Philosophy and the crossword puzzle

 

Apollinaire started writing his typographically complex poems, the Calligrammes, in Paris in 1913 -14. By that point, the cubists were pasting bits of printed matter into their paintings, and Marinetti and the futurists were trying to develop a poetry of pure punctuation.

On the other side of the Atlantic, an English immigrant named Arthur Wynne, working at the New York World, unveiled his own adventure in art in the “Fun” pages, the World’s way of creating a family demographic for the paper. The word cross, as Wynne called it, debuted on December 21, 1913. "Wynne’s puzzle was a peculiar, diamond shaped grid, with no black squares... Rather than being divided into the Across and Down clue columns that we know today, the clues were designated by the first numbered square in the answer and the last.” (Stanley Newman and Mark Lasswell) It was soon called the cross word – although whether this was Wynne’s decision or a typesetter’s error is not known. What is know is that it is a Smith graduate, Margaret Petherbridge, who worked as a secretary at the World, who really gave the puzzle its shape. “She threw out Wynne’s double numbering of clues, decreed that puzzles would be a symmetrical grid with no lonely patches of isolated answer squared, and laid down plenty of other rules. But her biggest contribution might have been the fact that she made ingenuity a hallmark of the crossword puzzle. She jettisoned obvious cluing, introduced the idea of theme puzzles, and generally created an atmosphere that sent the message: Crosswords were smart entertainment.”

It was in the 20s that the fad for the puzzles hit. Petheridge wrote the first book of them, which sold out, and crossword puzzles, like bridge, dancing and bootleg whiskey became part of the decade’s nature.

The twenties also saw the publication of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus , with its strangely numbered “clue”-propositions. Wittgenstein was a devourer of certain sorts of popular culture – Westerns, detective novels. I can find no mention of crossword puzzles in Ray Monk’s biography of Wittgenstein, and perhaps he viewed them as a waste of time. But as an odd language game, where language is indeed on a holiday, they might have interested him.

In a very fine article, The “Puzzle of Scientific Method”, Susan Haack used the crossword puzzle as a governing analogy for how we should feel about scientific explanations and extends her analogy to the scientific method. Her intention was to “give a model of the structure of evidence which would (like foundationalism) acknowledge the relevance of experience to empirical justification, and (like coherentism) allow pervasive mutual support among beliefs without vicious circularity. The difference between clues and intersecting entries mirrors the difference between experiential evidence and reasons for a belief; the interdependence of entries, the mutual support among beliefs. Apropos of the latter desideratum, I was encouraged both by Peirce’s robust insistence that only an ignorance of logic could lead anyone to confuse mutual support and vicious circularity, and by Quine’s observation that “there can be mutual reinforcement between an explanation and what it explains.”

The analogy is rather convincing to me. Haack does not think that science has a privilege in its evidentiary procedure over ordinary life, but that science is distinguished, mostly, by its care for those procedures – what I would call its ability to routinize them, its habitus.

Haack goes further, though, and uses the way crossword puzzles are solved as a way of understanding the scientific method.

“... that, as there is no mechanical procedure for arriving at a plausible entry, there is no mechanical procedure for arriving at good conjectures: and that, as there are no strict rules about when an entry is secure enough to be inked-in, or when it is insecure enough to be rubbed out, there can’t be rules, but only guidelines requiring discretion in their application, for deciding when a conjecture should be accepted and when rejected. “

I like the spirit of this: I think it has a Wittgensteinian cast. Although I think that it misses something about the relationship of the clues, their numbering, and the inscribing of erasing of entries. Or rather, I would like to know more about the clue formation, which is quasi-dependent on the squares to be filled in.

Has Haack’s crossword puzzle analogy traveled through the philosophy sphere? I don't know. I like it though, since it has a quality that is also true of great crossword puzzles: it is very very pretty.

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Martin Buber and the tree 1

 

Freud once famously said thaat sometimes, a cigar is just a cigar. In fact, the Freud who said this might well be the folklore Freud. Still, the Apocrypha counts. Derrida famously tried to show that an example is never just an example, although as far as I know, he never approached Freud’s cigar ( he confined himself to Baudelaire’s tobacco use).

I’m with Derrida on this. The cigar example is a good example of an example that goes a bit far, part of the identikit of Freud with the masculine-marked brown tube in his mouth. What is interesting about the fake saying is that it is supposed to be an example of something that isn’t an example, that will stubbornly remain the thing that it is, just the thing that it is. And in making it exemplarily non-exemplary, the fake Freud is offering us a counterfeit, something  parasitic on a systems of markers of value that isn’t, as it happens, what it seems to be. How was the cigar chosen to be this exemplary non-example – that is the question.

I don’t want to ask that question of the cigar, though. I want to take up the logic of self-identification and its melodrama as it applies to the tree.

I ran into the tree while reading, for the first time, Martin Buber’s I and You (I and thou in the English translation, although the “thou” is a bit too muschmouthed for the plain old German “du”). I have never read this book because Buber has a vague reputation, one I can’t quite pin down, as one of the middle class prophets, the wise men who talk about the “crisis of man”, to borrow the title of Mark Greif’s book. And just as Humbert Humbert is (unjustly) snobby about Charlotte Haze’s “Great Books”, I, too, have been unjustly snobby about the American wisemen of the fifties – the Niebuhrs, the Herschels, et al. – and the Europeans that were published under their aegis – a gallery that definitely included “I and Thou”, published by Simon and Schuster, and licked by the PR department ever since. The term “dialogue”, which had quite the history at the height of American liberalism in the 1960s, owes a debt to Buber.

Snobbishness is the counterfeit of good taste. I’ve laid it down and laid it down as I’ve gotten old and gray. And I occasionally remember that what I know about intellectual history is based, ultimately, on the Will and Ariel Durant books that I read in the seventh and eighth grade – still a good place to get an education, albeit a Eurocentricl one.

To summarize a bit: Buber starts out contrasting the I-you and the I-it relations. He elides the third person, at first, altogether. There’s an anecdote in a wonderful essay on Buber by Avishai Margalit for the NYRB, November 4, 1993, that backgrounds the he/she/they aversion:

“Buber describes an encounter he had in Berlin with the aged, influential pastor Wilhelm Hechler. After several hours of conversation Hechler was suspicious of Buber and before they parted asked him directly, “Do you believe in God?” Buber tried to reassure Hechler that he did, but the answer he thought he ought to have given him, the answer he spent his whole life trying to articulate, came to him on the way home: “If belief in God means speaking about Him in the third person, then I don’t believe in God. But if belief means being able to speak to Him in the second person, then I do believe.’”

For Buber, the I-you relationship creates the possibility for there being a moral and religious domain – or I should perhaps put this in reverse: that there is a moral and religious domain points to the possibility of there being an I-you relationship. Although, unlike Kierkegaard, Buber does not want us to clearly distinguish the moral from the religious. This is an important point: Buber’s supposed existentialism differs in significant ways from other existentialists.

Post-Shoah Jewish philosophers, strongly influenced by Levinas, begin the moral and religious realm with the face. The human face.

Buber, however, begins not with the human face, but with a tree.

A tree.

  “I and You” was published in 1923. Like Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, it reflects both the pre-war sense of an old world coming apart and the catastrophe that occurred when the old world committed suicide by trench. There are textual commonalities: although we now look at the Tractatus as a philosophy text, in comparison with philosophy treatises both then and now. It doesn’t reference other arguments, or rarely, it is all about stating (The world is all the case is), and of course at the end of the book it pulls the ladder up and reveals that the book, in as much as it has been philosophical, has been nonsensical .  Wittgenstein once remarked that he wondered if philosophy could be written as a joke book – forgetting that he’d already done that with the Tractatus.

Buber had different teachers – notably George Simmel – and was evidently influenced by the Expressionists, who were evidently influenced by Zarathustra. I and You looks like a philosophical poem, just as Simmel’s sociology often looks like Baudelaire’s poems in prose.

Like Simmel, Buber was fascinated by links, connections, relations. For him, these are primary. In this, he’s following not only Simmel, but a Kabbalistic thematic. Marc-Alain Ouaknin, in Lire aux eclats (1993), writes of the dialogue between the masters of the Midrash or Talmud (the mahloquet) ax proceeding in a space of between that reflects on and in the interval.

“Thought is the thought of the interval, of the entre-deux. Rather than a distinct and certain point of view, each perspective represents a crossing of threads knotted interiorly, an infinitely complicated network, always turning and always subject to turn.”

Ouaknin is a rabbi, while Buber was a non-practicing Jew. As a Rabbi, Ouaknin resists the absolute overturning of hierarchies and oppositions that would destructure, for instance, man/animal (for instance) (that is quite an instance( (an overdetermined instance that turns and is subject to turn).

Buber was not so sure.