly commonsensical proposition is questionable on the grounds that it doesn't meaningfully assert anything about the world - certainly nothing upon which we can ever be completely certain - and is, therefore, what Wittgenstein terms in the Tractatus a 'nonsensical pseudo-proposition' [4.1272] (i.e. one that refers us only to the logic of language by which we talk about the world and not to things in themselves). 

And so, perhaps Wittgenstein wasn't being a dick after all ... Perhaps, as J. F. Macdonald argues, it was Russell who profoundly misunderstood matters and who, by attempting to ridicule the younger man, was the one acting like a dick. Wittgenstein, says MacDonald, wasn't rejecting empirical propositions; rather, he was rejecting propositions that posed as such, but were not, and discreetly "making a point about what can be meaningfully said, not about what we don't know".

And perhaps I too should learn to listen more carefully to what it is Mr X is saying and not be so quick to dismiss it as absurd, or him as foolish ... For I fear this reveals merely my own philosophical arrogance and limitations. 


Notes

Details of the conversation between Russell and Wittgenstein on the rhinoceros can be found in Russell's letters from the period to Lady Ottoline Morell (reprinted in Ray Monk's biography, Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, (Vintage, 1990), pp. 38-40), and in Russell's article in Mind Vol. 60, issue 239 (July 1951), pp. 297-98, which served as an obituary notice for Wittgenstein who died in April of that year.

Click here to read the above article online, noting how Russell misremembers the conversation concerning a hippo, not a rhino.

The essay by J. F. MacDonald from which I quote, 'Russell, Wittgenstein and the problem of the rhinoceros', is in the Southern Journal of Philosophy, vol. 31 (4), (1993), pp. 409-24, but can also be found in full online at the Rhino Resource Center (the world's largest rhino information website): click here.   

The book by Edmonds and Eidinow that I mention at the beginning of the post - Wittgenstein's Poker: the story of a 10-minute argument between two great philosophers - was published by Faber in 2001.

Finally, readers interested in directly engaging with the early Wittgenstein should either get hold of a copy of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness, (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961), or click here to read the original 1922 edition as an ebook trans. C. K. Ogden, with an introduction by Bertrand Russell, courtesy of Project Gutenberg.

This post is for Mr X and Andy G.