‘it is a person’s privilege to go to hell’
Until recently, I knew exactly one story about Alice Ambrose, to whom (along with Francis Skinner), Ludwig Wittgenstein dictated what would come to be known as the “Brown Book” in 1934-35. The story turns out to be false.
It appears in Ray Monk’s biography of Wittgenstein, The Duty of Genius:
[Ambrose] planned to publish in Mind an article entitled ‘Finitism in Mathematics’, in which she would present what she took to be Wittgenstein’s view on the matter. The article annoyed Wittgenstein intensely, and he tried hard to persuade her not to publish it. When she and G. E. Moore, who was then editor of the journal, refused to succumb to this pressure, he abruptly ended any association with her.
As I learned from Sophia Connell’s essay, “Alice Ambrose and Early Analytic Philosophy,” Wittgenstein tried more than persuasion, and did so after the first part of the essay was published in April 1935. Going by a letter Ambrose wrote to Wittgenstein on May 16, he had demanded, via Moore, that Ambrose write another article for Mind, on the basis of discussion with him, that he would find more acceptable. Wittgenstein was an intimidating force, and her reply to his overture is magnificent:
[It] is doubtful whether what I write at the end of further discussion with you will be satisfactory to you—unless you dictate the material. This latter I refuse to be partner to. If you want to write an article, that is your affair; but there is no point in giving a quotation from you with my name to it. … I resent bitterly your attempts at forcing on me the advice I refused to accept from you more than a week and a half ago. I will not have advice forced on me, and such tactics are useless. … All has been said on [this] topic that needs to be said and I refuse to hear it repeated. I do not agree in your feeling, nor am I willing to submit to further attempts to force on me a feeling I don’t have.
On the same day, Wittgenstein wrote to Moore, who was advising Ambrose for her PhD, resigning as an examiner. He returned her message with a passive-aggressive note: “Don’t destroy this letter, it might interest you one day to reread it”—implying that she would come to rue her words.
Two days later, Wittgenstein wrote to Moore, again, this time suggesting that Ambrose lacked philosophical ability:
[She] is now actually standing at a crossroad. One road leading her to perpetual misjudging of her intellectual power and thereby to hurt pride and vanity etc. etc. The other would have led her to a knowledge of her own capacities and that always has good consequences.
This despite the fact that Ambrose had applied successfully for a fellowship at Newnham College, with Wittgenstein’s support, that Elizabeth Anscombe failed to get. Until the Mind essay, in fact, their relationship has been cordial, or as cordial as it could be given his fractious intensity. In January 1935, Wittgenstein ended a letter to Ambrose with an in-joke: “P.S. This signature is worth £100.”
I don’t know the context for the comedy, though it has an ironic dénouement: a letter by Wittgenstein praising Ambrose was sold at auction decades later for what must have been considerably more than £100. “I am greatly impressed by her extraordinary seriousness and sincerity,” Wittgenstein wrote, “and have found her indefatigable in trying to understand the extremely difficult problems we have been discussing. I am sure she will make a valuable, painstaking and patient teacher of philosophy…”
On the last point, he seems to have been right. After a year at Michigan, Ambrose was hired by Smith College in 1937. She completed her Cambridge PhD in 1938, was promoted to Full Professor in 1951, then to a named chair in 1964, before retiring in 1972. Ambrose wrote dozens of articles, co-authored an influential logic textbook, and from 1953-68 edited the Journal of Symbolic Logic. At the same time, she was a pioneer in “public philosophy,” writing two accessible but ambitious essays for the Massachusetts Review, one solving scepticism with linguistic philosophy, the other on what was revolutionary in the later Wittgenstein.
Her own work was indebted to Wittgenstein, but she was no mere acolyte. “The Problem of Linguistic Inadequacy,” published in 1950, argues against philosophers who complain that ordinary language is inadequate to reality because it is vague or incomplete. For Ambrose, vagueness is ineliminable, since the terms we use to precisify our words are themselves vague; even if we introduce “a formal language [its] exactness is lost when it is applied to the vernacular.” Meaning is use, and our use of words is always messy and creative.
The process of removing vagueness, if conceived as a process of approaching what is not theoretically attainable, is no process of removing vagueness. ‘Removing vagueness’, like ‘approaches the horizon’, describes nothing.
Nor is vagueness problematic: in practice, we refine the application of terms as needed on the fly, and language functions fine. In explaining how vagueness is resolved in context, Ambrose anticipates pragmatic theories developed by Delia Graff Fara and Agustín Rayo five decades later.
As to incompleteness: it’s true that we introduce new words, but we should resist the idea that mere “incompleteness” is a defect:
It is natural, when we have the new language and look back at the old one, to read into the old one the inadequacy we should feel were we to continue using it in certain contexts. We assert that the rudimentary language cannot express certain relations among concepts which the more highly developed one can, as though this were a deficiency which is internal to it. Actually we are merely stating the fact that certain symbols, together with the rules for their use, are not part of it. And this is not like saying that certain cards are missing from the deck. It is like saying the deuces play no rôle in a game which uses a deck without them.
Here Ambrose anticipates the pragmatist again: if a language serves its purpose, it is not inadequate, even if we need other languages for other purposes. There is no prospect of mismatch between functioning language and the “metaphysical structure” of the world. What’s more, no language can do everything. Where Wittgenstein compared languages to games, Ambrose prefers the metaphor of maps: a diagram designed to help you navigate the subway once you are in it can’t be faulted for not helping you to find the station.1
Elsewhere, Ambrose—writing this time with her husband Morris Lazerowitz—takes on the father of modern philosophy:
It is something of a mystery that such an astute and original thinker as Descartes should have thought it necessary to deduce his existence. For all that is necessary to establish the statement “I exist” is to negate it. The result, “I do not exist”, is a semantic absurdity. How, then, is “I exist” to be understood?
The answer lies in usage. For if “I do not exist” is a semantic absurdity, its negation, “I exist”, cannot be understood to assert a nonverbal fact…
I don’t think this is true, but it is certainly original.
What happened after the Mind essay débacle? Monk tells us that Wittgenstein “abruptly ended any association with [Ambrose].” But this is at best misleading. Connell cites a letter from February 1937 in which Wittgenstein apologized: “I hope your work is going well and I hope you have forgiven me for inflicting pain upon you while you were in Cambridge.” (He apologizes, too, for not sending a Christmas card.)
Standing up to Wittgenstein, as few were brave enough to do, seems to have worked. In fact, we have evidence that Ambrose was even more direct with him after he quit as PhD examiner. She wrote to Moore’s wife Dorothy in 1936:
I told him what I thought of his own conceit. I’m tired of his going about laying down the moral law. I told him outright that he wasn’t aware of how much of an egotist he was, that he doesn’t question his right to pass judgment about people, that he took it upon himself to guide the lives of others. And that, it seems to me, does presuppose that one thinks oneself better fitted to judge what is right for that person than the person does himself. I hardly know what’s right for myself, let alone others … I think it is a person’s privilege to go to hell even, if he wants to … I told him that he used his power over people to extract worship. I suspect he will be wild at me.2
The future tense indicates that Ambrose is not referring to the letter quoted above: she continued to be straight with Wittgenstein.
The letter to Dorothy Moore is held in Cambridge University Library’s Special Collections and is quoted here; but the piece that quotes it makes some notable errors. In particular, it doubles down on Monk’s conclusion: “Wittgenstein died in 1951, without ever reconciling with Ambrose.”3
In fact, Wittgenstein visited Ambrose and Lazerowitz at Smith College in 1949, along with O. K. Bouwsma, who recorded his conversations with Wittgenstein for posterity. Ambrose blurbed the published version:
Gives an extraordinarily intimate insight into what Wittgenstein was like as a human being. … These notes … capture Wittgenstein’s outlook on morality and religion, and reveal some of his personal problems.
As so often with Wittgenstein, personal problems are entangled with philosophy. Bouwsma records a long discussion with Wittgenstein during the visit to Smith, October 11, 1949, in which Wittgenstein is sceptical of the possibility of giving good advice:
Yesterday about noon we went for a ride to Mount Tom reservation. On the way up he began talking about teaching ethics. Impossible! He regards ethics as telling someone what he should do. But how can anyone counsel another? Imagine someone advising another who was in love and about to marry, and pointing out to him all the things he cannot do if he marries. The idiot! How can one know how these things are in another man’s life?
Was Wittgenstein’s wrestling, still, with his mistreatment of Ambrose? “I will not have advice forced on me,” she had written to him in 1935, after his reaction to her article in Mind. And in 1936: “I told him outright that he wasn’t aware of how much of an egotist he was, that he doesn’t question his right to pass judgment about people, that he took it upon himself to guide the lives of others.” Wittgenstein was not one to credit students for his thinking. But perhaps he had her letters in mind when he walked with Bouwsma—don’t destroy them, Ludwig, it might interest you one day to reread them.
I am in awe of Alice Ambrose, who worked in technical philosophy at a time when the pressures excluding women were fierce—a decade before Ruth Barcan Marcus, who recounts the discrimination she faced, along with much else, in her Dewey Lecture.
I don’t know that Ambrose ever wrote about sexism in philosophy. As Connell notes, her 1972 “Portrait” of Wittgenstein is studiously respectful. She mentions Wittgenstein’s “formidable impatience,” that “he was a difficult person” and that there was “a break” between them that caused her grief. But she is concessive about it: “Both Moore and I may have been wrong [to publish the article in Mind], but at the time I did not think so.”
Two decades later, still active in her late 80s, Ambrose gave a lunchtime talk at Smith about Moore and Wittgenstein as teachers, in which we get a taste of her resilient irreverence. About Wittgenstein, she says, wry and dry:
He upbraided himself for being a bad teacher and was said to have tried to return his stipend to the University Treasury. His own appraisal of his teaching was certainly shared by others.4
BONUS CONTENT: Here’s the full video of the talk; the bit I quoted is at 6:32.
Here is Wittgenstein’s Tractatus as a subway map, thanks to David Stern and colleagues at the University of Iowa.
Ambrose continues: “I wasn’t offensive in my letter, but he may find the truth offensive. We all do.”
According to the piece, Wittgenstein continued to supervise Ambrose after the first part of her article was published in April 1935. But Wittgenstein was only briefly her supervisor, three years earlier, before Moore took over. It was as PhD examiner that Wittgenstein continued, at least until May 16. The article also reports a letter from Ambrose, written from the US, criticizing her colleagues, which Wittgenstein found arrogant, but wrongly takes the letter to Moore denigrating her abilities to be a response to this, when it was a response to her letter refusing to write a new essay in consultation with him. The piece also suggests that there is some doubt about whether Skinner and Wittgenstein were lovers.
A fragment of the first sentence appears in her published essay on the same topic; the second sentence does not.
This was awesome—both the history and the philosophy. “It is a person’s privilege to go to hell” is so much better than “There exists a distinction between strong and weak deontic necessity.”
Ambrose and Lazerowitz were at Smith College when Wittgenstein visited in October 1949, but I've always understood that he did not see them there. He was there to see Bouwsma and to continue the discussions the two of them had had at Cornell in July and August. In Bouwsma's notes of the discussions there is no mention of either Ambrose or Lazerowitz. But more importantly, Wittgenstein had been enraged by Lazerowitz less than two years earlier, and in this case apparently with more reason than in Ambrose's. Lazerowitz had written to him asking for permission to attend to his Cambridge lectures, which he had given, but he then ended up resigning his professorship before that could happen. As Norman Malcolm writes in his memoir, Lazerowitz "was greatly incensed and made [...] absurd and unjust accusations against Wittgenstein, as if under the impression that the latter had deliberately misled him, or as if Wittgenstein was under an obligation to remain in his chair because this man had expected to attend his lectures". (Malcolm did not identify Lazerowitz by name, but Wittgenstein's letter to Malcolm where he does is in the – paywalled – electronic edition of Wittgenstein's collected correspondence.)
Of course there may be a source that shows that Wittgenstein in fact met at least Ambrose in 1949, but I've always understood that they never met again after Ambrose returned to the US in 1935.
As an admirer of Wittgenstein's philosophy but not his personality, I automatically feel like admiring almost anyone who dared to stand up to Wittgenstein (Ramsey, Piero Sraffa and John Wisdom come to mind as three prominent examples). But until recently, Ambrose has nevertheless been "ruined" for me, and the reason is Lazerowitz! Not because of his accusations against Wittgenstein, but because of his metaphilosophy, for which he was best known in his lifetime (he apparently coined the very word "metaphilosophy", in 1940). Lazerowitz holds that basically any claim made by any philosopher throughout the history of philosophy can be explained by unconscious fears or wishes, which in turn can best be dealt with by the more clichéd and stereotypical kind of psychoanalysis: Heraclitus had cloacal fantasies, Parmenides had castration anxiety, and so on throughout the canon. Already decades ago when I came across this, I found it simply so ludicrous that Ambrose was stained in my mind with guilt by association, and it is only by reading the recent historical scholarship on her that has made me see her as an interesting philosopher in her own right. Which she undoubtedly was.