Sam Spade, Philosopher

“It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window.” That was Raymond Chandler writing in the genre of the hardboiled detective novel, a nearly forgotten stream of early and mid twentieth century literature.

It turns out that the rock star philosopher of the time, Ludwig Wittgenstein (pronounced as a ‘V’), the ultimately eccentric and famous guru at Cambridge University, was addicted to these true crime magazines and novels from America. I remember them. My dad, who after 12 years of public school spent the rest of his life reading philosophy and mathematics whenever he could, would also have true detective magazines in his room, with cover pictures of the dame Chandler was describing, or maybe her sister, and likely a gumshoe on her trail.

I first read Wittgenstein at Yale. I remember struggling with his "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus." After about ten pages of the translation, I put it down and said to my wife, “Every word is an English word, every sentence is an English sentence, and I hardly understand anything I’m reading. I keep going over the same pages and have no progress.” She, a dental hygienist at the time, suggested I just plow on. “Maybe the farther you get into it, you’ll develop more of a sense of what’s going on and that will give you a context for understanding.” Yeah. She’s the real philosopher in the family after all, despite being Chandler's blonde. I’m just her understudy. So I did what she advised, and a week later I went to the professor’s office, and along the way, I saw another grad student from the class who asked me what I thought of Wittgenstein and I said, “I’ve read the book assigned ten times through, ten times, and I think I understand about 60% of it.” He said, “Maybe you’re in the wrong field of study.” Huh. Could that be? I walked down the hall a bit more and knocked on the professor’s door. He opened it slowly and said, “Yes?” I repeated what I had said to the graduate student. Ten times through the book and I grasped about 60%. I had to be honest. He looked shocked. I thought “Uh, oh.” He was an expert on Wittgenstein, later launching his own book on it all. He was silent for a few seconds and then his expression changed a bit. He said, “That’s the most anyone has ever understood.”

I ended up getting hooked on Wittgenstein. I loved his craziness. He’d teach his classes pacing the room, gesturing wildly, maybe slapping himself on the forehead, thinking out loud, seeking new paths around old problems, really inventing a new way to do philosophy as a detective questioning all the known suspects, using something beyond logic, something more like intellectual shoe leather, beating the streets and the bushes, sidling up to the problem, whatever it was, and maybe smacking it around a bit. He kept voluminous notebooks and in later years began doing philosophy in a fresh new way, looking at our language as establishing and reflecting distinctive practices and ways of dealing with the world around us. He discovered new things by thinking in new ways.

Today, an old friend, a recently retired host from CBS Radio and a true philosopher, posted a new long article about Wittgenstein and his passion for detective fiction, a passion that his colleagues ignored at the time as a major embarrassment and certainly irrelevant to his work, which it wasn’t at all. You probably don’t want to read the article unless you’re an academic philosopher or the sort of person that others call “an intellectual.” The author says about the true crime writers of the time:

<<These writers 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.>>

In a letter Wittgenstein wrote to his former student Norman Malcolm, then teaching at Cornell, he contrasted his favorite detective magazines Norman would send him from the US with the top British philosophy journal of the time. The author of the article reports:

<<In 1948, he contrasts his favorite “mag” with the Oxford philosophical journal Mind: “Your mags are wonderful. How people can read Mind if they could read Street & Smith beats me. If philosophy has anything to do with wisdom there’s certainly not a grain of that in Mind, & quite often a grain in the detective stories.”>>

The author of the article goes on:

<<A student transcript from 1935 shows him opening a lecture with a quote from Detective Story Magazine. The passage concerns a detective’s thoughts about a ticking clock and the enigmatic nature of time.>>

He then contrasts the old Sherlock Holmes detective tale based on logic with this new genre focused on bars and street hoods and a guy with a 38 who refuses to fall for the dame who keeps showing up, and he adds this about the influence these new wild stories had on the original thinker of Cambridge

<<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, because unlike the police he is not too close to the case. 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.>>

He adds:

<<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.>>

I can relate, since as a philosopher myself, I’ve been hitting the streets for 30 years now, getting close to the problems people actually experience, and solving case after case because of that immersion. It’s not a mystery after all that a philosopher could leave the university world, and through a lot of sweat and shoe leather, track down some of the most elusive quarry in modern times. It works. And you can take that to the bank, Doll.

For the article itself, click HERE. And don't say I didn't warn you.