I remember the first discussion of the first philosophical issue to become decisive for my intellectual development. The issue arose from my rejection of the attitude of attributing importance to words and their meaning (or their “true meaning”).
I must have been about fifteen. My father had suggested that I should read some of the volumes of Strindberg’s autobiography. I do not remember which of its passages prompted me, in a conversation with my father, to criticize what I felt was an obscurantist attitude of Strindberg’s: his attempt to extract something important from the “true” meanings of certain words. But I remember that when I tried to press my objections I was disturbed, indeed shocked, to find that my father did not see my point. The issue seemed obvious to me, and the more so the longer our discussion continued. When we broke it off late at night I realized that I had failed to make much impact. There was a real gulf between us on an issue of importance. I remember how, after this discussion, I tried strongly to impress on myself that I must always remember the principle of never arguing about words and their meanings, because such arguments are specious and insignificant. Moreover, I remember that I did not doubt that this simple principle must be well known and widely accepted; I suspected that both Strindberg and my father must be behind the times in these matters.
Years later I was to find that I had done them an injustice, and that the belief in the importance of the meanings of words, especially definitions, was almost universal. The attitude which I later came to call “essentialism”7 is still widespread, and the sense of failure which I felt as a schoolboy has often come back to me in later years.
The first repetition of this sense of failure came when I tried to read some of the philosophical books in my father’s library. I soon found that Strindberg’s and my father’s attitude was quite general. This created very great difficulties for me, and a dislike of philosophy. My father had suggested that I should try Spinoza (perhaps as a cure). Unfortunately I did not try his Letters, but the Ethics and the Principles According to Descartes, both of them full of definitions which seemed to me arbitrary, pointless, and question-begging, so far as there was any question at all. It gave me a lifetime’s dislike of theorizing about God. (Theology, I still think, is due to lack of faith.) I also felt that the similarity between the ways of geometry, the most fascinating subject to me at school, and Spinoza’s more geometrico was quite superficial. Kant was different. Though I found the Critique much too difficult I could see that it was about real problems. I remember that after trying to read (I do not suppose with much understanding, but certainly with fascination) the Preface to the second edition of the Critique (in the edition by Benno Erdmann), I turned the pages and was struck and puzzled by that queer arrangement of the Antinomies. I did not get the point. I could not understand what Kant (or anybody) might mean by saying that reason can contradict itself. Yet I saw from the table of the First Antinomy that real problems were being argued; and also, from the Preface, that mathematics and physics were needed to understand these things.
But here I feel I must turn to the issue underlying that discussion, whose impact on me I remember so well. It is an issue that still divides me from most of my contemporaries, and since it has turned out to be so crucial for my later life as a philosopher I feel I must examine it in some detail, at the cost even of a long digression.