‘it is a person’s privilege to go to hell’

Until recently, I knew exactly one story about Alice Ambrose, to whom (along with Francis Skinner), Ludwig Wittgenstein dictated what would come to be known as the “Brown Book” in 1934-35. The story turns out to be false.

It appears in Ray Monk’s biography of Wittgenstein, The Duty of Genius:

[Ambrose] planned to publish in Mind an article entitled ‘Finitism in Mathematics’, in which she would present what she took to be Wittgenstein’s view on the matter. The article annoyed Wittgenstein intensely, and he tried hard to persuade her not to publish it. When she and G. E. Moore, who was then editor of the journal, refused to succumb to this pressure, he abruptly ended any association with her.

As I learned from Sophia Connell’s essay, “Alice Ambrose and Early Analytic Philosophy,” Wittgenstein tried more than persuasion, and did so after the first part of the essay was published in April 1935. Going by a letter Ambrose wrote to Wittgenstein on May 16, he had demanded, via Moore, that Ambrose write another article for Mind, on the basis of discussion with him, that he would find more acceptable. Wittgenstein was an intimidating force, and her reply to his overture is magnificent:

[It] is doubtful whether what I write at the end of further discussion with you will be satisfactory to you—unless you dictate the material. This latter I refuse to be partner to. If you want to write an article, that is your affair; but there is no point in giving a quotation from you with my name to it. … I resent bitterly your attempts at forcing on me the advice I refused to accept from you more than a week and a half ago. I will not have advice forced on me, and such tactics are useless. … All has been said on [this] topic that needs to be said and I refuse to hear it repeated. I do not agree in your feeling, nor am I willing to submit to further attempts to force on me a feeling I don’t have.

On the same day, Wittgenstein wrote to Moore, who was advising Ambrose for her PhD, resigning as an examiner. He returned her message with a passive-aggressive note: “Don’t destroy this letter, it might interest you one day to reread it”—implying that she would come to rue her words.

Two ...