What a coincidence that the same event should happen to Wittgenstein!
In the autumn of 1939, Ludwig Wittgenstein and his young Cambridge student and friend Norman Malcolm were walking along the river when they saw a newspaper vendor’s sign announcing that the Germans had accused the British government of instigating a recent attempt to assassinate Hitler. When Wittgenstein remarked that it wouldn’t surprise him at all if it were true, Malcolm retorted that it was impossible because “the British were too civilized and decent to attempt anything so underhand, and . . . such an act was incompatible with the British ‘national character’.” Wittgenstein was furious. Some five years later, he wrote to Malcolm:
Whenever I thought of you I couldn’t help thinking of a particular incident which seemed to me very important. . . . you made a remark about ‘national character’ that shocked me by its primitiveness. I then thought: what is the use of studying philosophy if all that it does for you is to enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic, etc., & if it does not improve your thinking about the important questions of everyday life, if it does not make you more conscientious than any . . . journalist in the use of the DANGEROUS phrases such people use for their own ends.
In fact, it’s a good job that one refered to the Germans, and the other the British, or this would be a duplicate posting, and I know you wouldn’t want to steal the origional poster’s glory.
What a coincidence that the same event should happen to Wittgenstein!
http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/perloff/witt_intro.html
In fact, it’s a good job that one refered to the Germans, and the other the British, or this would be a duplicate posting, and I know you wouldn’t want to steal the origional poster’s glory.