Frank Ramsey: A Sheer Excess of Powers

"This is a fantastic biography. Frank Ramsey was an extraordinary character, evidently brilliant from an early age. He made path-breaking advances in mathematics , philosophy and economics. In his spare time, he helped Keynes edit the Economic Journal. He translated Wittgenstein into English because nobody else could understand what Wittgenstein was saying. He was a larger-than-life character who hung out with the Bloomsbury Group and had an extraordinary life, and who then died tragically young at the age of 26. So, all of this he achieved between 18 and 26. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter The biography is a really interesting read, because he’s such an interesting character, and because he pushed forward the intellectual frontiers across this incredibly wide waterfront. It’s also a very good read about the Cambridge of the 1920s. I’m still relatively new to Cambridge, so I enjoyed learning about all of that. Then there are also inserts, where very distinguished people from maths, philosophy and economics explain some of Ramsey’s theories. So, for example, in economics, Misak has Partha Dasgupta explaining how Ramsey figured out what the right way to think about the social discount rate was. It’s broader, it’s intergenerational fairness in any context—investment, thinking about the environment. The Ramsey rule is widely used. The social rate should be lower than the private market rate. But exactly what it should be is much debated in economics even now, particularly in the environmental literature. But at least we know how to think about it and which bits we should be debating."

"My PhD supervisor Hugh Mellor, a Cambridge philosopher who died this year, was a huge fan of FR Ramsey and described him as Cambridge’s greatest ever philosopher. He made an excellent radio programme about him “Better than the Stars” . He ranked him above Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein . This is a man who died very young – he was only 26. He was a genius – no question. He made contributions not just to philosophy but to maths, game theory , and economics. He was taken seriously as an extremely young man by John Maynard Keynes and Wittgenstein, neither of whom suffered fools gladly. He was 19 or 20 and they were talking seriously with him as an intellectual peer. It’s quite remarkable. They immediately recognized his brilliance. He had such a fertile mind that he spun off these short papers that 20, 50 years later suddenly became the focus for game theory discussions or injected life into debates about knowledge and belief in philosophy. His contributions have had these afterlives, but unfortunately – and this gets back to the biography – they’re often highly mathematical, highly technical, and it’s not easy for a general public to understand precisely why he was so important. Because he was a polymath, they’re not just in one field, so very few people have grasped him whole. Economists latch onto one bit of his thought, game theorists onto another; philosophers another. What Cheryl Misak has tried to do is pull that all together in a biography, a book which is quite long for somebody who lived such a short life. She’s done something unusual for a biographer, which is to commission a number of experts to write a brief explanation of the key contributions that Ramsey made in that short lifetime. That’s an interesting decision. I’m not sure I’m completely convinced by it, but I’m not sure how else she could have done it. It would be very difficult for anyone to summarize all these contributions accurately, so it’s better, perhaps, to get a range of experts to summarize them. These are parts of the book you can skip, if you want. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter The biography as a whole is really interesting. Ramsey was very unusual. He grew up in Cambridge and the simplest explanation of how he came to be so clever is that his father was a mathematics don who gave him an excellent foundation in mathematics. He excelled at it as a schoolboy at Winchester College. He was an odd, very large child and then man and was very genial. He was on the left politically, involved with the Bloomsbury set and their ideas of openness in sexual relations. He got involved with psychoanalysis early on as well. He was an atheist, but his brother, Michael Ramsey, became Archbishop of Canterbury. He’s in this milieu of early 20th century Cambridge, which was a fascinating time with Bertrand Russell and Keynes and Wittgenstein around. Amongst other things, he translated Wittgenstein’s Tractatus from German – having learnt German extremely quickly – and had intense discussions with him. He came up with a brilliant line about the Tractatus . The Tractatus famously ends with the line, “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” That’s just saying that the things that he’s explained in the book are all that you can meaningfully say, that there’s a very narrow range of things that can be spoken about. All the interesting, important stuff is outside that, which is almost a mystical conclusion. Ramsey said, “What we can’t say we can’t say, and we can’t whistle it either.” Wittgenstein used to whistle all the time. He was into whistling Mozart as he walked down King’s Parade. So it’s a joke at Wittgenstein’s expense. The point he’s making is that you can’t show something that can’t be said. If it really can’t be said, it can’t be whistled either. The Tractatus is an attempt to whistle it, as it were. It’s just remarkable that such a young man should be so clearly intellectually the equal (or perhaps even the superior) of somebody who’s been thought of as one of the most important 20th century philosophers. It’s so sad that he died so young. He got sick after swimming in the Cam and it’s possible he caught something there. He died pretty quickly of a fever, but it wasn’t clear exactly what he died from, possibly Weil’s disease. Yes, she’s a first-rate philosopher and she makes the case that as well as making contributions in his own right, Ramsey persuaded Wittgenstein to move in the direction that he later moved in—the later Wittgenstein’s concern with forms of life and the social context in which utterances were made, moving away from the more austere, logical Wittgenstein of the Tractatus . The discussions that Wittgenstein had with Ramsey were, she thinks, the triggers for that change. She backs this up with evidence too. But the book isn’t just fascinating as a biography of this genius. There are so many interesting features of the Cambridge world in this period just after the First World War . I think it’s the clarity of his thought and startling originality. He grasped where people had gone wrong and very quickly overturned disciplines which had been going in one direction. I think it’s a tribute to just how original he was. Amazing to think of somebody so young being compared seriously with Newton. There are just so many absorbing aspects to the book. Lettice Ramsey, Frank’s wife, was an eminent photographer and later photographed Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath in Cambridge. The other bit that stayed with me about the book is that Ramsey’s mother was such a strong and interesting character. She studied history at Oxford and was a socialist thinker connected with the suffragettes. I almost wanted another biography just of her. It was very early for a woman to be studying at Oxford or Cambridge – I tend to think of Oxford and Cambridge as rather conservative, not radical places. It’s interesting to get a glimpse of the left-wing side of Cambridge between the wars."

"He’d just turned 27. He was born in 1903. Yes. The word ‘genius’ is bandied around, but with Ramsey, it is clearly totally appropriate. He was Cambridge-based. He did his undergraduate degree at Cambridge. And, already as an undergraduate, he was recognized as a great mind. He has several connections with the Vienna Circle. Most importantly, he went off to Austria when he was still an undergraduate to visit Wittgenstein, who at that stage had become a primary school teacher in small villages in southern Austria. He went to talk to him about his German manuscript, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus , which Ramsey then translated. So, he’s a very important figure in Wittgenstein scholarship. He was his first translator, which is remarkable, given how young he was at the time. Wittgenstein himself, of course, was an important inspiration for the Vienna Circle. Yes. Now, Cheryl Misak makes two very important claims in connection with Ramsey and the Vienna Circle. She claims that it was Ramsey’s discussion with Moritz Schlick that brought the Tractatus to the attention of the Circle. No. At least – according to Cheryl – they didn’t know about the Tractatus . She notes a reference to Schlick talking about the Tractatus , in which he mentions his discussions with Ramsey. It may be that that was the first time Schlick became aware of the Tractatus . And then he brought it to the attention of the Circle – and then they went through it literally line-by-line. The second huge claim she makes about Ramsey and the Circle is that it was Ramsey who gave the Circle the idea that mathematics should be treated as consisting of analytic propositions. There had always been a puzzle about how to treat mathematics. Was it empirical? Was 2+2=4 out there in the world, to be observed, as some philosophers of mathematics have believed? That was John Stuart Mill’s approach to mathematics. According to Cheryl Misak, it was Ramsey who put into the minds of the Vienna Circle the idea that perhaps mathematical proofs should be treated like logical tautologies—propositions like ‘all bachelors are unmarried men’—that mathematical proofs are true by definition. And yet Cheryl Misak’s written this beautiful book. It’s a huge book, 500 pages, and I don’t think anybody will ever attempt—this is my scientific, falsifiable prediction!—another biography of Ramsey again. Yes, a clever technique. She did get experts to write these boxes, which are often very technical. She doesn’t exactly encourage the reader to bypass them, but she says it’s forgivable if they do! As well as the connections we’ve been talking about between Ramsey and the Circle, she’s very interesting on Ramsey in Vienna. As I mentioned, Ramsey first went to Austria specifically to talk to Wittgenstein. But then he went back – this time to Vienna – to be psychoanalyzed. He’d had a disastrous love affair and going to Vienna was THE place, of course, to be psychoanalyzed. You didn’t go to your local psychoanalyst in London. Yes, although Ramsey is one of the people who helped spread the word about psychoanalysis back in the UK and, specifically, in Cambridge. The elite Cambridge intellectual society, The Apostles, discussed the status and nature of psychoanalysis. Yes. For the purposes of this Five Books interview I wanted to choose one book that was specifically focused on a character who was either in the Circle or linked to the Circle. Ramsey was one of those characters. I could have chosen a whole array of very good books about some of the other characters in the Circle. Rebecca Goldstein has written a lovely biography of Gödel, for example. The other book that I was tempted to choose was Malachi Haim Hacohen’s incredible work of scholarship about the first half of Popper’s life, Karl Popper: The Formative Years 1902-1945, which goes from Popper’s birth in 1902 to the publication of The Open Society and its Enemies at the end of World War II . It’s the formative period in Popper’s life, before he became famous. It grounds Popper’s ideas in the milieu of Vienna and of the Circle. He’s very forgiving of Popper’s very difficult character—Popper was a notoriously difficult man. Because Hacohen regards him as a genius, he’s more tolerant of some of his character flaws than others have been. He goes too far, I think, in forgiving him for the way he treated other people. Yes, but with this difference: Ray Monk interprets Wittgenstein’s personality ‘issues’ as saintliness, or maybe eccentricity, or, more fundamentally, that Wittgenstein acted out of a sense of obligation to fulfil his brilliance. In other words, he gives them a good motive. Hacohen doesn’t go that far. He doesn’t say that it’s perfectly alright that Popper was a bully. He says that Popper’s behaviour should be put in context, and my sense is that he thinks it’s kind of irrelevant, given the weight of his genius. The other thing I would say is that Wittgenstein has a much stronger claim to the label of ‘genius’ than Popper. So, if you’re going to use the Hacohen excuse for personality weaknesses, then it’s better used for Wittgenstein than for Popper."