Ludwig

Why businessmen should read Wittgenstein

I have no interest in football. Watching overpaid youngsters with expensive hairstyles pretending to be injured does nothing for me. But the reality is that the ‘small talk’ bit before or after a business meeting is very often devoted to this topic, so I’ve learned over the years to wait patiently for these lacuna fillers to run their course.

Now on occasion these conversations acquire a level of depth beyond simple recognition of last night’s results, as the protagonists turn briefly into fantasy football managers - testing their own judgement against the tactical decisions of the dugout panjandrums. And this does strike a chord. 

As a child I became taken with chess, and spent a good deal of time studying the games of some of the top players. What this meant in practice was playing through games move-by-move on my own board, and ‘testing’ the moves made against my own judgement - figuring out what I would have done and comparing that against what was played, or just trying to work out why a certain move had been chosen. This was long before the advent of computer-based ‘chess engines’.

At some level of course this was as absurd as Barry from Accounts Payable pitting his wits against Sir Alex Ferguson. But of course the point wasn’t to outfox Bobby Fisher, it was to learn from him, albeit indirectly. It was, within the context of the game of chess, to learn how to think better.

It’s a matter of some controversy whether the kind of thinking used in a game of chess has any value at all outside of that context. In an age where the ability to concentrate for any length of time has been severely undermined by addiction to distraction and by low-attention-span tools - by Twitter, by open plan offices, by ‘notifications’, by the dopamine hit of a virtual thumbs up, and by what Cal Newport dubs “the cognitive cacophony of the Inbox” - maybe there is some value in training the mind to focus intently for an hour or so. But, beyond the rookie level, chess-thinking is highly specific and it’s hard to see much carry over into other fields. Which is a shame.

There is another discipline though, albeit an obscure one, with the potential for much greater application to the hard problems of business life: analytic philosophy. 

"Heidegger, Heidegger was a boozy beggar

Who could think you under the table"

- Monty Python, Bruces' Philosophers Song

Thanks to the likes of Bill Gates, Elon Musk and Charlie Munger, among many others, it’s not contentious nowadays to stress the value of the habit of reading and life-long learning in navigating a career path through the world of ‘knowledge work’. On the other hand, tackling Immanuel Kant or Ludwig Wittgenstein in your spare time might reasonably be argued to be taking it a bit far.

But.

Business strategy is an intrinsically ‘wicked’ problem. In an earlier article (Wicked, LinkedIn 17 April 2020) we looked at a whole raft of techniques for tackling this issue, but something that was left more-or-less implicit was the basic need to be able to think hard, to construct a rigorous and comprehensive line of argument, to challenge our own lines of thought with the strongest possible counter-arguments, to face up to hard problems (and acknowledge them as being hard) in the first place. All of this is also the domain of analytic philosophy.

Take on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and you're reading one of the hardest works you’ll ever find in a library. You don’t read a book like that in the same way as you would a self-help book. It’s very slow going. It’s slogging up a mountain, rather than strolling alongside a babbling brook. 

A couple of decades ago Alain de Botton published a book called Consolations of Philosophy, to generally favourable reviews as I recall. I’ve never read it, and I’ve no idea what it’s about, but it puzzles me anyway because I’ve found analytic philosophy to be anything but consoling.

It’s laughably easy to parody though. Or is it? How would we know? What do we mean by ‘knowing’, in fact? What do we mean by ‘meaning’ for that matter? Or ‘fact’? Or 'matter'? What do we mean by ‘what’? Why? And so on, ad infinitum.

"Socrates scores, got a beautiful cross from Archimedes. The German's are disputing it."

- Monty Python, the Philosophers' Football Match

The problems that the great philosophers have tackled have been some of the most difficult and fundamental ones we face, and whether we view them as intrinsically ridiculous or not we can probably agree that they are of precisely zero relevance to the average CEO.

But we don’t read Kant, Wittgenstein, Russell, Frege and their ilk to get concrete answers to concrete questions (or if we do, we’re liable to be sorely disappointed). What we can do though is learn from them about how to think hard, to construct a rigorous and comprehensive line of argument, to challenge our own lines of thought with the strongest possible counter-arguments, to face up to hard problems (and acknowledge them as being hard) in the first place. To think better. The very platform we need for tackling wicked problems in fact. 

And the best way to do this is to test our own judgement, our own lines of thinking, against theirs, as we read. To be fantasy philosophers in other words.

"The Feynman Algorithm:

1. Write down the problem

2. Think real hard

3. Write down the solution"

- Murray Gell-Mann

Aside from all that, slogging up a mountain may not be as pleasant as strolling by a babbling brook, but it might well be a more rewarding thing to do from time to time. And besides, the views are better.

Tackling the works of the analytic philosophers ‘cold’ is a big ask. The interested reader might want to start with a primer on the field, such as Roger Scruton’s ‘Modern Philosophy: An Introduction and Survey’.