‘If some people looked like elephants and others like cats, or fish …’ On the difficulties of understanding each other: the case of Wittgenstein and Sraffa
2009; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 16; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/09672560902891192
ISSN1469-5936
Autores Tópico(s)Marxism and Critical Theory
ResumoClick to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes Review article with special emphasis on the relationship between Wittgenstein and Piero Sraffa. 1 For a discussion of Sraffa's influence on Wittgenstein, see Sen (Citation2003) and several contributions in Kurz et al. (Citation2008). 2 At the time Sraffa was a member of King's College. According to Sraffa's Cambridge Pocket Diary 1928–1929, the first meeting with Wittgenstein took place on 17 February 1929 at 4:30 p.m. 3 Sraffa resigned from his lectureship in May 1931. The above remark may therefore be taken as an indication that he had composed the note in 1932. 4 See Sraffa's papers D3/12/174: 1–2 (references follow the Trinity College catalogue prepared by Jonathan Smith, archivist. The catalogue is available online: http://rabbit.trin.cam.ac.uk/∼jon/Msscolls/Sraffa.html). See in this context also a document presumably composed somewhat earlier in which Sraffa contemplated on how the social position of an observer in a given society or state of the world affects his point of view and on the problem of self-sameness in thought experiments that imagine alternative states of the world. When one talks about worlds other than the actual one, one engages in counterfactuals. This, however, is as risky enterprise and puts in question one's capacity to judge properly. For example, in the context of a discussion of what is a sufficient reason for the existence of profits, Sraffa remarked: ‘Our point of view was wrong. We were looking at it from the point of view of “what can be changed”. … But by whom, and how? “If I were dictator of the world”.’ The difficulty of the involved thought experiment is put into sharp relief by Sraffa's following addendum: ‘But if I were, could I have the same ideas: would I remain [the same] if I had?’ (D3/12/7: 42–3). 5 As Wittgenstein once famously put it, in some of their discussions Sraffa made him feel like a tree stripped off its branches. 6 As regards the transliteration of emphases and so forth in Wittgenstein's letters and documents, see the editor's remark (p. 12). 7 For echoes of these exchanges in the Blue and Brown Books, see the editorial notes (pp. 228–9). 9 The reference is to Diehl (Citation1923). 10 See in this context especially the copy of Einaudi (Citation1929) in Sraffa's library, which Sraffa annotated heavily. 8 The note on the construction of the rules of language quoted in the above is contained in the same folder. Since in the note Sraffa refers to a book by Einaudi published in 1929, the note may have been written in late 1929 or shortly later. This gets also some support from the fact that it is contained in a ring book next to excerpts from and comments on Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk's Positive Theory of Capital, published in 1891, on which Sraffa worked at around this time, as is reflected in some of his other papers (see Gehrke and Kurz Citation2006: 108). 11 Sraffa had visited the Soviet Union in August/September 1930. 12 This is the only letter of Sraffa's preserved among Wittgenstein's papers. 13 In an editorial note McGuinness comments that ‘Sraffa's standards were high’ and adds the opening phrase of a letter of Keynes to Sraffa: ‘After three months commercial diplomacy with the Americans, I feel almost equal to correspondence with you’ (p. 270). 14 More precisely: Wittgenstein was admitted to a Senior Research Fellowship on 5 December 1930. He signed the admissions book for fellows together with the mathematician Abram S. Besicovitch (whom Sraffa was later to consult on mathematical problems he encountered when working on his 1960 book). This fellowship had a limit of six years, and after it lapsed in 1936 Wittgenstein left Cambridge to spend some time in Norway. However, when he became Professor of Philosophy, Trinity elected him to a Professorial Fellowship and he signed the admissions book on 10 October 1939, together with Sraffa. 15 Sraffa was widely known as a kind and obliging man. When Michal Kalecki once visited Cambridge he said that there he had encountered only two gentlemen: one was a Communist (Maurice Dobb) and the other an Italian. 16 Sraffa used large capitals in his diary only rarely. It can safely be assumed that, despite their ‘endless misunderstandings’, Wittgenstein's death was a great loss for him.
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