The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat

It is Sunday, January 13, 2008, the 13th day of the year. A bit earlier today, I posted my fifth reading list, the one for May 2007. If I say so myself, it was an interesting selection of books that I finished last May, and those of you interested in history, the Middle East, naval warfare (both historical and fictional), how Hitler consolidated his power in Germany, or the Sicilian Defense will all find material of some value. Because of the particularly philosophical interest of one of the books I read that month, I have decided to post on it here, and to expand upon the brief remarks I posted on Knight's Castle.

Sachs, Oliver. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. 1987. x + 243 pages. Begun 12 May 2007, finished 16 May 2007. Short, quick, fascinating, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, by the author of Awakenings (movie version starring Robin Williams and Robert DeNiro), is about memory, consciousness, and how the brain actually functions. From my point of view, this book, along with several of the works of Daniel Dennett, does much to support the view that the “mind” is a product of the manner in which the brain functions, rather than an autonomous organ.

Oliver Sachs is a medical doctor and has studied people with a variety of mental disorders. This book consists of a number of essays which are case studies of such mishaps to the brain as Asberger's Syndrome, Korsakov's Syndrome, migraine, epilepsy, and traumatic brain injuries. The title story is about a man who ceased to be able to recognize people by the gestalt of facial features which identify them for most of us. He could only recognize his friends, students, wife, by assigning each person a theme song, or melody, by which he could distinguish her.

Some of these stories reminded me of the works of R. D. Laing, which I read years ago. I tend to agree that Freudian psychotherapy was, and is, unscientific, and it is unknown how it works, to the degree that it works at all. Still, Laing made one very good discovery based upon his confidence in Freudian method. Laing treated young people for reported mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia, and he cured them by the Freudian method. As a reminder, the Freudian theory is that early events, buried in the mind, cause disturbances in one's behavior later on. If one can discover (literally) and resolve these traumas and conflicts, one effects a cure. There is no way in which these problems of early childhood could recur. Why, therefore, did Laing find young people returning to his clinic?

The answer, put simply, was that people are not treated for what is inside their minds. They are treated when their behavior becomes a problem for themselves or others. In many cases, parents were having their children committed because they found the child's behavior intolerable, even though many of us would find nothing out of the ordinary in the particular behavior. That is, the child is being treated for the parent's neuroses. (See James Thurber's wonderful short story of "The Unicorn in the Garden" for a fictional account of such a situation.)

Similarly, Sachs finds that, in many cases, it isn't the illness or trauma that causes problems - some people enjoy the mental brilliance that comes with Tourette's Syndrome, and stop taking their meds on weekends. Hildegarde of Bingen wrote music and made fantastic drawings of her holy visions, which are characteristic of drawing of epileptics. Most of us think of these drawings as symptoms; Hildegarde thought she was privileged to see angels. It's all in the interpretation.

The intimate connection between the brain's functioning and changes in the way peoples ideas, moods, and behavior exhibit themselves, indicates to me that Daniel Dennett is correct. We don't have a little mental driver - the soul, mind, anima, psyche, who is watching the actions of the brain and steering things. Descartes' dualism was incorrect. At the same time, some of these events are so far out of the conscious control of the subjects, that it is easy to understand why they find it difficult to accept that there is only one, integral, mind-body unit at work.

Wittgenstein's Poker

Yes, my children, philosophers are human. Some may be more human than others, but all of them have their failings, their foibles, their quirks.

Wittgenstein's Poker was written by David Edmonds and John Eidinow and published in 2001. It concerns a meeting of the Moral Sciences Club at Cambridge University on October 25, 1946. The guest speaker was Karl R. Popper, recently appointed to a position teaching philosophy at the London School of Economics, and in attendance were Ludwig Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell, as well as most of the philosophy faculty of Cambridge, and a good many students.

Popper, quite intentionally, threw down the philosophical gauntlet by taking as is topic whether there are real philosophical problems. Wittgenstein, as was his habit, interrupted Popper and began waving about a fireplace poker. Popper made a joke (or was it a joke?) about a moral rule not to threaten visiting lecturers with pokers. Wittgenstein stormed out of the room, offended by the joke. Or maybe he didn't "storm"; maybe he just left. And maybe he left before Popper's little quip, in which case he could not have, as later reported, left because the comment offended him.

And so Edmonds and Eidinow take us on a fascinating journey from the Jewish community of pre-war Vienna, in which the Wittgenstein's were extremely wealthy and prominent - the Poppers less so, to post-war Cambridge, with the stained-glass windows from the King's College chapel still in the basement for fear of German air raids. Why were Popper and Wittgenstein such ardent opponents? Why was a rather arcane issue emotionally fraught? What was the meaning of the poker?

Along the way we get an explanation of how the Vienna Circle and logical positivism failed, and what role, if any, Wittgenstein and Popper had in that failure. Mixed in with the social and personal details is a good bit of quite lucid philosophy. There is even a discussion of Wittgenstein I and Wittgenstein II, to use Bertrand Russell's terminology. Finally, we get an assessment of whether Popper or Wittgenstein is the more influential, and a reminder that influence and fame are not the same thing.

At some point in the future I hope to read another book about philosophers' quarrels by Edmonds and Eidinow: Rousseau's Dog, but the time is not yet ripe.