Cultural Amnesia

by Clive James

  Wittgenstein’s requirement that we should not be seduced by language is understandable in the context of the rich second phase of his philosophy, whose aim we can find summed up for him on his brass plate in Trinity College chapel in Cambridge: “Rationem ex vinculis orationis vindicam esse.” (Reason must be released from the chains of speech.) The requirement that we should not be seduced by his language, however, is hard to meet. He had things to say that were as good as Hegel’s line about the owl of Minerva. He was the poet without a context, the poet in the waste land. His chief fear was that philosophy would be dominated by science. David Pears—whose short book Wittgenstein (1971) remains valuable even in the flood of light cast by Ray Monk’s magnificent biography of 1990—assures us that the whole aim of Wittgenstein’s work was to prevent such a domination. But of course philosophy is dominated by science, if philosophy is thought of as a subject in itself. What Wittgenstein proved is that the dominance of science does not extend to language, and that philosophy, as a corollary, is present in all the considered language that is ever used. Far from it being hard to say something significant, to say something insignificant is almost impossible, even for a baby just old enough to know that babbling makes it popular.

  Philosophy, as we use the word, is a fight against the fascination which forms of expression exert on us.

  —LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN, The Blue and Brown Books, P. 27

  PHILOSOPHY AS anyone uses the word, one would have thought. But for a long time few dared to think that, so Garboesque was Wittgenstein’s glamour. When Wittgenstein was in the room, even Isaiah Berlin was at a loss for words. Wittgenstein placed such an emphasis on precision of language that he made the merely eloquent feel slovenly. To get Wittgenstein in perspective, it required first of all his death, and then some unsentimental reflection on the breathtaking scope of what he had never talked about. He received credit for giving away the large amount of money he had inherited, and thus detaching himself from his social privileges and from the involvements and distractions of everyday life. But he also detached himself from everyday life by ignoring what was going on in Europe. After his sufferings in World War I the detachment was understandable, but the result was a chilling hermeticism in his frame of reference. Neither in his philosophy nor in his ancillary writings did he ever say much about what subsequently happened in the German-speaking countries, at the very time when civilization was facing its greatest threat. It could be said that he was under no obligation to, but it is still a strange omission. The advantage to his philosophical position was that by not saying much he never said anything ill considered. His philosophical position was like a defensive aesthetic strategy by which a poet hopes to write poetry in which there is nothing that can be criticized for its looseness: every line a Maginot line.

  In the fully developed form of his second phase, Wittgenstein’s eventual position about language was so obviously right that it is hard to see, at this distance, how a whole school of philosophy could have grown out of it. “Ein Ausdruck hat nur im Strom des Lebens Bedeutung,” he said in his last days. An expression has meaning only in the stream of life. Could anyone doubt it? Generations of students learned not to ask for the meaning, but to ask for the use. Wittgenstein got the credit. If Shakespeare had ever believed anything else, he would never have written a line. (The drawback of the academic guru is that his students continue, long after graduation, to see him as the incarnation of the seriousness of their subject: but their subject incarnates its own seriousness, or it would never have been worth studying in the first place.) Wittgenstein’s real power lay in the fact that he, too, was a literary prodigy. In all phases of his career Wittgenstein was an important writer in the rich German tradition of the aphorism. He favoured the epigrammatic, the dry, the tart. But he was slow—painfully slow, hour after hour slow, sweating and struggling in front of his own class slow—to accept the truth about the simple statement: the truth being that it is an ignis fatuus.

  The simple statement was never a problem: or, rather, it was never anything except a problem. The difficulty of getting something said clearly was never news: except of course, to the latest intake of philosophy students, who gave Wittgenstein the credit for everything that would have struck them anyway if they had been left alone with the merest metaphysical lyric from the early seventeenth century. Expressing oneself clearly is the most complicated thing there is. Mature English is complicated in order to mean one thing at a time—the closest to the simple that it can ever get. Wittgenstein looked always to the moment when, with the rhetoric blown away and language reduced to the parameters of a children’s language game, the “mental mist . . . disappears.” It can never quite do that, but with the proper illumination we can tell it is a mist. Wittgenstein was closer to the pay dirt in one of his letters to the philosopher G. E. Moore, when he talked about thought with due attention to what fascinated Heisenberg on his deathbed: turbulence. “One can’t drink wine while it’s fermenting, but that it’s fermenting shows that it isn’t dishwater.”

  As Wittgenstein conceived it, and apparently wanted to conceive it, philosophy should leave everything as it is, after having flooded it with light and air. But there was a consequence of his principle of refinement and precision that was seldom considered within his lifetime, and is still not often considered now. The precise tool was never ready to be brought to bear on the world: only on philosophy itself, which increasingly, under his influence, defined itself as an activity whose references were all to its own ways and means. The completeness with which this exclusive preoccupation suited its professional practitioners should have tipped off the more talented among them that they were engaged in a system for betting on the horses. Few of them, alas, were as talented as Wittgenstein: they could do the logic, but they could not duplicate his sensitivity to language—a sensitivity that was essentially poetic. Like literary theory at a later time, however, analytical philosophy was a game hard to get out of after you had started drawing the salary.

  We acted as though we had tried to find the real artichoke by stripping it of its leaves.

  —LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN, The Blue and Brown Books, P. 125

  This is the Wittgenstein that matters to a writer. There is a Wittgenstein that matters to professional philosophers, but they can prove it only to each other. The Wittgenstein that matters to a writer might be mistaken for his meaning by ordinary readers, but he can never be mistaken for his poetic quality, which is apparent even in his plainest statement. The precision of his language we can take for granted, and perhaps he should more often have done the same. His true and unique precision was in registering pre-verbal states of mind. In The Blue and Brown Books (p. 137) he proposes a “noticing, seeing, conceiving” process that happens before it can be described in words. That, indeed, is the only way of describing it. It sounds very like the kind of poetic talent that we are left to deal with after we abandon the notion—as we must—that poetic talent is mere verbal ability. “What we call ‘understanding a sentence’ has, in many cases, a much greater similarity to understanding a musical theme than we might be inclined to think” (p. 167). But he doesn’t want us to think about music as a mechanism to convey a feeling: joy, for example. “Music conveys to us itself !” (p. 178). So when we read a sentence as if it were a musical theme, the music doesn’t convey a separate sense that compounds with the written meaning. We get the feeling of a musical theme because the sentence means something. I thought he was getting very close to the treasure chamber when he wrote this. In 1970, reading The Blue and Brown Books every day in the Copper Kettle in Cambridge, I made detailed transcriptions in my journal every few minutes. It didn’t occur to me at the time that his prose was doing to me exactly what he was in the process of analysing. It sounded like music because it was so exactly right.

  Y

  Isoroku Yamamoto

  ISOROKU YAMAMOTO

  Isoroku Yamamoto (1884–1943) was the son of a schoolmaster called Takano, and the famous surname by whic
h we know him belonged to the family into which he was adopted. After his education at the naval academy he was wounded at the battle of Tsushima in the Russo-Japanese War. He studied at Harvard after World War I and served as a language officer in the early twenties, before becoming naval attaché at the Japanese embassy in Washington later in the decade. His wide knowledge of the United States extended to the factory floors, where he was impressed by American powers of production, and to the gambling joints, where he always fancied his chances. As chief of the aviation department of the Japanese navy in 1935, and as vice navy minister from 1936 to 1939, he argued both for a main force based on aircraft carriers and for avoiding any policy that would lead to a fighting alliance with the Axis powers in World War II. But after being promoted to Admiral and placed in command of the Combined Fleet, he dutifully planned the attack on Pearl Harbor. After his defeat at Midway six months later, and probably before, he knew that to continue fighting was a mere formality; the war was already lost. The idea that his death by enemy action was tantamount to suicide, however, is almost certainly part of the romance that continues to surround his name, not least in Japan, where he is a cult figure, and not exclusively on the political right. His distaste for a war with the Western allies has always rung a bell with post-war liberals aware that, if the enemy had been as pitiless as the Japanese High Command, the defeat could have been more disastrous, the occupation more humiliating, and the subsequent resurgence of both the culture and the economy much less impressive.

  The Yamamoto romance benefits from his artistic tastes. Like America’s General Patton, Yamamoto wrote accomplished poetry. Again like Patton, and like other romantic commanders such as Rommel and Guderian, Yamamoto probably experienced battle as an aesthetic event: the most likely reason for his participation in a war of which he disapproved. Superior military minds share with poets the uncomfortable position of waiting for lightning to strike, and having to act on it when it does. Yamamoto knew that World War II was the wrong war, but it was the only war he had. Strategy is a talent, and talent will out, even though it is hard to get the credit for it, since it becomes less possible to visualize the larger the scale grows. For that reason alone, the idea of a star strategist never transfers satisfactorily to film, because the action of even the smallest battle is too complex to be dramatized. (Hence the hero of Patton is shown to be decisive by the way he sorts out a traffic jam involving two trucks: the low moment of George C. Scott’s career.) In Tora! Tora! Tora! and Midway, both of them Hollywood films but made with Japanese participation, the Japanese producers eked out the necessary paucity of hardware by casting, in each film, one of their most venerable actors as Yamamoto. In Tora! Tora! Tora! he was played by Soh Yamamura and in Midway by Toshiro Mifune. Both actors conveyed genius with a flashing glance and resolution with a fixed frown. In either case, the viewer was left hungering for a more detailed characterization. It can be found in the extensive literature that has built up around Yamamoto in his own language, but almost every general study in English of the Pacific war has a chapter on Yamamoto, usually concluding that although the Japanse navy might have done no better had he lived, it was bound to do worse after he was dead. For the Pearl Harbor attack itself, the Reader’s Digest picture book of 1966, Tora! Tora! Tora!, with a text by Gordon W. Prange, might sound like an elementary proposition but is still the first book to have, if you can find it.

  The book was translated into Japanese and had a huge success in the hero’s homeland. It seems a fair guess that the average Japanese reader got the same point as Yamamoto did: that the war with the United States was a wilful mistake. The idea that Japan was tricked into the war by the Americans is one held only by Tokyo right-wingers who dress up like Michael Jackson, by the priests at Yasukuni shrine, and by Gore Vidal in his dotage. Yamamoto would have laughed aloud to hear it. For young people who correctly suspect that a schlockbuster movie like Pearl Harbor dishonours the dead as well as insulting the intelligence of the living, most of the issues concerning Yamamoto and the opening shots of the Pacific war are covered in Prange’s later, more complete historical work At Dawn We Slept (1981), but a warning should be attached: once the reader is launched on the study of a war so huge and horrible, he should be prepared at least to consider the unpalatable proposition that the quick ending of it by recourse to the atomic bombs was not only inevitable, but justified. Any revisionist historian who contends that the millions of Japanese soldiers based in the home islands would not have opposed a landing is obliged to believe that the military commanders, without a specific instruction from the Emperor, would have seen reason and surrendered. For those who hold that view, a close study of Yamamoto’s face can be recommended. He knows your country well, admires its virtues, and doesn’t even think he can prevail: but he wants to fight anyway.

  If we are ordered to do it, then I can guarantee to put up a tough fight for the first six months or a year, but I have absolutely no confidence as to what would happen if it went on for two or three years.

  —ADMIRAL ISOROKU YAMAMOTO TO PRIME MINISTER PRINCE KONOE, IN LATE 1940

  ON AT LEAST two separate occasions, Prince Konoe asked Yamamoto what Japan’s chances would be in a war against the United States. Each time, Yamamoto gave roughly the same answer, which is nowadays usually quoted and printed as if it had been given once. Variously translated into English, and variously rendered even into Japanese, Yamamoto’s declaration of uncertainty is probably the second most famous thing any Japanese of the Pacific war period ever said, ranking only slightly behind the passage in the Emperor’s surrender broadcast which conceded, in impossibly high-flown court language, that the war had developed in ways not necessarily favourable to Japan. Yamamoto’s advice to the government seems to have predicted that the unfavourable developments would be inevitable in the long term. Later on he was much criticized for not having expressed himself more firmly, but he must have felt that he didn’t need to. He was already on record as having advised that “Japan and America should seek every means to avoid a direct clash, and Japan should under no circumstances conclude an alliance with Germany.” That last part was in line with the genro Prince Saionji’s advice to the Emperor: advice which the Emperor ignored. Yamamoto never lost hope, however, that the Japanese government, even when Tojo was running it, would see sense and reach an agreement with the United States. He still had hopes even as the Pearl Harbor operation got under way. His last briefing to Admiral Nagumo was that if the negotiations in Washington were successful then the attack would have to be stopped even if the aircraft had already taken off from the carriers, and that there could be no arguing with such an order. Yamamoto, sometimes at the risk of his life, had spent the whole of the thirties preaching the necessity of staying out of a war with the United States. He had studied at Harvard, seen America’s factories, and knew more than any other top-ranking Japanese officer about America’s war potential. What else could he advise Konoe?

  Why, then, did Yamamoto consent to lead the Pearl Harbor attack? There are several possible answers, all leading by separate paths into the brain of a complex man. Speculations about the subtlety of “the Oriental mind” we can safely discount: they never amount to much more than ignorance and racism snuggling together under a duvet of rhetoric. Yamamoto would have been complex if he had been born and raised in Brisbane. First, he was a gambler anyway. He enjoyed gambling, possibly because he won almost every time. Second, he might have thought the chances reasonably good that the war would be short. If the Japanese diplomatic service had not botched the declaration of war, Pearl Harbor would still have been a surprise attack—an attack on Hawaii, a full two-thirds of the way across the Pacific from Japan, was not much more likely than an attack on Seattle—and might conceivably have brought America to terms, especially if the American aircraft carriers had been put out of action along with the battleships. Third, he was Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, supreme commander, Combined Fleet, Japanese navy. That was his career, those were his orders, and he had a
job to do, win or lose.

  To hindsight, the third reason seems the most powerful. Like Nelson and Napoleon, Yamamoto was a short man whose military gifts had carried him to great heights. If you look at the press photographs of his funeral cortège arriving at the Yasukuni shrine, the coffin looks about the size of a shoebox. A coffin always looks smaller than the person inside, but Yamamoto, even for a Japanese man of his generation, was of small physical stature. His moral stature meant a lot to him, and long before the war it had already grown enormous. His tactical brilliance, organizational ability and nonconformist daring were legendary, and they were all in service of the navy. Japanese naval aviation was practically his invention. He had opposed the laying down of the last two great battleships, Yamato and Musashi. He was for more aircraft carriers and a lot more aircraft. He represented the transition from heavy steel to light metals—from deep keels to free air. The bright young officers adored him for it. Though he was always self-deprecating about his poetry, he was probably serious when he wrote this poem on New Year’s Day, 1940.