Ludwig Wittgenstein between Analytic Philosophy and Apophaticism [1 ed.] 9781443884846, 9781443881081

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Ludwig Wittgenstein between Analytic Philosophy and Apophaticism

Ludwig Wittgenstein between Analytic Philosophy and Apophaticism Edited by

Sotiris Mitralexis

Ludwig Wittgenstein between Analytic Philosophy and Apophaticism Edited by Sotiris Mitralexis This book first published 2015 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2015 by Sotiris Mitralexis and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-8108-2 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-8108-1

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction ............................................................................................... vii An Apophatic Wittgenstein—or a Wittgensteinian Apophaticism Sotiris Mitralexis Chapter One ................................................................................................. 1 Non-Discursivity in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: Is a Conceptualist Reading of the Saying/Showing Distinction Possible? Miltos Theodossiou Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 49 Wittgenstein’s Apophatic Descriptions Chryssi Sidiropoulou Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 81 Identifying the “Apophatic Impulse” in Wittgenstein’s Early Philosophy: The Lecture on Ethics as an Interpretative Key Pui Him Ip Chapter Four ............................................................................................ 107 Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard’s Ethics: Ethics as Apophatic Knowledge George A. Sivrides Chapter Five ............................................................................................ 127 Wittgensteinian Semantics and the Suspension of Meaning: Theological Discourse Veering between Sense and Nonsense Haralambos Ventis Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 151 ǻȚ-ਫȞȞȠȘȝȐIJȦıȚȢ, or Inter-Ȃeaningfulness: Re-reading Wittgenstein through Gregory Palamas’ and Thomas Aquinas’ Readings of Aristotle Nicholas Loudovikos Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 167 Wittgenstein and the Language of Religion Michael Grant

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List of Contributors ................................................................................. 213 Index ........................................................................................................ 215

INTRODUCTION AN APOPHATIC WITTGENSTEIN— OR A WITTGENSTEINIAN APOPHATICISM SOTIRIS MITRALEXIS

This volume constitutes an attempt to initiate an inquiry into a subject that has been repeatedly hinted at, but hitherto never thoroughly researched through this particular hermeneutical lens. Namely, the relationship between Ludwig Wittgenstein’s “analytic stance” towards philosophy and the inherently apophatic nature of his epistemology. In using the term “apophaticism,” a term deriving from Christian and—more preeminently—Byzantine philosophy and theology, we are not merely referring to the theological “via negativa” or to tendencies towards mysticism, but rather to a comprehensive epistemological stance irrespective of a particular civilizational setting. According to Christos Yannaras’ seminal definition of apophaticism as an epistemology, it consists in (1) the denial that we exhaust knowledge in its formulation; (2) the refusal to identify the understanding of the signifiers with the knowledge of what is signified; and (3) the symbolic character of every epistemic expression: its role in bringing together atomic experiences and embracing them within a common semantic boundary marker, a process which allows epistemic experience to be shared, and once shared to be verified.1

The argument is that the more dominant currents in Byzantine thought rely on such an epistemological stance, which becomes most explicit in the case of defining (or not defining) its ontological model’s uncreated

1

Christos Yannaras, Relational Ontology (Brookline Mass.: HC Press, 2011), 9.

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Other,2 while actually being the implicit precondition in most instances of applying epistemological criteria. However, apophaticism as a comprehensive epistemology does not need to be confined to the historical context of the pre-modern civilization in which it primarily reigned. Ludwig Wittgenstein’s work can be approached as a particularly efflorescent case of the implementation of an implicitly (and at times explicitly) apophatic epistemology. As such, this volume’s claim is that such an approach would not merely provide elucidations on apophatic epistemologies, but rather shed potentially valuable hermeneutical light on Wittgenstein’s work, functioning as an epistemological thread running through it. Consequently, the focal points here consist of questions concerning knowledge and its disclosure, ineffability, non-discursivity, the function of language, the limits of my language as the limits of my world, the language of religion, and so on. However, the contributors of this volume do not necessarily adhere to a strict and exclusive understanding of apophaticism or epistemology as it has been portrayed above. Rather, these questions, considerations, reflections and concerns have provided the impulse for most of the chapters that follow. The present volume is an attempt to shed more light on the apophatic aspects of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophy by including a broad spectrum of different approaches, with contributors ranging from Wittgenstein scholars to Patristics scholars—and beyond. In the first chapter, Miltos Theodossiou is concerned with the connection of the Tractarian concept of showing to ineffability, or nondiscursivity. The specific framework in which the examination of this issue is undertaken belongs to the wider thematic area of the so-called “Myth of the Given,” a line of questioning opened up by the work of the American philosopher John McDowell. The aim of the chapter is to provide a reading of the Tractatus—a “conceptualist” reading—according to which any traces of non-discursivity in the book should not fall into the Myth. The author, however, concludes that such a reading cannot fully accommodate the Tractatus’ view of logic as separate from its application in ordinary language. Nevertheless, the failure is instructive, since it allows us to understand better Wittgenstein's later views on language.

2

A prime example for this would be the fifth chapter of the Areopagite corpus’ Mystical Theology—in Clarence Edwin Rolt, trans., Dionysius the Areopagite: On the Divine Names and the Mystical Theology (New York: Cosimo, 2007), 200-1.

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Chryssi Sidiropoulou begins by engaging with Wittgenstein’s criticism of dichotomies such as truth and formulation or expressions of a dualism such as understanding of a word and knowledge of its signified reality. This Wittgensteinian critique is itself part of Wittgenstein’s apophaticism rather than a refutation thereof. She argues that there is room for the ineffable in Wittgenstein’s thought in highlighting the impossibility of an absolute perspective available to us. In this, all descriptions are given within a given language-game and so intrinsically embedded in a specific—finite—spatiotemporal set of limitations. Our realization of the latter enables us to acknowledge that there will always be something “ineffable” and thus apophatic, in the sense of something transcending our possibilities of expression within our language-game, but which could be available to others within different limitations or possibilities open to them—leading us to apophatic descriptions. In the next chapter, Pui Him Ip attempts to show that the apophatic impetus underlying the early Wittgenstein’s philosophy could be identified most lucidly in light of the Lecture on Ethics, a text that could act as an interpretative key for Wittgenstein’s early thought as a whole. We find that Wittgenstein’s insistence on the nonsensicality of ethical propositions springs from his desire to elucidate clearly the presence of the paradox at the heart of the ethical. But more than that, the impetus behind the “ladder” —the call to throw away the propositions of the Tractatus—could be identified from Wittgenstein’s desire for his readers to bypass a mere recognition of the paradox and accept the ethical imperative to stop trying to run against the boundary of our language. Drawing from the work of Von Wright, the author interprets these results in light of Wittgenstein’s lifelong concern for human culture and concludes that Wittgenstein’s apophaticism was driven by a deep concern for the transcendence of human values, lest they are manipulated by man. Following this, George A. Sivrides associates Wittgenstein’s ethics with Kierkegaard’s, in order to trace ethics as apophatic knowledge and as a foundation of thought itself. Initiating from the ineffability of ethics in Wittgenstein, he points to the categories of the aesthetic, of the ethical and of the religious conduct in Kierkegaard, to conclude with the conception of language as practice which constitutes the apophatic sense of thought. From a theological standpoint, Haralambos Ventis attempts to reclaim the conceptual validity of theological statements from the widely endorsed attacks occasioned by Wittgensteinian immanentism. He argues

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that the exercise of a critical theology is very essential to the health of religions, affording as it does the latter’s main chance for self-criticism—a vital feat, given the non-falsifiable nature of religious claims and the intolerance they can encourage. In the sixth chapter, Nicholas Loudovikos offers an indirect reading of Wittgenstein through Gregory Palamas’ and Thomas Aquinas’ readings of Aristotle. He thus provides us with an approach to Gregory Palamas’ distinctions and categories as an unexpected interpretative key both for some of the metaphysical and some of the non-metaphysical aspects of Wittgenstein’s thought. Beginning with a consideration of Wittgenstein's account of aspectdawning, Michael Grant’s paper endeavors to show how the opposition between the particular and the universal or general is displaced in Wittgenstein’s thought by a concern for the singular, a concern irreducible to the oppositions and dichotomies on which philosophy has tended to rely. Wittgenstein’s thought is characterized not by a movement from particular to general or general to particular, but by a more paradoxical and less easily characterized movement of singularities, one that goes from particular to particular. It is the consequences of this order of thought as they bear on an understanding of the language of religion that the paper seeks to bring out. The initial inspiration for this volume’s initiative did not emerge from tracing apophaticism in Wittgenstein, but from “tracing Wittgenstein” in apophaticism. During my study of Maximus the Confessor’s thought (7th century), I came across many ideas that strongly reminded me of Wittgenstein’s 20th century aphorisms. To cite an example, Maximus the Confessor follows Wittgenstein’s advice; he does not speak of what cannot be said, reminding the modern reader of TLP 7. The Patristic commentator speaks of God (and, to be precise, of everything) “according to the measure of our language (for it is not possible for us to transcend it).”3 In utter respect for the realism of language, the Church Father declares that God does not exist, for his existence is completely beyond everything that

3 Scholia in De Divinis Nominibus, in Corpus Dionysiacum Band 4,1. Ioannis Scythopolitani prologus et scholia in Dionysii Areopagitae librum ‘De divinis nominibus’ cum additamentis interpretum aliorum, ed. Beate Regina Suchla (Berlin, Boston: de Gruyter, 2011), 189 B (p. 122, fn.): “IJ૶ ȝȑIJȡ૳ IJોȢ ਲȝİIJȑȡĮȢ ȖȜȫııȘȢ ਕțȠȜȠȣș૵Ȟ (Ƞ੝ Ȗ੹ȡ ਫ਼ʌİȡȕોȞĮȚ IJĮȪIJȘȞ įȣȞĮIJઁȞ ਲȝ૙Ȟ).”

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we call “being” and “existence.”4 For Maximus this is not a mere rhetorical device: he explicitly writes that “nonbeing is properly meant with regard to [God], since he is not among beings.”5 Any designation concerning God and the sense of the world cannot but be incorrect, as it emerges from within the limits of our world. The mode of existence (IJȡȩʌȠȢ ਫ਼ʌȐȡȟİȦȢ) of creatures cannot be the same or comparable to the mode of existence of their source of being, to the mode of existence of the uncreated, and nothing at all can be said about it, as it resides beyond the limits of createdness—a notion usually described by the radicalism of the created/uncreated distinction. Ludwig Wittgenstein’s genius provides us with another language to express this from a quite different perspective, in saying that “the sense of the world must lie outside the world” (TLP 6.41). Wittgenstein explains: In the world everything is as it is, and everything happens as it does happen: in it no value exists—and if it did exist, it would have no value. If there is any value that does have value, it must lie outside the whole sphere of what happens and is the case. For all that happens and is the case is accidental. What makes it non-accidental cannot lie within the world, since if it did it would itself be accidental. It must lie outside the world. (TLP 6.41)

For thinkers such as Maximus, the question of the sense of the world is the question of its cause, the question about God. However, “the limits of my language signify the limits of my world” (TLP 5.6): to signify in language what lies beyond the limits of my world, the extremities of which in a Maximian ontology would be the limitations of createdness, would be impossible—it would be non-sense. For since it is necessary that we understand correctly the difference between God and creatures, then the affirmation of being beyond being [ਫ਼ʌİȡİ૙ȞĮȚ, ਫ਼ʌİȡȠȪıȚȠȢ] must be the negation of beings and the affirmation of beings must be the negation of being beyond being. In fact both names,

4

Maximus the Confessor, Mystagogia, in S. Massimo Confessore. La mistagogia ed altri scritti, ed. Raffaele Cantarella (Florence: Testi Cristiani, 1931), proem.109: “[…] because of his being beyond being, [God] is more fittingly referred to as nonbeing.” 5 Maximus the Confessor, Quaestiones et dubia, ed. José H. Declerck. Corpus Christianorum Series Graeca 10 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1982), 2.14.4-6: “KȣȡȓȦȢ Ȗ੹ȡ ਥʌ’ Į੝IJȠ૨ ȜȑȖİIJĮȚ IJઁ ȝ੽ ੕Ȟ, ਥʌİȚį੽ Ƞ੝įȑȞ ਥıIJȚ IJ૵Ȟ ੕ȞIJȦȞ.” Translation by Despina Prassas, in St Maximus the Confessor's Questions and Doubts (Illinois: Northern Illinois University Press, 2009), 155.

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Introduction being and nonbeing, are to be reverently applied to [God] although not at all properly.6 For nothing whatsoever, whether being or nonbeing, is linked to him as a cause, no being or what is called being, no nonbeing, or what is called nonbeing, is properly close to him. He has in fact a simple existence, unknowable and inaccessible to all and altogether beyond understanding which transcends all affirmation and negation.7

This stance towards knowledge and language permeates Maximus’ Lebensanschauung and marks his work, an epistemological realism “beyond affirmation and negation.” Of course, neither of these elements is Wittgenstein in the most strict sense. However, the question persists: if the reader, engaging in a welcome anachronism, finds Wittgenstein in apophaticism, then how and in which way would he or she trace apophaticism in Wittgenstein, if at all? It is from such questions that the idea and intention for this volume initially emerged. I am indebted to all contributors, as well as to Cambridge Scholars Publishing for making the publication of this volume possible. I am especially thankful to Chryssi Sidiropoulou from Bo÷aziçi University’s Philosophy Department, my postdoctoral collaboration with whom, combined with her kind counsel and indispensable assistance, helped actualize this volume’s transition from intention to reality.

References Berthold, George C, trans. Maximus the Confessor: Selected Writings. New York: Paulist Press, 1985. Maximus the Confessor. Ambigua. In Patrologiae Cursus Completus. Series Graeca, vol. 91, edited by Jacques Paul Migne. Paris: Migne, 1857-1866. —. Mystagogia. In S. Massimo Confessore. La mistagogia ed altri scritti, edited by Raffaele Cantarella.. Florence: Testi Cristiani, 1931. —. Quaestiones et dubia. Edited by José H. Declerck. Corpus Christianorum Series Graeca (CCSG) 10. Turnhout: Brepols, 1982. 6

Maximus the Confessor, Mystagogia, proem.110-115. Translation in George C. Berthold, Maximus the Confessor: Selected Writings (New York: Paulist Press, 1985, 185. 7 Maximus the Confessor, Mystagogia, proem.120-12, trans. in Berthold, 186. See also Ambigua, MPG 91, 1128 B, 1129 C.

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Prassas, Despina, ed., trans. St Maximus the Confessor's Questions and Doubts. Illinois: Northern Illinois University Press, 2009. Rolt, Clarence Edwin, trans. Dionysius the Areopagite: On the Divine Names and the Mystical Theology. New York: Cosimo, 2007. Suchla, Beate Regina, ed. Corpus Dionysiacum Band 4,1. Ioannis Scythopolitani prologus et scholia in Dionysii Areopagitae librum ‘De divinis nominibus’ cum additamentis interpretum aliorum. [CD4.1] Berlin, Boston: de Gruyter, 2011. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus [TLP], Translated by Brian McGuiness & David Pears. London: Routledge, 2011. Yannaras, Christos: Relational Ontology. Translated by Norman Russell. Brookline Mass.: HC Press, 2011.

CHAPTER ONE NON-DISCURSIVITY IN WITTGENSTEIN’S TRACTATUS: IS A CONCEPTUALIST READING OF THE SAYING/SHOWING DISTINCTION POSSIBLE? MILTOS THEODOSSIOU

1. Introduction One of the most difficult concepts in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus (TLP from now on) remains the notion of showing (zeigen, sich zeigen). Indeed, the saying/showing distinction harbors all those features that make it a hard nugget to crack, setting up great obstacles in the way of straightforward interpretation: it is ambiguous and obscure, yet promises to pay rich dividends to the philosopher who manages to decrypt Wittgenstein’s intentions in introducing it. Here we shall concern ourselves with only one aspect of the distinction, though one that may be of the greatest relevance for making sense of TLP’s view of logic: namely, the connection of showing to ineffability, or non-discursivity. The term “non-discursivity” seems to us properly minimal and metaphysically non-committal when attempting to interpret the saying/showing distinction: it allows us to put aside (temporarily or not) the connotations of “ineffability” and similar terms. Whether showing means that what is shown is ineffable is plainly a matter of interpretation. One should not decide in advance how to stand on this issue by automatically relating showing to ineffability; arguments should be offered. To the extent that “ineffability” decides the issue in advance, we prefer “non-discursivity” to “ineffability” or “inexpressibility” as the proper term for an impartial investigation of the Tractarian showing: the

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term simply implies that what is shown is not discursive, does not belong to the level of discourse, with nothing mystical or ineffable being necessarily implied thereby. The positive aspects of the term are to be investigated. In what follows, we shall undertake this investigation in the context of ongoing debates over the interpretation of the book. We shall pursue certain lines of interpretation initiated by Cora Diamond and James Conant in the 1990s, two philosophers who have opened up an entirely novel approach to the book, reviving interest in it after a decades-long period of silence and dismissal. This approach, the Resolute Interpretation, will guide us in trying to set up a so-called “conceptualist” understanding of showing and the saying/showing distinction. The term “conceptualism” signals our interest in placing the resolute interpretation of the book in the context of the problematic of the Myth of the Given, a theme figuring prominently in analytic discussions of philosophy of mind and perception (in analytic epistemology) during the last twenty years. Inspired by the American philosopher Wilfrid Sellars’ work, and developed most fruitfully in the philosophy of the so-called “Pittsburgh Neo-Hegelian” philosopher, John McDowell, the problematic of the Myth of the Given, as well as the conceptualist attempts developed to avoid it, have far greater scope and application—or so we shall argue. Consequently, we shall try to combine three lines of approach to the interpretation of the saying/showing distinction: (a) textual evidence internal to the Tractatus itself, (b) the Resolute program of interpretation, and (c) the Myth of the Given problematic. The structure of the paper is therefore as follows. In section 2, we shall try to bring out our questions about “showing” by briefly commenting on certain passages in the Tractatus. In section 3, we shall attempt to place these passages in the context of the problematic of the Myth of the Given. This will allow us to specify in more detail what a conceptualist reading of TLP would involve. In section 4, we shall present our take on the Resolute Interpretation. This will allow us to pinpoint two key notions in TLP, whose analysis is needed for any deeper resolute and conceptualist treatment of the Tractarian understanding of showing: the notion of “logical syntax” and the Tractarian concept of the “logical proposition.” In section 5, we shall briefly mention the debates over the first notion in the recent literature, and comment on them in order to show how they may shed light on a conceptualist understanding of showing. In section 6, we shall expand on this line of thinking in the case of TLP’s “propositions of

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logic.” Again, the relevant literature will be presented and commented upon. This will enable us to argue that a fully conceptualist understanding of non-discursivity in TLP may not be possible, even on resolute principles of interpretation. Finally, in section 7, we shall sum up our findings and conclude. Tractarian non-discursivity will be shown to be innocent of the standard idea of “ineffability,” namely of non-discursivity with overtones of mysticism and transcendence. Nevertheless, some kind of non-conceptualist Givenness seems to be deeply embedded in TLP’s understanding of logic, a sort of metaphysical transcendence which cannot be overcome. This non-conceptual remainder, however, might simply be taken to be one of the metaphysical premises whose existence in TLP resolute interpreters have no problem acknowledging. Indeed, the nonconceptuality involved may be fruitfully understood as giving rise to Wittgenstein’s so-called “rule-following considerations” in Philosophical Investigations.

2. Showing and the saying/showing distinction The importance of the notion of “showing” in TLP can hardly be overestimated. Wittgenstein himself highlighted its significance. In a letter to Russell in 1919, he wrote: I’m afraid you haven’t really got hold of my main contention, to which the whole business of logical propositions is only a corollary. The main point is the theory of what can be expressed by propositions—i.e. by language and what cannot be expressed by propositions, but only shown; which, I believe, is the cardinal problem of philosophy.1

It is of some interest that Wittgenstein does not confuse here the issue of non-discursivity with the issue of ineffability, inexpressibility, or unsayability, bringing in associations of mysticism and metaphysical transcendence. However, in a letter to Engelmann in 1917, he does write about Ludwig Uhland’s poem “Graf Ebenhards Weissdorn” [Count Ebenhard’s Hawthorn]: “And this is how it is: if one does not endeavor to express the unutterable [das Unaussprechliche], then nothing gets lost. But the unutterable will be—inexpressibly—contained in what has been

1

Ludwig Wittgenstein, in Ludwig Wittgenstein: Cambridge Letters. Correspondence with Russell, Keynes, Moore, Ramsey, and Sraffa, ed. Brian McGuinness and G. H. von Wright (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 124.

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uttered!”2 At least without further analysis, this does give one the impression that Wittgenstein is talking of some “deep truth” buried in the poem. Although what precisely Wittgenstein might have had in mind here is not self-evident, his way of putting the matter certainly muddles the waters for anyone attempting to interpret non-discursivity in TLP as nonmetaphysically as possible. Furthermore, Unaussprechliches and its cognates appear in TLP as well (for example, in 6.522). On account of this, we shall restrict ourselves primarily to internal evidence, trying to make sense of TLP on its own terms (the way its author presumably wanted it.)3 There are at least three places in TLP where worries over showing may crop up: over how nonsense works (6.54), how propositions show (4.022), and the notion of the Mystical (6.522). Of course, there are several other places where the notion of “showing,” in the sense of non-discursivity, is involved: for example, the object-name relation (3.321), the picturing relation (2.172), the way that something falls under a formal concept (4.126) and the remarks on solipsism (5.62). But it is not difficult to see that for one to properly understand these latter issues one should have available a solid interpretation of the former: clarity on how TLP conceives meaning and sense-making sheds light on the manner in which meaningful sentences have a non-discursive aspect and contributes significantly in determining “what the solipsist means.” Clarity on meaning and sense-making has priority here. For the same reason, it is our belief that to understand the notion of the Mystical itself properly, the “Unaussprechliches” of 6.522, it is necessary to be clear beforehand on the first two issues: how nonsense works and how propositions show. Unless, for example, one has a solid understanding of how precisely one avoids confusing nonsense (unsinnig) with tautologies or contradictions 2

See Paul Engelmann, Letters from Ludwig Wittgenstein (New York: Horizon Press, 1968), 6-7 and 83-4. 3 This implies a different methodology from P. M. S. Hacker’s, for example. Cf. P. M. S. Hacker, “Was He Trying to Whistle it?,” in The New Wittgenstein, ed. Alice Crary and Rupert Read (London and New York: Routledge, 2000). He allows his understanding of external evidence to guide him in the exegesis of TLP. However, exegesis concerns whether TLP makes sense on its own terms, even if by the lights of the later Wittgenstein it is a philosophically flawed book. The exegesis of external evidence should be guided by an interpreter’s internally-specified findings, and their impact should be appreciated after an interpretation of TLP has been evaluated on its philosophical merits. This will also make it possible for the reader to form some idea of where exactly the book’s philosophical flaws lie.

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(sinnlos), since according to TLP both are contentless and say nothing, but only the latter show, one will not be able to connect the remarks on the Mystical with the remarks on ethics (6.41-6.422) without conflict.4 It is worth expanding a bit on the priority we just attributed to TLP’s remarks on meaning and sense-making over other remarks on the issue of showing and the saying/showing distinction. From the way that the book is structured, it is easy to see that TLP’s remarks on the Mystical, solipsism and ethics involve an understanding of showing which has been elucidated already in the remarks on meaning and sense-making. The remark, for instance, that “ethics cannot be put into words” (6.421) should not be taken to stand on its own, as if one could get the point of this remark simply by taking it at face value; on the contrary, the specific way that things are put into words according to TLP (4.116), is presupposed. It is easy to forget that TLP broaches primarily issues of logic, not of ethics or mysticism. Consequently, a certain understanding of TLP’s standpoint on logic should be deemed necessary before putting the later remarks into work. This is not an original thought; after all, TLP, even if not a treatise on logic, belongs to the philosophy of logic, commenting repeatedly on Russell’s and Frege’s work. Nevertheless, the intimate way that its standpoint on logic coheres with its standpoint on ethics has not always been appreciated.5 The non-discursivity involved in sense-making may 4

We have in mind Russell’s “discomfort” here: “The whole subject of ethics, for example, is placed by Mr Wittgenstein in the mystical, inexpressible region. Nevertheless he is capable of conveying his ethical opinions. His defense would be that what he calls the mystical can be shown, although it cannot be said. It may be that this defense is adequate, but, for my part, I confess that it leaves me with a certain sense of intellectual discomfort” (Introduction to TLP, xxiii-xxiv). 5 P. M. S. Hacker, for example, writes: “It is common to view the Tractatus as a complete and wholly integrated work, and hence to think that the so-called ‘mystical’ parts of the book are ‘a culmination of the work reflecting back on everything that went before’ [Hacker is quoting from a paper by E. Zemach on the Mystical—MT]. This is, I think, at best misleading, at worst erroneous. It is true that these sections of the Tractatus are connected with what went before, although the connection is tenuous. It is also true that they were of great importance to Wittgenstein. It is not obvious, however, that they follow from the earlier sections of the book.” In P. M. S. Hacker, Insight and Illusion: Themes in the Philosophy of Wittgenstein (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 101. His justification for this claim is that “the argument in support of the ineffability of ethics is tenuous to say the least. It hangs on nothing more than the non-contingency of the ethical, a point asserted rather than argued. But logically necessary truths are expressible by the senseless propositions of logic. Categorial necessities are reflected in the

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determine the impossibility of the “propositions of ethics” (6.42), rather than the other way round: the idea that it is the supposed “ineffability” of ethical value and the Mystical which language has to respect and to which it succumbs, may simply be a figment of the reader’s imagination.6 The issue of priority brings us closer to the core problematic of our paper. It is widely acknowledged that TLP conceives logic normatively, specifically as an aspect of language which may be made clear via the use of a “sign-language” (3.325), a quasi-mathematical symbolism or calculus, a “logical syntax” whose rules the linguistic signs follow when sense is produced. However, neither the status of logic in relation to language, nor the philosophical role of the Tractarian calculus has found an interpretation similarly acknowledged. Both issues remain admittedly obscure. To put it roughly: if “logic” stands for a transcendent-like structure whose effects, so to speak, are binding on the use of ordinary language, is the calculus supposed to mirror this structure? Or does “logic” live immanently in the use of language, in which case the calculus acts as a useful tool, allowing us to make clear to ourselves the relation we have to our own words, when this relation becomes difficult to fathom on our own? In the first case, TLP would have to be considered as Wittgenstein’s contribution to theoretical work on logic, offering to the reader a non-discursive glimpse into the “logical syntax” of our language via an ultimately self-refuting theory of logic. In the second case, however, TLP would contribute to a form of therapy, aiming to dispel the illusions produced by the complexity of our formation-rules of language, but cannot be expressed in language. Any attempt to express them involves the use of formal concepts and hence the violation of rules of logical syntax. But ethical pseudo-propositions are not tautologies or contradictions, and certainly it is not obvious that ethical predicates are formal concepts. If they were, then it would be clear why putative ethical propositions are pseudo-propositions. But equally, if they were, they would incorporate variables taking a range of objects of a given category as their values. But if ethical predicates are formal concepts, what are their correlative ‘material’ concepts, i.e. the substitution instances of such variables? No clue is given us as to what these might be” (Hacker, Insight and Illusion, 105-6). Apparently, Hacker’s difficulty to find a coherent interpretation of the remarks on ethics lies in the logical theory he attributes to TLP. Curiously, this does not make him doubt the attribution, but rather Wittgenstein’s reasoning. 6 On this point, see the interesting exchange of Kremer and Sullivan (Michael Kremer, “Mathematics and Meaning in the Tractatus,” Philosophical Investigations 25 (2002): 272-303 and Peter M. Sullivan, “On Trying to Be Resolute: A Response to Kremer on the Tractatus,” European Journal of Philosophy 10 (2002): 43-78.

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relation to our words, specifically in the domain of philosophy. Nevertheless, in both cases TLP would be an exercise in the philosophy of logic: respectively, either as a theoretical one, constituting a third-personal viewpoint on language (from “sideways-on,” in John McDowell’s felicitous phrase),7 or a first personal, non-theoretical study of how to get clear, on our own “conceptual capacities” (another of McDowell’s often used expressions), about our expectations from philosophy and our desires when we engage in it. Contributing either to theoretical knowledge, or to ethics; this is the dilemma currently facing any well-informed and up to date interpreter of TLP. As is well-known, standard (textbook) interpretations take TLP as a self-undermining contribution to theoretical knowledge, an exercise in the science of logic. According to these interpretations, the book introduces a metaphysical theory which founds our language’s logical structure on transcendent, ineffable aspects of the world.8 In this reading, the metaphysical structure of logic is not immanent to language but literally transcends it, making it impossible for language to speak of itself and of its relation to the world: the relationship of the metaphysical structure to ordinary language and the world becomes an ineffable issue. In this way, Wittgenstein’s notoriously characterizing, towards the end of the book, what he wrote as nonsense (6.54), is taken by standard interpretations as a purposeful move, on Wittgenstein’s part, to consciously violate the theory’s logical principles he himself introduced, since according to these same principles, a theory of logic is impossible: its subject-matter, namely language and its relation to the world, cannot be spoken about, cannot be put into words, it is ineffable. In other words, Wittgenstein gleefully recognizes that TLP in the end refutes itself. Methodologically speaking, our paper belongs to the second, nonstandard camp.9 Brought into world-wide attention in the 1990s thanks to

7

This phrase already appears in James J. Conant, “The Search for Logically Alien Thought: Descartes, Kant, Frege and the Tractatus,” Philosophical Topics 20 (1991): 157. 8 See P. M. S. Hacker, Insight and Illusion: Themes in the Philosophy of Wittgenstein (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986) and David Pears, The False Prison: A Study of the Development of Wittgenstein’s Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987 and 1988), among others. 9 We have attempted to make our commitments explicit in Miltos Theodossiou, The Philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Turning-Points in Interpretation, in Greek

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the brilliant efforts of the American philosophers Cora Diamond and James Conant, inspired by the Harvard philosophers Stanley Cavell and the late Burton Dreben, the non-standard interpretation has flourished into the so-called Resolute Interpretation of TLP. As promised, we shall present our take on it in section 4. For the moment, just to put our cards on the table, we restrict ourselves to the following. It is our belief that TLP should not be taken to exclude its readers from the philosophical work involved in distinguishing sense from nonsense; on the contrary, without abandoning logic, TLP should be taken to assist the reader in the “climbing” of the Tractarian ladder by showing him or her how the ladder’s rungs are essentially tied to work one has to do oneself: there are no “rungs” without the reader. Wittgenstein, on this interpretation, is very far from constructing theoretical ladder-like structures that anticipate in advance the creativity and the capacity for novelty characteristic of language-using, rational subjects. Wittgenstein’s manner of writing in TLP, akin to proofs in geometry, is another way to see how he aims to motivate his metaphysically troubled reader to make connections, to notice gaps and discover ambiguities, by encouraging one to actualize step-bystep one’s own logical capacities. He does not try to numb these same capacities by taking his reader passively on a trip to a realm of “ineffable truths” via a fatal, self-undermining contradiction proudly announced in the end of the book, as the standard interpretations have it. He does not try to force the reader’s language into a metaphysical, preconceived (a priori), transcendent-like, linguistic net, violating which damns one immediately to nonsense. On the contrary, Wittgenstein tries to bring the reader’s own conceptual capacities alive in philosophy, to challenge the reader into an enlivening struggle with himself or herself. This should not be taken, however, as a demand on our part for the book’s absolute self-consistency on its negative stance towards metaphysics. The book harbors several methodological biases of the metaphysical kind, the “dogmatism” which the later Wittgenstein will so successfully diagnose in his later work, after the deeply self-educational experience of TLP has fully set in. This issue of metaphysical bias in TLP will come up again, in the conclusion of our paper. Now it is time to elaborate on the second strand of our questioning, which we aim to bring in our discussion of showing: what a conceptualist reading of TLP involves.

(Athens: Eurasia Publications, 2007). Our debt to Diamond’s and Conant’s thinking, as well as to McDowell’s work, cannot be overestimated.

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3. The Myth of the Given The “Myth of the Given” is a phrase employed in the 1950s by the American philosopher Wilfrid Sellars in his work, “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind.” He used it to denote, in as broad a way as possible, the idea of immediate and non-inferential apprehension of non-normative structure or non-normatively shaped elements, which, however, are taken to play a normative or guiding role (whether epistemic or epistemological, justificatory or constitutive) in the formation or the identity-constitution of normatively charged items (beliefs, perceptions or meanings). So, for example, “sense-data” may be understood as bits of Givenness employed in the formation and the justification of perceptual beliefs; or “private meanings,” of the kind that Wittgenstein himself exposed as mythical in the Philosophical Investigations, if taken to support public language use and to constitute the ultimate normative binding and the meaningfulness of language, may be seen as embodiments of the Myth.10 In further work, Sellars specifies that the Myth is essentially the view according to which “if a person is directly aware of an item which has categorial status C, then the person is aware of it as having categorial status C,” and explains that “to reject the Myth of the Given is to reject the idea that the categorial structure of the world—if it has a categorial structure—imposes itself on the mind as a seal on melted wax” (emphasis in the original).11 The problematic of the Sellarsian concept of the Myth of the Given has been extensively developed in the last twenty years, after the publication of John McDowell’s Mind and World. In this book, McDowell deals with the Myth in the specific case of perception and the empirical judgments and beliefs resting on the former. Falling prey to the Myth of the Given, according to McDowell, amounts to appealing directly to something that 10 Indeed, it was McDowell’s paper on the Private Language Argument (Chapter 13 of John McDowell, Mind, Value and Reality (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998)) that alerted us to the possibility that the Myth of the Given may have wider application in Wittgenstein’s work. Although there has been no such application in the case of TLP (at least so far, at least explicitly and to our knowledge), we shall see in section 5 that the Resolute Interpretation has some understanding of the threat of the Myth in interpreting TLP, in essence if not in name. 11 Wilfrid Sellars, “The Lever of Archimedes,” The Monist 64 (1981): 11-2. We owe these references to Dionysis Christias, whose upcoming work on the “Myth of the Categorial Given” (Sellars’ later construal of the Myth) has helped us sort out the issues here.

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Chapter One

can secure objective purport almost by force: “bare presences that are supposed to constitute the ultimate grounds of empirical judgments,” namely sensations or sense-data, “presences … outside the conceptual realm altogether.”12 These non-conceptual presences, supposedly present in perceptual experience, are taken to secure, somehow, our rational connection to the world. McDowell takes special pains in his book to point out that this Myth is just that: a Myth. No matter how heavy the epistemological work it is called upon to do, it actually explains nothing, “it is useless for its purpose,”13 it borders on incoherence.14 “How,” McDowell justifiably asks, “could pointing to a bit of the Given justify the use of a concept in judgment?”15 Consequently, McDowell insists that we introduce a “new notion of givenness.”16 We should accept no mythical Givens, he suggests, and goes on to encourage us to conceive of perceptual content itself as belonging to the conceptual, to accept that perceptual experiences have conceptual content. The correct formulation of this idea as found in Mind and World is quite tricky: according to McDowell, experience is not supposed to be a proposition, a judgment or a belief; it is something like a proposition. In cases of perception, our senses, our “sensibility” (to use McDowell’s preferred Kantian idiom), already involve something of a propositional nature. They have conceptual content: the content the corresponding proposition or judgment has. So one’s receiving an impression via one’s senses is, as such, a conceptually structured episode. Our conceptual capacities, namely those which are responsible for our drawing inferences, reaching conclusions, making judgments and justifying them, “are already operative in the deliverances of sensibility themselves.”17 How exactly does this “new notion of givenness” help us overcome the danger of losing our rational contact with the world? McDowell points out that, if properly understood, this very same idea (that experience has conceptual content, namely the same content with the corresponding judgment “that things are thus and so”) also satisfies the demand for direct contact with the world: [I]n enjoying an experience one is open to manifest facts ... To paraphrase [the later] Wittgenstein, when we see that such-and-such is the case, we, 12 John McDowell, Mind and World. With A New Introduction (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 24. 13 McDowell, Mind and World, 7. 14 McDowell, Mind and World, xvii. 15 McDowell, Mind and World, 6. 16 McDowell, Mind and World, 10. 17 McDowell, Mind and World, 39.

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and our seeing, do not stop anywhere short of the fact. What we see is: that such-and-such is the case. … Wittgenstein's aphorism can be reworked like that for any conceptual shaping of subjectivity.18

Insisting on the rejection of this Myth everywhere in philosophy where there is a risk of succumbing into it, McDowell several years later provided a succinct formulation of it as follows: Givenness in the sense of the Myth would be an availability for cognition to subjects whose getting what is supposedly Given to them does not draw on capacities required for the sort of cognition in question.19

For the purposes of our paper, we will call any understanding of our normative relation to the world that succumbs to the Myth of the Given (construed as above), non-conceptualist, and, equally, any conception avoiding the Myth, conceptualist. In this context, we should note how this last way of (re)conceiving mythical Givenness allows for far greater scope in the Myth’s application: it is not tied down to a specific normative domain but, on the contrary, it holds for any kind of “availability for cognition”; “for any conceptual shaping of subjectivity,” as McDowell puts it; it makes no distinction between material and form—any which of them may be conceived as Given—or between a rule and its correct manner of application—again, both may be understood as Given—and therefore, it allows us to bring the Myth to bear on TLP’s understanding of logic. Putting pressure on TLP on that score, however, is not as straightforward as it may first appear. This is because the points of pressure, if available, are not so easily found. TLP and the logical structure it argues for— whether in the shape of a mirroring “logical syntax” or in a conception of our relation to language—employs a very rich and complex picture of how words and propositions are “given”; deconstructing this picture takes some work. We shall undertake this task in what follows. At present, we restrict ourselves to a brief account of our thinking on this matter. As we will endeavor to show in sections 4 and 5, we believe that the appropriate point of pressure in TLP lies in the conception of showing and the saying/showing distinction. Its appropriateness consists precisely in its non-discursivity. Non-discursivity, when brought into contact with the 18

McDowell, Mind and World, 29, our emphasis. John McDowell, “Avoiding the Myth of the Given,” in Having the World in View: Essays on Kant, Hegel, and Sellars (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009), 256.

19

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threat of the Myth of the non-conceptual Given, makes the risk of the Given palpable: non-discursivity and non-conceptuality seem to be twin brothers, unless we reach some understanding of the former that excludes the threat of the latter. Certainly, “ineffability” or “inexpressibility,” to the extent that they imply a brute, non-discursive, metaphysical understanding of whatever is shown, a non-discursive understanding that “does not draw on capacities required for the sort of cognition in question,” but supposedly transcends them, fall automatically prey to the Myth of the Given. However, without a conceptualist reading of Tractarian nondiscursivity at hand, TLP itself seems to come under threat.20 This makes

20

Again, this is not always appreciated. It is one thing to deny ineffability and the corresponding construal of “showing”; offering a different understanding, however, that avoids even the temptation of ineffabilism, is a different story altogether. For example, in probably the best non-standard reading of TLP available at this time, Eli Friedlander’s Signs of Sense: Reading Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), we find formulations about “showing” at once helpful in avoiding ineffability and tempting us to bring it back under a different name: “The concept of showing involves a fundamental passivity with respect to meaning. Showing involves something that is already there, which we turn or return to; it is a realm of presence and not a realm of activity that generates projects, anticipations, hypotheses, discoveries, hierarchies, systematization, or enumeration. Showing characterizes our access to the level of form or meaning. Our access to the body of meaning is precisely opposed to our activity of making sense … It is not a representation but a laying out, or presenting, of the ligaments that hold the body together, thus showing the form of the body” (Friedlander, Signs of Sense, 110, emphases ours). “Showing is not intuition, in the sense of a special recognitional capacity. … Rather, it is to be thought of as an acknowledgment of the conditions of saying, which means the complete presence of those conditions” (Friedlander, Signs of Sense, 111). “If anything remains from the idea of acquaintance in relation to objects, it should be sought in the understanding that objects are shown. To know an object is to show its form as it appears through language. Showing, like acquaintance, refers us to a certain nondiscursive recognition, but it is a term that is freed from all connections to sensibility. It is used solely to characterize our capacity for recognizing the internal relations that constitute the forms of objects, or for recognizing the meaning of the sense we make” (Friedlander, Signs of Sense, 174). “But both Carnap and Russell miss Wittgenstein’s deepest intentions—that form is not the postulation of rules for the use of signs but rather something that must be recovered through the recognition of internal relations between the various propositions we use. Wittgenstein’s notion of showing emphasizes that meaning is revealed through language, and that we can never control the appearance of such meaning but are required to be attentive to it” (Friedlander, Signs of Sense, 185). These formulations seem to bring the “fundamentally passive” and non-discursive yet

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for us the feasibility of a conceptualist reading of showing an urgent matter if we are to proceed in our investigation. Taking into account the priority of TLP’s remarks on meaning and sense-making over other remarks for the issue of showing and the saying/showing distinction (see section 1), it seems that two roads are open to us at this point. First, to get clear on how TLP construes the relation of nonsense to showing: according to a widespread interpretation that builds on standard, “irresolute” insights, nonsense supposedly “shows” or “conveys” ineffable truths, and this is also what Wittgenstein aimed for in composing the ladder of TLP. Tractarian nonsense, on this interpretation, consists in “the violation of the rules of logical syntax,” thus providing access, directly or indirectly, to the “ineffable.” The “violation,” in other words, somehow, directly or indirectly, manages to “show” or “convey” transcendence. But is this non-conceptualist understanding of nonsense’s “showing” tenable, not only as an interpretation of TLP but also on its own philosophical merit? In order to reach a conceptualist reading of showing, we have to give a negative answer to this question. As we shall see in the next section, this will take us into an examination of the Tractarian notion of “logical syntax”—an examination undertaken in section 4. Secondly, we have to take on directly the showing involved in propositions according to TLP. This involves both the logical propositions (the “propositions of logic”) and the non-logical ones. In order to establish the credentials of a conceptualist understanding of showing in this case, we shall have to provide for an understanding of nondiscursivity which excludes any “ineffabilist” connotations. This we shall undertake in section 6. Fortunately, resolute interpreters have already provided access to both roads. Unfortunately, when we examine the case of logical propositions, we shall hit a snag that will make any conceptualist destination unfeasible—or so we shall argue.

4. The Resolute Interpretation In contrast with previously established TLP interpretation, in the 1990s a new reading of the book was developed by Cora Diamond and James Conant: the so-called “New Wittgenstein” or “Resolute Interpretation.”21 non-special “recognition of the conditions of saying” too close to the Givenness of meaning. 21 See The New Wittgenstein, ed. Alice Crary and Rupert Read (London and New York: Routledge, 2000) and, more recently, Beyond the Tractatus Wars. The New Wittgenstein Debate, ed. Rupert Read and Matthew A. Lavery (New York:

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This reading aims to offer an interpretation, according to which the book’s nonsensicality is not to be accounted for via self-refutation or, more generally, because it supposedly violates the principles of an a priori logical theory. Rather, Wittgenstein has authored TLP in such a way that our own attempt to go through it, under the impression that it offers a metaphysical theory of logic,22 will lead us, on its own, to abandoning it as nonsense—at least, if we are “resolute” enough to put aside the metaphysical prejudices and expectations we ourselves bring to the book. If we truly follow up Wittgenstein’s idea of how to read his book, then we shall find that there are purposefully placed gaps of meaning from one proposition to the next or even among sets of propositions,23 in such a way that coming up with a straightforward, coherent reading of the book as a treatise, or, equivalently, as a metaphysical theory of logic, as the book seemingly aims to provide, turns out to be impossible. This conclusion is established in stages, with the support of the logical calculus (a “sign-language”) which Wittgenstein introduces. This is not as a logical system or a formal mathematical calculus supposedly founded on and mirroring the transcendent, supra-linguistic structure of the world; rather, it consists in a tool-like formal syntax oriented to the elucidation of an order immanent to language. It merely makes clear the logical articulation and the logical integrity of our well-founded relationship to language by providing us with a way to present it to ourselves perspicuously (somewhat like the language-games the later Wittgenstein employs to bring out the order immanent to our language). This foundation consists in nothing less than our conceptual capacities and our logical Routledge, 2011) and Silver Bronzo, “The Resolute Reading and Its Critics. An Introduction to the Literature,” Wittgenstein-Studien 3 (2012): 45-80. The second chapter of Miltos Theodossiou, The Philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein. TurningPoints in Interpretation, in Greek (Athens: Eurasia Publications, 2007), is a detailed presentation of the resolute interpretation and the relevant debates on it. 22 “[E]very reader must begin life qua reader of the Tractatus as a standard reader and climb her way up from there to a different way of coming to understand her task as a reader.” In James J. Conant, “Mild Mono-Wittgensteinianism,” in Wittgenstein and the Moral Life: Essays in Honor of Cora Diamond, ed. Alice Crary (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I. T. Press, 2007), 49. 23 Conant, “Mild Mono-Wittgensteinianism,” 62-3: “A reader is led to an appreciation of the significance of the later cluster of remarks only given an inchoate recognition that the remarks in the earlier cluster do not quite make sense (that they pull themselves apart), and this later appreciation, in turn, enables a full recognition that there is no sense to be made of the remarks in the earlier cluster (that they are simply nonsense).”

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mastery of language that comes with our being logical beings endowed with language-using abilities honed by learning and imparted by culture. Thus, Wittgenstein teaches his readers, via the employment of intentional inconsistencies and well-placed ambiguities in his text, how they themselves, on their own powers, may realize not only that logic needs no grounding in a metaphysical theory, but also that the philosopher has no real need of any theoretical treatment of his or her own language: in trying to offer the latter, TLP presents how the attempt itself collapses into nonsense, immanently, in practice, “from within,” so to speak.24 This way of interpreting the book rests heavily on 5.4733, according to which, “if a proposition has no sense, that can only be because we have failed to give a meaning to some of its constituents.” In other words, according to TLP, nonsense is generated because the meaning of certain signs is missing, that is, because of a lack. Also relevant here is 6.53: “whenever someone else wanted to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had failed to give a meaning to certain signs in his propositions.” If we stick to this understanding of nonsense, we ought to conclude that if TLP itself makes no sense, this can only be because certain signs in its sentences lack meaning—something which has been done on purpose, if the resolute interpretation is to be taken seriously on this point.25 Therefore, it is not because of an excess that nonsense is generated; because, for example, certain logical categories do not fit or cannot co-exist in the same proposition26—something which, were it (“per impossibile”) to happen, would immediately make certain propositions wrongly or improperly formulated in relation to their proper “logical syntax” (wrong fit), or, equivalently, would bring in “violations of logical rules” (transgressions of the “bounds of sense”). According to the resolute 24 The expression “from within” should be overcome by the end of the book: no internal-external distinction is supposed to survive. We are unsure whether this insight is always fully appreciated; cf. Miltos Theodossiou, Review of Peeling Potatoes or Grinding Lenses: Spinoza and Young Wittgenstein Converse on Immanence and Its Logic by Aristides Baltas, in Greek, Deucalion 29 (2012): 13545 for an analysis of the seemingly irresolute way Aristides Baltas, for example, in his Peeling Potatoes or Grinding Lenses: Spinoza and Young Wittgenstein Converse on Immanence and Its Logic (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012), applies the resolute insights in his reading of TLP. 25 Equally significant for the resolute interpretation is 3.3, on the “context principle.” 26 This is the idea of nonsense as due to a “category mistake.”

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interpretation, this way of conceiving nonsensicality presupposes, ad absurdum, that we may, somehow yet without abandoning logic, make out some kind of “meaning” in nonsense—the “wrong” or “inappropriate” one—and from this conclude that a proposition makes no sense because of its malformed articulation or improper construction. This way of conceiving nonsense, however, would allow us to suppose that isolated words appearing in a meaningless sentence are somehow capable to refer to the meaning they have in other, meaningful contexts, and in this way allow us to see that those meanings do not fit here, in this sentence, they cannot be present here, and this impropriety supposedly makes the sentence nonsensical. But this also makes it totally unclear how one sees, without abandoning logic, a conflict of meaning starting from a sentence that makes no sense: how does one see, how does one recognize the relevant meanings, supposedly available to these isolated words in this nonsensical sentence, meanings which do not fit with each other? How does one recognize the meanings to which the isolated words supposedly refer to, if the sentence is plainly nonsense? This recognition can only be a psychological matter: I am simply reminded of meanings because I am familiar with the shape of the signs, with the appearance of the isolated words—but these psychological associations are not a matter of logic. This way of conceiving nonsense goes against Wittgenstein’s own admonition not to risk getting ourselves entangled “in unessential psychological investigations” (4.1121). Furthermore, if one goes down this road, one essentially makes out of sense and nonsense two equally substantial realms sharing a common boundary or limit. In such a case, however, one should be able to speak with sense on both sides of the limit; but this is absurd: sense belongs to one side only, and there is absolutely nothing on the other. Wittgenstein himself makes this point in the book’s Preface: “For in order to be able to draw a limit to thought, we should have to find both sides of the limit thinkable (i.e. we should have to be able to think what cannot be thought).” Consequently, when trying to account for the book’s nonsensicality via self-refutation or violations of logical rules, previously established interpretations of TLP wrongly ascribe to it a theory of the logic of our language, a theory supposedly impossible to articulate yet on account of which the author refutes himself. For the resolute interpretation, this reading unnecessarily burdens Wittgenstein with a substantial conception of nonsense.27 According to this substantial conception, as far and as far as 27 See James J. Conant, “Wittgenstein on Meaning and Use,” Philosophical Investigations 21 (1998): 222-50.

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logic is concerned, “nonsense” does not imply nonsensicality plain and simple; on the contrary, the substantial conception has to bring in multiple kinds of nonsense, logically differentiated from each other, in order to handle TLP’s nonsensicality: this latter kind of nonsense, logically different from nonsense plain and simple (mere gibberish), supposedly enlightens us, on account of its special nonsensicality, about the ineffable, metaphysical or logical structure of the world, and is necessary to interpret what it means to climb the Tractarian ladder successfully. Starting from an entirely different conception of nonsense, which does not commit them to seeing rules (violated or not) where there aren’t any, the resolute interpreters conclude that TLP does not introduce any theory of logic. “Logical syntax,” in this context, should not be understood as a system of (explicit or implicit, “effable” or “ineffable”) rules governing language use and determining a priori the bounds of sense, allowing certain combinations of words and forbidding others. By contrast, logical syntax may be a clarification tool or an auxiliary set of sign-use to clarify the sense of our propositions. Its advantages over the vernacular lies in its making it impossible to employ the same linguistic sign in different ways simultaneously. This helps us recognize the logical role of a proposition’s constituents, or its lack of it in a pseudo-proposition. According to this line of thinking, the clarification promoted in TLP via its purposefully nonsensical sentences does not culminate in the recognition of wrongly formulated (logically speaking) propositions, namely those violating “the rules of logical syntax,” thus allowing us to grasp those ineffable truths allegedly “shown” by correctly formulated propositions, and also enabling us to correct the “logical errors” of the metaphysically-oriented philosopher; far from it. On the contrary, the book is concerned to make patent the nonsense we are tempted to produce if we are attracted to the pictures illustrated in TLP, and to enable us to bring out, in our own employment of the Tractarian tool of logical syntax, how these “philosophical propositions” are no different from gibberish (logically speaking).28 Differing, however, from gibberish in the psychological attraction they exercise on our thinking, still they force upon us the illusion that they uncover a “metaphysical depth,” supposedly “showing” what can only be said:

28

This implies that any incoherence involved does not lie in the nonsensical sentence itself, as an internal conflict or an unmanageable self-undermining excess internal to it; the incoherence lies in “our desires with respect to the sentence” (Conant, “Wittgenstein on Meaning and Use,” 248).

18

Chapter One [W]e are drawn into the illusion of occupying a certain sort of perspective. ... From this perspective, we take ourselves to be able to survey the possibilities which undergird how things are with us, holding our necessities in place. From this perspective, we contemplate the laws of logic as they are, as well as the possibility of their being otherwise. We take ourselves to be occupying a perspective from which we can view the laws of logic from sideways on. The only “insight” the work imparts therefore is one about the reader himself: that he is prone to such illusions.29

To combat these illusions, the book should be read the way one tries to solve a riddle.30 The process of riddling it out, so to speak, rests on nothing less than the metaphysically motivated readers’ own conceptual capacities, their imagination, and their exercise in practice and case by case.31 In particular, the reader is invited to exercise those same capacities he or she possesses as a language user, the ones he or she employs in ordinary life when, for example, confronted with a novel text. In such daily uses, one does not know in advance what or even whether the novel sentences make sense. They should be made sense of, however. And this “making sense of” is not a Given, a mere following through ready-made procedures of sense-making, but a riddle-solving given to the reader as a task. Similarly, in the Tractatus the reader is taught a process of clarification via the useful tool of logical syntax, a process which ends with the reader himself or herself recognizing, in his or her own attempts to make sense of the book’s sentences, that the seemingly metaphysical propositions are plainly nonsense. This re-orients the reader’s attention, from “ineffable truths” to truths concerning oneself, from words and sentences to one’s own relation with these words and sentences. [W]e feel our words are attempting to think a logically impossible thought—and that this involves a kind of impossibility of a higher order 29

James J. Conant, “The Search for Logically Alien Thought: Descartes, Kant, Frege and the Tractatus,” Philosophical Topics 20 (1991): 157. 30 See Chapter 10 in Cora Diamond, The Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy, and the Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991). 31 Or, as Jim Conant and Cora Diamond put it: “the exercises of logical capacities.” In James J. Conant and Cora Diamond, “On Reading the Tractatus Resolutely: Reply to Meredith Williams and Peter Sullivan,” in Wittgenstein’s Lasting Significance, ed. Max Kölbel and Bernhard Weiss (London: Routledge, 2004), 91. See, in this connection, Cora Diamond, “Ethics, Imagination and the Method of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus,” in The New Wittgenstein, ed. Alice Crary and Rupert Read (London & New York: Routledge, 2000).

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than ordinary impossibility. But Wittgenstein’s teaching is that the problem lies not with the words (we could find a use for them) … but in our confused relation to the words: in our experiencing ourselves as meaning something definite by them, yet also feeling that what we take ourselves to be meaning with the words make no sense. We are confused about what it is we want to say and we project our confusion onto the linguistic string.32

TLP encourages one, then, to undertake a form of therapy, thus contributing to the enhancement of one’s autonomy in opposition to one’s own metaphysical motivations and attractions: metaphysics, in this case, and the transcendence that goes with it, invading language from sideways on like a brute Given guiding the use of our words, are revealed to be a subterfuge, an evasion of responsibility for the meaning of our words, an evasion of finitude or a covering-up of authenticity. What is at stake in TLP, then, according to this interpretation, is a matter of ethics. In this way, a philosophy of logic supports one’s ethical self-discovery through a freely undertaken act of reading: engaging the reader oneself to distinguish sense from nonsense, by freely exercising one’s own conceptual capacities in making sense of TLP, Wittgenstein allows the philosophically troubled reader to lead himself or herself to the ethical reorientation of his or her own conception of language and the world, of philosophy and ultimately of oneself. One teaches oneself, therefore, to “see the world aright” (6.54). On account of the resolute interpreters’ emphasis on the reader’s free exercise of his or her own conceptual capacities when making sense of the book’s conception of logic, we suggest that the foundations for a conceptualist kind of reading have been set. To interpret TLP resolutely one has to reject the Myth of the Given, in this case the Given as brute sense-making, a blind and utterly passive following through ready-made procedures of sense-making, taken to “invade” language from sideways on, a Given structure guiding and constraining the use of our words. Where precisely might this Given be found in TLP, however? To the 32

James J. Conant, “The Search for Logically Alien Thought: Descartes, Kant, Frege and the Tractatus,” 158. Also: “[T]he problem lies not with the words … but in our confused relation to the words.” In James J. Conant, “Wittgenstein’s Methods,” in The Oxford Handbook of Wittgenstein, ed. Marie McGinn and Oskari Kuusela (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 631. “For a resolute reader, the charge of nonsense is directed not at the propositional sign itself, but rather at the character of the relation in which a particular speaker stands to a propositional sign” (Conant, “Wittgenstein’s Methods,” 630).

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extent that the temptation of the Given involves the way that TLP conceives of sense-making, one’s attention should be focused on how TLP describes the rule-bound uses of language. In other words, one should take care to develop a conceptualist notion of the structure doing the normatively charged sense-making work, namely “logical syntax.” The rules of logical syntax, on this interpretation, the way that sense-making works, should not be Given; they should be given to the reader—to all language users—as a task, as something to do, as a call for action. This non-foundationalist, non-theoretical understanding of the “rules of logical syntax,” according to which the reader—the language-user—participates actively in sense-making and is not merely following rules passively, determines also the way TLP opposes metaphysics. In this rejection of the Given would lie the conceptualist aspect of the book. In the following section, therefore, we shall try to substantiate this suggestion by further analysis of the conceptualist conception of the Tractarian logical syntax we have in mind. Afterwards, in section 6, this will allow us to face the non-discursivity of the Tractarian showing headon.

5. A Conceptualist Construal of Logical Syntax How might one go wrong in one’s understanding of logical syntax in TLP? What kind of non-conceptualism is threatening us here? What might the Given be in this case? The answer is not straightforward: to the extent that the Given has something to do with TLP’s account of sense-making, an account rich in implications and quite detailed in its construction, locating the precise points where the temptation of the Given may arise takes work; to declare simply that it lies in its conception of logic, is too general, whereas to go into the object-name relation or the sign-symbol one, may lose the forest for the trees. However, the notion of “showing” and the saying/showing distinction prove crucial here: they help us locate where some of the points of pressure lie. The reasoning is a bit complex: (A) First of all, as described in the previous section, according to standard interpretations, violating the rules of logical syntax “shows” or “conveys” non-conceptual, non-discursive, language-transcendent and ineffable truths that cannot be said.

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(B) Now, resolute interpreters reject this option, insisting that nonsense is simply noise (logically speaking): it says nothing, it shows nothing, either directly or indirectly; it is simply a lack of meaning and any impressions to the contrary are produced by psychological associations we ourselves project onto the linguistic signs. (C) Nonsense, that is, should be understood literally as “sheer lack of sense,”33 instead of an excess brought about by conflict between mismatched logical categories or, equivalently, by a transgression of rules, a misapplication or a violation of “the rules of logical syntax.” (D) Therefore, the rejection of the non-conceptual Given “shown” or “conveyed” by nonsense supposedly produced by “violations of logical syntax” demands that one show that the construal of nonsense as “violation of rules of logical syntax” does not make sense: it rests on a misleading account of nonsensicality. (E) So how is nonsense produced, according to the resolute interpreters? By one’s abstaining from the process of sense-making. (F) But sense-making, according to TLP, is tantamount to logical syntax being at work, to its rules being followed. Abstaining from it, then, amounts to depart from following its rules. (G) So it is crucially important for the resolute reader to clarify how logical syntax works, what following its rules means, in such a way that, indeed, violating its rules makes no sense. This is what it takes to reject the Myth of the ineffable, non-conceptual Given in this case. In other words, one way to establish the credentials for a conceptualist account of TLP is to clarify how logical syntax works, what rule-following here means, in such a way that violating its rules makes no sense. This is what it means to provide a conceptualist reading of logical syntax. Fortunately, resolute interpreters have already made great strides in how one should proceed in this matter. In a three way debate between the resolute interpreters, Cora Diamond and James Conant, on the one side, and the most consistent defender of the standard, irresolute interpretation, 33

James J. Conant and Ed Dain, “Throwing the Baby Out: A Reply to Roger White,” in Beyond the Tractatus Wars. The New Wittgenstein Debate, ed. Rupert Read and Matthew A. Lavery (New York: Routledge, 2011), 72.

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P. M. S. Hacker, on the other, provoked by James Conant’s paper, “Two Conceptions of Die Überwindung der Metaphysik: Carnap and Early Wittgenstein,” it was made abundantly clear what a conceptualist34 construal of logical syntax involves. Perhaps surprisingly, it implies that the comparison of logical syntax to a rule-bound game akin to chess, for example (a well-rehearsed analogy in the secondary literature), should be rejected. We shall elaborate on this in what follows.

Conant on Carnap, TLP and Logical Syntax Conant’s aims in his paper of 2001 are ultimately two: first, to bring out how the Logical Positivists misunderstood TLP because the Tractarian standpoint on logic and nonsensicality; and second, to the extent that the same misunderstanding characterizes the standard reception of TLP, no real difference exists between the standard and the positivist interpretation of early Wittgenstein’s thought. Conant argues persuasively that if nonsense is taken literally as sheer lack of meaning, then no rational basis is available to assert further that nonsense is produced because of a violation or a transgression of the rules of logical syntax. For one to assert such a thing would imply that one has construed nonsense not merely as lack, but also as a substantial realm of “a sense that is senseless” (cf. Philosophical Investigations §500), the realm of logically misshapen sentences, the improper, the malformed or incoherently articulated ones, which the rules of logical syntax supposedly exclude, keep away or forbid us to construct. According to Conant, the Logical Positivist Rudolph Carnap missed precisely this point. When, for example, Carnap explains why “Caesar is a prime number” is nonsense, he writes: “[It] is meaningless. ‘Prime number’ is a predicate of numbers; it can neither be affirmed no denied of a person.”35 One might reasonably wonder how is it possible for Carnap to recognize in this specific instance the predicate “prime number” on the one side, and the name referring to Caesar on the other, and that one is trying to combine the one with the other; Carnap has plainly admitted that the sentence “Caesar is a prime number” is nonsense (“unsinnig” in the original). How can there be structural conflict here? 34 We remind the reader that “conceptualism” is a term we have introduced in this debate and not one to be found in resolute or irresolute interpretations (at least so far, and to our knowledge). We have explained what we mean by the term in section 3: the rejection of the Myth of the non-conceptual, ineffable Given. 35 As quoted in James. J. Conant, “Two Conceptions of Die Überwindung der Metaphysik: Carnap and Early Wittgenstein,” in Wittgenstein in America, ed. Timothy G. McCarthy and Sean C. Stidd (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), 22.

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Carnap, encouraged by his own (mis)understanding of TLP, seems able to grasp some kind of “illogical” structure in the sentence, in virtue of which he is able to contrast the proper application of the predicate to numbers with its (non-)“application” to people. On this basis, he feels confident to conclude that the nonsensicality of the sentence is produced because of its logical incoherence. For the resolute interpreter, however, this construal of logical incoherence not only is unnecessarily forced into TLP; it also undermines the book by ascribing to it a doctrine of nonsensicality, according to which nonsense is produced by conflict, contradiction or transgression (for example, among the parts of the sentence or because their manner of proper combination are disallowed by “the rules of logical syntax”). This idea of the production of nonsense as if by excess, so to speak, has its source in a dogmatically introduced theory of legitimate and illegitimate combinations of the parts of a sentence. Carnap seems to take logical syntax as a sort of constitution governing a perfectly lawful logical realm and excluding by force any sentence attempting to violate its boundaries. In this way, according to Conant, nonsense as sheer lack of sense, is transformed into “substantial” nonsense. Precisely at this point, TLP differs from Carnap’s and the Logical Positivists’ projects. TLP, if read resolutely, lies far apart from any theory of logic akin to Carnap’s: Wittgenstein’s practice aims to liberate the philosopher from metaphysical theory by calling on one to exercise one’s own powers, autonomously, and not to subscribe to the heteronomously imposed principles of some (whether effable or ineffable) “logical syntax.” Thinking this through leads Conant to the conclusion that Carnap has reached the conception of nonsense introduced, decades later, by standard TLP interpretation.36

Hacker’s Reply to Conant P. M. S. Hacker replied to Conant’s charges in his paper, “Wittgenstein, Carnap and the New American Wittgensteinians.” Aiming to put into doubt Conant’s interpretation of both Carnap’s thought and the standard TLP interpretation as a whole, Hacker sticks to his guns and presents his own take on Carnap and Tractarian nonsense. Hacker insists that not only is TLP offering a metaphysical theory of how propositions represent 36

See Conant, “Two Conceptions of Die Überwindung der Metaphysik,” 17 for an example of the convergence between Carnap’s reading of TLP and standard TLP interpretation in the case of 4.003.

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(“picture”) the world; in addition, it is precisely this ultimately selfrefuting theory, the “picture theory of representation,”37 which separates sense from nonsense. However, Hacker explains that this theory does not conceive of nonsense as a conflict produced by the combination of the sentence’s “intelligible ingredients” or of the “meanings of the constituent expressions”38 but as a departure from proper ways of using linguistic signs (words).39 These proper ways of going on with signs constitute “logical syntax,” the totality of the a priori formal rules of language. This “logical syntax” excludes a priori certain ways of using words as illegitimate and transgressive: both metaphysics, as well as the sentences of TLP, violate these syntactical strictures, the former involuntarily, the latter on purpose. Consequently, Hacker’s reading of TLP offers us a theory which can point out which uses of language are excluded a priori from the realm of sense.40 In this context, it is quite evident that meaningful sentences and logical laws—the latter, according to TLP, belonging to the Tractarian “tautologies” (6.1, 6.1201)41—differ radically from pseudo-propositions, namely metaphysical nonsense and the nonsensical sentences of TLP, since nonsense indeed neither says nor shows anything. Why not? Because, according to Hacker, the “picture theory of representation” excludes such a thing:

37

P. M. S. Hacker, “Wittgenstein, Carnap and the New American Wittgensteinians,” Philosophical Quarterly 53 (2003): 3. 38 Hacker, “Wittgenstein, Carnap,” 4. 39 Hacker, “Wittgenstein, Carnap,” 17. 40 Hacker, “Wittgenstein, Carnap,” 17. 41 Famously, the construal of logical laws as tautologies is a radical technical novelty of TLP. See Joelle Proust, “Formal Logic as Transcendental in Wittgenstein and Carnap,” Nous 21 (1987): 501-20 and Burton Dreben and Juliet Floyd, “Tautology: How Not to Use a Word,” Synthese 87 (1991): 23-49. As Russell puts it in 1918, explicitly under the influence of Wittgenstein, “Everything that is a proposition of logic has got to be in some sense or other like a tautology” (quoted in Burton Dreben and Juliet Floyd, “Tautology: How Not to Use a Word,” 30.) However, it is often neglected that TLP considers that for some purposes contradictions serve equally with tautologies as logical propositions (6.1202). Young Wittgenstein himself writes to Russell in 1913: “a logical proposition is one the special cases of which are either tautologous … or ‘self-contradictory’ (as I shall call it)” (quoted in Dreben and Floyd, “Tautology: How Not to Use a Word,” 32).

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Hence the sentence is nonsense, and the expressions in it do not stand for anything, i.e., do not stand for their customary meanings—since the sentence is not a picture of a possible state of affairs. … [A] pseudoproposition represents nothing.42

It is in this sense that Hacker agrees with Conant on nonsense: nonsense is sheer lack of meaning, plain nonsense—but this is because it does not “represent.” Hacker, consequently, disagrees with Conant on showing. The sentences of TLP, even if plainly nonsensical, nevertheless do manage to “illuminate” Wittgenstein’s readers by referring them to meaningful sentences. It is those latter propositions that properly show the transcendent nature of reality, not the nonsensical sentences themselves. Specifically, Hacker attempts to explain this sort of referral in analogy with Escher’s drawings43 which, while presenting to the viewer impossible geometrical relationships in spatial geometry, and in this way those twodimensional drawings violate the rules of three-dimensional geometry (its “logical syntax,” so to speak), still they do manage to implicitly illuminate and refer the viewer to proper three-dimensional logic, without actually showing anything themselves. Similarly, the sentences of TLP, while they picture no possible state of affairs—and thus are nonsensical—, they do manage to illuminate us indirectly, by referring us to meaningful sentences, those that do picture properly state of affairs, and thus do show directly the ineffable logic of the world. The analogy is complete: the 42

Hacker, “Wittgenstein, Carnap,” 17, second emphasis ours. See Hacker, “Wittgenstein, Carnap,” 9 and 22. This specific analogy can also be found in Roger M. White, “Throwing the Baby Out with the Ladder: On ‘Therapeutic’ Readings of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus,” in Beyond the Tractatus Wars. The New Wittgenstein Debate, ed. Rupert Read and Matthew A. Lavery (New York: Routledge, 2011), 42 (“What we have is a crossing of two different, incompatible, ways of talking, in much the same way as in an Escher print we have the crossing of two incompatible techniques of visual representation”) and in Denis McManus, The Enchantment of Words: Wittgenstein’s Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 137-8 (“What we come to see is a quite determinate structure or, perhaps better, a structure which is overdetermined in certain specific ways, as one might say that some of Escher’s drawings are; we come to see the multiple foundations of that ‘structure’, the multiple sources of sense upon which it draws and which provide it with its characteristic and specific pseudo-logic”). It is important to note that all such analogies rest on the idea of nonsense as a sort of internal conflict, presupposing a certain kind of seeing mysteriously providing access to nonsense’s “pseudo-logic,” as McManus puts it. Evidently, this is not nonsense as sheer lack of sense. 43

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sentences of TLP are taken to work in analogy to the “geometrically impossible” Escher drawings, which point to the proper, three-dimensional geometry indirectly, by violating or transgressing it. Nonsense is indeed sheer nonsense; but, plainly, according to Hacker, some nonsense may actually do plenty of logical work.

Diamond’s Intervention Cora Diamond, in her paper “Logical Syntax in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus,” contributed to the Conant-Hacker debate by accepting Hacker’s emphasis on rules as ways of going on with signs, thus by-passing the issue of “substantial” nonsense that was Conant’s own worry. “What is at issue in the debate about logical syntax in the Tractatus,” she writes, “is whether logical syntax fixes rules for the use of a sign as its correct use.”44 And she goes on to explain: According to Hacker, Wittgenstein held in the Tractatus that we produce nonsensical pseudo-propositions when we use signs in ways which contravene the rules of logical syntax for the signs. The resulting pseudopropositions are nonsensical because they use signs in ways which are excluded by the rules. The signs thus used do not indeed have their usual meaning, or any other meaning, but the source of the nonsensicality of the would-be propositions in which they occur is the use of signs in contravention of the rules.45 … [If] logical syntax fixes rules for the use of a sign as its correct use, [then] a sufficient condition for a sign’s being used incorrectly, a sufficient condition for the use to be a proscribed use, is that the sign is not, in some combination, being used in accordance with those rules. [But then one may reasonably wonder] whether departing from some set of rules for the use of a sign can ever be a sufficient condition for the nonsensicality of the would-be proposition of which the sign, so used, is part.46

Diamond focuses her attention on Hacker’s idea, according to which, the syntactical rules of logical syntax, in virtue of the logical theory they embody, are automatically capable of excluding certain unfamiliar uses of language as nonsense. What troubles Diamond about Hacker’s position is that he considers it possible for one to recognize nonsensicality—the departure from established syntactical rules—merely by comparing the use 44

Cora Diamond, “Logical Syntax in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus,” Philosophical Quarterly 55 (2005): 82. 45 Diamond, “Logical Syntax,” 78, our emphasis. 46 Diamond, “Logical Syntax,” 82, our emphasis.

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of a sign with the available rules. If the available rules do not cover the use, indeterminacy ensues; does that make the use automatically illegitimate? Diamond answers, quite reasonably, that the use may be just an unfamiliar or a novel use of the sign, a novelty: a use not anticipated by the established rules, yet a perfectly meaningful one.47 Boldly put, Diamond is really pointing out that the rules of language should not be conceived in analogy to the rules of a game such as chess.48 Unlike chess, language rules are not given a priori, simply to be applied passively by us. Diamond ends up charging Hacker with dogmatic preconceptions about sense-making: he has simply decided in advance to read TLP metaphysically, projecting onto it a reading of logical syntax which makes the reader’s active participation in the work irrelevant. Thus excluding the reader from the work, an a priori logical theory takes the reader’s place, setting the “bounds of sense” and anticipating in advance all legitimate uses—in precisely the way rules work in a game such as chess. Nonsense, on this interpretation, is taken to be a departure from what the theory dictates, and not something we ourselves, intentionally or not, have abstained from doing. This standpoint allows Hacker to imagine that he recognizes in nonsensical sentences “violations of the rules of logical syntax”—thus making it possible to introduce in his reading of TLP the kind of nonsense that does “illuminating” work. Conant proves right, therefore, when he implies that this “illuminating nonsense” presupposes a sideways on view on language, a place from where one imagines that the anticipatory surveyability of legitimate and illegitimate uses of language is possible. This makes us prey to a given theory that sets in advance boundaries to our uses of language. Diamond, however, shows in detail that nowhere in TLP does Wittgenstein explicitly or implicitly deny that a divergent use may actually constitute, for example, a novelty. This makes the standard interpretation, according to Diamond, arbitrary and dogmatic.49 In our terms, Diamond’s intervention allows us to conclude that logical syntax and its rules should not be taken as Given: a conceptualist reading of logical syntax is what Diamond is trying to set out. Rejecting a 47

Diamond, “Logical Syntax,” 83-4. On page 87 Diamond gives as an example of such “divergent” uses in the way refugees, who do not speak proper English and thus “violate” English grammar, still make perfect sense to English speakers. In Greece this is a quite common phenomenon, perhaps even ordinary. 48 Diamond, “Logical Syntax,” 86-8. 49 Diamond, “Logical Syntax,” 86.

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metaphysical reading of TLP’s logical syntax, the reader recognizes that in TLP language use may have many more uses than the two officially acknowledged by the standard interpretation, namely one according to logical syntax and one violating it. Consequently, the Givenness of a logical syntax which anticipates sense and nonsense makes it very difficult for one to understand the possibility of new logical laws. A theory of meaning should not be taken to anticipate all creative uses of language; using linguistic signs is not like playing chess, after all. Yet standard interpretations consider it legitimate to assume that Wittgenstein in TLP offers a theory of meaning which immediately sets up limits to the creativity of the subject: once set up, supposedly this theory may be used also to determine nonsense, simply because a use diverges from established uses according to the theory. However, it is unclear how this may be carried through in practice: it is up to us to come up with new logical laws (novel rules governing novel uses of signs) at any time, thus making it possible to employ signs in ways we had never imagined before. Standard interpretations try to avoid this possibility by projecting an a priori theory of sense onto TLP, anticipating all uses in advance. Novel uses are possible, but only if they accord with what the theory has already dictated. This cannot satisfy, however. As Diamond puts it: That Hacker takes the rules of logical syntax to play a role within language comparable to the role of those constitutive rules of chess which define valid moves, i.e., that the analogy he wants is between a game like chess and language … is, I think, plain in his essay. [But e]ven on Hacker’s view of the analogy, there is an important difference between the case of the rules of a game and the case of the rules of logical syntax, since on Hacker’s account of logical syntax, there appears to be room for the possibility of providing new rules of logical syntax, room (that is) for the stipulation of further uses of words which already have an established use. But the point would then be that the game is thereby in a sense reconstituted with the newly stipulated rules; the set of rules still excludes (does not allow as valid moves within the language) any uses of any words not in accordance with those rules. The fact that Hacker’s analogy does leave room for some modification of language by newly stipulated rules does not alter the fact that the analogy is meant to make clear that uses of a word not in accordance with the established rules of logical syntax of the language are thereby identifiable as illegitimate. The analogy, thus understood, fits closely with Hacker’s account of how rules of logical syntax determine the “bounds of sense.”50

50

Diamond, “Logical Syntax,” 86, all emphases are ours.

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Furthermore, the Givenness of logical syntax encourages us to think of nonsense as akin to logical laws. Let us say that a novel use of language is introduced. All such uses, according to TLP, are to be thought of as new rules governing the use of signs, or, equivalently, as new “logical laws.” As mentioned above in passing, logical laws according to TLP are tautologies; here, a tautology not imagined previously. Being a tautology, it says nothing. Yet, on the standard interpretation, nonsense also says nothing: it does not “represent,” as Hacker puts it. To quote again his own words: “the sentence is nonsense, and the expressions in it do not stand for anything, i.e., do not stand for their customary meanings—since the sentence is not a picture of a possible state of affairs. … [A] pseudoproposition represents nothing.”51 Hacker here claims that nonsense is nonsense because it does not “represent” (“the sentence is not a picture of a possible state of affairs”). However, even by his own lights, this formulation holds properly for tautologies (or contradictions), not for nonsense: by definition, the “picture theory of representation” applies only to meaningful sentences and logical propositions. Just because a sentence does not “represent” in the customary way (“the expressions in it do not stand for anything, i.e., do not stand for their customary meanings”) does not make it immediately nonsensical; it may simply be a tautology we had not thought of before, or even an unfamiliar way to depict a state of affairs (an unfamiliar “method of projection,” in TLP’s terminology). Why stick to customary ways?

The Givenness of Logical Syntax? Having gone through the recent debates in the secondary literature over the interpretation of logical syntax, we have arrived at a first conclusion in our investigation on non-discursivity: logical syntax and its rules admit of a conceptualist reading if language use is not conceived in analogy to playing a game such as chess. This excludes nonsense from any kind of non-discursive showing, direct or indirect, even vaguely similar to the showing attributed by TLP to propositions. In this way, we believe we have taken care of one issue where Givenness may be thought to arise in TLP, namely the case of nonsensical sentences. However, there is still work to be done, since, as we have already made clear, the temptation of non-discursive Givenness may also arise in the case of the kind of showing belonging to propositions (meaningful sentences) and logical laws. We shall examine this case in the following section. We shall find that 51

Hacker, “Wittgenstein, Carnap,” 17, emphasis in the original.

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although the showing of propositions may be handled in conceptualist terms, the showing of logical propositions may not be accommodated in similar terms.

6. Meaningful Sentences and Logical Propositions in TLP It is of great interest to note that one’s commitment to the Resolute Interpretation, according to which no “ineffable remainder” is acknowledged by Wittgenstein in TLP, does not imply that one should reject the notion of showing altogether. This should not surprise us; after all, TLP introduces the notion along with other equally controversial terms, and, at least prima facie, there is nothing in its specific way of introduction that makes it hang on the resolute/irresolute exegetical debate: “showing” is just another term for the reader to go through and “overcome” by the end of the book. However, it is particularly easy to see why the notion of “showing” may be taken to create trouble for the Resolute Interpretation. Having rejected all associations of ineffability and unsayability, the resolute interpreters find themselves obliged to explain (or explain away) Wittgenstein’s apparent commitment to “things that cannot be said,” to “Unaussprechliches” and “things that manifest themselves” (6.522). This would seem to be an impossible task; it appears, almost by definition, that “showing” cannot be given a resolute interpretation.52 But, as we have intimated in the beginning of our paper, closer inspection of the matter shows that Wittgenstein in TLP is not actually committed to ineffability, but to non-discursivity. “What can be shown cannot be said” (4.1212), he says. As we explained in section 4, Wittgenstein does not actually imply in TLP that showing straightforwardly entails mysticism, ineffability and inexpressibility, in the sense of metaphysical truths accessible only via one’s failure to put them in words, via the “violation of the rules of logical syntax” and therefore the production of a special kind of nonsense. As we shall explain in this section, neither does he write that propositions perform the rather mysterious feat of “making manifest” ineffable contents, denizens of a realm to which language has no access. On the contrary, according to what Wittgenstein actually writes in TLP, whatever is shown or displayed (the “logical form of reality” (4.121), for example, 52 As Conant and Diamond have noted: “One reason why people who accept a standard reading have generally taken resolute readers to reject altogether the very idea of showing is that they assume that the only possible understanding of it takes it to be a matter of revealing an ineffable content” (“On Reading the Tractatus Resolutely,” 65).

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or “the pictorial form” (2.172), expressions which need interpretation, not philosophical defense as such) inhabits the realm of language53 and does not abandon logic: “What signs fail to express, their application shows. What signs slur over, their application says clearly” (3.262). Although Wittgenstein’s sentences need interpretation (including, of course, the ones we just quoted), they certainly do not force us to locate showing beyond language, but only beyond discursivity (or “propositionality”)—yet, the kind of “beyond” here is precisely at issue. Conant and Diamond suggest some ways in which this exegetical task might be pursued: Resolute readers are not obliged to throw away [non-discursive showing] while throwing away the idea of [ineffable showing] as part of a Tractatus theory involving our supposed access to a special realm, the denizens of which are supposed to be officially unthinkable, but somehow graspable (in a way that doesn’t count officially as thinkable) when “shown.” All a resolute reading commits one to here is: (1) drawing the distinction in such a way that it applies only to sinnvoll and sinnlose Sätze and never to unsinnig propositional signs; and (2) drawing it in such a way that showing ceases to require an irresolute waffle between wanting to claim that the content of that which is shown cannot be said (because that’s what Wittgenstein says) and wanting to hint at what the content in question is (in ways that, in effect, turn it into a kind of quasi-sayable quasi-content). … This still leaves it open to different resolute readers to develop different understandings of how showing works.54

Consequently, a resolute understanding of showing involves demonstrating both (a) “how showing ceases to require an irresolute waffle between wanting to claim that the content of that which is shown cannot be said and wanting to hint at what the content in question is,” and (b) “drawing the distinction in such a way that it applies only to sinnvoll and sinnlose Sätze and never to unsinnig propositional signs.” In the previous section, we explained how nonsense should not be taken to point to ineffable and supra-linguistic truths, on pain of falling prey to the Myth 53

“The Tractatus shows what it shows (i.e. what it is to make sense) by letting language show itself, through das Klarwenden von Sätzen,” James J. Conant, “The Method of the Tractatus,” in From Frege to Wittgenstein: Perspectives in Early Analytic Philosophy, ed. Erich Reck (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 424. 54 Conant and Diamond, “On Reading the Tractatus Resolutely,” 66. Instead of the inserted “ineffable”/“non-discursive” terms, Conant and Diamond write “showing” in scare quotes and italics respectively. We believe they draw essentially the same distinction.

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of the Given. This takes care of (a). In this section, we continue our investigation into showing as non-discursivity in the case of (b) (“sinnvoll and sinnlose Sätze”) in order to test whether a fully conceptualist understanding of TLP is possible on this matter. However, if the conclusions we are going to reach in this section are valid, a fully conceptualist grasping of Tractarian non-discursivity may not be feasible.

Meaningful sentences Let us first review in brief TLP’s threefold distinction, in relation to showing, figuring centrally in the case of meaningful sentences.55 This will enable us to clarify how one might set up a conceptualist reading of “showing” in this case. The saying/showing distinction A central feature of TLP is that a meaningful sentence, namely one which bears on the way the world is, on how things stand, not only says something but also shows what it says (this double function of meaningful sentences in TLP is well-known, if not notorious): “A proposition shows how things stand if it is true. And it says that they do so stand” (4.022). The form/content distinction What a meaningful proposition shows is non-propositional: it shows what constitutes it as a sentence with sense—namely, its “logical form,” which, according to TLP should be distinguished from its content (4.12). Form is what makes a sentence bear on the world, gives it sense; to that extent, form cannot be the content of a sentence: it is always what makes a sentence meaningful (4.121).56

55

The distinctions that follow should be understood primarily as notional distinctions, not substantial ones. Whether we have the right to take them as substantial ones is what is at issue. However, in this area even notional distinctions may be disallowed, since resolution implies (correctly) that such “notional” distinctions ultimately make no sense. 56 A very attractive elaboration of this point, taking “form” as the precondition or condition of meaning, and setting up a resolute reading of the entire TLP on this basis, may be found in Eli Friedlander’s Signs of Sense: Reading Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001).

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The sign/employment distinction Furthermore, what is shown, yet, being non-propositional, cannot be said, namely logical form, may be traced to the use of the proposition. We might put this point as follows: whatever a meaningful sentence shows, it shows it immanently57 in the use in which its signs are put, provided the use of the sentence makes sense: “In order to recognize a symbol by its sign we must observe how it is used with a sense” (3.326); “A sign does not determine a logical form unless it is taken together with its logicosyntactical employment” (3.327); “What signs fail to express, their application shows. What signs slur over, their application says clearly” (3.262). Evidently, the key notions for a conceptualist reading of the “showing” appropriate to meaningful sentences, once the option of non-discursivity has been acknowledged, are “logico-syntactic employment” (3.327), “use with sense” (3.326) and “application” (3.262). Coordinating the use of “showing” in accordance with these terms makes it possible for a resolute interpreter to insist on taking showing to be a performance entirely immanent to language. According to this reading,58 what is shown by a meaningful sentence is shown in the meaningful use one reserves for it; in the conceptual shape (the “logical form”) of what one does with it. What is shown, what is exhibited, in other words, is practical knowledge of its use, mastery of using it correctly, “with sense.” This emphasis on a kind of know-how extinguishes one’s temptation to appeal to the Myth of the Given in order to explain what is shown. It is quite obvious that this line of thinking is perfectly suited to the needs of a conceptualist reading such as the one we are after: what is 57

For a reading of TLP that builds on this point (a so-called “Radical Immanentist” reading by its author, drawing far-reaching connections to Spinoza, Marx, Heidegger, McDowell, Kuhn, Lacan, Althusser and others), see Aristides Baltas, Peeling Potatoes or Grinding Lenses. For some reservations, concerning mostly its self-avowed resolute credentials, see my review of the book in Theodossiou, Review of Peeling Potatoes or Grinding Lenses. 58 See Marie McGinn, “Saying and Showing and the Continuity of Wittgenstein’s Thought,” The Harvard Review of Philosophy IX (2001): 24-36, Michael Kremer, “Mathematics and Meaning in the Tractatus,” and Cora Diamond, “Wittgenstein and What Can Only Be True,” Nordic Wittgenstein Review 3 (2014): 9-40. The work of Hidé Ishiguro, Brian McGuinness and Peter Winch on TLP is of special relevance here; cf. the second chapter of Theodossiou, The Philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Chapter One

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shown is nothing Given; it consists in a know-how, a non-propositional knowledge, yet conceptually shaped, since it involves no supra-linguistic Given. Showing happens in language, immanently, in the sense that every meaningful sentence embodies or reflects the actualization of conceptual capacities in the form of practical knowledge of its place in the logical space of inferences and so on.

The Propositions of Logic As explained in section 4, the rule-bound uses of language may be brought out and made clear via the use of a logical calculus, a “signlanguage”—a logical syntax. The normatively shaped, sense-making work, is found in the use of meaningful sentences. Meaningful sentences and their rule-bound use are “internally connected,” we might say; and logical syntax helps us see these connections. However, the rule-bound uses of language have an additional aspect as well: not only do they embody a structure of inferences and patterns of rule-bound relationships among themselves; the structure itself is not arbitrary, its rules are not stipulated arbitrarily. On the contrary, the structure is lawful: these laws are precisely what we (and TLP, cf. 6.123 and 6.3) call logic: “If we know the logical syntax of any sign-language, then we have already been given all the propositions of logic” (6.124). We present TLP’s standpoint on logical propositions by applying the threefold distinction we presented in 5.1 to their specific case and noting the differences. The saying/showing distinction In Wittgenstein’s “sign-language,” the propositions of logic are “tautologies” (6.1): they do not say anything (6.11), in the sense that they have no bearing on how the world is (“It is raining or it is not raining” does not say anything about how things stand). Nevertheless, being propositions they show something. They show that they say nothing: “Propositions show what they say: tautologies and contradictions show that they say nothing” (4.461). The form/content distinction Tautologies, being contentless, saying nothing, yet nevertheless showing (that they say nothing), may be taken to be pure form. By this we

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mean that, according to TLP, logical laws are purely formal: “All theories that make a proposition of logic appear to have content are false” (6.111). However, a positive spin can be put on this: being purely formal, characterized by pure formality, the propositions of logic may be taken to show their own non-propositional standing in the world: similar to the contentful, yet non-propositional (logical) forms shown by meaningful sentences, “[t]he fact that the propositions of logic are tautologies shows the formal—logical—properties of language and the world” (6.12). It is noteworthy that, having said that, Wittgenstein immediately proceeds to demonstrate the kind of non-propositional standing he attributes to the propositions of logic: not the “ineffable,” transcendent kind, but simply the kind of immanent use their signs have. “The fact that a tautology is yielded by this particular way of connecting its constituents,” he writes, “characterizes the logic of its constituents. If propositions are to yield a tautology when they are connected in a certain way, they must have certain structural properties. So their yielding a tautology when combined in this way shows that they possess these structural properties” (6.12). The sign/employment distinction Since, according to TLP, what a meaningful sentence shows, namely its logical form, can be traced to its logical role, to its “use with sense,” one might be forgiven for expecting that the same will hold for the tautologies in which the propositions of logic consist. That is, one may expect that TLP locates the logical form of the logical laws thoroughly in their immanent use. TLP, however, explicitly denies this: the “use” characteristic of laws has no bearing on the world, on how things stand; the use of meaningful sentences, by contrast, does. Logical laws are tied to the “logical skeleton” of the word, to its formal features, and in that sense they take the rule-bound use of language, the use of meaningful sentences, for granted: “The propositions of logic describe the scaffolding of the world, or rather they represent it. They have no ‘subject-matter’. They presuppose that names have meaning and elementary propositions sense; and that is their connection with the world” (6.124). We might be tempted to suppose that laws, in contrast to the immanent use of meaningful sentences, have something of the transcendent: It is clear that something about the world must be indicated by the fact that certain combinations of symbols—whose essence involves the possession of a determinate character—are tautologies. This contains the decisive point. We have said that some things are arbitrary in the symbols that we use and that some things are not. In logic it is only the latter that express:

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Chapter One but that means that logic is not a field in which we express what we wish with the help of signs, but rather one in which the nature of the absolutely necessary signs speaks for itself. (6.124)

On account of this, in contrast to the use (Gebrauch) of meaningful sentences, TLP specifies the “immanent use” of logical laws or the logically guided employment of signs (3.262) with the term “application” (Anwendung): 5.552 Logic is prior to every experience—that something is so. 5.5521 And if this were not so, how could we apply logic? 5.557 The application of logic decides what elementary propositions there are. What belongs to its application, logic cannot anticipate. It is clear that logic must not clash with its application. But logic has to be in contact with its application. Therefore logic and its application must not overlap.

The passage numbered 5.557 seems to be especially troubling for anyone interested in a conceptualist reading of “showing.” It seems to be raising the specter of metaphysical transcendence at precisely the point where logic touches on the world: on pain of the Myth of the Given, this cannot be the whole story. Yet, TLP explicitly says that logic is “prior” to its application; in other words, it is “prior” to the actual use of meaningful sentences. It can be applied to that use, it guides it, if that is the way we want to put it. But there is no overlap with it. The normatively shaped application of logic apparently carries some kind of excessive Givenness over the immanent use of language.

Hitting a Snag For one to take these first impressions seriously entails questioning the grounds for a fully conceptualist meaning of “showing”; that is, it raises questions about how the logical forms of tautologies exhaust themselves immanently in the case of the propositions of logic. Being tautologies, these propositions show (that they say nothing) and have a logical form. Being propositions, they ought to show their form immanently, in the “use” they have in language. Yet they have application, not just a “immanent use”: they presuppose rule-bound uses of language in order to shape them up, so to speak, logically. Precisely for this reason, they simply cannot exhaust themselves immanently in the actual use of language. But

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where else might a resolutely oriented reader look to trace out the structure of logic? The temptation at this point to diagnose some kind of metaphysical transcendence, an “ineffable remainder” in TLP, grows quite strong. To put it roughly: were the non-propositional “showing” to transcend discursivity, namely actual language-use, it would transcend the actualization of our conceptual and logical capacities. The ensuing Givenness of logic would infect our logical standing in the world; following logic would be a kind of “unfreedom.” Non-propositionality would turn into non-conceptuality, in the sense that the showing appropriate to logical laws would refer us to a brute Given invading language from sideways on, to guide us in the normatively shaped use of our words. We might say: “If we know the logical syntax of any signlanguage, then we have already been Given all the propositions of logic” (6.124). It seems that the Myth of the Given confronts us head on at the point where the guiding role of rule-following takes shape in TLP. If TLP indeed falls prey to the Myth of the Given at this point, then it places concepts on the one side (the normatively shaped, rule-bound language use) and an (“intellectual,” non-sensible) intuition (Anschauung) on the other, in virtue of which one grasps non-conceptually, non-mediately, the guiding thrust of rule-application, of rule-following. TLP would support the view, according to which, as Conant has put it already in 2001 (though in a different context), “the names which occur in a proposition, on the one hand, and ‘the logical form’ of that proposition, on the other, make (at least notionally) separable contributions to the meaning of the proposition”;59 one side contributing immanently, the other transcendently. This would simply destroy the chances for a fully conceptualist reading of TLP’s understanding of showing. Non-propositionality and nondiscursivity would collapse into non-conceptuality and ineffability. To present the issue in no uncertain terms: can a resolute reading of TLP avoid the Myth of the Given at the point where the manner of the exercise of the normative force of logical laws on language use comes into question? This line of questioning may be summed up as follows:

59

Quoted in Kremer, “Mathematics and Meaning,” 279.

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(a) the propositions of logic are tautologies (b) tautologies are contentless yet have logical form, which cannot be discursively articulated but can be shown (c) what is shown by a proposition can be traced to its logical role (the place it occupies in the logical space), to its “use with sense”; but (d) logical propositions do not have a “use with sense” (they do not occupy a place in the logical space like meaningful sentences do); they have application (they are the scaffolding of the logical space) (e) So they do not show “immanently”; logic and its application make contact but they do not overlap. (f) What kind of showing do they do, then?

Some ways out and why they fail In the secondary literature, aspects of the above line of questioning have been reached via a different route. Specifically, similar questions (on how tautologies show) have been raised in connection with the differentiation of tautologies and nonsense. TLP characterizes the former as “lacking sense” (sinnlos, 4.461), the latter as “plain nonsense” (einfach unsinnig, Preface); the former are pure form, the latter have neither (logical) form nor content. Both are contentless (they say nothing). But if both say nothing, why are they not equally nonsensical? Confronted with this question, and having rejected all theoretically grounded answers (for example, the “picture theory of meaning” or “bipolarity”), resolute interpreters build on the “practical understanding”interpretation of “showing” (see 6.1 above) and explain how tautologies, contrary to nonsense, have a useful practical role to play in the organization of language use. Tautologies may be understood to have an auxiliary function in language, akin to definitions, mathematical equations or even scientific laws: none bear directly on the world, on how things stand, yet have a guiding role to play in relation to the meaningful sentences which do take a stand on how the world is.60 In this indirect 60

See the references in note 58. “If a proposition is shown by a logical calculation to be a truth-functional tautology, the tautology may be kept, as being the record of the calculation, and can then also come in handy in making inferences,” Cora Diamond, “Wittgenstein and What Can Only Be True,” 33. She also talks of tautologies as “aids to representation,” “apparatus propositions,” “preparatory propositions” or “accommodatory propositions.” On page 14, she also writes of “the idea of a kind of logical ‘before’, where what belongs to grammar comes ‘before’ the application of language.”

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way, tautologies have a “showing” function, perhaps the way that rulers or color-charts have a function in helping one to come up with meaningful sentences about the world (“This wall is 3m high,” “this wall is painted white”), though they themselves say nothing about how things actually stand. This line of thinking leads resolute interpreters to a rather neat and homogeneous solution concerning what “showing” means in TLP: whether they bear on reality or not, all propositions show their logical form immanently, in the way they are “used with sense,” namely in the practical mastery of the use of the sentence or the word at issue. As explained in section 6.1, this way allows us to avoid Givenness in the non-discursivity characteristic of the propositions of logic. Givenness, in this case, would appear in one’s taking the “notional”61 separation of meaning and logical form as a substantial separation, each making absolutely independent contributions to sense-making (a gap between concept and intuition.) Therefore, one might insist that a satisfying answer along resolute lines may be at hand even in the case of logical propositions, provided we do not give in to the temptation to see showing as anything but practical know-how: logical propositions show in being applied to language-use— and only there. There is no other “place” to look for what logic shows—it exhausts itself in being applied to language. Indeed, TLP itself might seem to make this kind of move available, since it suggests that logical syntax, which embodies logical propositions (6.124), becomes immediately available (though not immediately open to view, 4.002) once language-use (how signs signify, which is shown, and thus a practical matter) is solidly in place: “The rules of logical syntax must go without saying, once we know how each individual sign signifies” (3.334). However, it seems to us that this way of solving the problem of showing still leaves open the question of logic’s “application”: is practical mastery of the use of a sentence or a word all that logic’s “application” in TLP consists in? If so, then how is one to take logic’s priority to its application? Why would Wittgenstein emphasize that “logic must not clash with its application” (this would be superfluous, if logic is taken to be at work only in its application) and what does it mean to say that logic and its application “must not overlap” (5.557)? One cannot paper over

61

With the qualifications elaborated in note 55.

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such differences on this point.62 There is some uncertainty left concerning the way that logic applies to language use: “logic is not a field in which we express what we wish with the help of signs, but rather one in which the nature of the absolutely necessary signs speaks for itself” (6.124). Formulations such as these seem to forcefully imply that logical propositions do not exhaust themselves in their application, they do not show immanently, but somehow stand apart from language use, guiding it from afar, so to speak, instead of inhabiting it immanently, in the flesh. It is precisely this uncertainty over logic’s standing in the world that tempts us to diagnose the Myth of the Given being at work in Wittgenstein’s thought.

7. Conclusion In this paper, we investigated the issue of non-discursivity in Wittgenstein’s TLP. This issue becomes somewhat urgent once one realizes that even a resolute understanding of TLP may not exclude the mythical Givenness characteristic of supra-discursive conceptions of “showing” (sections 3 and 4). Such doubts were allayed in the course of our investigation in the case of nonsense (section 5) and meaningful sentences (section 6.1); but they came back with a vengeance in the case of logical propositions (section 6.2). At that point, the suspicion that TLP’s notion of “showing” falls prey to the Myth of the Given, on account of logic’s Given “transcendence” over its application, became difficult to put aside. There is a way, however, to put a positive spin on the state of aporia we have found ourselves in. We may reformulate the point of the previous section as follows: when TLP assumes that logical propositions are not only a matter of practical mastery but also (in some unspecified sense) stand apart from language use, in order to apply to it and guide it, without overlapping with it in any way, this assumption may simply be TLP’s own 62

Perhaps the issue concerns how TLP conceives of the “transcendental” (“Logic is transcendental,” 6.13): certainly, one should not automatically conclude that TLP has a “transcendent” (metaphysical) understanding of logic’s standing in the world. A (neo-)Kantian understanding of logic’s “transcendental” nature is strengthened by 6.125 (“It is possible … to give in advance a description of all ‘true’ logical propositions”) and 6.1251 (“Hence there can never be surprises in logic”). This is a controversial issue that has produced a lot of interesting papers. We cannot go into this here. We simply note that, depending on the kind of Kantianism offered, the Myth of the Given may still apply in this case.

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way of acknowledging that logical propositions do not display the variability characteristic of ordinary, linguistic (“empirical”) phenomena. Phenomena may surprise us, logic cannot; not because logic is Given, but because logic does not reduce to its application, to language use. Therefore, in talking of logic’s application as a “non-overlap” with logic itself, TLP may be simply trying to draw the reader’s attention to the insight that logic is irreducible to its “empirical” application. This would be a harmless way to defend a robust “transcendence” of logical rules: their “transcendence” would be an indication of their “dignity,” of their guiding role, their irreducibility to variable language use—in brief, of their normativity. Nevertheless, it seems to us that Wittgenstein in TLP does not yet know how to handle successfully this “transcendence” Ƞf the rules. Forbidding logic almost by force to overlap with its application; insisting that it should not come into conflict with it (although no reasoning has been actually given to exclude this possibility); these formulations infect Wittgenstein’s book with metaphysical connotations difficult to hide entirely under the resolute carpet. According to TLP, even on a resolute interpretation, the self-constitution (or self-identity) of a logical proposition does not involve an essential reference to its application: the logical proposition is allowed to stand apart from its application, to not overlap with it, in such a way that no activity of the subject is involved (“logic is not a field in which we express what we wish with the help of signs, but rather one in which the nature of the absolutely necessary signs speaks for itself”—6.124). This is enough to make a conceptualist reading of TLP and a conceptualist notion of “showing” rather unfeasible. Perhaps it is not a coincidence that the non-conceptualist gap we have located in TLP, through which the Given may supposedly be glimpsed, concerns logic’s manner of application to the world. If such a gap indeed exists in TLP, then language-use is conceived as a “medium” through which logic may be glimpsed as precisely Given. It is well-known that the later Wittgenstein will spend a lot of his philosophical energy in efforts to “repair” exactly this point. Indeed, a formulation he provides, in order to describe one of his philosophical targets in Philosophical Investigations, captures quite accurately the non-conceptualist conception of logic we have unearthed in TLP: The strict and clear rules of the logical structure of propositions appear to us as something in the background—hidden in the medium of the

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Chapter One understanding. I already see them (even though through a medium): for I understand the propositional sign, I use it to say something. (§102)

Both in Philosophical Investigations and elsewhere, Wittgenstein will devote a significant part of his later work to restore full immanence to logic: even logic’s application (the way a rule is applied) will shed all connotations of metaphysical transcendence, by being understood as “an aspect rather than a precondition of our practices.”63 This will allay any remaining doubts about the given normativity and the priority characteristic of rules, without appealing to their Givenness in the form of “railways into infinity” or “super-mechanisms” untouchable by how things stand in the world. This will also abolish any need to bring in the independent contribution of an (intellectual, non-sensible) intuition (see Philosophical Investigations §186) supposedly capable of guiding us in how a rule determines its application. A fully conceptualist reading of the rules’ application, therefore, may be found in the work of the later Wittgenstein. To show this, however, would take us too far from the concerns of this paper.64 In closing, we should note that the failure of a fully conceptualist reading of TLP should not be taken to imply the undermining of resolute interpretations in general. The uncovering of metaphysical bias in TLP is nothing new; neither does it go against resolution. Resolution does not attempt to provide an entirely non-metaphysical interpretation of TLP; its acknowledged task consists in providing a self-consistently nonmetaphysical interpretation of TLP according to early Wittgenstein’s lights. Taken this way, the conclusions we have reached in this paper confirm this general orientation in interpretation. Cora Diamond herself, already in 1991, made it clear that TLP harbors metaphysical biases and, 63

As Minar puts it in Edward Minar, “Rule-Following, Practice, and Agreement,” in The Oxford Handbook of Wittgenstein, ed. Marie McGinn and Oskari Kuusela (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 280. A key insight needed in order for Wittgenstein to accomplish this is found in Philosophical Investigations §242: “If language is to be a means of communication there must be agreement not only in definition but also (queer as this may sound) in judgments. This seems to abolish logic, but does not do so” (our emphasis). We have been greatly helped on this issue by Cora Diamond’s “Rules: Looking in the Right Place,” in Wittgenstein: Attention to Particulars. Essays in Honour of Rush Rhees (1905-89), ed. D. Z. Phillips and Peter Winch (New York: St. Martin’s, 1989). 64 It would be interesting to pursue a conceptualist interpretation of On Certainty with this issue in mind. See James J. Conant, “Wittgenstein on Meaning and Use,” Philosophical Investigations 21 (1998): 222-50.

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despite the book’s many insights, it should not be taken to be free of philosophical flaws. She wrote: [T]here is a sense in which the Tractatus might be described as metaphysical, even though it is not concerned with features of reality underlying sense, with things that are the case although they cannot intelligibly be said or thought to be the case. It is metaphysical … not … about what there is, external to language or thought, but about what they essentially are (despite appearances), and about what we can do, what it must be possible to do. The belief that there must be a certain kind of logical order in our language (the belief reflected in our seeing that order as already there, given the understanding we have of the signs we use (Philosophical Investigations, I, §101-2)): this is a belief also in what we must be able to do, given that we understand sentences and use them, where using them is saying things in determinate logical relations to each other. … [Yet w]hat is metaphysical there is not the content of some belief but the laying down of a requirement, the requirement of logical analysis. We do make sense, our propositions do stand in logical relations to each other. And such-and-such is required for that to be so.65

More recently, Diamond and Conant provided a list of the metaphysical biases which they consider as present in TLP. Among them, one is of special concern to us here: “Antecedent to logical analysis, there must be this logical order—one that is already there awaiting discovery—and it is the role of logical analysis to uncover it.”66 This shows that the kind of Givenness we have unearthed in TLP is not one whose presence the resolute interpreters would deny. On the resolute interpretation, according to early Wittgenstein’s lights this kind of Givenness was not taken to be metaphysical: The metaphysical commitments at issue here are, however, not of a sort that early Wittgenstein, at the time of writing the Tractatus, would have taken to be metaphysical. Indeed, most of them would not have been taken by him to be theoretical commitments at all, let alone ones that were somehow peculiarly his. Rather, he would have regarded them as pertaining to matters that become clear through the process of clarifying propositions, and, in particular, through the adoption and application of a perspicuous notation—a notation that enables one to avoid “the 65

Cora Diamond, The Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy, and the Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 18-19, emphasis in the original. The passage is deemed significant enough to be quoted in its entirety in Conant and Diamond, “On Reading the Tractatus Resolutely,” 81-2. 66 Conant and Diamond, “On Reading the Tractatus Resolutely”, 83, emphasis in the original.

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Chapter One fundamental confusions” (“of which the whole of philosophy is full,” 3.324) by furnishing an absolutely clear way of expressing thoughts. His aim, in writing that book, was to bring metaphysics to an end; and the method of clarification he thereby sought to practice, to achieve that end, was to be one that was itself free of all metaphysical commitments.67

To sum up, then: the failure of a fully conceptualist reading of TLP on showing and the saying/showing distinction should not be taken to imply the weakening of the resolute reading of TLP; on the contrary, it strengthens it.68

References Baltas, Aristides. Peeling Potatoes or Grinding Lenses: Spinoza and Young Wittgenstein Converse on Immanence and Its Logic. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012. Bronzo, Silver. “The Resolute Reading and Its Critics. An Introduction to the Literature.” Wittgenstein-Studien 3 (2012): 45-80. Conant, James J. “The Search for Logically Alien Thought: Descartes, Kant, Frege and the Tractatus.” Philosophical Topics 20 (1991): 11580. 67

Conant and Diamond, “On Reading the Tractatus Resolutely”, 83-4. This paper has been very long in the making. Vasso Kindi, Costis Coveos and Stelios Virvidakis deserve special thanks for their encouragement and support of the project. Its basic idea (bringing the Myth of the Given to bear specifically on TLP interpretation) came to me in a conversation with Jim Conant in a conference organized by the University of Patras in 2011. Though he is undoubtedly totally unaware of this, I gratefully acknowledge the inspiration. Sections 4 and 5 draw on my contribution to a paper co-written with Kostas Loukos and published in Greek in the refereed philosophical journal Deukalion. The ideas found there were first presented in the Second Panhellenic Conference of Philosophy of Science in Athens in 2012. Comments by Vasso Kindi, Stavroula Tsinorema, and the participants in Vasso Kindi’s postgraduate seminar on “Wittgenstein and the Philosophy of Science” in 2012/13 are gratefully acknowledged. Section 6 was presented to the Ongoing Seminar on the Theory and Epistemology of the Social Sciences (The K. Psychopaidis Seminar) of the Kapodistrian University of Athens in February 2015. Comments on that section by Aliki Lavranou, Stephanos Dimitriou, Vanghelis Bitsoris, Maria Pournari, Christina Katsari, and Dionysis Christias have greatly improved the paper. Last but not least, debts should be acknowledged to Aristides Baltas for an hour-long public exchange we had in 2012 on his book on the Tractatus. Thanks are also due to the editor of this volume, Sotiris Mitralexis: his patience and generosity have been hugely appreciated. All mistakes, if any, are of course solely mine. 68

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—. “Wittgenstein on Meaning and Use.” Philosophical Investigations 21 (1998): 222-50. —. “Two Conceptions of Die Überwindung der Metaphysik: Carnap and Early Wittgenstein.” In Wittgenstein in America, edited by T. G. McCarthy and S. C. Stidd, 13-61. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001. —. “The Method of the Tractatus.” In From Frege to Wittgenstein: Perspectives in Early Analytic Philosophy, edited by Erich Reck, 374462. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. —. “Mild Mono-Wittgensteinianism.” In Wittgenstein and the Moral Life: Essays in Honor of Cora Diamond, edited by A. Crary, 31-142. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2007. —. “Wittgenstein’s Methods.” In The Oxford Handbook of Wittgenstein, edited by M. McGinn and O. Kuusela, 620-45. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Conant, James J. and Cora Diamond. “On Reading the Tractatus Resolutely: Reply to Meredith Williams and Peter Sullivan.” In Wittgenstein’s Lasting Significance, edited by M. Kölbel and B. Weiss, 46-99. London: Routledge, 2004. Conant, James J. and Ed Dain. “Throwing the Baby Out: A Reply to Roger White.” In Beyond the Tractatus Wars. The New Wittgenstein Debate, edited by R. Read and M. A. Lavery, 66-83. New York: Routledge, 2011. Crary, Alice and Rupert Read, eds. The New Wittgenstein. London and New York: Routledge, 2000. Diamond, Cora. “Rules: Looking in the Right Place.” In Wittgenstein: Attention to Particulars. Essays in Honour of Rush Rhees (1905-89), edited by D. Z. Phillips and P. Winch, 12-34. New York: St. Martin’s, 1989. —. The Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy, and the Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991. —. “Ethics, Imagination and the Method of Wittgenstein's Tractatus.” In The New Wittgenstein, edited by A. Crary and R. Read, 149-73. London and New York: Routledge, 2000. —. “Logical Syntax in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus.” Philosophical Quarterly 55 (2005): 78-89. —. “Wittgenstein and What Can Only Be True.” Nordic Wittgenstein Review 3 (2014): 9-40. Dreben, Burton and Juliet Floyd. “Tautology: How Not to Use a Word.” Synthese 87 (1991): 23-49. Engelmann, Paul. Letters from Ludwig Wittgenstein. New York: Horizon Press, 1968.

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Friedlander, Eli. Signs of Sense: Reading Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001. Hacker, P. M. S. Insight and Illusion: Themes in the Philosophy of Wittgenstein. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986. —. “Was He Trying to Whistle it?” in The New Wittgenstein, edited by Alice Crary and Rupert Read, 353-88. London and New York: Routledge, 2000. Reprinted in his Wittgenstein: Connections and Controversies, 98-140. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001. —. “Wittgenstein, Carnap and the New American Wittgensteinians.” Philosophical Quarterly 53 (2003): 1-23. Kremer, Michael. “Mathematics and Meaning in the Tractatus.” Philosophical Investigations 25 (2002): 272-303. McDowell, John. Mind and World. With a New Introduction. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996. —. Mind, Value and Reality. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998. —. “Avoiding the Myth of the Given.” In Having the World in View: Essays on Kant, Hegel, and Sellars, 256-72. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009. McGinn, Marie. “Saying and Showing and the Continuity of Wittgenstein’s Thought.” The Harvard Review of Philosophy IX (2001): 24-36. McManus, Denis. The Enchantment of Words: Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Minar, Edward. “Rule-Following, Practice, and Agreement.” In The Oxford Handbook of Wittgenstein, edited by Marie McGinn and Oskari Kuusela, 276-93. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Pears, David. The False Prison: A Study of the Development of Wittgenstein’s Philosophy. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987 (vol.1), 1988 (vol. 2). Proust, Joelle. “Formal Logic as Transcendental in Wittgenstein and Carnap.” Nous 21 (1987): 501-20. Read, Rupert, and M. A. Lavery, eds. Beyond the Tractatus Wars. The New Wittgenstein Debate. New York: Routledge, 2011. Sellars, Wilfrid. Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind. Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press, 1981 (original publication in 1956). —. “The Lever of Archimedes.” The Monist 64 (1981): 3-90. Sullivan, Peter M. “On Trying to Be Resolute: A Response to Kremer on the Tractatus.” European Journal of Philosophy 10 (2002): 43-78. Theodossiou, Miltos. The Philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein. TurningPoints in Interpretation, in Greek. Athens: Eurasia Publications, 2007.

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—. Review of Peeling Potatoes or Grinding Lenses: Spinoza and Young Wittgenstein Converse on Immanence and Its Logic, by Aristides Baltas, in Greek. Deucalion 29 (2012): 135-45. White, Roger M. “Throwing the Baby Out with the Ladder: On ‘Therapeutic’ Readings of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus,” in Beyond the Tractatus Wars. The New Wittgenstein Debate, edited by Rupert Read and Matthew A. Lavery, 22-65. New York: Routledge, 2011. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-philosophicus. Translated by David F. Pears and Brian F. McGuinness. London and New York: Routledge, 2001 (original publication in 1921). —. Ludwig Wittgenstein: Cambridge Letters. Correspondence with Russell, Keynes, Moore, Ramsey, and Sraffa. Edited by Brian and G. H. von Wright. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995.

CHAPTER TWO WITTGENSTEIN’S APOPHATIC DESCRIPTIONS CHRYSSI SIDIROPOULOU

Wittgenstein and the Ineffable: From the Tractatus to the Investigations Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: Logical Form and the Picture of Reality Were one to follow Christos Yannaras’ dictum to the effect that apophaticism consists in a refusal “to identify truth with its formulation”1 one would have a promising standpoint through which to engage with Wittgenstein’s philosophy. For the dichotomies “truth and its formulation” and “understanding of a word and knowledge of its signified reality” are expressions of a dualism with which Wittgenstein never ceased to engage with and to critically expose. Is Ludwig Wittgenstein then the archenemy of apophaticism given his insistence that the “limits of my language are the limits of my world” or is he advancing an apophaticism par excellence by insisting on redemptive silence about what one cannot speak of? No matter how one is to answer this pivotal question, its significance is by no means deriving from, neither is it limited to, his scarce remarks on religion. If what will be argued for here is right, the religious significance of this thinker who was not a religious man but could not help “seeing every problem from a religious point of view”2 is informed by the humility of debunking the picture of “finitude as a flaw.”3 The claim being made is 1

Christos Yannaras, Relational Ontology, trans. Norman Russell (Brookline Mass.: HC Press, 2011), 9. 2 Rush Rhees, ed., Ludwig Wittgenstein, Personal Recollections (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 94. 3 The phrase “finitude as flaw” belongs to Fergus Kerr. See Fergus Kerr, Theology after Wittgenstein (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1997), 184-5.

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that this picture, informed as it is by an epistemological depreciation of our bodiliness, turns the immanence-transcendence opposition into an ontological chasm. In this vein, to accept both Wittgenstein’s immanentism and his avowal of what cannot manifest itself in language, (not only in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, but also—albeit in a different sense—in the later work) can be seen as a project of a quasi-religious nature, or at least a vision that many Christian souls should be happy to share. Wittgenstein’s assertion that “the limits of my language are the limits of my world”4 is bound to hold for many—both his admirers and those less than impressed—the significance of an infamous rejection of transcendence. The Tractarian conception of “unsinnig” (Nonsense) as a category under which any ethical, aesthetic, religious or, in general, value statement is subsumed goes along with the view that value is out of the world.5 In the light of the metaphysics of the Tractatus, propositions can picture states of affairs on the basis of sharing the same logical form with them. The common logical form is at the basis of language’s ability to represent the world. Any meaningful proposition is a picture of a state of affairs in the world. This means that meaningful propositions must be either true or false according to whether the states of affairs they represent obtain or not. All meaningful propositions then are about facts, and identifiable with the totality of the propositions of the natural sciences. This is a restrictive conception though, as statements including value terms do not represent any state of affairs. Any attempt to express value within language would be going against the very essence of the latter. Ethical or religious or aesthetic reality would have to be a Sachverhalt in order to enter language, and this is exactly what the Tractarian tripartite division into sinnvoll, sinnlos and unsinnig denies. Nevertheless, Wittgenstein does not share the standard positivist standpoint of Logical Empiricism. Despite his allocation of value to the unsayable, he never ceases to be concerned with it and to attach great importance to it.6 Even the totality of 4 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. C. K. Ogden (New York: Dover Publications, 1998), 5.6: “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” 5 Wittgenstein, TLP 6.41: “the sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is and happens as it does happen. In it there is no value— and if there were, it would be of no value.” 6 Wittgenstein, TLP 6.41. As regards the picture theory of proposition Wittgenstein writes: TLP 4.01: “the proposition is a picture of reality. The proposition is a model of reality as we think it is.” TLP 4.03: “the proposition communicates to us a state of affairs, therefore it must be essentially connected with the state of

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meaningful propositions will leave the quest for meaning intact, as it would do nothing to contribute to the “solution of the problem of life.” Here one sees a resolute refusal on Wittgenstein’s part to treat ethics, aesthetics and religion in a reductionist way: the Tractatus does not attempt to reduce the unsinnig to the sinnvoll, thus eliminating the former and rendering the unsayable redundant. Such an unsophisticated repudiation of important distinctions is not what one normally expects from Wittgenstein. In the Tractatus, the ineffable remains a formidable, if not the most formidable, part of what is. It cannot enter language but it is as much as present in revealing itself through showing. (TLP 6.522: “There is indeed the inexpressible. This shows itself; it is the mystical.”) Thus in the Tractatus there remains a dualism between what exists in the world and can be talked about and what “exists out of the world” and, although not to be dismissed, must be passed over in silence. (TLP 7: affairs.” TLP 4.05: “Reality is compared with the proposition.” TLP 4.06: “Propositions can be true or false only by being pictures of the reality. And the connection is, in fact, that it is its logical picture.” Meaningful propositions (sinnvoll) are of this kind: they constitute pictures of the world and bipolar between truth and falsity. The totality of the propositions of the natural sciences are of this kind. TLP 4.001: “the totality of propositions is the language.” The propositions of logic and of mathematics do not represent any state of affairs in the world. So they do not belong to the group of meaningful propositions. They are senseless (sinnlos). TLP 6.1: “the propositions of logic are tautologies.” TLP 6.11: “the propositions of logic therefore say nothing. (They are the analytical propositions.)” TLP 6.21: “Mathematical propositions express no thoughts.” TLP 6.22: “the logic of the world which the propositions of logic show in tautologies, mathematics shows in equations.” TLP 6.13: “Logic is not a theory but a reflection of the world. Logic is transcendental.” TLP 6.21: “Mathematical propositions express no thoughts.” TLP 6.22: “the logic of the world which the propositions of logic show in tautologies, mathematics shows in equations.” Ethics, aesthetics, the propositions of philosophy itself are not meaningful (sinnvoll) in the sense specified in TLP 4.03 and 4.06. They are Nonsense (unsinnig). With respect to ethics Wittgenstein writes: TLP 6.42: “Hence also there can be no ethical propositions. Propositions cannot express anything higher.” TLP 6.421: “It is clear that ethics cannot be expressed. Ethics are transcendental. (Ethics and aesthetics are one.)” With respect to the “problem of life” and the mystical, he writes: TLP 6.52: “We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all. Of course there is then no question left, and just this is the answer.” TLP 6.521: “the solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of this problem. (Is not this the reason why men to whom after long doubting the sense of life became clear, could not then say wherein this sense consisted?)” TLP 6.522: “there is indeed the inexpressible. This shows itself; it is the mystical.”

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“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”) This dualism undergoes radical transformation in the Philosophical Investigations as in it Wittgenstein parts with the idea of logical form as the essence of language. It remains to be seen whether the Tractarian apophaticism of silence is forfeited as well. In Wittgenstein’s later philosophy the idea that language has an essence is itself denounced. Even more importantly perhaps, language is not supposed to mirror reality or to represent it in any way. This is absolutely central in the Investigations; from it spring both Wittgenstein’s rejection of the possibility of a private language and also, more generally, the opposition to the conception of language as a purely mental reality which causally precedes its uses in the spatiotemporal life of embodied human beings. This renunciation constitutes the Leitmotiv of Wittgenstein’s critique of the disembodied subject in the later period. It is not a theme limited to its immediate vicinity, i.e. Philosophy of Mind, but informs Wittgenstein’s thought on a plethora of issues and levels, religion being what is bound to be of additional interest here. The question then of apophaticism and the ineffable can gain in clarity upon being treated in this connection.

The Investigations: Self and Body In the Philosophical Investigations the rejection of the logical form of the proposition signifies the abandonment of the isomorphic relation between language and reality. There is no linear line or lines of projection between language on the one hand and any kind of extra linguistic reality on the other. The meaning of words is not sought in any essential and strictly defined correspondence to an extra-linguistic item. For one thing, there is no such “extra-linguistic reality,” if this is supposed to mean a reality of which our language and subjectivity have not already been formative. In the eyes of the later Wittgenstein, the quest for an ultimate point of contact between language and the world requires a standpoint outside reality. Only from such a standpoint would it be possible for the question to be asked, if it could be asked at all. A standpoint out of language and the world, however, points to a locus out of the embodied, social and historical human condition. A disembodied, a-social and unhistorical perspective has been absolutely characteristic of the metaphysical subject-protagonist in many an episode of Modern Philosophy. Only a non-embodied being, unbound by any immersion in body and society—out of the world, that is to say—could meaningfully

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pose the question about “where” language and “reality” connect. Wittgenstein’s insistence that there cannot be, for us, any reality out of language, is but a reminder of our embodied nature and an insistence on its centrality for our identity.

Philosophical Investigations: subjective experience as model for all ineffability claims Two extended discussions form the core of the Philosophical Investigations and bear a strong resonance, which spreads over various contexts of exploration. The most important among them are the discussion of rule following and that of the private language. The latter can be seen as a reintroduction of rule following concerns not in a mathematical context but with respect to the language of sensation. It gradually undoes the aspiration to locate the ultimate link of language and reality in introspectively defining and subsequently recognizing phenomenal qualities in “my own” experience. In this way, it is the investigation of the meaning of mental terms such as “pain,” “thinking,” “expecting” etc., being part of “the problem of subjective experience” that gets prime place in Wittgenstein’s efforts to dismantle the picture of the solipsist self, whether in mathematics, psychology or religion. Vis-à-vis this, the typical objection has been a disgruntled plea for “preserving” “subjective experience” or, more dramatically, “the subject” itself, considered to be all but annihilated by Wittgenstein’s “behaviorism in disguise.” Within the framework of the private language argument, inquiry into subjective experience crosses path with the question of ineffability. Those less than convinced by Wittgenstein’s analysis insist that space must always be allocated to a part of ourselves and of our experience that resists inclusion into language. In their view, such an elusive reality must always be present in order to prevent a suffocating construction of the self as an epiphenomenon of community. Given this, the Wittgensteinian analysis seems to them to impoverish our being dramatically by curtailing the realm of our personal experience and autonomy. There is—this line of thought claims—a kind of experience so personal as to be impossible to communicate to others in language, something so very much one’s own so as not to be susceptible to “outward” expression. Outward expression would inevitably have to go through the body and so—the alleged purity of the inner self—would be lost in this way. Highlighting outward expression—mediated by the body—as formative of (the very concept of) mental life, Wittgenstein seems to do away with all ideas of an ineffable

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presence in the core of the self. If the Tractarian point to the effect that the limits of my language mean the limits of my world is still valid, no ineffability seems to have any place in a picture whose opponents persist in seeing as a behaviorist reduction and as focused on the crudely visible. Wittgenstein’s protracted struggle over “subjective experience” with the Cartesian alter ego of the Philosophical Investigations offers a focus for exploring all ineffability. In PI 304 a putative Cartesian persona advocates the idea of a necessary mental accompaniment to “outward behavior”: “But you will surely admit that there is a difference between pain-behavior accompanied by pain and pain-behavior without any pain?”—Admit it? What greater difference could there be?—“And yet you again and again reach the conclusion that the sensation itself is a nothing.”—Not at all. It is not a something, but not a nothing either! The conclusion was only that a nothing would serve just as well as a something about which nothing could be said. We have only rejected the grammar which tries to force itself on us here.7

The something-nothing antithesis points to a disagreement the terms of which remain barren in Wittgenstein’s view. For the attempt to safeguard the “endangered” subjectivity from the perils of behaviorist reduction regards the incommunicable inner experience as a positive object. The problem is, however, that if this picture is followed through, incommunicability undermines the very ground for construing sensation as an object—in the terms of PI 304 as a “something.” Meaningful talk about a private “something”—just like talk about anything else—presupposes independent criteria for the correct application of my mental terms. Nevertheless, in the case of a private mental object such criteria are ex hypothesi unavailable; given the lack of any links to the public language, anything that would appear to me to be an occurrence of some mental reality would have to be so. Wittgenstein’s point is that such a mental objectification would then collapse upon the lack of any independently established criterion. As it would not be possible to talk about a correct recognition of a mental occurrence as opposed to an incorrect one, a mental term denoting what goes on in me would simply not gain any content.8 7

This and all subsequent quotations from the Philosophical Investigations (PI) are taken from: Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1972). 8 The question of what correct identification of a private sensation would consist in is treated in PI 258. The paragraph, famous in bibliography as “the private diarist” reads as follows (last part): “A definition surely serves to establish the meaning of

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If the inner item of sensation is so indefinable, what is the sense of the implied Cartesian demand that it be “something”? This is not further elaborated upon; presumably, the term “something” evokes an object in space and time that can be pointed at and defined.9 The “something” mentioned in PI 304 is not of this kind though, as, in Wittgenstein’s view, it fails to fulfill the conditions for objecthood. Its very status as a “something” remains unsettled. Given this, it may come as a surprise—especially to the Cartesian interlocutor—that PI 304 also asserts that mental experience is not a “nothing.” Conspicuously though Wittgenstein disavows reductionism of the mind, those in the grip of dualist metaphysics of the mind have difficulty accepting the fact. PI 307 seems to be a reply to the lingering suspicion of behaviorism: “Are you not really a behaviorist in disguise? Aren’t you at bottom really saying that everything except human behavior is a fiction?”—If I do speak of a fiction, then it is of a grammatical fiction.

There is indeed a fiction, in the Cartesian conception. Nevertheless it does not consist in thinking (mistakenly) that a non-existing reality (subjective experience) exists after all. Not quite. The idea that subjective experience is something over and above its behavioral manifestation is not a fiction. That one may occasionally be unwilling or unable to communicate what she feels or thinks, and that in this sense there is always the possibility of experience which is exclusively one’s own, is not an idea rejected by the Philosophical Investigations. In this sense, subjective a sign.—Well, that is done precisely by the concentration of my attention; for in this way I impress on myself the connection between the sign and the sensation.— But ‘I impress it on myself’ can only mean: this process brings it about that I remember the connection right in the future. But in the present case I have no criterion of correctness. One would like to say: whatever is going to seem right to me is right. And that only means that here we can’t talk about ‘right’.” 9 Here we find an extra complication regarding ostensive definition. Wittgenstein discusses ostensive definition in the early part of the Philosophical Investigations (PI 27-64). There he argues that ostensive definition cannot form the basis of a theory of meaning, but it may still work in some cases, if there is a sufficient enough context for the “grammar” of the concept under definition to be presupposed. The extra problem with private ostensive definition is that such a context can never exist in private. So that a private ostensive definition attempted in introspection will never work.

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experience is not a fiction. There is still a fiction, though, to which PI 307 offers a roundabout response: “If I do speak of a fiction, then it is of a grammatical fiction.” What is involved in the claim that rejection of the ineffable “something” signifies a rejection of a grammatical fiction? The last sentence of PI 307 revisits a similar move of rejection in PI 304: “We have only rejected the grammar which tries to force itself on us here.” It is commonplace that we do not have a specific definition of the term “grammar” in Wittgenstein’s work. If “grammar” is understood in the sense of a conceptual system’s crystallization in language, a “grammatical fiction” would signify an incoherent attempt to articulate what cannot be articulated within a particular language-game. The “grammatical fiction” under consideration in PI 307 consists in the effort to “objectify” subjective experience, that is to depict it as a concrete ostensible entity located in the mind. A few sections before 307, with the celebrated “beetle in the box” metaphor, Wittgenstein had rejected the possibility that such an “entity” can enter language. In PI 293 he wrote: The thing in the box has no place in the language-game at all; not even as a something: for the box might even be empty.—No, one can “divide through” by the thing in the box; it cancels out, whatever it is. That is to say: if we construe the grammar of the expression of sensation on the model of “object and designation” the object drops out of consideration as irrelevant.

The “beetle in the box” metaphor in PI 293 is an integral part of the private language argument. Its concluding lines suggest that construed as a “something,” subjective experience ultimately remains non-linguistic and non-communicable, and in this respect, effectively arcane. From the Cartesian point of view, “inner life” is either ineffable or it is not at all, a nothing. For Wittgenstein, by contrast, in order for subjective experience to be more than “nothing” it does not have to be—indeed it cannot be—an ineffable ethereal “something.” At this juncture it may be worth adding some more nuance to what is meant by “ineffable,” as it will be necessary for the discussion of apophaticism to follow in the later parts of this chapter. Before doing this, however, a re-writing and re-evaluation of PI 304 is in place. This re-rendering of PI 304 will feature not the antithetical pair of behavior accompanied with pain and behavior not accompanied with it, but that of religious expression accompanied by genuine belief in

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God and religious expression which does not go along with any such faith. This “religious duplicate” of PI 304 would then run as follows: “But you will surely admit that there is a difference between religious expression accompanied by faith and religious expression without any faith in God?”—admit it? What greater difference could there be?—“And yet you again and again reach the conclusion that the sensation itself is a nothing.”—Not at all. It is not a something, but not a nothing either! The conclusion was only that a nothing would serve as well as a something about which nothing could be said. We have only rejected the grammar which tries to force itself on us here.

If in the original PI 304 the challenge to Cartesian dualism was supposed to come from reductive behaviorism, in this imaginary re-make of it the Cartesian interlocutor is asking for a clear line of demarcation between real faith and mere conformity to the “externalities” of religious life. The Cartesian perspective calls for a notion of pure faith, conceptually independent from aspects of religious expression that can be shared in public. There emerges, then, an understanding of faith as a part of subjective experience and as elusive in principle as a radically private sensation. The Cartesian view of subjective experience emphasizes the essentially non-physical, non-bodily, and non-public character of what one feels when one is, for example, in pain. With respect to religion, the parallel Cartesian view would be that there is an essential mental core of religious life, equally distinct from anything bodily and communicable to others. This clearly dualist understanding motivates a quest for an immaterial “something” in a way analogous to the case of pain in the original PI 304. Here, failure to provide an immaterial mental “something” is considered to be a reduction of religious belief to “nothing.” Once more, the two alternatives in the dilemma are either something ineffable or nothing at all! The imaginary reconstruction of PI 304 is instructive in so far as it can facilitate an awareness that for Wittgenstein of the Philosophical Investigations the issue of ineffability is inseparable from that of dualism. Dualism understood as the source of a dichotomy between what is bodily, communicable, shareable and “outer” on the one hand, and mental10 10

At this juncture, it is worth noticing that the construal of the “mental” as the opposite of the “bodily” springs from the Cartesian perspective. This is by no means the only possible conception. Aristotle, for example, would have classified walking or digestion together with phenomena which fall under “mental” in our classification. Nevertheless, it is the conception which has put an indelible stamp

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incommunicable, unsayable, and “inner” on the other. It follows that an elucidation of the mind-body dualism would offer a framework of analysis quite apt for exploring ineffability and, on this basis, apophaticism.

The standard critique—a metaphysical/dualist conception of ineffability A standard response to Wittgenstein’s critique of the solipsistic self has been that he does away with the subject altogether, or, a variation of this charge, that he causes its dissolution into the linguistic consensus of a particular community. This outlook, so widespread as to defy specific reference, would certainly contest any room for the ineffable in Wittgenstein’s later thinking. In its understanding of the ineffable in terms of an immaterial, bodiless “something” in the sense delineated above, it forms part of a specific view concerning how language refers. It is important that this view be brought into focus, as this could open the way to an alternative way of understanding ineffability and, along with it, apophaticism. As regards religious belief, the question of ineffability is often conjoined to that of transcendence. Here again, the typical unsympathetic response to Wittgenstein’s later philosophy would be to say that Wittgenstein does not allow for divine transcendence, given his disinclination to address what is beyond meaningful linguistic expression. For Wittgenstein’s critics, transcendence involves ineffability dualistically conceived—that is to say, transcendence requires the conceivability of a reality logically free from all association with time, space, body and community. The conceivability of such a reality is certainly denied by Wittgenstein. The force of this denial, however, can be qualified in the following sense: Wittgenstein rejects transcendence only insofar as the latter is expected to enter language as an objectified mental “something.” He can be plausibly read as rejecting transcendence as “a something,” in the sense of a positive representation—but also as allowing that it is not a “nothing,” if this means an alternative, non-dualistic account of how transcendence may be represented in language. It is imperative then to examine how such an alternative non-metaphysical11 reading of ineffability could be offered. An upon the modern picture of the self and all modernity. In this context, “mental” is standardly identified with the subjective. 11 The term “metaphysical” here is quite specific and evokes Wittgenstein’s use of it as a technical term. According to this, “metaphysical” indicates an invalid move

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exploration of paragraphs 297, 300 and 301 can contribute a lot towards this aim, given the tremendous dialectic of picture and representation (German: Bild and Vorstellung, respectively) unfolding in them.

Pictures, representations, and the ineffable Shortly before engaging with the grammar of “something” and “nothing” in PI 304, Wittgenstein introduces another distinction, that between “picture” and “images.” In PI 300 he writes: It is—we should like to say—not merely the picture of the behavior that plays a part in the language-game with the words “he is in pain,” but also the picture of the pain. Or, not merely the paradigm of the behavior, but also that of pain. —It is a misunderstanding to say “the picture of pain enters into the language-game with the word ‘pain’.”—The image of pain is not a picture and this image is not replaceable in the language-game by anything that we should call a picture.—The image of pain certainly enters into the language game in a sense; only not as a picture.

The single sentence of PI 301 attempts to spell out the attempted contrast of PI 300: “An image is not a picture, but a picture can correspond to it.” (In the original German: “Eine Vorstellung ist kein Bild, aber ein Bild kann ihr entsprechen.”) The distinction between “Bild” and “Vorstellung” introduced in PI 301 serves as a challenge to the idea that an image (German: Vorstellung) is necessarily constituted through a pictorial projection. In his “Wittgenstein: Picture and Representation,” Peter Winch maintains that the pivotal character of the contrast in PI 301 is better captured if the antithetical pair Bild-Vorstellung is rendered in English as, respectively, “image” and “representation.” Given that the German term “Bild” carries strong pictorial connotations whereas “Vorstellung” lacks any such, Winch claims that the English word “image” as a translation of the German “Vorstellung” is potentially misleading. The reason is that just like the German word “Bild,” the English “image” also suggests something pictorial. Winch’s alternative translations of PI 300 and PI 301 run as follows: within a language game—an attempt to express what can either not be expressed at all, or not in the given way. Such futile efforts, according to Wittgenstein, spring from misunderstanding the grammar of our language. The dualist construal of sensation as a mental object is the product of misunderstanding the grammar of the mental and an example of such (bad) “metaphysics.”

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PI 300 appears to anticipate the anxiety of the Cartesian interlocutor in PI 304 lest pain be considered a “nothing.” It can also help elucidate the familiar notion of “grammatical fiction” present a few paragraphs later in PI 407:13 It is the mark of a grammatical fiction to insist that pain be represented by a (pictorial) picture, or in Anscombian jargon, that the image of pain be a picture or something that we should call a picture.14 In order for there to be a picture (Bild) of pain in the language game, one would need to assume a mental object in one’s consciousness. A mental object one could point at and define through private ostension. This approach, however, is part of the understanding of subjective experience that Wittgenstein rejects. Nevertheless, despite the impossibility of such a fictitious picture of pain, for Wittgenstein pain is not absent from the language game of pain. This means: pain is not reduced to mere behavior. The way it is represented, though, involves a network of complex and interconnected references at the center of which is the public expression of the sensation mediated by the body. The representation of pain does not have a specific locus, as a pictorial depiction would do—so it cannot be pointed at directly; it has to be approached in a way which is multidimensional and presupposes a community with others, even in order for one to conceive one’s own experience. In his attempt to refute the idea that the meaning of “pain” is to be given through reference to an “inner” object of consciousness, Wittgenstein engages with the problematic of

12

Peter Winch, “Wittgenstein: Picture and Representation,” in Trying to Make Sense (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), 76. 13 Wittgenstein’s notion of a “grammatical fiction” has been introduced above. See pp. 52-3. 14 The translation of PI 300 and 301 on p. 11 are from G. E. M. Anscombe’s official translation.

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picturing. In PI 297 he introduces a metaphor aimed at exploring how inner experience comes to be expressed in language. Ǿe writes: Of course, if water boils in a pot, steam comes out of the pot and also pictured steam comes out of the pictured pot. But what if one insisted on saying that there must also be something boiling in the picture of the pot?

P. M. Hacker’s reading of the analogy15 correlates the pot with the human body, the water boiling inside the pot with the subjective experience of pain and the steam coming out of the pot with the behavior of a person in pain. In PI 297 there are both pictorial elements in the narrow strict sense of Bild, and a representation in the sense of the German Vorstellung which is not based on any lines of pictorial projection. Both the pot and the steam coming out of it are depicted pictorially—they are, after all, physical realities readily available for observation. The crux of the matter is how the process of boiling itself is to be represented: the minimum requirement for it to be represented pictorially would be that the pot be transparent. In such a case a picture of water with bubbles and small wavy lines could convey boiling. Still, however, this would not in itself be a representation of boiling, for boiling itself is a physical phenomenon caused by conditions that are not, easily at least, subject to picturing. Even less so are they subject to one, plain, direct and easily understood line of pictorial projection. How, for example, is one to “picture” the natural law that water boils at 100 degrees Celsius? And let it be noted that this law is but one of the elements—the most narrow one—associated with the boiling of water. Another one could be the position that the practice of boiling the water has within human culture, its importance for hygiene, for nutrition—even perhaps for ceremony. All of the above and also other factors like them are, as Wittgenstein would see it, constitutive parts of the phenomenon of boiling. From his point of view, the different strands of physical and social phenomena involved in boiling are not connected to each other in an essentialist way. Consequently, there cannot be a painter who would capture all of this rich canvas in one single graphic painting. No photographer can produce one ultimate photograph, either. For even if she would stand above the boiling pot and imprint the water during the time of boiling on a screen, much more would be still required for making this a complete illustration of what boiling is. In order to give a successful representation of boiling water, one has to look mostly out of the pot; only a very minimal part of such a representation would derive from the looking inside the boiling utensil. 15

P. M. Hacker, Wittgenstein: Meaning and Mind (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 212.

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Were one to apply this viewpoint to subjective experience, one would have to concede that the latter cannot be represented pictorially. Just as one needs to look far and wide out of the pot in order to grasp the whole reality of boiling (such as for example, the natural law that water boils in 100 Celsius), one needs to decentralize the direction of one’s gaze and lead it away from the alleged inner mental object. The Cartesian point of view sees the content of subjective experience as ineffable. At the same time it assumes that it can be represented in language by a meaningful term such as “pain.” For Wittgenstein this is as confused as the idea that boiling itself can be represented in language through a (pictorial) picture (Bild). The possibility to represent subjective experience, then, will depend on a radical change in the way one conceives the “inner-outer” dialectic. Such a shift will allow us to attempt representations of subjective experience by looking out of the alleged “inner” mental space and realize that the mental cannot ever become manifest without being a part of embodied human (or also animal) life. The human body is a sine qua non of such a representation, not by means of biological reduction, but in so far as it is what enables the various instances of mental life to escape ineffability and be meaningfully expressed in language. The question now is whether this refutation of ineffability in the logical sense leaves no space for a sense of the ineffable that many people may wish to preserve as part of a religious or spiritual perspective and way of living human life. At this juncture, revisiting of the hypothetical version of PI 304 may be instructive. The alternative PI 304 constructed above attempts to address the Cartesian worry that Wittgenstein leaves no space to anything other than “external” religious expression. This concern is intertwined with a generic charge against Wittgensteinian philosophy of religion which is emblematically representated by D. Z. Phillips, for example. It is being charged that in philosophy of religion inspired by Wittgenstein’s later philosophy there is hardly a place for a transcendent God or for resurrection. More specifically, this criticism unfolds as follows: Wittgenstein’s later philosophy does not allow for any ineffable subjective “inner” experience, but reduces everything to the linguistic consensus of particular communities. So there cannot be any real way to separate the reality of God from the finite realities of human language and human worship. God is not simply immanent inside the world; His existence is, as

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it were, diluted within the labyrinth of human language and expression. Not only can the authenticity of faith not be warranted; the question about the very existence of God is dismissed as a pseudo-problem. Ultimately, the majesty of (divine) transcendence concedes its place to the banalities of (human) finitude. The paragraph above summarizes a common sentiment of many, both philosophers and theologians. “Religious realists” as well as various strands of traditional theists subscribe to it. It is beyond the present confines to examine these views one by one.16 Let it suffice to say that the anti-dualist edge of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy appears to many to be doing away with any divine reality “above just words.” As a natural consequence of this standpoint, they fail to see how Wittgenstein could allow anything to come between “truth” and its linguistic formulation. Apophaticism then seems to be utterly foreign to Wittgenstein’s philosophy of religion. A response to this charge is by no means a simple task. Part of the problem is the unhelpful umbrella term “Wittgensteinian philosophy of religion.” Here the obvious model case to refer to is D. Z. Phillips—with a great number of books spanning over three decades, one of the last of which bears the inauspicious title Religion without Transcendence.17 Plenty of the philosophical production that comes under the rubric “Wittgensteinian philosophy of religion” tends to commit what, in Wittgenstein’s own eyes, would be the ultimate philosophical sin: to form a theory of reality or concerning an area of reality. Moreover, and this is something D. Z. Phillips is particularly at fault for, stipulate what is an authentic and grammatical use of religious language as opposed to a piece of bad metaphysics.18 To give but one example, the claim that petitionary prayer is no more than plain superstition in case the supplicant has “real” causal expectations, let us say, for restoration of health vis-à-vis a threatening illness, is a case of philosophical entitlement to stipulating the

16

Here one could mention the names of Roger Trigg and Keith Ward. Furthermore, the philosophical approach of Reformed Epistemology, with Alving Plantinga as its most prominent representative, is at the antipodes of Wittgenstein’s thinking on religion. 17 D. Z. Phillips and Timothy Tessin, eds, Religion Without Transcendence (Basingstoke, Hampshire and London: Macmillan, 1997). 18 Here the term “metaphysics” is again used in the specific sense presented in fn. 11 above.

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criteria of authenticity in the use of language.19 It is, that is to say, a theoretical normative move, quite unlike those of Wittgenstein’s. The latter has consistently disavowed such temptations. Moreover, Wittgenstein himself has on the whole been rather suggestive in matters pertaining to religion. Many of his followers do not seem to follow his example in this respect. It would then be appropriate to consider the question of apophaticism in drawing a distinction between Wittgenstein’s own later philosophy and the perspective shaped by his prominent followers such as D. Z. Phillips. With respect to Phillips’s work, much of the sentiment sketched above seems not to be unjustified. It may be more promising to revisit the Philosophical Investigations through the perspective of Wittgenstein’s antidualist critique in philosophy of language and mind. A case can be made that even if all meaning is in principle linguistic, still an alternative sense of apophaticism can be traced in Wittgenstein’s later work. This will be particularly relevant to exploring religious belief, but also applicable to the model cases of subjective experience discussed above.

The Aroma of Coffee and the voices of the ineffable In Part Three of his well-known book Theology after Wittgenstein called “theology without the mental Ego,” Fergus Kerr dedicates a few pages to the aroma of coffee.20 The discussion of coffee is strategically located in a chapter bearing the title “Wittgenstein’s Theological Investigations.” Something as personal as the sensation one gets in smelling or tasting coffee is used by Kerr as a model case of ineffable subjective experience. Under the spell of the Cartesian picture of the self, we often feel that we fail to give a precise description of our experience, whether with respect to the aroma of coffee or to the feeling produced in us by listening to a piece of music. In Kerr’s words, “there is an incipient sense of frustration that something is eluding our powers of description.”21 This issue is brought up 19

D. Z. Phillips, The Concept of Prayer (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965), 120. 20 Kerr, Theology after Wittgenstein, 162-7. 21 Kerr, Theology after Wittgenstein, 163.

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in paragraph 610 of the Philosophical Investigations, quoted by Kerr on the same page. Describe the aroma of coffee.—Why can’t it be done? Do we lack the words? And for what are words lacking?—But whence comes the idea that such a description must after all be possible? Have you ever felt the lack of such a description? Have you tried to describe the aroma and not succeeded? ((I should like to say: “these notes say something glorious, but I do not know what.” These notes are a powerful gesture, but I cannot put anything side by side with it that will serve as an explanation. A grave nod. James: “Our vocabulary is inadequate.” Then why don’t we introduce a new one? What would have to be the case for us to be able to?))22

We smell the aroma of coffee, we may enjoy it or we may not find it particularly inviting; we feel moved and excited by listening to, let us say, Mozart’s Requiem. There is something deep in these experiences which we fail—we think—to express in words. The feeling that something, which in principle could be available, is missing can even bring one to think that new words and concepts must be introduced. According to PI 610, this is William James’s position; it is not limited to him, though. The drive for new, more “complete” and sophisticated concepts is part and parcel of the dualist metaphysics of the self. In the context of the latter it is presupposed that there is a specific objectified mental presence that we should be able to point at. What sustains the quest for a better description, be it pain, the sensation of coffee’s aroma, or the sense of aesthetic delight in listening to Mozart’s music, is the by now familiar conception of the mental object. As regards this drive, Wittgenstein claims that to look for an elusive ultimate description is a misconceived response to a grammatical fiction—that of the incommunicable inner experience. If the quest for “a special vocabulary for subjective facts”23 is a mark of grammatical confusion, are we then to resign to the thought that our individual experience is either altogether ineffable, or describable only in its “coarsest” aspects? In the Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology Wittgenstein puts the idea that only the “coarsest features” of one’s inner

22

Kerr, Theology after Wittgenstein, 163. Kerr, Theology after Wittgenstein, 164. The expression “a special vocabulary for subjective facts” belongs to William James. Kerr gives reference to William James’s Principles of Psychology, in fn. 23. 23

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experience can be expressed into the mouth of an imaginary interlocutor. Presumably the latter represents the Cartesian point of view.24 A Wittgensteinian response to this challenge has to explore how the “aroma” of coffee enters language. If it is ineffable or so much below the standard of what a satisfying description is, how is it even possible to discuss it? Or, is it that various people use the expression “aroma of coffee” but not really in the same way? Are we not on shaky ground here? A look into an internet site featuring witty quotes about people’s relation to coffee can be very instructive. Below is a selection. The first quote, very elaborate in its descriptive style, comes from Honoré de Balzac: This coffee falls into your stomach, and straightway there is a general commotion. Ideas begin to move like the battalions of the Grand Army of the battlefield, and the battle takes place. Things remembered arrive at full gallop, ensuing to the wind. The light cavalry of comparisons deliver a magnificent deploying charge, the artillery of logic hurry up with their train and ammunition, the shafts of with start up like sharpshooters. Similes arise, the paper is covered with ink; for the struggle commences and is concluded with torrents of black water, just as a battle with powder.25

Here we have a narrative of the writer’s experience of drinking coffee. In describing this experience, Balzac tells a story of inspiration: of how his mental alertness increases, his ideas come faster and his memory reaches a peak. He can come up with comparisons and similes. His paper is “covered with ink” as his productivity gets a serious boost. The sensation of coffee is similar to the sensation of battle. Second quote: The cup had a lot of volume, so I poured in a lot of noise and sipped it up to my ears. And what I heard didn’t smell like coffee, but it did taste like love.26

Hearing, taste permeating even the ears, smell given in hearing (“what I heard didn’t smell...”). Sight, touch, hearing, taste, together saturate the coffee lover’s being. In this second quotation coffee does not feel like 24

Kerr, Theology after Wittgenstein, 164. Wittgenstein uses the phrase “the coarsest features of your experience” in the Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology I, 1079. This is quoted by Kerr (Theology after Wittgenstein, 164). 25 Honoré de Balzac, accessed February 20, 2015, http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/coffee?page=3 (my emphasis). 26 Jarod Kintz, Love quotes for the ages. And the ageless sages, accessed February 20, 2015, http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/coffee?page=8.

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battle, but more like love. Drinking it brings different sensations together: of volume with its visual and tactile connotations, of noise, of taste. Its suggestive language offers an intimation of being in love. Third quote: Just the other day, I was in my neighborhood Starbucks, waiting for the post office to open. I was enjoying a chocolatey cafe mocha when it occurred to me that to drink a mocha is to gulp down the entire history of the New World. From the Spanish exportation of Aztec cacao, and the Dutch invention of the chemical process for making cocoa, on down to the capitalist empire of Hershey, PA, and the lifestyle marketing of Seattle’s Starbucks, the modern mocha is a bittersweet concoction of imperialism, genocide, invention, and consumerism served with whipped cream on top.27

The third quote reveals the sensation of coffee as a sudden trigger of historical and social awareness: it connects the drinker with the long series of people involved in the discovery, cultivation, and procurement of the coffee beans. What’s more, she becomes part of a shared culture with its delights, responsibilities and feelings of guilt. A positive sense of diachronic belonging. Fourth quote: You are going to lose your home, your spouse, your life, and all at once, when you die. So why not drink coffee now and remember the life you haven’t started living yet?28

Here drinking coffee is a stable factor stretching through different periods of life; both soothing and energizing, it completes the picture of valuable presences in the person’s life. Something to always return to in order to refill one’s existential batteries and reinvigorate oneself. Fifth quote: Presently the smell of coffee began to fill the room. This was morning’s hallowed moment. In such a fragrance the perversity of the world is forgotten, and the soul is inspired with faith in the future.29

27

Sarah Vowell, accessed February 20, 2015, http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/coffee?page=1 (my emphasis). 28 Jarod Kintz, I love Blue Ribbon Coffee, accessed February 20, 2015, http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/coffee?page=4 (my emphasis). 29 Halldór Laxness, Independent People, accessed February 20, 2015, http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/894141-presently-the small-of-coffee-began-tofill-the-room (my emphasis).

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A very telling depiction of how the smell of coffee makes its way to the drinker’s soul. Redemption and trust in the goodness of things. A sense of aesthetic and moral uplifting. Finally, two little poems on the same theme: Coffee Sweet and savory tides Fill the self-perpetuating void Spinning spokes of inspiration Distillate of jungle and earth... 30 coffee again Bittersweet the rush of caffeine the warmth inside my bones... 31

In reading the above quotes one gets into very interesting and informing perspectives about what the aroma of coffee consists in in various situations. One sees that it is involved in the coffee lovers’ life in a multitude of ways, as part of a rich mosaic of desires, needs and aspirations, emotional conditions and personal stages in one’s life, defining particular moments and triggering recollections, offering inspiration, sealing milestones, adding a touch of aesthetic appreciation and ideals, and so much more. As for the very specific sensation one undergoes when drinking coffee, the three first lines in each of the two little poems quoted above are anything but an elusive description: Sweet and savory tides Fill the self-perpetuating void ... Bittersweet the rush of caffeine the warmth inside my bones

It is quite plausible to suggest that many a coffee lover would consider these stanzas to be a great description representing what exactly they experience once the drops of coffee are sipped down their mouth. This 30

Christian Reid, Coffee, accessed February 20, 2015, http://hellopoetry.com/words/3752/coffee/poems/. 31 Adam, Coffee again, accessed February 20, 2015, http://hellopoetry.com/words/3752/coffee/poems/.

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experience is one they share with the poet or, at least, an experience they can recognize as their own up to a point. If this so, one cannot talk about the “aroma of coffee” as something ineffable. The matter is not that simple, though. For ineffability—dualistically conceived—may be rejected, but a “complete” illustration of the “experience of coffee” remains elusive. However beautiful, witty, deep or penetrating the above descriptions may be, none of them is likely to grasp and convey the “whole” picture. They cannot “speak” to each and every one in the same way. What they mean and how they are to be understood will be part of the position they will get in a person’s life. Just a couple of examples: Quotation no. 1 from Honoré de Balzac does not probably “say much” to a person not interested in or engaged in writing. Quotation no. 5, with all its uplifting optimism, is not likely to mean much to the clinically depressed or to those who labor in appalling conditions in a coffee plantation. Such a list of comparisons can be very long. Most probably, none of the descriptions involved will satisfy either all people or the same person at different times and instances of her or his life. Each of them can be a more or less successful representation of what it is to experience the aroma of coffee. And so, even if the latter is described and put into meaningful words everybody can understand, there is and will always be something elusive about it. None of us is above space and time. Conditioned as we are by our embodied nature, we are embedded in particular and specific contexts of life that give shape to different shades of similarity in our mental life or, indeed, to completely different experiences. Given this, to ask for a unique and final representation of subjective experience (the aroma of coffee) would equal a demand to revoke human finitude. For only an infinite and, by definition, immaterial being can be above the particularities, the different perspectives, viewpoints and situations of life that render the aroma of coffee so unique for each one us. This sense of uniqueness could be credibly articulated in the following way: I understand what you tell me when you describe to me how your morning coffee feels to you. What is more, your experience may have many things in common with mine. Nevertheless, there are so many different alternative ways and perspectives through which we live and express this experience, as many as the numberless instances of life itself. Given this, not two of us can be totally similar as far as their embedded conditions of life and experiences are concerned: the vast canvas of personal history, the complex relations with the human, physical and

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social environment, the vicissitudes of life each one of us goes through, our acquired habits, values and tastes. It is neither possible nor desirable to squeeze all this manifold of human experience and out of it distill a description of the aroma of coffee as “something mental.” Good literature is the best chance we have for partially transcending the particularity of our perspectives. A good example of this is the quotation from Balzac. A writer of this level with his exquisite use of language can express what for the average person remains rather elusive. Still, another great writer may produce an equally penetrating and moving account of the aroma of coffee. That one could be even more brilliant or successful; yet, it can at most aspire to taking its place next to a series of other great ones. Not one of them in itself can express the whole. It cannot satisfy any quest for completion. In this sense, then, subjective experience retains something ineffable. This is not, though, the kind of ineffability postulated by metaphysical dualism. It is an “ineffability” which arises from the partiality of any of the ways in which our subjective experience is represented in the frame of embodied life. This partiality (the word “fragmentation” would convey an unnecessarily negative undertone) is a grammatical feature of our being in the world and, so, of our experience. In conclusion, Wittgenstein’s later philosophy does have place for the ineffable in this sense. What then about the ineffability of a transcendent God?

The ineffable transcendent Throughout human history people have talked about God, addressed Him in prayer, glorified Him in hymns and art. Religious texts have been written, of great depth and spiritual fervor, sophisticated pieces of theology have been put forward. All of this notwithstanding, we consider God’s transcendence as essentially ineffable. If there is nothing pertaining to God that remains ineffable, if the divine existence can be put into the narrow frame of the structures of human language, then faith in such a God appears to many to be no more than an elevated form of humanism, at best. In the Postscript of Theology after Wittgenstein, Kerr discusses several variations of this charge. There is one aspect of it that particularly stands out. It is the discomfort with the logical primacy that religious practice, ritual, liturgy, in one word acting, has in Wittgenstein’s account of

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religious life. Referring to F. A. Murphy’s review of his book,32 Kerr comments on her criticism as follows: Murphy’s point is that I am “so intent on the fact that faith is done before it is thought about” that I effectively deny that the “intentional acts of believers are directed to an object which is believed to stand beyond the intending self.” While she likes the “delightful suggestion” that religion is “danced out,” if it has any hold on people’s lives and imaginations, she sees such remarks as committing me to the conclusion that religious acts are about humanity before they refer to deity. In contrast, the intention of any liturgical event, she insists, is “to imitate, or to refer to, a narrative which extends beyond the liturgy.”33

Murphy’s serious reservations presented above are typical of a misunderstanding concerning Wittgenstein’s philosophy of theology and religion. Behind her elaborate phraseology, there is the anxiety generated by suspicions of endemic crypto-behaviorism in what she calls “Fergus Kerr’s Wittgensteinian ‘Philosophy of Theology’.” This is, mutatis mutandis, the same kind of apprehension as the one regarding the ineffability of the coffee’s aroma; a fear of losing one’s own innermost self. In the case of God, the fear expressed by Murphy is not simply a fear lest subjective life should be taken away. It is rather a fear of having to give up God Himself, through reducing him to the pure immanence of social practice. After all, Murphy tellingly makes no secret of wanting an object—God—which logically precedes any of our (embodied) responses to it. This object has to “extend beyond liturgy” in order for liturgy (= practice) to be read as a causal outcome and not as connected to it with internal links. In other words: For Murphy, practice must not be a constitutive part of what is involved in the concept “God.” This is because in her view, if the concept “God” involved criterial reference34 to human reactions, this would signify a behaviorist reduction of sorts. In trying to avoid what she sees as a reduction of the “beyond” to embodied acts, she re-opens the way to dualist metaphysics of ineffable presence.

32 Francesca Aran Murphy, “Fergus Kerr’s Wittgensteinian ‘Philosophy of Theology’: An Appreciation and A Critique,” The Scottish Journal of Theology 45 (1992): 449-63. Mentioned in Kerr, Theology after Wittgenstein, 195-6. 33 Kerr, Theology after Wittgenstein, 196 (my emphasis). 34 Here, let it be noted that for Wittgenstein, behavior is a criterion on the basis of which there can be meaningful mental ascriptions. It is not simply a symptom of mental life, but connected to it by logical/conceptual links.

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Just like with the aroma of coffee, the position explored above is typical of the way Wittgenstein’s critics construe the ineffable—as an indescribable description, as an invisible picture. In opposition to this, a Wittgensteinian response would point out that a description no human being can possibly offer, and a picture that none of us can ever see are not, respectively, either a description or a picture. Furthermore, that even if such esoteric descriptions were possible, they would not be what the ineffability of God consists in. They have precious little to contribute towards our understanding of ineffable transcendence. It remains to be seen whether there can be an alternative (non-dualist, non-metaphysical) understanding of ineffability in the case of God, in the same vein as a non-Cartesian understanding of the ineffability of sensation was attempted above. Saint Gregory of Nyssa’s mystical work The Life of Moses can be a source of inspiration in this direction. In Book Two of the Life of Moses, Gregory of Nyssa presents three theophanies/God’s manifestations to Moses.35 In part III, we have the “third Theophany: Face-to-Face Vision,” referring to the narrative of Exodus 33:7-23. In an explicit reference to Paul’s 1st Corinthians (13:12), Gregory explores the difficult dialectic of divine transcendence and human limitation: When the soul is moved towards what is naturally lovely, it seems to me that this is the sort of a passionate desire with which it is moved. Beginning with the loveliness it sees, it is drawn upwards to what is transcendent. For this reason, the ardent lover of beauty understands what is seen as an image of what he desires, and yearns to be filled with the actual substance of the archetype. This is what underlies the bold and excessive desire of him who desires to see no longer “through mirrors and reflections, but instead to enjoy beauty face to face” (1 Cor. 13:12).36 And the true vision of God consists in this, in never reaching satiety of the desire. We ought always to look through the things that we can see and still be on fire with the desire to see more. So let there be no limit to curtail our growth in our journey towards God. This is because no limit to the beautiful has been found nor can any satiety cut short the progress of the soul in its desire for the beautiful.37 35

Bernard McGinn, ed., The Essential Writings of Christian Mysticism (New York: Random House, 2006), 13-20. 36 McGinn, The Essential Writings, 17 (my emphasis). 37 McGinn, The Essential Writings, 18 (my emphasis).

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Here the great Cappadocian Father refers to God as “what is transcendent” and also “what is hidden.” But this hiddenness of God does not prevent us from desiring to see Him. Our desire marks the outset of a journey which—as long as we live as embodied beings—will never fully reach Him. Let us notice two phrases, very similar to each other, from the excerpts above. In the first quote, our soul comes to desire the hidden “by means of what it has already grasped.” In the second, we are told that in our desire “to see more,” “we ought to look through the things that we can see.” Both of them can be read along the line of acknowledging and accepting our finitude, rather than seeing it as a flaw.38 Such an affirmation of finitude goes together with breaking free from the quest for completion in knowing God. We are always “limited” through our embodied and social nature. This is precisely what makes us who we are and enables us, among other things, to form representations of God as the object of our desire. These representations we share with others, for after all, they arise within our common life and in interdependence with our culture. A representation of God is not elusive in the Cartesian sense of conceptual privacy. Where it remains elusive, though, is in its radically “incomplete” character. Even the use of the term “incomplete” here is regrettable for it seems to suggest that a completion may be possible. The completion cannot be offered within human life, for in our human universe of plurality there will always be an endless number of different ways through which we may relate to Him. This may be because we have different personal histories, come from different cultures, live in different historical periods, find ourselves at very different places in our spiritual development, have different personalities and dispositions. There will always be numberless variations in the ways we experience and think about God’s reality. When all is said and done, our desire to know God will not be satiated. Gregory seems to be saying that, were this to happen, it would have a spiritually negative effect (“nor can any satiety cut short the progress of the soul”).39 To come to the end of the journey for knowing God would be to have achieved a complete and definite description of Him. In such a situation nothing would be unsayable. To use the jargon of the Philosophical Investigations, God would enter the language-game as a picture/Bild. 38 39

See Kerr, Theology after Wittgenstein, 184-5. See McGinn, The Essential Writings, 18, as quoted in fn. 37.

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To return to pain very briefly: a person in pain often exclaims “Ouch, I am in pain!” or “It hurts!” For the Wittgenstein of the Philosophical Investigations these are not descriptions-reports of an inner state but unreflective expressions of suffering, not much different from a cry of pain.40 My crying out “I am in pain” is not simply caused by whatever it is that I “feel inside.” The meaning of “pain” is not independent of the fact that most of the time sufferers will spontaneously exclaim “I am in pain.” The representation of pain in language is logically linked with the communicable expression of pain on the part of the sufferer. In a similar way, the representation of “God” is logically linked with public expressions of faith and worship on the part of believers. Religious practice is not a merely external response to a logically prior reality—that of God. The reality of God, as much as it is accessible to human beings, is a reality logically constituted by human responses to the transcendent. Suppose we try to understand, define or describe God without any reference to how we, humans, relate to Him through religious practice. From Wittgenstein’s viewpoint, this would be a dualist move in the familiar tradition of Cartesian metaphysics. He is not the only one, though, to oppose the yearning for such an absolute conception of God. In the eyes of Gregory of Nyssa, it would be to forget that the true vision of God cannot but be pursued “through the things that we can see.”41 Any attempt at a “direct,” as it were unmediated by human schemata, picture of God, would not only be an à la Wittgenstein grammatical fiction, but worse, an unintended act of idolatry. In part II of the Life of Moses, Gregory puts it as clearly as follows: What the divine word above all inhibits is human assimilation of the divine to anything that we know. Every thought and every defining conception which aims to encompass and grasp the divine nature is only forming an idol of God, without declaring him as he truly is.42

This is a formidable warning—do not try to look for the elusive allencompassing definition—a definition that can cover all aspects of the

40

See PI 244: “‘so you are saying that the word pain really means crying?’—On the contrary: the verbal expression of pain replaces crying and does not describe it.” 41 McGinn, The Essential Writings, 18, as quoted in fn. 37. 42 McGinn, The Essential Writings, 17 (my emphasis).

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divine being at once and reflect one unique way in which God would be available to each and every one of us at all times. God is ineffable but not because there is somewhere, out of our reach, an absolute description of Him which we fail to find. Rather, because there is no such ultimate description and we should not tempt ourselves into looking for it. The more “complete,” the less a representation of Him it would be. Such a picture, as per Gregory’s stern warning, would be no more than an idol.

Summing up Having clearly affirmed the “ineffable” in the Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus, Wittgenstein seems then to forfeit any ineffability in his later work. So much so as to be charged with “subsuming the self within the speaking community”43 and be among people who “… treat the self as an epiphenomenon of the social narrative.”44 Nevertheless, were one to explore his refutation of the crypto-behaviorism charge, one would be able to appreciate that Wittgenstein’s critique of metaphysical dualism does not do away with the depth and special importance of subjective experience. The sense in which subjective experience may be considered ineffable, however, does not consist in its being totally impervious to language. A non-dualistic sense of ineffability in subjective experience can be traced in the impossibility to offer the latter an ultimate, all encompassing, and sharply contoured description. The discussion of the “aroma of coffee” is an attempt to trace a non-metaphysical understanding of ineffability in the direction of what Wittgenstein would call a “grammatical investigation.” The ineffability of God can be seen as a question analogous to that of the ineffability in subjective experience. Given this, a non-dualist understanding of divine ineffability can be attempted in the light of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. Human language has the means to talk about God and has been doing so for thousands of years. Our words, expressions, and concepts of the divine are fine as they are. This means: they are not incomplete and second best in lack of better ones that could offer an all-encompassing representation of God. For such a thing to be possible, not only God but 43 44

Francesca Aran Murphy, quoted by Kerr, Theology after Wittgenstein, 196. Francesca Aran Murphy, quoted by Kerr, Theology after Wittgenstein, 195.

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also we would have to transcend our human embodied condition and our creaturely nature. Such an effort, as Gregory of Nyssa straightforwardly warns us, borders idolatry. In the Christian tradition God is Truth itself. God as truth will never be identical with its formulations, because all possible formulations, either linguistic or in art, poetry, etc., are our formulations and so mediated by human finitude. A possible response here may be that in Scripture it is God Himself who talks to us, revealing Himself to the world; so that the language and concepts present there are themselves transcendent, being the pure and unadulterated words of God. This type of objection is particularly strong in Islam, which considers the Qur’an to be the pure and unadulterated word of God, directly recited by the Archangel Gabriel to the Prophet Muhammad. This criticism, however, is beside the point. Even if God speaks to us, in order for us to understand what He tells us, the language He uses has to engage with our finitude. It is in this sense that God, being infinite, transcends our inextricably human ways to think about Him, talk about Him and represent Him in our life. The apophatic way is then open to us and this seems to be very much in tune with the eschatological perspective of Paul in the First Letter to Corinthians. 9 For we know in part, and we prophesy in part. 10 But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away. 11 When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. 12 For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. (1 Corinthians 13: 9-13—King James Bible)

Verse no. 12 seems to point towards eschatologically transcending the finitude of actual human existence. Only then will we be able to know God in the way we are known [by Him]; Following some of Wittgenstein’s best lessons in the Philosophical Investigations it can be suggested that only then, in our exiting our present embodied condition, will all perspective be canceled. Only then will all ineffability also go. We will at last be able to see His face in its completeness.

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References Ambrose, Alice and Morris Lazerowitz, eds. Ludwig Wittgenstein: Philosophy and Language. New York: Allen and Unwin, 1973. Arrington, Robert L. and Mark Addis, eds. Wittgenstein and Philosophy of Religion. Routledge, 2008. Baker, G. P. and P. M. S. Hacker, Wittgenstein: Rules, Grammar and Necessity. Oxford: Blackwell, 1985. —. Wittgenstein: Understanding and Meaning. Oxford: Blackwell, 1980. Barrett, Cyril. Wittgenstein on Ethics and Religious Belief. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. Clack, R. Brian. An Introduction to Wittgenstein’s Philosophy of Religion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999. Dilman, Ilham. Language and Reality Modern Perspectives on Wittgenstein. Leuven: Peeters,1998. —. Matter and Mind. Two Essays in Epistemology. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1975. —. Studies in Language and Reason. London: Macmillan, 1981. —. Wittgenstein’s Copernican Revolution: The Question of Linguistic Idealism. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002. Drury, Maurice O’ Connor. The Danger of Words. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973. Hacker, P. M. S. Insight and Illusion: Themes in the Philosophy of Wittgenstein. Revised edition. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986. —. Wittgenstein: Meaning and Mind. Oxford: Blackwell, 1990. Hanfling, Oswald. Wittgenstein's Later Philosophy. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989. Kenny, Anthony. The Legacy of Wittgenstein. Oxford: Blackwell, 1984. —. The Anatomy of the Soul: Historical Essays in the Philosophy of Mind. Oxford: Blackwell, 1973. —. The God of the Philosophers. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979. —. The Self. Marquette University Press, 1988. —. What is Faith?: Essays in the Philosophy of Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. —. Wittgenstein. London: Penguin Press, 1973. Kerr, Fergus. Theology after Wittgenstein. London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge,1997. Literature. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990. McGinn, Bernard, ed. The Essential Writings of Christian Mysticism. New York: The Modern Library, 2006.

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Malcolm, Norman. Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir. London: Oxford University Press, 1962. —. Knowledge and Mind: Philosophical Essays. Essays in honour of N. Malcolm. Edited by Carl Ginet and Sydney Shoemaker. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983. —. Knowledge and Certainty: Essays and Lectures. Prentice-Hall, 1963. —. Nothing is Hidden: Wittgenstein's Criticism of his Early Thought. Oxford: Blackwell, 1986. —. Problems of Mind: Descartes to Wittgenstein. London: Allen and Unwin, 1972. —. Thought and Knowledge: Essays. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977. —. Wittgenstein: a Religious Point of View? London: Routledge, 1993. Nielsen, Kai. An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion. London: Macmillan, 1982. Pears, Davis. The False Prison: A Study of the Development of Wittgenstein's Philosophy. Oxford: Clarendon Press Vol. I, 1987 / vol. II, 1988. Phillips, D. Z. and Tessin Timothy, eds. Philosophy of Religion in the 21st Century. Basingston and New York: Palgrave, 2001. —. Religion without Transcendence. Basingston and London: Macmillan, 1997. Phillips, D. Z. “Dislocating the Soul” and “Mysticism and Epistemology: One Devil of a Problem.” Unpublished papers delivered at the University of Wales, Lampeter, in November 1993. —. Faith and Philosophical Enquiry. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970. —. From Fantasy to Faith: The Philosophy of Religion and 20th Century —. R. S. Thomas: Poet of the Hidden God: Meaning and Mediation in the Poetry of R. S. Thomas. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1986. —. Recovering Religious Concepts. Closing Epistemic Divides. Basingston and London: Macmillan, 2000. —. Religion and Understanding. Oxford, Blackwell, 1967. —. Religion without Explanation. Oxford: Blackwell, 1976. —. The Concept of Prayer. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965. —. Wittgenstein and Religion. London: Macmillan, 1993. Pitcher, George. The Philosophy of Wittgenstein. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1964. Rhees, Rush. Without Answers. Edited by D. Z. Phillips. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969.

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Rhees, Rush, ed. Ludwig Wittgenstein: Personal Recollections. Oxford: Blackwell, 1981. Rhees, Rush. Discussions of Wittgenstein. London: Routlege and Kegan Paul, 1970. —. “Can there be a Private Language?” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Suppl. vol. (1954): 77-98. —. Wittgenstein and the Possibility of Discourse. Edited by D. Z. Phillips. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2006. Tessin, Timothy and Mario von der Ruhr, eds. Philosophy and the Grammar of Religious Belief. Basingston and London: Macmillan, 1995. Trigg, Roger. Reason and Commitment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973. Ward, Keith. God and the Philosophers. Fortress Press, 2009. Winch, Peter and D. Z. Phillips, eds. Wittgenstein: Attention to Particulars: Essays in Honour of Rush Rhees 1905-89. Palgrave Macmillan, 1990. Winch, Peter, ed. Studies in the Philosophy of Wittgenstein. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1969. Winch, Peter. Trying to Make Sense. Oxford: Blackwell, 1987. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Culture and Value. Edited by G. H. von Wright and Heikki Nyman, translated by P. Winch. Oxford: Blackwell, 1980. —. Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief. Edited by C. Barret. Oxford: Blackwell, 1966. —. Philosophical Investigations. Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell, 1972. —. The Inner and the Outer, 1949-1951, vol. 2 of Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology. Edited by G. H. von Wright and Heikki Nyman, translated by C. G. Luckhardt and M. A. E. Aue. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992. —. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Translated by C. K. Ogden. New York: Dover Publications, 1998. —. Zettel. Edited by G. E. M Anscombe and G. H. von Wright. Bilingual. Oxford: Blackwell, 1975.

CHAPTER THREE IDENTIFYING THE “APOPHATIC IMPULSE” IN LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN’S EARLY PHILOSOPHY: THE LECTURE ON ETHICS AS AN INTERPRETATIVE KEY PUI HIM IP

And this satisfies besides a longing for the supernatural for in so far as people think they can see the “limits of human understanding,” they believe of course that they can see beyond it. —Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value1

One need not go very far in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus to see why it might be an attractive proposal to consider his early philosophy as containing some form of apophaticism. Indeed, in his early writings we encounter many scattered remarks that reveal a thinker who was deeply engaged in some form of apophasis. Notoriously, the early Wittgenstein seems to deny that philosophical2 and ethical3 propositions have sense 1

CV 22e. TLP 4.003. 3 Lecture on Ethics, MS139b11-2. A number of clarifications on my citation convention are necessary. Throughout this essay, the text quoted will be MS139b found in Lecture on Ethics (LE), edited with commentary by Edoardo Zamuner, Ermelinda Valentina Di Lascio and D. K. Levy (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2014), 42-51. As the editors in this recent volume have established, it is likely that MS139b was the intended manuscript for the actual delivery. See Lecture on Ethics, 52-65 for the arguments. Second, following the convention of this edition, when I cite the text of the Lecture directly I will use the abbreviation LE, followed by the manuscript number and directly by the page turn in the original. Thus page 2

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(Sinn). According to Wittgenstein, these propositions misuse language and therefore lack sense in a technical sense—they are nonsense (Unsinn). Moreover, this is not the end of the matter since in the Tractatus—though this is a highly controversial matter amongst scholars—Wittgenstein seems to insist that even the very propositions set out in the book are nonsense.4 Thus Wittgenstein’s early works for the very least suggest a complex understanding of denials in his philosophy and pose many substantial questions concerning the nature of these denials. But what kind of apophaticism is this? Caution is needed here. The unique character of Wittgenstein’s literary output and his unwillingness to connect his ideas with pre-existing philosophical works suggest that he intended to force his readers to think. We cannot take the easy way out, namely, to merely point out the similarity of Wittgenstein’s use of denials with some patterns of thought found in the theological and philosophical tradition commonly denoted as “apophatic.” Rather, to identify the core impetus behind his “apophaticism,” we need to think harder about the significance of Wittgenstein’s use of denials in light of the deeper underlying concerns in his philosophy. Following this line of reasoning, it is worth holding back from jumping too quickly to the assumption that there are continuities between the sort of denials found in Wittgenstein’s writings and other sorts found in various philosophical and theological literatures. Instead, in this essay, I shall focus on identifying the impetus in Wittgenstein’s philosophical outlook that led him to make these denials in his early writings.5 With this in mind, I wish to put forward three theses in this essay. First, I shall contend that Wittgenstein’s 1929 Lecture on Ethics (LE) is an interpretative key to identify the apophatic impetus in Wittgenstein’s early philosophical outlook. This will be established on the basis of two key observations: (i) the Lecture’s literary genre—delivered as a public lecture to a non-academic audience with a simple purpose to communicate— 4-5 of MS139b is LE, MS139b4-5. Finally, when I cite the editors’ commentary, I will cite the page numbers of the edition. Thus Lecture on Ethics, 52-65 refers to pages 52-65 in the edition. 4 In this essay, I make no attempt to enter into the “New Wittgenstein” debate. I take it for granted that the nonsensicality of the propositions in the Tractatus is controversial. I shall briefly touch upon the significance of this nonsensicality at the end in light of the Lecture. 5 By focusing on the “early” Wittgenstein, I am restricting myself to Wittgenstein’s thought up to and including his Lecture in 1929.

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allowed Wittgenstein to express the key impetus in his philosophical outlook in a manner more explicit and less condense than the Tractatus, which was written with a purpose that goes beyond mere direct communication, (ii) the Lecture displays some key continuities with the Tractatus in relevant areas of Wittgenstein’s early thought. Second, I shall argue that from the main point and conclusion of the Lecture, we can identify the source of Wittgenstein’s apophatic impulse clearly: the ethical—the “realm” of values—must remain out of reach from human language in order for us to see clearly the presence of a paradox at the heart of its essential nature. Seeing this, however, should provide us with an ethical imperative to stop running against the boundaries of language in order to achieve progress in ethical matters. Last, but not least, following the approaches of Georg Henrik von Wright and Paul Engelmann, I shall argue that Wittgenstein’s apophatic impulse, just like any other aspects of his writings, must be understood in light of what Wittgenstein called “the spirit behind his writings.” If we do so, we shall see clearly that the deepest dimension of Wittgenstein’s apophatic impetus sprang from his desire to fight against the dominant tendency of the culture of his times by way of a Sprachkritik.6 The structure of this essay is as follows. In the first part, I conduct a brief review on the difficulties of interpreting the nature and aim of the sort of denials found in the Tractatus. I then put forward the aforementioned argument for the interpretative significance of the Lecture in relation to understanding the impetus behind these denials in Wittgenstein’s early philosophy. In the second part, I first provide an exegesis of the final pages of the Lecture, concluding with Zamuner, Di Lascio and Levy that the Lecture’s main aim is to bring the audience to the conclusion that “the experiences that give rise to thoughts of the ethical are paradoxical in form.”7 I then try to show why this conclusion is precisely the key to identify the source of Wittgenstein’s apophatic impetus in his early philosophy. In the final part of this essay, I return to the question concerning the unique significance of Wittgenstein’s apophaticism and demonstrate that this must be understood in light of the spirit of his writings.

6

I will not go into Wittgenstein’s early philosophy as Sprachkritik in much detail in this essay. See Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin, Wittgenstein’s Vienna (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1973), 120-66 for a detailed discussion on this tradition as the place where Wittgenstein might have situated his own work in the Tractatus. 7 LE, 8.

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The difficult Wittgenstein I shall begin by locating the difficulties in pinpointing the exact nature of the denials found in certain parts of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (TLP). It is difficult to miss the noteworthy nature of the denials in the Tractatus. To be more precise, I have two kinds of denials in mind when I speak of Wittgenstein’s use of denials in his early philosophy. The first is the denial that the content of a certain subject-matter (e.g. ethics) can be properly expressed with sense by verbal expressions. Thus I consider Wittgenstein’s insistence to treat propositions of ethics (TLP 6.42-6.421) or philosophy (e.g. TLP 4.003) as nonsensical a key part of his “apophaticism.” The second kind of denial I have in mind is the one bound up with the issue of the “ladder” (TLP 6.54), namely, the imperative to “throw away” the propositions of the Tractatus itself by recognizing them as nonsensical.8 In my view, it is essential to distinguish between these two kinds of denials in the early Wittgenstein. For the reader who is well acquainted with Late Antique philosophy, these denials remind one of the technical usages of apophasis found in various Middle-Platonic or Neo-Platonic writers.9 These similarities have long fascinated scholars and recent scholarship has pointed out some interesting parallels between Wittgenstein and the apophatic tradition.10 While I do not wish to deny the insightfulness of these approaches, I would like to simply re-emphasize that the nature of denials in Wittgenstein’s early philosophy is much more difficult than is commonly presupposed, to the extent that comparison with the use of apophasis in the philosophical tradition might draw us away from paying sufficient attention to the unique nature of denials found in Wittgenstein. I shall offer three reasons to substantiate this caution. First, Wittgenstein’s use of denials in the Tractatus is closely bound up with interpretation questions concerning the nature and aim of the book. 8

This is the kind of denial that seems to me to be more difficult and causes endless controversy related to the interpretation of the Tractatus. 9 See Raoul Mortley, From Word to Silence, II: the Way of Negation, Christian and Greek (Bonn: Hanstein, 1986) and Deirdre Carabine, The Unknown God. Negative Theology in the Platonic Tradition: Plato to Eriugena (Louvain: Peeters Press, 1995) for an introduction. 10 For instance, see the suggestive study of the early Wittgenstein’s theology in Earl Stanley B. Fronda, Wittgenstein’s (Misunderstood) Religious Thought (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 27-52.

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The significance of the first kind of denials is grounded on how one reads the second kind in relation to it. Must “throwing away the ladder” invalidate the meaningfulness of the first kind of denials? In what sense it invalidates it? To answer this question in turn requires one to settle on the significance of the second kind of denials—the “ladder’—and so we are back to the question at the heart of the Tractatus interpretation debate, namely, the status of the “nonsense” contained in it. Since this question remains highly controversial and showing little sign to be settled anytime soon,11 it seems premature to assume a definitive nature of these denials before some progress is made on the interpretative question. Second, Wittgenstein’s insistence in the preface of the Tractatus to abstain from citing his sources has made it difficult for us to obtain a historically balanced reading of the book.12 As is well known, Wittgenstein did provide us with a list of his most important influences.13 Up to Oswald 11

Tractatus scholarship has been engaged in heated debate about the status of the “nonsense” in the book (i.e. the very propositions that made up the book itself). As indicated above (note 4), I shall not enter into this debate here with regard to whether the “traditional” reading or the “resolute” reading (or a combination of elements from both) is correct. Rather, the spirit of this essay is similar to that in a recent volume edited by Michael Potter and Peter Sullivan, namely, to shed light on the meaning of the Tractatus by treating it as a text in the history of philosophy. See Michael Potter and Peter Sullivan, eds., Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: History and Interpretation, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 1-2. From the point of view of Tractatus interpretation, this essay makes a contribution by pointing out that there exists a significant continuity between the Tractatus and the Lecture and that this continuity implies that the Lecture should be regarded as a key piece to evaluate different interpretations of the Tractatus. 12 On this point, it is worth making a distinction between a “historical” reading and a “Wittgensteinian” reading (i.e. one that follows the wish of Wittgenstein’s intention for his readers). Wittgenstein did not necessarily intend his readers to conduct a historical reading of his writings by tracing all his intellectual influences and sources. It seems that what he intended for his readers is the opposite: to focus on the philosophical questions and discussions without being distracted by all the historical questions unless they become necessary within a particular discussion (it is worth noting that he mentioned Darwin, Frege, Hertz, Kant, Mauthner, Newton and Russell in the Tractatus). Nevertheless, it seems that historical understanding and contextualization should not be absent in a good reading of Wittgenstein since this allows us to appreciate his philosophical concerns in a deeper manner. 13 “I think there is some truth in my idea that I am really only reproductive in my thinking. I think I have never invented a line of thinking but that it was always provided for me by someone else & I have done no more than passionately take it up for my work of clarification. This is how Boltzmann, Hertz, Schopenhauer,

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Spengler, we can count the first eight authors on the list as having some degree of influence on Wittgenstein’s philosophy in the Tractatus. However, for ideological as well as practical reasons, Wittgenstein specialists have tended to focus on one or two figures on the list more than the rest. Few studies have integrated convincingly the “Cambridge analytic Wittgenstein,”14 the “Austrian Wittgenstein”15 and the “engineer-physicist Wittgenstein”16 into a coherent picture of the “early Wittgenstein.” As a result, our reading of Wittgenstein’s early philosophy—including his use of denials—is somewhat hampered by this lack of rigorous historical contextualization. Third, given the difficulties inherent in the interpretative and historical aspect of the Tractatus, comparison with the use of apophasis in the philosophical tradition somewhat complicates our task to determine the exact nature of Wittgenstein’s use of denials. This is because in order to make such a comparison possible, one needs first to address Wittgenstein’s understanding of God and the nature of reality since these topics are part and parcel of the use of apophasis in traditional varieties of apophaticisms. These complications burden our task to determine with clarity Wittgenstein’s own use of denials because first of all, Wittgenstein did not articulate his view on God in any great detail in the Tractatus17 and so we have very little to work with to determine his theology. Moreover, the question concerning the nature of reality—i.e. whether one can truly say

Frege, Russell, Kraus, Loos, Weininger, Spengler, Sraffa have influenced me.” CV 16e. 14 I take this to refer to approaches considering Wittgenstein chiefly as an “analytic” philosopher in the Anglo-Saxon tradition. For a good example of this approach, see Anthony Kenny, Wittgenstein (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006). 15 See Janik and Toulmin, Wittgenstein’s Vienna and Allan Janik, Wittgenstein’s Vienna Revisited (London, New York: Transaction Publishers, 2001). 16 For instance, see Alfred Nordmann, “Another New Wittgenstein: The Scientific and Engineering Background of the Tractatus,” Perspectives on Science 10 (2002): 356-84, Andrew D. Wilson, “Hertz, Boltzmann and Wittgenstein reconsidered,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 20 (1989): 245-63, Peter Barker, “Hertz and Wittgenstein,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 11 (1980): 243-56 and Janik, Wittgenstein’s Vienna Revisited, 147-69. See John Preston, “Hertz, Wittgenstein and philosophical method,” Philosophical Investigations 31 (2008): 48-67 for some reservations about linking Hertz and Wittgenstein too closely. 17 We have only a few scattered remarks in the Tractatus (TLP 3.031, 5.123, 6.372, 6.432) and some more in the Notebooks.

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that there exists an articulated ontology in the Tractatus18—once again leads us back to the question concerning the nature and aim of the book. For the purpose of understanding the nature of denials in Wittgenstein’s early philosophy, it seems to me instructive to focus first on dealing with the interpretative and historical questions surrounding the Tractatus, establishing a definitive context within which Wittgenstein’s denials obtain their significance. We can then try to work out an understanding of his use of denials that is contextualized within the unique set of philosophical concerns in his early philosophy. This is the approach I shall undertake to identify the source underlying the use of denials in Wittgenstein’s early philosophy. My thesis is that the Lecture is the key to address the interpretative aspect of the difficulties raised by the question concerning the nature of denials in the Tractatus. As we shall see, the Lecture provides us with an external source that contains Wittgenstein’s view on the nature and aim of the Tractatus. As a result, we can bypass the interpretative difficulties posed by the Tractatus itself. Once we get to grips with the philosophical intention behind the Tractatus, it is then possible to get a clear understanding of the use of denials within it.

The Lecture on Ethics as an interpretative key to the early Wittgenstein I shall now put forward the arguments for the thesis that the Lecture can helpfully serve as an interpretative key to understand the early Wittgenstein. To remind the reader, my aim is to establish this thesis on the basis of two observations: first, the literary genre of the Lecture and second, its continuity with the Tractatus on some key themes. I shall now consider each of these in turn.

18

David F. Pears, for instance, holds this “metaphysical” reading of the Tractatus and argued that Wittgenstein was a realist. See David F. Pears, The False Prison, vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 6-10. For a recent critique of this type of reading, see Warren Goldfarb, “Das Überwinden: Anti-Metaphysical Readings of the Tractatus,” in Beyond the Tracatus Wars: the New Wittgenstein Debate, ed. by Rupert Read and Matthew A. Lavery (New York: Routledge, 2011), 6-21. See also Oskari Kuusela’s contribution in the same volume for a good overview of this debate.

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(i)

The genre of the Lecture on Ethics

The Lecture is unique in Wittgenstein’s literary corpus because its style and genre are arguably very different from most of Wittgenstein’s other writings.19 Throughout his career, Wittgenstein preferred to write philosophy in the distinctive style that involves ordering and manipulating a vast amount of short paragraphs into a coherent form. The Tractatus is a prime example of this method of writing philosophy. On the one hand, this literary form conveys a sense of precision that succinctly summarizes the author’s theses and argumentations. On the other hand, such a form leaves implicit the interconnection between the short paragraphs. Such a form inherently leaves a degree of ambiguity concerning the logical flow of the argumentation and this flow in some sense is left for the readers to figure out. While there is nothing inherently positive or negative about this feature, nevertheless it is a notable characteristic of Wittgenstein’s literary corpus, as exemplified in the Tractatus. Part of the interpretative issues surrounding the Tractatus is certainly due to its literary style. Gottlob Frege famously made the following remark that resonates with many readers of the book: What you write me about the purpose of your book strikes me as strange. According to you, that purpose can only be achieved if others have already thought the thoughts expressed in it. The pleasure of reading your book can therefore no longer arise through the already known content, but, rather, only through the form, in which is revealed something of the individuality of the author. Thereby the book becomes an artistic rather than a scientific achievement; that which is said therein steps back behind how it is said. I had supposed in my remarks that you wanted to communicate a new content. And then the greatest distinctness would indeed be the greatest beauty.20

It is easy to be sympathetic with Frege’s judgment. Having provided a brief programmatic statement of intent in the preface, Wittgenstein did not attempt to guide his readers any further to see how the program is supposed to be understood throughout the Tractatus. In fact, it seems that 19

An exception perhaps is “Some Remarks on Logical Form.” However, this paper was intended as a direct communication to an academic audience, unlike the Lecture which was intended for a non-academic audience. 20 Burton Dreben and Juliet Floyd, trans., “Frege-Wittgenstein correspondence,” in Interactive Wittgenstein: Essays in Memory of Georg Henrik von Wright, ed. Enzo De Pellegrin (Dordrecht: Springer Verlag, 2011), 57.

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for Wittgenstein, there is something important about the fact that the literary style of the book forces the readers to work out these issues themselves. In this sense, he indicated clearly that the Tractatus was not written as a textbook. Moreover, Wittgenstein seems to have produced the book specifically for those who would be able to make the connections between the short remarks and obtain the perspective that it offers for those who could construct such a viewpoint out of the materials in the Tractatus. While it is not my aim here at all to offer a critical evaluation of the literary style of the Tractatus, my point is simply that the style is responsible for a substantial part of the interpretative difficulties surrounding the nature and aim of the book.21 Our consideration on this point makes the Lecture all the more a remarkable piece in Wittgenstein’s literary output. The Lecture was written in straightforward prose style, delivered to a non-philosophical audience at The Heretics Society. In it Wittgenstein made no attempt to use the literary form to produce a similar kind of effect on his reader, as was the case with the Tractatus. In other words, unlike the literary form of the Tractatus that was intended to be an inseparable part of the point of the book, the literary form of the Lecture was functioning purely to communicate and to explain the ideas contained within it, as Frege had wanted. The Lecture can thus be considered as a piece of Wittgenstein’s direct self-reflection on the significance of his early philosophy. If this is correct, then we can draw conclusions about Wittgenstein’s early philosophical concerns and outlook from the Lecture in a more direct way than the Tractatus would allow. This is the reason why in my view, the document is a powerful interpretative key to understand Wittgenstein’s early philosophy. (ii) Key Tractatus themes in the Lecture on Ethics But more is required to establish my claim that the Lecture provides a window into Wittgenstein’s philosophical intentions in the Tractatus. Given that the Lecture’s literary genre allows us to view the content of Wittgenstein’s early philosophy more directly—thereby sidestepping the interpretative difficulties caused by the Tractatus—the question remains as 21

Indeed, Genia Schönbaumsfeld goes further and argues that this is what Frege and many other commentators missed—the inseparability between content and form—in the Tractatus. See Genia Schönbaumsfeld, A Confusion of the Spheres: Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein on Philosophy and Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 198-9.

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to whether there exists substantial continuity between the Tractatus and the Lecture. More specifically, for the purpose of this essay, we need to ensure that the Lecture contains the relevant key themes for it to be a useful document to study Wittgenstein’s intention behind his use of denials in the Tractatus. In what follows, I shall point out three key themes where we can find significant continuity: (i) the ontology of the world, (ii) the nature of propositions, and (iii) the nature of ethics.22 In the Lecture, we find that Wittgenstein still holds to the ontology of the world found in the Tractatus. This is the view that the world is given by the sum total of all occurrent states of affairs (Sachverhalten). In other words, the world is the totality of all possible states of affairs that so happen to be the case.23 We know that this ontology still holds for Wittgenstein by the time he wrote the Lecture because it shows itself through the use of his “big book” illustration: Suppose one of you were an omniscient person and therefore knew all the movements of the bodies in the world dead or alive and that he also knew all the states of mind of all human beings that ever lived. And suppose this man wrote all he knew in a big book. Then this book would contain the whole description of the world; and what I want to say is, that this book would contain nothing that we would call an ethical judgment or anything that would logically imply such a judgment.24

The “big book” illustration was originally used in the Tractatus (TLP 5.631-5.6331) to illustrate the point that propositions about the “metaphysical subject” are nonsensical because the subject lies outside the world. In the Lecture, Wittgenstein applied the same illustration to make a different but similar point: propositions of absolute ethical judgment are nonsensical because absolute judgment lies outside the world. It is easy to see that the same setup—the ontology of the world as the totality of facts, i.e. totality of states of affairs that obtain—was presupposed by Wittgenstein in the Lecture as in the Tractatus. The whole point of the illustration is that the omniscient man could only describe the world by describing facts but there could be no such facts about absolute judgment. 22

It will be the burden of the second part of this paper to show that these key themes are indeed relevant to the question concerning Wittgenstein’s use of denials in his early philosophy. 23 TLP 2.04. Note that the world also determines which states of affairs do not exist, TLP 2.05. See also TLP 1, 1.1, 1.12, 2 for the general ontology of the world in the Tractatus. 24 LE, MS139b7.

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This works only if what counts as “in the world” is what could be described as facts that so happen to be the case, i.e. the Tractatus ontology. From this, we can see that the ontology of the Tractatus is clearly the basis for Wittgenstein’s arguments in the Lecture that the sense of ethics must lie outside the world. We will return to the significance of this continuity in a moment. The second significant continuity with the Tractatus found in the Lecture is its account of propositions. There are two important aspects of this continuity for our purposes here. First, Wittgenstein assumed, as in the Tractatus, that the sense of the proposition is given on the basis of which states of affairs obtain and which do not obtain.25 The crucial point to notice here is that the sense of a proposition in this account is grounded on the assumption that a state of affairs is allowed two possibilities: to be the case or not to be the case. If this is not so, then there is no basis for a proposition to have sense and its usage would be ungrounded—hence, nonsensical (unsinnig). We can see that Wittgenstein still holds this account in the Lecture in the place where he explained why the verbal expression of ethical experiences is nonsense: If I say “I wonder at the existence of the world” I am misusing language. Let me explain this: it has a perfectly good and clear sense to say that I wonder at something being the case, we all understand what it means to say that I wonder at the size of a dog which is bigger than anyone I have ever seen before, or at anything which, in the common sense of the word, is extraordinary. In every such case I wonder at something being the case which I could conceive not to be the case. I wonder at the size of this dog because I could conceive of a dog of another, namely the ordinary size, at which I should not wonder. To say “I wonder at such and such being the case” has only sense if I can imagine it not to be the case.26

Wittgenstein’s point is clear: the expression “I wonder at…” is properly used of a situation only if one can envisage the situation not

25

A tautology is when all states of affairs obtain and a contradiction is when all do not obtain. See TLP 4.46-4.461. It is important to recognize a technical difference between tautology and contradiction that are said to lack sense (sinnlos), and the verbal expression of the ethical that are said to be nonsense (Unsinn). 26 LE, MS139b12.

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being the case.27 I wonder at the size of a dog is a correct use of language because it is grounded on the possibility that I could conceive the size of the dog that causes my wonder not being the case. In other words, as in the account of the proposition in the Tractatus, Wittgenstein grounds the sense of a proposition on the possibility that a state of affairs has two possibilities: obtain or not obtain. The expression “I wonder at the existence of the world” is a misuse of language because one cannot imagine the world not existing. It is therefore clear that in the Lecture, Wittgenstein’s notion of nonsense and consequently his account of the misuse of language is the same as the one in the Tractatus. Second, in the Lecture, Wittgenstein continued to maintain his conviction in the Tractatus that the only kind of necessity is logical necessity.28 This is captured by his famous assertion that “outside logic everything is accidental.”29 If necessity only exists in logic, then any kind of non-logical necessity must on this view be either reducible to a logical necessity or is not a necessity at all. This point is crucial for us to appreciate Wittgenstein’s account of the ethical because a key presupposition

27

There is a delicate subtlety here. One might object that while the Tractatus’s account of propositions was grounded on which states of affairs might obtain/not obtain, the Lecture’s account was grounded on which states of affairs are conceivable to obtain/not to obtain. The first is concerned with what might actually obtain/not obtain and the second is concerned with what is humanly conceivable or imaginable to obtain/not to obtain. It is not possible to address this topic in full here since this would require a detailed treatment on the early Wittgenstein’s notion that the limits of language set the limits of the world (TLP 5.6). However, a brief remark is in place here. The argument offered here for continuity shows that in both the Tractatus and the Lecture, the sense of propositions is grounded on the possibility that a state of affairs—whether actual or conceivable—has two possibilities, what von Wright called the “bi-polar” character of significant propositions. See Georg Henrik von Wright, Wittgenstein (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982), 192. The grounding of sense on the basis of this “bi-polarity” is the sense in which I claim that there is continuity between the Tractatus and the Lecture. In order to develop this claim further, it is necessary to show that for the early Wittgenstein, that which is humanly conceivable is included in what is logically possible—the sense of “possibility” in the Tractatus’ account of propositions. Of course, this will have to be demonstrated in detail by an exposition of TLP 5.6, namely, the sense in which “the limits of my language means the limits of my world.” 28 TLP 6.37, 6.375. 29 TLP 6.3.

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in that account is the assertion that “all propositions are of equal value.”30 This follows easily from TLP 6.3: (1) If everything outside logic is accidental, and (2) if the sense of propositions are grounded on the facts of the world (which must be accidental from (1)) then (3) the sense of all propositions is accidental.

In other words, if there is nothing that determines that the state of affairs represented by proposition A is more necessary to occur than that represented by proposition B, then there is nothing that determines the sense of A as more valuable than B. This is because value, at least in Wittgenstein’s view, implies necessity. One state ought to be the case more than another. A man ought not to lie instead of lying. According to the view of necessity in the Tractatus, value cannot be accounted for by the sense of propositions. Hence all propositions are of equal value. Wittgenstein’s view on necessity remained the same in the Lecture. After the “big book” illustration passage quoted earlier, he elaborated further his reasons for holding his view that “no statement of fact can ever be, or imply, a judgment of absolute value.”31 The “big book” that contains all that is to be known about the world would (on Wittgenstein’s ontology of the world) contain all relative judgment of value—all true scientific propositions and in fact all true propositions. But: All the facts described would, as it were, stand on the same level and in the same way all propositions stand on the same level. There are no propositions which, in any absolute sense, are sublime, important, or trivial.32

Here, we can see that Wittgenstein simply rearticulated the account of necessity found in TLP 6.3 and 6.4. All propositions stand on the same level, in the sense that there are no propositions that represent states of affairs that obtain by necessity over other states of affairs. Wittgenstein put it in a striking fashion: “The murder will be on exactly the same level as any other event, for instance the falling of a stone.”33

30

TLP 6.4. LE, MS139b7. 32 LE, MS139b8. 33 LE, MS139b8. 31

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The final continuity between the Lecture and the Tractatus is, fittingly, on the nature of ethics. Given that as Wittgenstein maintained a similar account in the Lecture as in the Tractatus on the world and proposition, we should not at all be surprised that his views on ethics did not change significantly. This point is critical to my overall thesis in this paper and I shall expand on the significance of this continuity in more detail in a moment. But for now, it is important to note down a few aspects of this continuity. In the Lecture, as in TLP 6.42, Wittgenstein continued to maintain that it is impossible to have propositions of ethics: TLP: It is clear that ethics cannot be put into words.34 LE: There are no propositions which, in any absolute sense, are sublime, important, or trivial.35 LE: …if I contemplate what ethics really would have to be if there were such a science, this result seems to me quite obvious. It seems to me obvious that nothing we could ever think or say should be the thing.36

We can see from the second quotation that Wittgenstein continued to affirm the conclusion that since all propositions are of equal value (TLP 6.4), there can be no propositions which have intrinsic importance over and above the others (TLP 6.42) and as a result, it is impossible to have propositions of ethics. The third quotation shows us more: in the Lecture, Wittgenstein’s view on the nature of science remained the same as in the Tractatus.37 There could be no such science of ethics because there could be no ethical propositions with sense. Knowing that Wittgenstein still holds these views in the Lecture, it is no surprise to find that his fundamental conviction on the nature of ethics remained the same: TLP: Ethics is transcendental. (Ethics and aesthetics are one and the same.)38 LE: Now I am going to use the term “ethics” in a slightly wider sense, in a sense in fact which includes what I believe to be the most essential part of what is generally called “aesthetics.”39

34

TLP 6.421. LE, MS139b7. 36 LE, MS139b8. 37 TLP 4.11: “The totality of true propositions is the whole of natural science (or the whole corpus of the natural sciences).” 38 TLP 6.421. 35

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LE: Our words, used as we use them in science, are vessels capable only of containing and conveying meaning and sense, natural meaning and sense. Ethics, if it is anything, is supernatural.40

In other words, in the Lecture, Wittgenstein continued to uphold the view that the subject-matter of ethics lies outside the world and as a result, it is supernatural in the sense that it falls outside the subject-matter of natural science. Further, we find that Wittgenstein continues to treat ethics and aesthetics as one and the same subject-matter, i.e. that which concerns the sublime or the important. Thus we can conclude that Wittgenstein’s views on ethics in the Lecture displays some significant continuity with the ones stated in the Tractatus.

Identifying the source of Wittgenstein’s apophatic impulse in the Lecture on Ethics So far, I have argued that the Lecture constitutes the interpretative key to Wittgenstein’s early philosophy. If this is the case, is it possible to use this document to shed light on the nature and aim behind Wittgenstein’s use of denials in the Tractatus? In what follows, I shall argue that learning from the final pages of the Lecture, we can identify the source of Wittgenstein’s apophatic impulse in his early philosophy.41 The main point of the Lecture, according to Wittgenstein, is that It is a paradox that an experience, a fact, should seem to have absolute value. And I will make my point still more acute by saying “it is a paradox that an experience, a fact, should seem to have supernatural value.42

Here, Wittgenstein provides two different ways to describe the same point. To appreciate why in each case we have a paradox would require us to return to the continuity between the Tractatus and the Lecture pointed out earlier. According to the Tractatus, a proposition with sense is simply a picture of a fact—a record, so to speak, of the state of affairs that so happens to obtain (and those that do not). As pointed out earlier, the sense of a proposition presupposes the possibility that the fact underlying the 39

LE, MS139b3. LE, MS139b9. 41 That is from the sentence “And here I have arrived at the main point of this paper” (LE, MS139b15) to the end. 42 LE, MS139b15-16. 40

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proposition does not obtain. In the terminology of the Lecture, the sense of the proposition in this account is relative: the sense is given relative to the possibility of the contrary. For example, the expression “I wonder at the size of the dog” only has sense according to the Tractatus if it is used relative to the possibility that the contrary could obtain, e.g. “the dog is smaller than it is now.” But in expressing our ethical experience, we are compelled to attribute to our expression an absolute sense: a sense that is absolutely independent of any other state of affairs. I am absolutely safe independent of whatever is the case in the world. I wonder at the existence of the world regardless of whatever is the case in the world.43 Thus in the first formulation, Wittgenstein wished to point out that it is paradoxical that ethical language—propositions with relative sense—should be regarded as having absolute value, which results in the utterance of nonsensical propositions. In the first formulation, the paradox is stated in terms of ethical language. But there is another way to understand this paradox—in terms of ethical experience. A fact, according to the Tractatus, is a description of a possible state of affairs in the world. For Wittgenstein, any experience is describable as a fact because it has taken place in time and space.44 But in analyzing the kind of experience that serves as a personal impetus to utter an ethical proposition, Wittgenstein found that one is compelled to attribute something supernatural—something indescribable by facts in the world—to such an experience. Thus once again, we have two incompatible beliefs: on the one hand, ethical experiences seem to be mere experiences in the world describable by facts and yet on the other hand, such experiences are thought of as constituting something outside the world— having supernatural significance. This is what Wittgenstein wished to convey in the second formulation above. The main point in the Lecture is therefore to bring to light for the audience the presence of this paradox when considering the nature of the ethical. There are two ways to resolve the paradox.45 Either one concedes that the experience behind the utterance of an ethical proposition is describable 43

LE, MS139b13. LE, MS139b15. 45 Here in stating the ways to resolve the paradox, I seem to jump from one formulation to another. This is because the two formulations are basically equivalent if we see that for Wittgenstein, an ethical experience is what purports to be described by an ethical proposition. It is illuminating to state the concession in the resolution in terms of ethical experience and the implication of the concession 44

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by facts in the world after all. In this case, it is apt to admit that we are mistaken in attributing absolute sense to ethical expressions. Or one simply gives up attributing supernatural significance to an ethical experience and as a result, avoids the conclusion that ethical expressions are nonsensical. In the last pages of the Lecture, we find Wittgenstein opted for discussing the first line of approach: if we reflect more deeply on the nature of the ethical experience, we can conclude that the paradox is not paradoxical after all because such experiences are not outside the world, but are describable as facts. If this is the case, what is the lesson here? According to Wittgenstein, by recognizing the manner in which this resolution of the paradox will not satisfy us, we learn that the essence of ethics—the valuable—is bound up with the very nonsensicality of its expressions.46 Wittgenstein’s consideration of miracles provides an illuminating illustration of this point. A miracle can be taken as an event that we have never seen. Now when a miracle has occurred for the first time, we can analyze it scientifically. If a human being suddenly grew a lion head and began to roar, after the initial astonishment we would immediately find a doctor to investigate the cause of the matter scientifically. The question is: would the event still be considered as a “miracle”? The answer is no, because: For it is clear that when we look at it in this way everything miraculous has disappeared; unless what we mean by this term is merely that a fact has not yet been explained by science, which again means that we have hitherto failed to group this fact with others in a scientific system. This shows that it is absurd to say that “Science has proved that there are no miracles.” The truth is that the scientific way of looking at a fact is not the way to look at it as a miracle.47

The point here is that when we try to resolve the paradox by pointing out that the ethical experience is not outside the world, but simply describable by facts, this resolution has simply destroyed the ethical (or more provocatively, transcendental) dimension of the experience. If we consider an ethical experience as an experience describable by facts in the world, we are simply not considering an ethical experience anymore, so to in terms of ethical language—thus jumping from one formulation to another— because this seems to mirror Wittgenstein’s tendency to formulate his conclusions about the ethical in terms of the nonsensicality of ethical language in the Tractatus and the Lecture. 46 LE, MS139b18. 47 LE, MS139b16.

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speak. Now we have reached the climax of the Lecture where Wittgenstein drew his conclusion: Now when this is urged against me I at once see clearly, as it were in a flash of light, not only that no description that I can think of would do to describe what I mean by “absolute value,” but that I would reject every significant description that anybody could possibly suggest, ab initio, on the ground of its significance. This is to say: I see now that these nonsensical expressions were not nonsensical because I had not yet found the correct expressions, but that their nonsensicality was their very essence. For all I wanted to do with them was just to go beyond the world and that is to say beyond significant language.48

The central conclusion of the Lecture is thus as follows: it is precisely the treatment of facts in the world as outside the world that constitutes the essence of the ethical. We lose sight of the ethical nature of our experience once we give up one side of the paradox because each side is one half of the ground for preserving a proper notion of the beyond that forms the essence of the ethical. For Wittgenstein, the essence of the ethical is bound up with its paradoxicality. In light of this main conclusion from the Lecture, it is possible to appreciate clearly why Wittgenstein insisted on certain points about ethics in his early philosophy. In fact, both the Lecture and the Tractatus can be seen as attempts to point to the same point, namely, the essential paradoxical nature of ethics. The difference is that in each case, Wittgenstein pointed to the paradoxicality of ethics from different sides of the paradox. We can see this as follows. In the Lecture, as we have seen in the example of the miracle, if we do not acknowledge that the experience underlying our utterance of ethical propositions is simply describable as a fact in the world, we lose the sense in which a fact in the world is treated as outside the world. Here, Wittgenstein pointed to the paradoxicality of ethics by highlighting that it is a fact in the world that has been elevated in ethical experience. But in the Tractatus, Wittgenstein pointed to the same paradoxicality from the other side of the paradox. If we give up attributing supernatural significance to an ethical experience, we lose the sense that a fact in the world is treated as outside the world—or viewed sub specie aeterni.49 If one accepts Wittgenstein’s account of propositions, then insisting on attributing supernatural significance to the ethical amounts to recognizing that propositions concerning the ethical are nonsensical. In 48 49

LE, MS139b18. TLP 6.45.

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other words, acknowledging the nonsensicality of ethical propositions is a prerequisite to preserve the essence of the ethical, namely, the sense in which a fact in the world is treated as outside the world. Thus we can see that both the Lecture and the Tractatus can be considered as attempts to illustrate the same point—the presence of a paradox in considering the nature of the ethical. It is on the side from which the Tractatus pointed to the paradox where we can identify the source of Wittgenstein’s apophatic impetus. We are now in a position to apply this insight drawn from the Lecture to elaborate on the philosophical motivation behind the first kind of denials I identified at the beginning of this paper. It is clear that the paradox explicitly discussed by Wittgenstein in the Lecture must be the hidden source behind his insistence on the nonsensicality of certain propositions (e.g. ethics) in the Tractatus. We can put a general picture together as follows: throughout the course of writing the Tractatus, Wittgenstein was concerned with two distinct “problems of philosophy”: first, from his Viennese cultural and intellectual background he inherited the problem of clarifying the essential nature of the ethical; second, from Frege and Russell he inherited the problem of constructing an account of logic (and consequently, of proposition and its sense) that avoids some of the problems in their earlier accounts. Sometime during the war, Wittgenstein discovered that according to his account of logic (and proposition), it is possible to show that propositions concerning the ethical are nonsensical. This insight enabled him to see that his account of logic could serve as the basis for asserting his solution to his first “problem of philosophy”: that the nature of the ethical can be understood clearly only if the transcendental sense of the ethical is excluded from verbal expressions. In other words, only if we insist that propositions concerning the ethical are nonsensical will we be able to see the paradox clearly. From this picture, we can see that the desire to preserve the clarity of the paradox articulated in the Lecture provides the original motivation behind the first kind of denials found in the Tractatus. But what about the second kind of denial? This is a more difficult question but I shall offer a brief answer in light of Wittgenstein’s main conclusion in the Lecture. So far, I have argued that the source of Wittgenstein’s apophatic impetus can be identified in the main conclusion of the Lecture, namely, his insistence on seeing clearly the paradox underlying the essence of the ethical. But he did not stop at the paradox. In fact, it seems clear that Wittgenstein would encourage his audience to

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resolve the paradox after all by rejecting the legitimacy of attributing the supernatural significance to ethical propositions: Now the answer to all this will seem perfectly clear to many of you. You will say: well, if certain experiences constantly tempt us to attribute a quality to them which we call absolute or ethical value and importance, this simply shows that by these words we do not mean nonsense, that after all what we mean by saying that an experience has absolute value is just a fact like other facts and that all it comes to is, that we have not yet succeeded in finding the correct logical analysis of what we mean by our ethical and religious expressions.50

In other words, while Wittgenstein concluded that we must see the paradox as an essential part of finding clarity in our understanding of the ethical, nonetheless, the paradox is only the means to an end. There is more beyond the conclusion—an ethical imperative: For all I wanted to do with them was just to go beyond the world and that is to say beyond significant language. My whole tendency and I believe the tendency of all men who ever tried to write or talk ethics or religion was to run against the boundaries of language. This running against the walls of our cage is perfectly, absolutely, hopeless.51

For Wittgenstein, the audience must recognize that the conclusion of the Lecture—the presence of the paradox in the very essence of the ethical—is due to the perennial human tendency to reach beyond the world. For Wittgenstein, this tendency is both deeply respectable and absolutely hopeless. It is an aspect of humanity that he would not ridicule. However, it is also perfectly clear that for Wittgenstein, this reaching out beyond the world is a “running against the walls of our cage.” It will never succeed. Thus after we have recognized the essential paradoxical nature of the ethical, the ethical imperative is clear: throw away the paradox and stop trying! This brings us back to the apophatic impetus behind the second kind of denials in the Tractatus—the “ladder.” While the impetus behind the first kind springs from Wittgenstein’s desire to clarify the paradox in the essence of the ethical, as I have argued here, this is only a means to an end—the end being Wittgenstein’s ethical imperative I have just identified. This sheds a bright light on the nature and aim of the Tractatus 50 51

LE, MS139b17-18. LE, MS139b18-19.

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as a whole. On the one hand, the book has a positive purpose: it is supposed to serve as elucidations by clarifying the paradox at the heart of the essential nature of the ethical. As we have seen previously, only by insisting on the nonsensicality of ethical propositions will we be able to see clearly the true nature of the ethical. On the other hand, the Tractatus also serves a negative purpose: having seen the clarity of the paradox, the reader must throw away the propositions of the Tractatus because they are only the means to an end, namely, the ethical imperative to throw the paradox away. Our tendency—and the tendency of the Tractatus—to run against the limit of language is absolutely hopeless. The apophatic impetus underlying what I call the second kind of denial is therefore the ethical imperative to give up trying the kind of running against the limit of language found in the Tractatus.

Wittgenstein’s Apophasis as a critique of culture I began this essay by calling for caution in determining Wittgenstein’s “apophaticism.” The reason I gave was that we need to think harder about the significance of his use of denials within the larger underlying concerns in Wittgenstein’s early philosophy. Having identified these concerns with the help of the Lecture, we may now return to the question: what is the unique significance of Wittgenstein’s use of denials? I shall end this essay by providing a brief answer to this question. Wittgenstein’s apophasis is an attempt to fight against what he perceived to be the pervasive disease in the culture of his times, namely, the obsession with scientific progress. This desire to fight against the culture of his times constitutes the spirit of Wittgenstein’s philosophy at the deepest level. As von Wright has pointed out, while Wittgenstein has influenced many twentieth century philosophers, only a few of those shared the spirit underlying his concern for philosophy.52 Moreover, only a few have attempted to draw out the significance of Wittgenstein’s cultural concern for understanding his philosophy.53

52

Von Wright, Wittgenstein, 203-5. Von Wright discussed Christoph Nyíri, Allan Janik and Stephen Hilmy’s work in this direction in G.H. von Wright, “Wittgenstein and the Twentieth Century” in Wittgenstein: Mind and Language, ed. Rosaria Egidi (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1995), 5-8. Of course, von Wright himself was attempting something similar in the essay and I shall add to this list Paul Engelmann, who was a pioneer in pointing out the significance of Wittgenstein’s cultural concern for his 53

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According to von Wright, Wittgenstein thought that “the problems with which he was struggling were somehow connected with the ‘Lebensweise’ or the way people live.”54 If this is correct, then the elusive “problems of philosophy” in the preface of the Tractatus were not purely intellectual problems, but problems that were deeply entangled with aspects or features of a whole culture or civilization. That Wittgenstein was concerned with the way people live in his times more than with “philosophical problems” is clear: It is by no means clear to me, that I wish for a continuation of my work by others, more than a change in the way we live, making all these questions superfluous.55

But if this is the case, why was Wittgenstein so concerned with philosophy, especially with the use of language in philosophy? To appreciate this, we need to see that for Wittgenstein, as it was for many of his Viennese contemporaries,56 the way we use language is deeply connected with the life of the human individual: they manifest the way of life of an individual. These manifestations of the individual in language in turn provide us a window into the features of the culture that the individual is entrenched in. Later in his writings, Wittgenstein would call these social structures Lebensformen—forms of life.57 For Wittgenstein, the forms of life embedded in the culture of his time were badly diseased, as manifested in the malfunctioning of language in philosophy. In light of this, Wittgenstein’s philosophy is a Sprachkritik that in turn can be understood as a critique of culture: by providing a critique of how we misuse language, he thought it is perhaps possible to signal that something is wrong with the ways in which men of his culture lived. Von Wright summarized this fundamental impetus underlying Wittgenstein’s philosophy beautifully: Wittgenstein’s view of the entrenchment of the individual in social reality is intimately connected with his view of the nature of philosophy. The problems of philosophy have their roots in a distortion or malfunctioning of the language-games which in its turn signalizes that something is wrong philosophy. See Paul Engelmann, Letters from Ludwig Wittgenstein with a Memoir, trans. L. Furtmüller (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1967), especially 122-32. 54 Von Wright, Wittgenstein, 206. 55 CV 70e. 56 See Janik and Toulmin, Wittgenstein’s Vienna, 67-91 and Engelmann, Letters, 122-32. 57 PI, Pt I, §19, §23.

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with the ways in which men live. On the intellectual level this malfunctioning consists in certain unhealthy habits of thoughts (“Denkgewohnheiten”) permeating the intellectual culture of a period. … Wittgenstein’s philosophizing can to a great extent be seen as a fight against such thought-habits.58

If Wittgenstein’s philosophical spirit is to provide a Sprachkritik that reveals the symptoms of the diseased culture of his time, what is the disease that he had in mind? Wittgenstein provided us with some clues in his draft of the foreword for Philosophical Remarks. According to one of the draft paragraphs, the spirit of his writings stands in opposition to the main current of the European and American civilization of his time which is characterized by the word progress: Our civilization is characterized by the word progress. Progress is its form, it is not one of its properties that it makes progress. Typically it constructs. Its activity is to construct a more and more complicated structure.59

In particular, Wittgenstein pointed out that the “Western scientist” will be typically unable to understand or appreciate his works because she is unable to grasp the spirit of Wittgenstein’s writings. From this, it is clear that the disease Wittgenstein had in mind was about a certain ideological commitment to the notion of scientific progress that seems to promise some form of improvement or teleology to humanity. According to this commitment, improvement is sought by achieving progress through construction: the more we make progress in technological innovation and scientific knowledge, the better for humanity. For Wittgenstein, what is wrong with the belief in progress is that unwittingly, we allow ourselves to be led into delusion: It is not e.g. absurd to believe that the scientific and technological age is the beginning of the end for humanity, that the idea of great progress is a bedazzlement, along with the idea that the truth will ultimately be known; that there is nothing good or desirable about scientific knowledge and that humanity, in seeking it, is falling into a trap. It is by no means clear that this is not how things are.60

It should now be clear that Wittgenstein’s Sprachkritik was driven by a deep concern for human culture. He was concerned that human values 58

Von Wright, Wittgenstein, 207. CV 9e. 60 CV 64e. 59

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would be destroyed by the delusion of progress that took hold of the culture of his times. By showing that the “realm” of values are out of reach from science and the “realm” of facts—the proper arena for science— Wittgenstein sought in his early philosophy to preserve human values from the delusion of self-progress through science. Thus Wittgenstein’s apophasis is a denial of the possibility that the deepest things of humanity are under our own control. Rather, things that are most valuable to us are out of reach and our tendency to take control of everything is absolutely hopeless, a running against the walls of our cage.

Conclusion In conclusion, in this essay I have argued that the Lecture is a crucial interpretative key to understand Wittgenstein’s use of denials in his Tractatus. His insistence on the nonsensicality of propositions concerning the ethical—what I call the first kind of denials—sprang from the desire to elucidate clearly the presence of the paradox at the heart of the essential nature of the ethical. We must see ethical expressions for what they are: an attempt to go beyond the world. We must also acknowledge that their sense is radically distinct from the sense of propositions about the world. Only by maintaining this side of the paradox will we see clearly that the very nature of the ethical is bound up with our running against the limit of language. But more importantly for Wittgenstein, we must bypass a mere recognition of the paradox and accept the ethical imperative: stop trying! The penultimate proposition in the Tractatus—what I call the second kind of denial—is thus motivated by the desire to urge the reader to take up this imperative personally. But there is a deeper dimension to Wittgenstein’s apophatic impetus. His apophasis is one that sprang from an utter mistrust of the dominant tendency in his culture to obtain scientific progress in spheres concerning the deepest things for humanity. From his conviction that language is deeply connected to ways of life, Wittgenstein saw the symptom of this disease in how language was used by people in his times to achieve “scientific progress” in matters concerning human values. Wittgenstein’s apophasis is thus a Sprachkritik to fight against any such attempts. It is an apophasis that sprang from an utter mistrust of what he calls the human tendency “to run against the boundaries of our language”:61

61

LE, MS139b19.

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Human beings are deeply mined in philosophical, i.e. grammatical confusions. And, to free them from these, would presuppose that they became disentangled from the enormously multitudinous network which holds them captive. One would, so to speak, have to rearrange their entire language.—but this language has, to be sure, become like this because human beings had—and have—the inclination to think like this. Therefore only those can escape who live in accordance with an instinctive distrust of the language—not those whose whole instinct is to live in accordance with that herd which has created this language as its particular expression.62

As such, while Wittgenstein’s apophaticism shared the concern for a proper understanding of transcendence found in traditional varieties of apophaticism—his concern was for the transcendence of human values—it is at the same time quite unlike them in that it was exclusively motivated by a concern with human culture.

References Barker, Peter. “Hertz and Wittgenstein.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 11 (1980): 243-56. Burton, Dreben and Juliet Floyd, trans. “Frege-Wittgenstein correspondence.” In Interactive Wittgenstein: Essays in Memory of Georg Henrik von Wright, edited by Enzo De Pellegrin, 45-75. Dordrecht: Springer Verlag, 2011. Carabine, Deirdre, The Unknown God. Negative Theology in the Platonic Tradition: Plato to Eriugena. Louvain: Peeters Press, 1995. Engelmann, Paul. Letters from Ludwig Wittgenstein with a Memoir. Translated by L. Furtmüller. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1967. Fronda, Earl Stanley B. Wittgenstein’s (Misunderstood) Religious Thought. Leiden: Brill, 2010. Goldfarb, Warren. “Das Überwinden: Anti-Metaphysical Readings of the Tractatus.” In Beyond the Tractatus Wars: the New Wittgenstein Debate, edited by Rupert Read and Matthew A. Lavery, 6-21. New York: Routledge, 2011. Janik, Allan and Stephen Toulmin. Wittgenstein’s Vienna. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973.

62

This passage is from the “Big Typescript” TS213, 423. See The Big Typescript: TS 213, ed. and trans. by C. Grant Luckhardt and Maximilian A. E. Aue (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 311e. However, the English translation given here is von Wright’s, found in von Wright, Wittgenstein, 209, n. 10.

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Janik, Allan. Wittgenstein’s Vienna Revisited. London, New York: Transaction Publishers, 2001. Kenny, Anthony. Wittgenstein. Oxford, Blackwell, 2006. Mortley, Raoul. From Word to Silence, II: the Way of Negation, Christian and Greek. Bonn: Hanstein, 1986. Nordmann, Alfred. “Another New Wittgenstein: The Scientific and Engineering Background of the Tractatus.” Perspectives on Science 10 (2002): 356-84. Potter, Michael and Sullivan, Peter, eds. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: History and Interpretation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Pears, David F. The False Prison, vol. 1. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. Preston, John. “Hertz, Wittgenstein and philosophical method.” Philosophical Investigations 31 (2008): 48-67. Schönbaumsfeld, Genia. A Confusion of the Spheres: Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein on Philosophy and Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Wilson, Andrew D. “Hertz, Boltzmann and Wittgenstein reconsidered.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 20 (1989): 245-63. Von Wright, Georg Henrik. Wittgenstein. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982. —. “Wittgenstein and the Twentieth Century.” In Wittgenstein: Mind and Language, edited by Rosaria Egidi, 1-19. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1995. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Culture and Value. [CV] Edited by G. H. von Wright in collaboration with Heikki Nyman and translated by Peter Winch. Revised Edition of the text by Alois Pitcher. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998. —. Lecture on Ethics. [LE] Edited with a commentary by Edoardo Zamuner, Ermelinda Valentina Di Lascio and D.K. Levy. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2014. —. Notebooks. 1914-1916. Edited by G. H. von Wright and G. E. M. Anscombe and translated by G. E. M. Anscombe, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1979. —. The Big Typescript: TS 213. Edited and translated by C. Grant Luckhardt and Maximilian A. E. Aue. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005. —. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. [TLP] Translated by D. F. Pears and Brian F. McGuinness. London and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961. —. Philosophical Investigations. [PI] Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.

CHAPTER FOUR WITTGENSTEIN AND KIERKEGAARD’S ETHICS: ETHICS AS APOPHATIC KNOWLEDGE GEORGE A. SIVRIDES

Wisdom is passionless. But faith by contrast is what Kierkegaard calls a passion.1

In the textbooks of history of philosophy, Ludwig Wittgenstein is best known for his contributions in logic and as one of the founding fathers of analytic philosophy. On the other hand, the legacy of the thinker of the human existence, Søren Kierkegaard, is abandoned to the nihilistic view of Heidegger and Sartre. However, scattered Kierkegaardian topics that preserve the original theological aspect of the Dane can be found throughout the writings of Wittgenstein. In the following I am going to argue that the existential and theological thought of Wittgenstein, instead of leading to an impasse, imparts an apophatic theology. Wittgenstein was never a philosopher in the usual, academic sense of the term. He rather mingled with concrete life than stand apart and solely contemplate it. By affirming vita activa, as a soldier, a schoolteacher, an architect or even a convent gardener, he was not looking for a “high” cause to support, but a challenge to his very self. Work on philosophy—like work IN architecture in many respects—is really more work on oneself. On one’s own conception. On how one sees things. (And what one expects of them.)2

1

MS132 167, in Ludwig Wittgenstein, Vermischte Bemerkungen/Culture and Value, trans. Peter Winch, ed. G. H. von Wright (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1998), 61e. All references to Wittgenstein’s manuscripts (MS) henceforth correspond to this edition. 2 MS112 46: 24e.

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There is no need to point to the suicidal history of his family, as the cult of death was commonplace in fin-de-siècle Vienna.3 What was also customary in Vienna was to debate in the coffee-houses and in cenacles.4 Thinking is speaking and speaking is engaging in social association. Therefore, in contrast to German idealism and historicism, Viennese intellectuals were mostly oriented towards a philosophy of everyday life, where theory is a means to action and thought is a mental act itself. Karl PĜibram considers Austrian thought as an outpost of nominalist reasoning east of the Rhine.5 By “nominalism” we understand that concepts are not the very contents of life but mere names serving as marks of orientation. As in the Graeco-Roman world, thinking is not associated with a prophet or a specialist who can contemplate “the” truth and bestow it to the people, but with every man. Since the human phenomena are the outcome of human conduct, the thinker and everyday man should share the same standpoint.6 Thinking is not about why man acts in a certain way, but about how he acts thus. There is not a cause of action to discover and replace by something else in order to ameliorate man’s life, but a reason of action to understand and to cope therewith. Therefore, the individual man is not a part of a mechanism functioning for the sake of the mechanism, but something richer that cannot be understood but personally. In brief, Viennese thought is about the individual and the structures in virtue of which the individual is associated with other individuals (notably the language): that is what, more or less, the term “phenomenology” depicts. Wittgenstein goes further: Once we make life itself, i.e. action, the object of our thought we are confronted with its limits, meaning that we cannot 3

William M. Johnston, The Austrian Mind, An Intellectual and Social History 1848-1938 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), chapter 12: “Fascination with Death,” 165-80. 4 Barry Smith, Austrian Philosophy, The Legacy of Franz Brentano (Illinois: Open Court Publishing Company, 1996), 18-19: “And one can go further, and point to the method of communal philosophical argumentʊof philosophizing by means of a sometimes ritualized process of discussionʊas something that is shared, not merely by Brentano and the medieval schoolmen, but also by Schlick, with his Thursday-evening discussions, and by Wittgenstein in his cell in Cambridge.” 5 Karl PĜibram, Conflicting Patterns of Thought (Washington, DC: Public Affairs Press, 1949), 131. 6 Alfred Schütz, Interpretative Sociology in On Phenomenology and Social Relations, ed. H.R. Wagner (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1972), 273: “Verstehen is thus, primarily not a method used by the social scientist, but the particular experimental form in which common-sense thinking takes cognizance of the social cultural world. […] Verstehen is moreover, by no means a private affair of the observer which cannot be controlled by the experiences of the others.”

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explain exhaustively the object of our thought: we cannot say what it is definitely. Or, to be more exact, there is something we can say about it and some other thing to which we cannot latch on, something we cannot fetch from our heart to our tongue. Yet we couldn’t see the latter if we wouldn’t try to seize it. Moreover, if there is a cause to strive to understand the state of things, it must lie on the side of the ineffable. Here, we encounter what is known in the theological work of Dionysius the Areopagite, Maximus the Confessor and Maimonides as “apophatic” methodology. God cannot be known save through the effect of His activities (ਥȞȑȡȖİȚĮȚ) on our world. Therefore in apophatic theology the first name of God is that of summum bonum, of the sovereign Good,7 denoting ethics instead of cosmology. Under this assumption, I shall try to clarify Wittgenstein’s thought by juxtaposing it with Kierkegaard’s ethics. In regard to his treatise on logic, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein himself had declared that the very scope of the book was ethics, that is, the human deed. Among the readings of his youth was the notorious Sex and Character of Otto Weininger, in which the hyperKantian young philosopher, underlining the importance of memory in regard to the certainty of the self, relates logic and ethics: The logical axioms are the principle of all truth. These posit an existence towards which all cognition serves. Logic is a law which must be obeyed, and man realizes himself only in so far as he is logical. He finds himself in cognition. All error must be felt to be crime. And so man must not err. He must find the truth, and so he can find it. The duty of cognition involves the possibility of cognition, the freedom of thought, and the hope of ascertaining truth. In the fact that logic is the condition of the mind lies the proof that thought is free and can reach its goal. […] Ethics, however, the laws of which are postulates, cannot be made the basis of a logical proof of existence. Ethics are not logical in the same sense that logic is ethical. Logic proves the absolute actual existence of the ego; ethics control the form which the actuality assumes. Ethics dominate logic and make logic part of their content. (Chapter VII, Logic, Ethics and the Ego)8

7

Dionysius the Areopagite, De Divinis Nominibus [On the Divine Names], in Corpus Dionysiacum I: Pseudo-Dionysius Areopagita. De Divinis Nominibus, ed. Beate Regina Suchla (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1990), fourth chapter. 8 Otto Weininger, Sex and Character [Geschlecht und Charakter, 1903], authorized translation from the sixth German edition (London: William Heinemann; New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons 1906), 96.

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Another impact on the thought of young Wittgenstein is that of the journalist Karl Kraus (from whom he had inherited the love of language and of aphorisms) and of the architect Adolf Loos.9 According to them both, ethics and aesthetics are one. Superfluous ornamentation in words or in architecture is considered a crime, and a work of literature and a work of art differs from the pamphlet and the useful object respectively. Aiming at the ornamental movement of the Secession, Loos contrives an image where a girl has just committed suicide in an ornamented chamber. He asks himself what it is about, and replies that it is a blasphemy against death.10 Since an aesthetic judgment brings about a decision having implications in our way of life, it is an ethical one. Life and the mental construction delineating it must be two different things. “My ideal is a certain coolness. A temple providing a setting for the passions without meddling with them”11 remarks Wittgenstein. Logic describes the world as the walls of a building delineate the life of its dwellers, without the former creating the latter. Rather, the former fits on the latter as a garment, without assimilating it (the garment we wear is not our body). Our world is always something more than its description, as our life is something more than the building we dwell in. In the Tractatus Wittgenstein posits logic, aesthetics and ethics as transcendental (6.13, 6.421), as a priori conditions of the world of facts which is our very life (5.621). And if it is so, namely, if they constitute the sense of the world, those must lie outside the world (6.41), outside space and time. For instance, the description (or the depiction) of a murder has no difference from that of the falling of a stone. Those two facts as propositions are of equal value; it is ethics to impute value therein. By 9

Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin, Wittgenstein’s Vienna (Chicago: Elephant Paperbacks Ivan R. Dee Publisher, 1996), 93 (chapter four, “Culture and Critique: Social Criticism and the Limit of Artistic Expression”). 10 Adolf Loos, “Das Heim,” in Das Andere 1 (1903):8. „Ein Bild nur greifet heraus: Das junge Mädchen, das sich den Tod gegeben. Lang hingestreckt liegt es auf der Diele de Fußbodens. Die eine Hand umklammert noch krampfhaft den rauchenden Revolver. Auf dem Tische ein Brief. Der Absagebrief. Ist das Zimmer, in dem sich das abspielt, geschmackvoll? Wer wird danach fragen? Wer darum sich kümmern? Es ist ein Zimmer, basta! Aber wenn der Raum von Van der Velde engerichtet ist? Dann ist’s eben kein Zimmer. Dann ist es ʊ ʊ ʊ Ja, was ist es denn eigentlich? ʊ ʊ ʊ Eine Blasphemie auf den Tod!” 11 MS107 130: 24e.

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doing this I don’t change the world (i.e. the facts), but only its limits (i.e. how I see it and endure it). That “the world of the happy is quite another than that of the unhappy” (6.43) doesn’t mean that the facts themselves differ in each of the worlds, but only that I have a different position over them (a happy or an unhappy one). Rush Rhees remarks upon a phrase of Wittgenstein in his Notebooks (1914-16) postulating that willing is to place myself in the world, like we place our eye in its visual field (5.633). For the world is independent from my will and whatever may occur in my world is a matter of fate (6.374). We can recall the Stoics according to whom we have to live in accordance with experience of what happens by nature, namely, of what befalls us. This stoicism of Wittgenstein becomes more evident when he asserts: I am either happy or unhappy, that is all. It can be said: good or evil do not exist. A man who is happy must have no fear. Not even in the face of death. Only a man who lives not in time but in the present is happy. (8 July 1916)

Wittgenstein’s notion of world concerns a personal world: “I am my world (the microcosm).” However, there is no “I” to speak thereof. How could it be when the world I contemplate starts from my very eye? “The philosophical I is not the man, not the human body or the human soul of which psychology treats, but the metaphysical subject, the limitʊnot a part of the world” (5.641). Wittgenstein’s notion of “I” is framed in a Weiningerian manner (the genius as microcosm), recalls the KantianSchopenhauerian metaphysical subject as unity of the apperception which, according to Schopenhauer cannot experience itself as the object of experience, and it is absent as Hume’s self, which is nothing but a bundle of experiences linked by the relations of causation and resemblance. Nor do we encounter in Wittgenstein a kind of phenomenological self as an alter-ego mirrored in the world. In Wittgenstein’s words, “I” is a mystery (5.8.1916). Indeed, he asserts that instead of “I think,” we should say “it thinks” in the manner we say “it rains.”12 As a subject of a sentence, the “I” displays no difference from the “you” or any other pronoun. However, in his late writings (Philosophical Investigations II, On certainty, Last Writings II), where he is dealing with some topics of G. E. Moore,13 he 12

Friedrich Waismann, Wittgenstein und der Wiener Kreis, ed. B. F. McGuinness (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1967), 49-50. 13 Notably the famous Moore’s paradox: “It’s raining, but I don’t believe that it is raining.”

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draws our attention to the use of the first person, as indicative of a belief or of a certainty. One can mistrust one’s own senses, but not one’s one belief. If there were a verb meaning “to believe falsely,” it would not have any significant first person present indicative. […] The language-game of reporting can be given such a turn that a report is not meant to inform the hearer about its subject matter but about the person making the report.14 174. I act with complete certainty. But this certainty is my own. 177. What I know, I believe. 178. The wrong use made by Moore of the proposition “I know…” lies in his regarding it as utterance as little subject to doubt as “I am in pain.” And since from “I know it is so” there follows “It is so,” then the latter can’t be doubted either. 179. It would be correct to say: “I believe…” has subjective truth, but “I know…” not.15

Thus, the self shows itself by means of the language as it imparts to us its world either by what it believes, or by what it knows. However, in contrast to the self of idealism, and particularly that of Hegel, the self never becomes its object, but remains rather a shadow. Nor can we discern an “inner” self as psychology does. If there is an inner self—a soul—in human beings, we have a hint thereof by its unpredictable reactions for which, nevertheless—or precisely because of that—we have no definite rule (i.e. a sort of grammar or a sum of concepts) to apply and decipher its mental state (as when there are no rules in a game, we cannot know who wins): Das „Innere“ ist eine Täuschung. D.h.: Der ganze Ideen komplex, auf den mit diesem Wort angespielt wird, ist wie ein gemalter Vorhang vor die Szene der eigentlichen Wortvertwendung gezogen.16

14

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophische Untersuchungen/Philosophical Investigations II ix. (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998), 190e. 15 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Über Gewissheit/On Certainty, trans. Denis Paul & G. E. M. Anscombe, eds G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1999), 25e. 16 MS174, 1950. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Letzte Schriften über die Philosophie der Psychologie band II, Das Inner und das Äussere (Oxford: Blackwells Publishers, 1992), 84.

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If I cannot know the other there is also no way to make him aware of my own self. Consequently, interpersonal relation cannot be grounded on sole rational cognition. In brief, I simply understand that there is a self. I know that I am, yet I cannot say what I am, nor can I say who the other is. Essentially, as regards the self we are confronted with the ineffability of ethical conduct. Wittgenstein adopts the argument of G. E. Moore in his Principia Ethica that we cannot define the absolute good which makes us able to valorize and to evaluate facts (state-of-things or actions). When I say that someone is good at doing something I choose a value as a gauge to apply to the image of his activity. Yet if there is a good that yields the property of goodness of something (i.e. that imputes the sense of goodness thereto), this good cannot be an object of further analysis; in other words, it is non-derivative. Otherwise, there should be another, higher good whence that good derives. Thus, good is an absolute one once it is not a means to another good, but an end in itself, a good in itself.17 Considering ethics in a causal, so to speak, Aristotelian, chain and discerning lower and external effective values [Wirkungswerte] from higher and inner, intrinsic ones [Eigenwerte] is a contribution of another Austrian, pupil of Franz Brentano and Carl Menger, Christian von Ehrenfels.18 Moreover, on the impossibility to discover the cause of values Wittgenstein’s second cousin, Friedrich von Hayek, founds his social theory.19 Nonetheless, Wittgenstein has no interest to build a formal theory of value, nor a social one. In addition, he doesn’t follow Moore’s view that this “good in itself” is 17

G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1903), chapter 1: “The Subject-Matter of Ethics.” 18 Christian von Ehrenfels, “System der Werttheorie I. Band Allgemeine Werttheorie, Psychologie des Begehrens,” in Werttheorie, philosophische Schriften Band I, ed. Reinhard Fabian (München: Philosophia Verlag, 1982), 268-79 (§§2428). Christian von Ehrenfels II: On Value and Desire in Werttheorie, Band 4, 281297. 19 Friedrich A. von Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty Vol. III (London: Routledge & Kegan, Paul, 1982), 155: “Culture is neither natural nor artificial, neither genetically transmitted nor rationally designed. It is a tradition of learnt rules of conduct which have never been ‘invented’ and whose functions the acting individuals usually do not understand.”ʊ158: “Hence what on an earlier occasion I have called the twin concepts of evolution and spontaneous order enables us to account for the persistence of these complex structures, not by simple conception of one-directional laws of cause and effect, but by a complex interaction of patterns […]”ʊ179: “Man is not and never will be the master of his fate: his very reason always progresses by leading him into the unknown and unforeseen where he learns new things.”

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accessible by means of intuition. In fact, when another denizen of Cambridge and Moore’s pupil, John Maynard Keynes wrote his Treatise on Probability (1921) using his teacher’s notion of intuition as a “rational belief” independent from any observed rule, the mathematician, and close associate of Wittgenstein, F. P. Ramsey refuted his thesis, speaking instead in favor of a “partial belief”:20 In a horse race all the attendants share the same lack of information yet everyone places a different bet; that is, given the same amount of information everyone forms a different belief from the other. Thence, one’s belief is grounded on a personal expectation. Wittgenstein, for his part, finds an ally in Søren Kierkegaard, whom he admired, placing him in the antipodes of “crude” Schopenhauer, as the greatest and most profound thinker of the 19th century and as a saint. Rush Rhees recounts that when one day in 1942 he had asked him whether the assassination of Caesar by Brutus was a noble one as claims Plutarch or a vile one as claims Dante, Wittgenstein retorted that there is nothing there that one can discuss, and he made an allusion to Kierkegaard: Has a man the right to let himself be put to death for the truth? He replied that that is not even a problem. I am unable to know how this man could feel nor his mental state etc. I cannot judge another person’s decision. The only one who is to be concerned is he who took that decision. This is the notorious Kierkegaardian topic of Either/Or [Enten-Eller]. In life we renounce something for something else. And the author advises the reader: “take care that the great things to which you are really sacrificing your life do not deceive you.”21 Indeed, there is nothing to promise us a happy end and among the possible choices, neither is sound and safe: If you marry, you will regret it; if you do not marry, you will also regret it; if you marry or do not marry, you will regret both; […] This, gentlemen, is the sum and substance of all philosophy. (Diapsalmata)22

The idea of decision penetrates a scheme known as “stages on life’s way” shaped as a parody of Hegel’s dialectics. Kierkegaard discerns the 20

F. P. Ramsey, “Truth and Probability,” “Further Considerations,” “Last Papers: Probability and Partial Belief” in The Foundations of Mathematics and other Logical Essays, ed. R. B. Braithwaite (London: Kegan, Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co.; New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1931),156-98, 199-211, and 25657 respectively. 21 Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or Vol. I, trans. Howard Vincent Hong & Edna Hatlestad Hong (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2013), 170. 22 Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or Vol. I, trans. David F. Swenson & Lillian Marvin Swenson (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1959), 37.

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aesthetic, the ethical and the religious stage. In the first one we encounter both types of the indulgent or licentious individual and of the refined esthète. It is the individual who lives in immediacy to the world and acts pursuing every caprice of his senses, intoxicated by the pleasure they grant him. He floats on the surface of the outer world and he forgoes any choice which would force him to reflect and to fold his gaze inward. Talcott Parsons will say one century later that in the aesthetic mode of action (cathexis) there is no concern about the consequences thereof.23 However, as every stimulus has the same value for him he dreads boredom; hence his fear before commitment. So, he is condemned to a constant playing, tasting and consuming things, abandoning them once he feels his desire fulfilled or in order to avoid it. Nonetheless, the presence of dread, a kind of dread Kierkegaard will classify later in The Concept of Dread [Begrebet Angest], as “dread before good” or “daemonism” manifests the Spirit even if it is asleep. That’s why he posits the ancient Greeks in the aesthetic stage and the tragedy as a sign of its surpassing. The aesthetic type’s mood is that of a sweet poetic melancholy without concrete object like the one we observe in children; he lives in the present as there is no decision to define a past and a future. Yet this type of eternity is a false one, as it is not juxtaposed with time. However, the fact that he dreads this eternity and he dives demonically into the restless action to forego it, is something which brings forth the necessity of the next stage, that of the ethical. As in the first stage he uses as a paradigm the erotic love in the form of music, here he is concerned with marriage (which nevertheless has also an aesthetic value). By making a choice one becomes accountable to oneself, by valorizing and evaluating he acquires values and the things of the outer world take the form of objects of critical reflection. There is a part of the world which is his world, the part he has chosen. The open possibilities of his life turn to probable ones. Henceforth he has an inner self, a personality, as his very action manifests certain unique traits of his own. Choosing is to choose one’s self. The moment of the decision divides a past from a future and makes possible the intuition of time. And having an image of time means that I posit myself out of time, and view things aeterno modo. This is the very meaning of instant (Øieblikket) that Kierkegaard will develop in The Concept of Dread. But how can he avoid becoming a prisoner of the universal, namely of the object, as it happens in 23

Talcott Parsons & Edward Shills, Towards a General theory of Action (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 2001), 166: “Expressive orientations of action are concerned not with goals beyond the immediate action context but with organized gratifications in relation to the object.”

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the Hegelian Aufhebung? To assert it differently, doesn’t he who is observing a rule of conduct lose his uniqueness? How, as a married man, can he still desire the beloved who is hence under his possession? These are some counter-arguments the refined esthète would turn against the ethical. As the title of one of the chapters of Either/Or implies, there is a balance between the aesthetic and the ethical; or, we could say that both stages are complementary. The aesthetic type is forced in the end to deny the immediacy of the object in order to keep his desire alive. The ethical may gain the object, although he is in danger to lose the very reason for his choice. It is no accident that Kierkegaard titles the first part of the book dedicated to the aesthetic mode as “Either” and the second one dedicated to the ethical mode, as “Or.” There is a pseudo-dialectical scheme which necessitates a third stage to combine the two former stages, the religious. The religious stage is approached and developed in another book of Kierkegaard titled Fear and Trembling [Frygt og Baeven] in which he is dealing with Abraham. Kierkegaard contrasts the story of Abraham to Greek tragedy. We could say that if tragedy is the passage from the aesthetic to the ethical, Abraham’s story is the passage from the ethical to the religious. In tragedy the hero by his defeat is saluted by the universal. When Agamemnon is incited to lose his beloved daughter by sacrificing her he is saluted as king of the Achaeans. He lost his immediate relation to the world but he gained a mediate one as a civic personality. He is sanctioned as the true king of the tribe because for this he has bartered something of his. Yet when Abraham sacrifices his son he doesn’t do it for the universal but for himself. Therefore he is to be condemned by ethics. Furthermore, concealment is a trait of aesthetics. The case of the unavowed love between a lass and a swain is common in poetry: Both lovers believe that they will end up together, and indeed in the end of the story something happens accidentally to fulfill their wish. On the other hand, ethics requires revelation, a concrete voluntary decision. Abraham’s decision may be concrete and voluntary yet it is concealed: So aesthetics required concealment and rewarded it, ethics required revelation and punished concealment. … The ethical idea contradicts itself as soon as it must be carried out in reality. Hence ethics requires revelation. The tragic hero displays his ethical courage precisely by the fact that it is he who, without being ensnared in any aesthetic illusion, himself announces to Iphigenia her fate. If the tragic hero does this, then he is the beloved son of ethics in whom it is well pleased. If he keeps silent, it may be because he thinks thereby to make it easier for others, but it may also be because thereby he makes it easier for himself. However, he knows that he is not influenced by this

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latter motive. If he keeps silent, he assumes as the individual a serious responsibility inasmuch as he ignores an argument which may come from without. As a tragic hero he cannot do this, for ethics loves him precisely because he expresses the universal. … Aesthetics permitted, yea, required of the individual silence, when he knew that by keeping silent he could save another. This is already sufficient proof that Abraham does not lie within the circumference of aesthetics. His silence has by no means the intention of saving Isaac, and in general his whole task of sacrificing Isaac for his own sake and for God’s sake is an offense to aesthetics, for aesthetics can well understand that I sacrifice myself, but not that I sacrifice another for my own sake. The aesthetic hero was silent. Ethics condemned him, however, because he was silent by virtue of his accidental particularity. His human foreknowledge was what determined him to keep silent. This ethics cannot forgive, every such human knowledge is only an illusion, ethics requires an infinite movement, it requires revelation. So the aesthetic hero can speak but will not. The genuine tragic hero sacrifices himself and all that is his for the universal, his deed and every emotion with him belong to the universal, he is revealed, and in this self-revelation he is the beloved son of ethics. This does not fit the case of Abraham: he does nothing for the universal, and he is concealed. Now we reach the paradox. Either the individual as the individual is able to stand in an absolute relation to the absolute (and then the ethical is not the highest) / or Abraham is lost—he is neither a tragic hero, nor an aesthetic hero. (Fear and Trembling, chapter V)24

During the course of the book Kierkegaard turns to his loving subject, erotic love (his personal story) and contrives two types of knight: The knight of infinite resignation and the knight of faith. The former is he who has abandoned his beloved although he has remained in love with her. He is living among us yet he is an alien, in distress and deep in his memories. For he has performed a leap into the infinite: he shall never be with her in this life and in this world. The latter is he who has performed the same movement yet he believes paradoxically that he shall be with her in this life and in this world. If God grants him his beloved, he will live with his princess in the finite as the happiest man on earth, liberated from any anxiety of losing her or that his love will be extinguished.

24

Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, A dialectical lyric and Sickness into Death, trans. Walter Lowrie (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2013), 160-2.

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Essentially the religious stage borrows the traits of both the aesthetic and the ethical. If we were to say that aesthetics and ethics are one wouldn’t that be in the religious? So we can hear again Wittgenstein: “Only a man who lives not in time but in the present is happy.” If this phrase wouldn’t be proceeded by an “Either/Or” type of proposition, “I am either happy or unhappy, that is all,” we could say that it concerns the Kierkegaardian aesthetic mode of existence: I am joyful because I am careless, living within the flow of things, and being attached to nothing I have nothing to worry about. In the Tractatus’ 6.4311 he is more precise: If by eternity is understood not endless temporal duration but timelessness, then he lives eternally who lives in the present. Our life is endless in the way that our visual field is without limit.

For the hedonic esthète every day is identical as he avoids to recall the day before and to reckon the day after, whereas for the knight of faith every moment of his life is present hinc et nunc yet he has no worries for he has faith. Let us hear Kierkegaard speaking of time in The Concept of Dread: So time is infinite succession. The life which is in time and is merely that of time has no present. It is true that to characterize the sensuous life it is commonly said that it is “in the instant” and only in the instant. The instant is here understood as something abstracted from the eternal, and if this is to be accounted the present, it is a parody of it. The present is the eternal, or rather the eternal is the present, and the present is full. In this sense the Roman said of the Deity that He is praesens (praesentes dii), and in using this expression for the Deity His powerful aid was indicated at the same time. The instant characterizes the present as having no past and no future, for in this precisely consists the imperfection of the sensuous life. The eternal also characterizes the present as having no past and no future, and this is the perfection of the eternal. (Chapter III)25

Another Kierkegaardian topic to relate to Wittgenstein is that of silence. Abraham cannot speak of the paradox and when he is incited to do so, he utters nonsense. Wittgenstein, for his part, concludes the Tractatus with the phrase: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must silent” (7). 25 Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Dread, trans. Walter Lowrie (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1957), 77.

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Before that, he argues: “There can be no ethical propositions” (6.42). As Kierkegaard has said in The Sickness unto Death [Sygdommen til Døden]: Let a man have a storehouse full of gold, let him be willing to dispense every ducat to the poorʊbut let him besides that be stupid enough to begin this benevolent undertaking with a defense in which he advances three reasons to prove that it is justifiableʊand people will be almost inclined to doubt whether he is doing any good.26

Yet before proceeding to the religious character of Wittgenstein’s ethics, it is necessary to scrutinize his aesthetics in order to clarify the subject of silence. In his Lesson on Aesthetics (1938) he argues that there can be no aesthetic judgment and that no one can give a cause of beauty. He formulates an example by borrowing from Loos the personage of the tailor. It is meaningless to ask a tailor why he is cutting the cuffs that way, or what he is feeling when he does that. The most important part of the very experience is that he cuts them that way, no matter whether he cuts them longer or says “no, no, no”? A similar example is that of an architect who is ready to come to a decision in regard to the height of a door. He is trying different heights till he utters “it is fine” and nods. Indeed for Wittgenstein, the idea of a cause in regard to feelings is entirely misleading: “I feel discomfort and know the cause” makes it sound as if there were two things going on in my soul—discomfort and knowing the cause. (Lesson on Aesthetics)27

The appreciations the tailor and the architect do are nothing more than the “good manners” they have apprehended practicing their work. And this is quite a complicated activity to discern a cause therein. It is the same with the language we use. The meaning of words comes from the use we make of them. When we ask “in what sense do you mean that?” we are appealing for a way, namely, a certain use we make of the word.28 So 26 Søren Kierkegaard, Sickness unto Death, trans. Howard Vincent Hong & Edna Hatlestad Hong (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1941), 98. 27 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology, and Religious Belief, ed. Cyril Barrett (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1966), 14. 28 “Every sign by itself seems dead. What gives it life?ʊIn the use it is alive. Is life breathed into there?ʊOr is the use its life?” Wittgenstein, Philosophische Untersuchungen/Philosophical Investigations, 128e, I §432.

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“words are deeds”29 for “in the beginning was action” which has been consolidated in symbols.30 Aesthetics is located at the beginning of language, in the realm of the symbolic. Therefore, in order to describe a work of art, asserts Wittgenstein, we use words which designate characters (“stately,” “pompous,” “melancholic”); we could also add for craftwork “comfortable,” “fine” etc. Yet a word designating a character doesn’t go any further than to express a sentiment or a sensation. It is a tautology that posits a limit to our language. Indeed we could also use, asserts Wittgenstein, gestures or pantomime instead. It is as if we were trying to recreate the work, to impute a face to it. It is as if the work were returning to the action whence it has emerged: The tailor’s client will show his approval by wearing the suit, not by describing it. The architect’s client will do the same by having a comfortable life in the house the architect has built for him. However, the delight I get from an artistic work or a craftwork has nothing to do with the very act of creation: The most refined taste has nothing to do with creative power. Taste is refinement of sensibility; but sensibility does not act, it merely assimilates. Taste can delight, not seize.31

Therefore, if we can locate something ethical here, it will be on the side of the author. The author acts, yet the approval of his act by the others is concealed in the sensual effect of his work. And when he is in the process of creation, he is alone and he cannot justify what he is doing. In Kierkegaard’s terms, we could say that he is in the realm of the religious for he can only have faith. That Wittgenstein attributes to ethics a religious trait, namely that of ineffability, is precisely because he envisages ethics from the standpoint of the agent, that is, before getting any sanction from the others. That is also why Kierkegaard, who focuses his interest on the individual, considers the religious stage as necessary to the ethical personality. Otherwise ethics would be nothing more than the superficial morality of the Philistine. Wittgenstein’s religiousness becomes explicit in his Lecture on Ethics in 192932 and in an interview to Friedrich Waisman, the secretary of 29

Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations, 146e. MS119 146, 36e. 31 MS134 129, 68e. 32 Ludwig Wittgenstein, “A Lecture on Ethics,” The Philosophical Review 74 (1965): 3-12. 30

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Moritz Schlick, a year later (17.12.30).33 In the latter he begins by asserting that he doesn’t agree with Schlick’s opinion that it is superficial to say that the Good is good because God wills it. By contrast he considers less profound the view that God wills the Good because it is good. He refutes Schick’s opinion by using Moore’s argument of good in itself. God is thereby what shields the Good from any definition which might deprive its very attribute as non-derivative. It’s the same with Kierkegaard when he associates Socrates’ ignorance with the sin before God. He writes elsewhere: “God has commanded it, therefore we must be able to do it” means nothing. There is no “therefore” about it. The two expressions might at most mean the same.34

However, this doesn’t mean that Wittgenstein identifies man’s will with God’s. In the Lecture he argues that not every value is an ethical one. My dexterity in piano has nothing to do with ethics since here the word “good” means coming up to a certain predetermined standard; it is a value relative to a goal. It is not absolute since it is permitted to say without shame: “I know, I’m playing pretty badly but I don't want to play any better.” Such judgments are mere statements of facts. A statement of fact, that is, of a describable state of affairs cannot have the coercive power of an absolute value judgment. If it were thus, everybody, independent of his tastes and inclinations, would necessarily bring about that state of affairs or feel guilty for not bringing it about. In the same sense, we can say that someone is a good fellow as if we were speaking of a good football player or that someone’s life was valuable as if we were speaking of some valuable jewellery, yet these statements imply a certain misuse of our language. In order to show us what the meaning of absolute value is, Wittgenstein chooses as his example par excellence the experience he has taking a stroll on a fine summer’s day. If he were to describe that experience, he would utter: “I wonder at the existence of the world.” If we look meticulously upon that phrase we will find out that it is a preposterous one. I can wonder at something, the existence of which I was ignoring, but not at something I know since I have been brought into the world. Moreover, this delight may be stirred by the clearness of the sky yet it is independent from the fact that the sky is blue or cloudy. Wittgenstein applies the same to the experiences of absolute safety or of radical sin. All these experiences where I am incited to misuse my language are the case 33 34

Waismann, Wittgenstein und der Wiener Kreis, 115. MS137: 130a.

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of ethical or religious language. This certain misuse may have the form of a simile or allegory, yet a simile must be a simile of something: saying that the firmament is made of lapis lazuli is the metaphor of a particular fact that science can describe. However, this very experience of Wittgenstein is a paradox, as it seems to have supernatural value; it is “the experience of seeing the world as a miracle.” As it is impossible to describe this fact, language doesn’t occupy the place of means. That’s why, according to Wittgenstein, in ethics and in religion the nonsensical character of the language is not due to the fact that we haven’t found the correct expressions yet, but it constitutes their very essence. As he asserts, they are expressions not by means of language but by the existence of language. So, he concludes the Lecture on Ethics as follows: This running against the walls of our cage is perfectly, absolutely hopeless. Ethics so far as it springs from the desire to say something about the ultimate meaning of life, the absolute good, the absolute valuable, can be no science. What it says does not add to our knowledge in any sense. But it is a document of a tendency in the human mind which I personally cannot help respecting deeply and I would not for my life ridicule it.

Like Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein has no aspiration to furnish a philosophical system as a substitute to religion. He wants to clarify the meaning of the given cultural structures. He doesn’t care for the refined, aseptic God of the philosophers. On the contrary, he is interested in the primal, colourful God of religion; the God of everyman. He is not asking “what is God?” or “is God necessary?” but rather “what do we mean by using the word ‘God’?”35 Likewise Kierkegaard is asking “what does it mean to have faith?” That they both deny defining God positively while on the other hand they take God for granted, suggests an apophatic theology. By “apophaticism” we understand that we suggest something by asserting what this very thing is not. For instance, to designate some action as its very image, namely its project describing its means and end (i.e. how to adjust the appropriate means to an end), is an affirmative (kataphatic) way to define action. Yet saying that the very action is not its image means that it is something more than that. Then the image of an action is shown before us as an artifice that occasions action by making it possible. The scope of the first, kataphatic method is scientific and impartial concerning the knowledge the agent must be equipped with and the calculations he must perform. On the other hand, the scope of the second, apophatic one, 35

MS132 8, 58e: “The way you use the word ‘God’ shows not whom you mean ʊbut instead what you mean.”

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is ethical and personal concerning how one chooses and endures the outcome of his choice. It complements the first method by underlying it. Thus the apophatic part is the most important one among the two since that very action can lead the agent to an end that he had not foreseen. Besides, what is the use of having a plan, if I cannot use it properly? And after all, those which will bring about the project are the agent’s values, that is, his beliefs. What I believe is not simply a prejudice or a superstition, but manifests in the proportion in which my will is corresponding to the world (i.e. what is the form of my relation thereto).36 The apophatic method entails that human reality is not to be considered a creation of human will since it seems eventually like a present of fate or of God. Besides, isn’t all that man does during his life done in order to eliminate uncertainty? And yet though I may call all my faculties and have all the means of the world at my disposal, what can I accomplish bereft of a fundamental certainty? Therefore, the resigning attitude or the impotence of will we encounter in the thought of Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein doesn’t entail a sole retirement from life, a proper anachoresis, but a reasonable denial to predict the outcome of an action. In fact, unpredictability is much lesser as regards a simple action (e.g. the use of a tool) or a routine. It becomes greater though, insofar as other agents are implicated therein. Kierkegaard’s own love story can serve here as an example par excellence. The methodologies of both Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein suggest an apophatic aspect. Kierkegaard’s irony implies a detachment from the current situation in order to view it from a different perspective. Therefore he invented a form of indirect speech under the guise of several pseudonyms and by interchanging various styles of expression; notably, he was contrasting the philosophical puppets of this “symposium” and he 36

Imagine that I am an architect and I have to calculate the size of the spaces of a house. I can predict which activities occupy spaces like the bathroom, but I cannot predict what takes place in the social spaces like the drawing room. Given the total space of the house, I am inclined to calculate the first ones (i.e. by way of affirmation) and subtract them from the total (i.e. by way of negation) in order to find the size of the social ones. But what if the social spaces which remain are insufficient? I have to rely upon my personal experience, not so much as an architect but most notably as a dweller. If they seem insufficient indeed, I will remove one or two of the calculable spaces. Thus, it is my experience as a dweller, (the values I observe) which makes me able to calculate the size of each chamber of the house as an architect.

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reviewed them. By this method he was aiming, like a modern Socrates, at stirring the mind of his reader (his beloved included). His intention was to make the reader aware of something as an independent person, that is, distanced from the author and free from his authority. In The Concept of Irony [Begrebet Ironi] he considers that irony brings about a meaningful nothing, which is like the still dark night having the power to speak to him who has ears to hear.37 In a similar way, Wittgenstein’s language games imply laying down rules which alter the view we had hitherto of a state of things: This entanglement in our rules is what we want to understand (i.e. get a clear view of). It throws light on our concept of meaning something. For in those cases things turn out otherwise than we had meant, foreseen. That is just what we say when, for example, a contradiction appears: “I didn’t mean it like that.”38

Essentially, the meaning of something is left to the individual itself and understanding is not a sole acceptance of a statement, but requires to play a game, a certain practice. Therefore, recognizing something is to be implicated personally in a relation therewith. And one has to bear by himself whichever meaning. On this ethical sense of understanding is grounded therewith the apophatic knowledge of God. The cognition of God may escape me, yet I am personally implicated in a relation with Him, once I do not consider God an object: Life can educate you to “believe in God.” And experiences too are what do this but not visions, or other sense experiences, which show us the “existence of this being,” but e.g. sufferings of various sorts. And they do not show us God as a sense experience does an object, nor do they give rise to conjectures about him. Experiences, thoughts,ʊlife can force this concept on us.39

37

Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony, with continual reference to Socrates/Notes of Schelling Berlin Lectures, trans. Howard Vincent Hong & Edna Hatlestad Hong (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University press, 1992), 258. 38 Wittgenstein, Philosophische Untersuchungen/Philosophical Investigations, 50e, I §125. 39 MS174 1v, 97e.

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References Ehrenfels, Christian von. Werttheorie, philosophische Schriften Band I. Edited by Reinhard Fabian. München: Philosophia Verlag, 1982. Hayek, Friedrich A. von. Law, Legislation and Liberty, Vol. III. London: Routledge and Kegan, Paul, 1982. Janik, Allan and Stephen Toulmin. Wittgenstein’s Vienna. Chicago: Elephant Paperbacks Ivan R. Dee Publisher, 1996. Johnston, William M. The Austrian Mind, An Intellectual and Social History 1848-1938. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972. Kierkegaard, Søren. Either/Or, Vol. I. Translated by Howard Vincent Hong and Edna Hatlestad Hong. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2013. —. Either/Or, Vol. I. Translated by David F. Swenson and Lillian Marvin Swenson. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1959. —. Fear and Trembling, A dialectical lyric and Sickness into Death. Translated by Walter Lowrie. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University press, 2013. —. Sickness unto Death. Translated by Howard Vincent Hong and Edna Hatlestad Hong. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University press, 1941. —. The Concept of Dread. Translated by Walter Lowrie. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University press, 1957. —. The Concept of Irony, with continual reference to Socrates/Notes of Schelling Berlin Lectures. Translated by Howard Vincent Hong and Edna Hatlestad Hong. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University press, 1992. Loos, Adolf. “Das Heim.” In Das Andere 1 (1903). Reprinted in Adolf Loos, Trotzdem, 1900-1930, Unveränderter Neudruck der Erstausgabe 1931, ed. Adolf Opel (Vienna: Georg Prachner Verlag, 1982). Moore, George E. Principia Ethica. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1903. Parsons, Talcott and Edward Shills. Towards a General theory of Action. New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, New Brunwick, 2001. PĜibram, Karl. Conflicting Patterns of Thought. Washington, DC: Public Affairs Press, 1949. Ramsey, F.P. The Foundations of Mathematics and other Logical Essays. Edited by R. B. Braithwaite. London: Kegan, Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co., New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1931. Schütz, Alfred. On Phenomenology and Social Relations. Edited by H.R. Wagner. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1972.

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Smith, Barry. Austrian Philosophy, The Legacy of Franz Brentano. Illinois: Open Court Publishing Company, 1996. Suchla, Beate Regina, ed. Corpus Dionysiacum I: Pseudo-Dionysius Areopagita. De Divinis Nominibus. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1990. Waismann, Friedrich. Wittgenstein und der wiener kreis. Edited by B. F. McGuinness. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1967. Weininger, Otto. Sex and Character. Authorized translation from the sixth German edition. London: William Heinemann; New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1906. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology, and Religious Belief. Edited by Cyril Barrett. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1966. —. Letzte Schriften über die Philosophie der Psychologie band II, Das Inner und das Äussere. Oxford: Basil Blackwells Publishers, 1992. —. Philosophische Untersuchungen/Philosophical Investigations II ix. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998. —. Über Gewissheit/On Certainty. Translated by Denis Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe. Edited by G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1999. —. Vermischte Bemerkunge/Culture and Value. Translated by P. Winch. Edited by G. H. von Wright. Oxford: Blackwell publishers, 1998.

CHAPTER FIVE WITTGENSTEINIAN SEMANTICS AND THE SUSPENSION OF MEANING: THEOLOGICAL DISCOURSE VEERING BETWEEN SENSE AND NONSENSE HARALAMBOS VENTIS

At such times I felt something was drawing me away, and I kept fancying that if I walked straight on, far, far away and reached that line where sky and earth meet, there I should find the key to the mystery, there I should see a new life a thousand times richer and more turbulent than ours. —Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot .

Jerusalem versus Athens: Rebuking the folly of theo-logy In Flannery O’Connor’s engrossing short story, Parker’s Back,1 the protagonist makes a futile attempt to impress his pious but joyless and self-righteous wife by having a tattoo of a Byzantine head of Christ Pantokrator (“All-mighty”) punctured on his back. Pleased with the result, he rushes home to show this new acquisition to his religious wife, in the hope of finally winning her over. His longing, however, is brutally discomfited when his arid wife not only rejects Parker’s newest tattoo as a silly and useless indulgence (“I might have known you was off after putting some more trash on yourself”), but reacts violently to the suggestion that the tattooed image is God’s. Parker implores his wife to quit babbling about the picture and to simply stare at it, in the hope that she would open herself up to an unexpected religious experience with 1

“Parker’s Back,” in Three by Flannery O’ Connor (New York: Signet Classics, 1986), 425-42.

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hints of possible Grace and reconciliation for both of them. However, not only does the woman completely fail to recognize Christ (“Don’t you know who it is?” he said in anguish.—“No, who is it?” Sarah Ruth said. “It ain’t nobody I know”) but is even appalled at her husband’s suggestion that it is God: “‘God? God don’t look like that!’… ‘He don’t look,’ Sarah Ruth said. ‘He’s a spirit. No man shall see his face’.” She then throws a tantrum accusing her husband of idolatry: “‘Idolatry! Enflaming yourself with idols under every green tree! I can put up with lies and vanity but I don’t want no idolator in this house!’ and she grabbed up the broom and begun to thrush him across the shoulders with it.” Dejected and hurt, physically as well as emotionally, Parker drew away and leaned against a tree, “crying like a baby.” Aside from the literary qualities of O’Connor’s short story, theologically alert readers are quick to grasp the rich theological implications flowing between the lines. In Parker’s Back, what is precisely at stake is one’s openness to the Incarnation of the Word and the gravity of its pictorial testimony, apart from creeds and any sort of verbal articulation. Though theologically illiterate and by all appearances devoid of religious instincts, Parker manages to perceive the divinity of Christ and confesses Him to be God. In a reversal of the expected roles, his pious Christian wife fails the test but still clads her blindness in religious attire, as she accuses Parker of idolatry. The patristic defense of icons in liturgy and worship has always drawn an inextricable link between the Incarnation and its iconic depiction; this, on the ground that the historical enfleshment of God renders the imaging of the second Trinitarian person possible and indeed necessary as a non-verbal semantics rich with meaning and indicative no less of the spiritual potential of material wood and paint to become the bearers of divine, uncreated Grace—as parts of the new, transfigured world of God to come.2 Those sufficiently acquainted with Ludwig Wittgenstein’s views on language, particularly his core distinction between saying and showing, cannot but appreciate the “wordless semantics” of Byzantine icons, which relay deep doctrinal claims by depiction alone (Tractatus 6.522: “There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves 2

For more on the sacred materialism of mainstream Christianity, see an excellent early paper by Metropolitan Kallistos Ware, “The Transfiguration of the Body,” in Sacrament and Image: Essays in the Christian Understanding of Man, ed. Arthur M. Allchin (London: The Fellowship of St. Alban and St. Sergius, 1967), see 1732 and especially 30-31.

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manifest. They are what is mystical.”) That was indeed Wittgenstein’s exclusively endorsed method for broaching and transmitting religious ideas. By his own confession, religious faith had better been nonpropositional. As he wrote once, I can well imagine a religion in which there are no doctrinal propositions, in which there is thus no talking. Obviously the essence of religion cannot have anything to do with the fact that there is talking, or rather: when people talk, then this itself is part of a religious act and not a theory. Thus it also does not matter at all if the words used are true or false or nonsense. In religion talking is not metaphorical either; for otherwise it would have to be possible to say the same things in prose.3

Wittgenstein’s anti-theoretical approach (long mobilized by the neopragmatists and other adherents to attack and demolish anything associated with the Cartesian cogito, such as conceptual transparency, wordless meaning or thought, and linguistic essentialism),4 appears to be insinuating that in religion, words impoverish faith5—in effect reducing it to a cerebral indulgence causing believers to lose themselves in a maze of doctrines to the detriment of moral act.6 Worse still, religious verbosity 3

Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (London: Penguin, 1991), 305. 4 The work of neo-pragmatist Richard Rorty is most representative of this trend. Rorty blends Darwinism and a somewhat jaundiced version of Dewey’s pragmatism with linguistic holism and non-representationalism to construct and defend a contingent view of world, reality, and the self—all in the liberal hope of rendering the concept of truth subject to temporary dialogical consensus and hence open to future revision, on opposite ends from its traditional (mostly religious) depiction as a fixed, perennial entity “written in stone,” so to speak. Rorty’s agenda is evident in his entire corpus, but see esp. his paper “Religion as a Conversation-Stopper,” in his Philosophy and Social Hope (London: Penguin, 1999), 168-74. 5 In different ways and to various degrees, aversion to philosophical theory and metaphysics constitutes the theological backbone of such disparate thinkers as Desiderius Erasmus, Martin Luther, Immanuel Kant, Gotthold Lessing, Karl Barth, and Emmanuel Levinas. 6 The exaltation of moral conduct over theological speculations has found immense favor among believers and theologians, particularly of a deist and more recently of a fideist bent. Gotthold Lessing, for one, whose certainties were moral, and by no means doctrinal in nature, is a good example of this mindset; see his Thoughts on the Moravians treatise. The Savoyard priest in Rousseau’s Émile captures this standpoint perfectly in his profession of faith: “My child, do not expect either learned speeches or profound reasonings from me. I am not a great philosopher,

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leads to dogmatism and the articulation of nonsense. Metaphysical dogmatism, as is well known, was relentlessly undercut in the first Kantian Critique, albeit not with the intent of undermining religion but with a view to placing it in its appropriate, more secure context. For, unlike other philosophers of the Enlightenment, Kant claimed he was doing religious belief a service by setting about to “abolish knowledge, to make room for faith.”7 A faith purified from idle speculation and metaphysical nonsense not by the construction of a newer dogmatic system, but “by closing up the sources of error,”8 as Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and its subsequent enlargement, the Philosophical Investigations later attempted to do. “Sophistication consists in the attempt to deduce the knowledge of God … by rational necessity and to apprehend and prove its necessity. There is no need for this,” warned Kant in anticipation of anti-theoretical theologians (such as Karl Barth),9 since “[i]n religion the knowledge of God is properly based and I care little to be one … General and abstract ideas are the source of men’s greatest errors. The jargon of metaphysics has never led us to discover a single truth … I see that particular dogmas, far from clarifying the notions of the great Being, confuse them; that far from ennobling them, they debase them … I serve God in the simplicity of my heart; I only seek to know what affects my conduct. As to those dogmas which have no effect upon action and morality, dogmas about which so many men torment themselves, I give no heed to them. I regard all individual religions as so many wholesome institutions which prescribe a uniform method by which each country may do honor to God in public worship … God rejects no homage, however offered, if it is sincere … The essential worship is that of the heart.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile or On Education, ed. and trans. Alan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1979), 266-308. Unlike most anti-theoretical philosophers, however, who downsized metaphysics and ontology over a predilection for moral concerns, Wittgenstein went the extra mile of relegating morality too, along with aesthetics, to the realm of the ineffable. He did so more likely out of a concern to protect ethics from the habitual twin blunders of the naturalistic fallacy (drawing the ought from is) and the conceit of morally pontificating in the name of God, Nature, History, or Reason. 7 See the preface to the second edition of The Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant, ed. Vasilis Politis (London and Vermont: Everyman, 1996), 21. (B xxix). 8 Kant, preface, 22 (B xxxi). 9 Karl Barth’s relentless effort to purge Christian revelation from the encroachment of all possible human perspectives, so evident in his monumental work The Epistle to the Romans, trans. Edwyn C. Hoskyns (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968; see esp. its second chapter, 56-7), comes to a head in volume IV of his Church Dogmatics. Small wonder that his exclusive reliance on God’s revelation was critiqued, correctly in my view, as positivistic by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in his Letters and Papers from Prison (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1968), 170-1.

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on faith alone… Sophistication in religious matters is a dangerous thing… A speculative basis is a very weak foundation for religion.”10 This view seems to enjoy, not unreasonably, a wide currency among believers and skeptics alike, as with everyone critical of religious vying over doctrinal accuracy and the penchant for ever finer distinctions—of the kind that render faiths less and less relevant, such as the celebrated medieval question of the number of angels dancing on a pin head: creeds divide, while material concern for others speaks volumes without lapsing in verbose doctrinal formulas that miss out on life. This aversion to creed was aptly raised by Virginia Woolf in the musings of the main character of her well-known novel, Mrs. Dalloway: a keen observer of social life and character, Clarissa Dalloway catches herself watching the motions of an unknown neighbor across the street from her bedroom window, and finds herself amazed at the immediacy and depth of the insight on human life granted her by the view. Love and religion! thought Clarissa, going back into the drawing-room, tingling all over. How detestable, how detestable they are! The cruelest things in the world, she thought, seeing them clumsy, hot domineering, hypocritical, eavesdropping, jealous, infinitely cruel and unscrupulous, dressed in a mackintosh coat, on the landing; love and religion. Had she ever tried to convert any one herself? Did she not wish everybody merely to be themselves? And she watched out of the window the old lady opposite climbing stairs. Let her climb upstairs if she wanted to; let her stop; then let her, as Clarissa had often seen her, gain her bedroom, part her curtains, and disappear again into the background. Somehow one respected that—that old woman looking out of the window, quite unconscious that she was being watched. There was something solemn in it—but love and religion would destroy that, whatever it was, the privacy of the soul. How extraordinary it was, strange, yes, touching, to see the old lady (they had been neighbours ever so many years) move away from the window, as if she were attached to that sound, that string. Gigantic as it was, it had something to do with her … Why creeds and prayers and mackintoshes? when, thought Clarissa, that’s the miracle, that’s the mystery; that old lady, she meant, whom she could see going from chest of drawers to dressingtable.11

10

Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Ethics, trans. Louis Infield (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), 87. 11 Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, (Orlando: 1st Harvest, 2010), 96-7 (italics provided).

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Like all abstract rules, Woolf’s character is telling us, creeds along with growing layers of theological elaboration, are totalitarian and only do violence to the simplicity of the ordinary flow of life; for, while religions boast of furnishing answers to ultimate questions, in actual fact doctrines are proven helpless and clueless in accounting for the simple spontaneity of life, given their iron rigidity and aloofness. Wittgenstein appears to be just as bent on preserving the ordinary and mundane from the parasitic onslaught of “deep explanations.” As he suggests in the Philosophical Investigations, We feel as if we had to penetrate phenomena: our investigation, however, is directed not towards phenomena, but, as one might say, towards the “possibilities” of phenomena. (PI 90) We must do away with all explanation, and description alone must take its place. (PI 109) Philosophy may in no way interfere with the actual use of language; it can in the end only describe it. For it cannot give it any foundation either. It leaves everything as it is. (PI 124) Philosophy simply puts everything before us, and neither explains nor deduces anything.—Since everything lies open to view there is nothing to explain. (PI 126)

At the same time, however, Wittgenstein seems to be equally as intent to protect the sanctity of the extraordinary (the so-called “mystical”) from the folly of intemperate human probes—and especially from all insolent attempts to appropriate the mystical and speak on its behalf. In a real sense, Wittgenstein’s thesis is echoed in the stern iconoclasm of the Savoyard priest in Rousseau’s Émile: “doctrine coming from God ought to bear the sacred character of the divinity.”12 Hence, in the absence of any revelation screaming of an unambiguously divine origin, mortals would be well advised to refrain from usurping God’s voice: “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence” (Tractatus 7). What was Wittgenstein’s ulterior motivation for drawing such a sharp divide between the ineffable transcendent and the articulable empirical? 12

Émile, 299. An illustration of what an unmistakably divine message might look like is given in Carl Sagan’s absorbing novel Contact (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985), although it is doubtful that it would have impressed Wittgenstein, given his pronounced distaste for scientism.

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And how did he go about defending the boundary?13 The latter question is far easier to answer: Wittgenstein’s neo-nominalist, as it were, program rendered language co-extensive with both reality at large (“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world,” Tractatus 5.6) and meaningful thought (e.g. PI 329, 337, 338, 339, 342, and especially 344). And no sooner is the possibility of wordless thought tossed out (a major doctrine in contemporary philosophy of mind as well), than metaphysical questions follow suit. For, these have habitually rested on the pre-modern notion of meaning as a self-contained, free-floating, “transcendental signified” (to use a Derridean term with all due caution).14 This notion has long been considered debunked by modern, chiefly Saussurean, linguistics that decisively transformed our understanding of language in a threefold manner: a) language was elevated from a mere garment of originally “unconceptualized” thoughts to a sine qua non condition for the sheerest possibility of all thinking and reasoning; incidentally, this is precisely the idea behind Wittgenstein’s denial of the existence of a meaningful “private language.” b) the relation of signifiers to signifieds was now deemed to be conventional only, and as a result thereof c) the meaning of words and even propositions is always contextual, as opposed to being fixed; words, that is, are variously nuanced depending on their use in particular situations.

13

The boundary is strongly reminiscent of the Kantian divide between phenomena and things-in-themselves, minus the transcendental factor at work in the uniform composition of the phenomena and the replacement of the transcendental subjectivity with a decentralized picture of language by Wittgenstein, as the inescapable horizon of meaningful human cognition and thought. The similarity between Kantian and linguistic non-representationalism has led some to dub positivist and post-positivist philosophy of language a “linguistic Kantianism” of sorts, albeit more with reference to Rudolf Carnap and Willard Quine than Wittgenstein: see George Romanos, Quine and Analytic Philosophy: The Language of Language (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983), 23-4. 14 Derrida, a “left-wing” linguacentrist, also attacked the mental and notional reifications of pre-modern theories of language, but unlike his so-called “rightwing” counterparts such as Quine and Wittgenstein, he extended the potency of written signs to the incredible point of stripping signifieds of any identifiable reference, for the purpose of undermining any inkling of “authorial meaning”: “From the moment that there is meaning, there are nothing but signs. We think only in signs … One could call play the absence of the transcendental signified as limitlessness of play, that is to say as the destruction of ontotheology and the metaphysics of presence.” Derrida, Of Grammatology, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, trans. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 50.

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Naturally, in this neo-nominalist perspective, mind and meaning, especially if seen as autonomous, language-independent entities, stand or fall together: for, as Hilary Putnam once pointed out, “meaning is always related to mind,”15 in other words “[t]o mean something was … just to have it in mind,” since “the whole aim of mentalism is to identify the meaning of a word with something that is in the brain/mind of every speaker who knows how to use the word.”16 But leaving aside the deleterious ontological implications of “linguacentrism” for the notion of mind, as regards our initial question of how this view of semantics impacts metaphysics, the answer is clear: for all practical purposes, Wittgenstein’s premises establish an intra-linguistic immanentism prohibitive of the possibility to do philosophical work in the systematic fashion, say, of Descartes, or at least as pre-critical (i.e. pre-Kantian) metaphysicians would have it. As Willard Quine bluntly declares, summarizing the epistemological upshot of Wittgensteinian semantics (and his own): “Truth is immanent and there is no higher. We must speak from within a theory, albeit any of various.”17 Or, in Alexander George’s condensed 15

Hilary Putnam, Representation and Reality (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1988), 19. 16 Putnam, Representation and Reality, 23-4. 17 Willard Quine, “Things and their Place in Theories,” in Theories and Things (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 23. Quine’s thought revolves around a cluster of highly popularized philosophical catchwords such as “indeterminacy of translation,” “ontological relativity,” “naturalized epistemology,” “holism,” etc., all of which add up to his eliminative program rendering the concept of truth solely internal to languages and theories. His program of shifting conceptual legitimacy “from talk of objects to talk of words” is thoroughly laid out in his Word and Object (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1960), wherein Quine declares that “[w]hat comes of the association of sentences with sentences is a vast verbal structure which, primarily as a whole, is multifariously linked to non-verbal stimulation”—this last reference is indicative of his empiricism. These links attach to separate sentences (for each person), but the same sentences are so bound up in turn with one another and with further sentences that the non-verbal attachments themselves may stretch or give way under strain. In an obvious way this structure of interconnected sentences is a single connected fabric including all sciences, and indeed everything we can say about the world (12). Thus Quine seems to have championed (along with Wittgenstein and his heir apparent Donald Davidson) the key presupposition of much of 20th century, i.e. “linguacentrism,” earlier encountered in Willfrid Sellars’ influential repudiation of the “Myth of the [unconceptualized] Given” in “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind,” Science, Perception and Reality (Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview, 1991 and more recently published in monograph form from Harvard University Press, 1997), where Sellars critiques and, to a certain extent revolutionizes, classical empiricism by thoroughly

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form of Quine’s dictum, “nonsense awaits if one fails to recognize that one must work from within, that one cannot leap outside language and all systems of belief [more so in Quine’s case] to evaluate these from a distance.”18 So much, then, in a nutshell about the Austrian philosopher’s method and presumed accomplishments. His intentions, on the other hand, are still a matter of intense debate. Be that as it may, our personal understanding of Wittgenstein’s agenda (applying to both periods of his intellectual pursuits)19 is that he arguably aimed at the attainment of spiritual tranquility (PI 133)—the kind obtained from the exposure of grand metaphysical riddles, following their subjection to linguistic analysis, as pseudoproblems with no real need of deep thought, much less resolution: for, as the Philosophical Investigations in particular tried to press home to us, anything that can be meaningfully (re)stated poses no uncanny mystery; consequently, any perceived philosophical conundrums urging a postempirical investigation must be discarded not as insoluble or needful of high-level theoretical analysis but as being due to confusion, bad use of conceptualizing the most rudimentary bits of sense-data, building his case on arguments reminiscent of the work of Wittgenstein and Quine. 18 Alexander George, “On Washing the Fur without Wetting It: Quine, Carnap and Analycity,” Mind 109:433 (2000): 1-24. 19 In assuming a common denominator of purposes (as opposed to methods) underlying both eras of Wittgenstein’s philosophical work, I follow the late Burton Dreben, whose seminar lectures on Wittgenstein and analytic philosophy I had the good fortune to attend at Boston University from 1994 to 1996. A learned Wittgensteinian scholar, Dreben persistently challenged the habitual division of Wittgenstein’s output into two distinct phases. In his monograph, The Continuity of Wittgenstein’s Thought (Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, 1996), John Koethe quotes Dreben approvingly, although not without some disagreement (p. 5, n. 5), concerning the continuity of Wittgenstein’s view of language: “My contention is that Wittgenstein’s ways of thinking about language show a considerable degree of continuity and that a certain broad principle runs throughout his work, both early and late: Language’s semantic aspects—what a word means, what a sentence says, what its truth-conditions are—cannot be described or characterized discursively in informative or explanatory ways” (p. 1). Koethe’s picture of continuity, however, differs somewhat from Dreben’s in that it admits the possibility for some real constructive philosophical theorizing in Wittgenstein’s later work (p. 49). Koethe spells out Wittgenstein’s “constructive vision” in pp. 64-71 of his book. Personally, I tend to agree more with Dreben’s construal of Wittgenstein’s intents and purposes as being anti-theoretical throughout, an appraisal I find more consistently expressive of Wittgenstein’s overall “deflationary mood” vis-à-vis metaphysics, as Koethe calls it (p. 53).

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standard grammar, and mental cramps—the philosophical equivalent of neurosis. An additional motive for Wittgenstein, as alluded above, seems to have been a strong spiritual desire to forestall the fabrication of comprehensive metaphysical systems with pretensions of ultimate explanations of the world, especially those invoking the voice or mind of History, Reason, and above all, God. It is indeed an enthralling aspect of Wittgenstein’s famously laconic aphorisms that God seems to lie dormant in the background or between the lines.20 Small wonder, then, that Wittgenstein’s insights, for all their technical character, have always made fascinating 20

There is evidence that at some point in their intellectual trajectory, both Wittgenstein and Derrida made a return trip to their Jewish roots. So at any rate suggests to me a reading of Derrida’s “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials,” in Derrida and Negative Theology, eds Harold Coward & Toby Foshay (Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 1992), 73-142. In that paper, which Derrida calls his most “autobiographical” piece (135, n. 13), he follows Heidegger’s lead in juxtaposing Biblical faith and revelation to Greek philosophy. Feeding off the hermeneutic clues of this radical disjunction, Derrida expresses discontent even with Dionysian negative theology as being tainted with hyperessentiality. That is, he reproaches it for being an organic extension of the Greek onto-theological tradition than a subversive alternative to it, by still positing God in terms of a supreme Being, even after a long list of negations, except now as one who remains incommensurable to the being of all that is (79). In the same volume, Morny Joy (“Conclusion: Divine Reservations,” 255-82, situates Derrida’s work in the mindset of rabbinic Judaism: “What captivates [Derrida] is the idea of the absence of God. Divine alterity is evoked not so much by prophetic exportations, nor by moral injunctions, as by rabbinic interpretation … Hermeneutics does not attain definitive meaning. Any utterance reflects the indeterminate situation of a displaced people, a people who never have the certainties of Greek metaphysics. The rupture between Athens and Jerusalem. Hegel’s bad infinity. Derrida at once seeks to elude and to expose HellenicChristian convictions. The fact of the nonadvent of the Messiah is not a calamity. It marks instead the Judaic disposition that constantly explores the limits of any reconciliation, any expectation” (274-5). In regards now to Wittgenstein’s intellectual debt to Jewish motifs, our clue to it is Wittgenstein’s own confession as it is recorded in Monk, 540: “Wittgenstein contrasted Drury’s ‘Greek’ religious ideas with his own thoughts, which were, he said, ‘one hundred per cent Hebraic’.” And “[c]entral to Wittgenstein’s ‘Hebraic’ conception of religion … is the strict separation of philosophy from religion.” I believe we would not be remiss were we to suggest a parallel between the Hebrew Bible’s condemnation of idolatry, and Wittgenstein’s life-long effort to undercut the natural philosophical inclination to spawn metaphysics with transcendental pretensions.

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inroads beyond their home field into the realms of theology and religious studies—to the effect that atheists and theists alike have claimed him their own or at least deemed him supportive of their agendas (with theologians usually appealing to similarities between patristic apophaticism and its Wittgensteinian counterpart in the Tractatus or to the fideist insularity to religious faith by the notion of “language-games” introduced in the Philosophical Investigations). The purported similarity between patristic and Wittgensteinian apophaticism is definitely intriguing, but is it really valid? And (more importantly) assuming that it is, does an acknowledgment that words fail us in every attempt to draw a positive image of God oblige us to retreat to a wordless faith, enacted in silence? Are we by implication forced to ditch theology as a futile, arrogant exercise unable to utter anything meaningful about God and given to verbosity and life-hating dogmatism? It is my contention that a consistent pursuance of the so-called “incarnational hermeneutic” (the open-ended endeavor to grasp the limitless intellectual, social, and ontological implications of the belief in the Incarnation) urges us to cast a long, critical look at the arbitrary metaphysics being implicitly at work in Wittgenstein’s worldview and of those sharing most or all of his premises. For, disguises notwithstanding, if metaphysics is at bottom as inescapably present in naturalism (if only implicitly so) as in every worldview claiming an awareness of the uttermost limits of reality,21 it

21

Here it might be useful to recall the ontological dimension involved in the transcendental completion of Berkeley’s idealism by Kant, if only as an illustration and a reminder that every epistemology must, in fact, tacitly rest on some minimal background ontology. As is well-known, the Kantian response to Hume’s nihilist assault on induction consisted not only in the grounding of phenomena in a priori conditions of perception but also in retaining the ontological identity of the phenomena with their noumenal aspect. This apposite interjection of the things-inthemselves (Critique of Pure Reason, B45, B59) in the Kantian effort to “save the appearances” suggests that more than mere “appearances” are at stake in setting up a robust epistemology: for his part, Kant felt compelled to affirm the independent existence of the world (Critique of Pure Reason, B42-43, B44, A28, A36) so as to round off his idealism with sufficient ontological solidity and endurance, in view of its likely peril to collapse into an untenable theoretical construct (of the Berkeleyan sort, for example). Sometimes, these inevitable ontological underpinnings, though largely unapparent, may entail strong metaphysical implications for their host theories of knowledge, notwithstanding the latter’s claims to an ordinary physicalism or a naturalized empiricism, as in the cases of Wittgenstein, Quine, Davidson, Rorty, etc.

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would be fitting for its a prioris to be exposed and challenged by a rival metaphysical viewpoint.

In praise of (theological) folly As a preliminary comment, permit me to frankly acknowledge that linguistic analysis, as engineered by Wittgenstein, is certainly a useful tool for sorting out conceptual abuse, when practiced as a mere technique and not as a doctrine. Unfortunately, on closer look Wittgenstein’s diagnosis of the causes of nonsensical utterance comes with a host of metaphysical assumptions that often pass unnoticed because they are covert and bathed in naturalistic colors. But they are there, all the same. In the first place, as I have tried to argue at length in a previous paper,22 a metaphysical contraction of the world enacted through an isomorphism between language and reality (with a view to establishing the impenetrable limits of linguistic non-representationalism) may be a fascinating philosophical trick, but it cannot be assumed as self-evident. Further to that, the said contraction posits a decisively reductive picture of reality that should actually be protested than blindly endorsed, following the lead of Thomas Nagel, Michel Marsonet and others. These theorists, falling as they do on the “realist” camp of modern philosophy, have convincingly chided Wittgenstein’s empiricist naturalism for being a “linguistic idealism”23 of 22

Haralambos Ventis, “The Eloquent Sounds of Silence: Contrasting Intimations of the Ineffable,” ĬǼȅȁȅīǿǹ 3 (2009): 123-47. 23 As Nagel explains in The View from Nowhere (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 90, linguistic, post-positivist idealism, far from making its predecessor’s claim that “to exist is to be perceived” (esse est percipi), holds rather that “what there is, is what we can think about or conceive of, or what we or our descendants could come to be able to think about—and that this is necessarily true because the idea of something that we could not think about or conceive makes no sense.” It stipulates, in other words, that what exists or what is the case, at any rate, coincides necessarily with what is a possible object of thought for us, thereby subjecting all significant (i.e. meaningful) ontological discourse to the conditions of human conceptualization: what there is and what we can think and therefore talk about, are all made co-extensive in a reductive move rendering human understanding the measure of all things. Michel Marsonet draws a similar parallel between classical and linguistic idealism along the following lines: “We might say, thus, that for classical idealism whatever is foreign to thought is unknowable, while for the analytic tradition whatever is foreign to language is unknowable as well.” Marsonet, “Linguistic Idealism in Analytic Philosophy of the Twentieth Century,” in Current Issues in Idealism, eds Paul Coates & Daniel D. Hutto (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1996), 114-5.

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sorts: his linguistic immanentism, along with Quine’s,24 “cuts reality down to size,”25 to use Nagel’s phrase; in other words, it downsizes meaningful 24

In his essay “A Comparison of Something with Something Else,” included in his Words & Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 330-50, Hilary Putnam contests the robustness of Quine’s realism, setting for himself the bold and unthinkable indeed task (for most people versed in post-positivist philosophy of language) of blurring the lines between Quine’s relative ontological commitments and Richard Rorty’s historicism. In the process of a careful reconstruction of Quine’s arguments, Putnam appears anxious to distance his own “internal realism” from Quine’s doctrine of “immanent truth.” Quine’s replies to critics notwithstanding, that neither the authority of ontology nor the authority of epistemology are in any way impaired by being seen as “immanent” (Putnam, Words & Life, 348), a claim Quine tries to further substantiate by recourse to the materiality of neurology and nerve endings stimulations as the empiricist basis of his system, Putnam still faults his internalism as hopelessly Pythegorean, a sort of “transcendental Skinnerianism” (p. 349) not qualitatively different from Rortyan intersubjectivity and culturalism. Putnam reaches his verdict by way of carrying Quine’s idea of relative reference through to its ultimate consequences, as he sees them. In Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), 49, Quine had already tried to forestall an immediate objection to his theory of reference: If reference is granted sense only relative to a background language, what of the infinite regress into further and further background languages, relative to which each of these would in turn only make sense? Quine’s reply invokes the relational doctrine of space, with its lack of an absolute position or velocity, as an analogue to the intra-linguistic relationality and relativity of reference (Ontological Relativity, 49). But Putnam thinks the analogy is flawed, since even relative position (in pre-relativistic physics) enjoys an absolute or invariant status that should be acceptable to any number of impartial observers at a time, regardless of which coordinate systems they individually use. This isn’t the case with relative reference as Quine intends it, because as Putnam shows Quine interjects interpretation down to the point of specifying the background language itself without which (i.e. unless one acquiesces to it) there is no fact of the matter as to the truth value of any sentence. The arguments and counter-arguments are long to be recorded here with any justice done to their subtlety. Suffice it simply to state (and thereby conclude) Putnam’s worry that “once truth goes ‘immanent,’ there is no reason [as Rorty holds] to privilege science over literature, or over ethics, aesthetics, and so forth” (Words & Life, 343). On the flip side to Putnam’s portrayal, Jonathan Dancy sketches a more “conservative” picture of Quine’s philosophy, whose holism and internalism are significantly tempered by the suggestion that Quine may also be classified as a foundationalist, on account of the distinction that he draws between observation and non-observation sentences. Quine’s coherentism is spared the excesses attributed to it by Putnam as a result of its empiricism, which ensures that for Quine “there are data and there is theory”; a good reminder, Dancy concludes, that

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ontology to the capacity and limits of human conceptualization, in the sense of rendering the notion of the real commensurate with the possibility of its epistemic justification (the real is what is conceivable only). Nagel reacts to this radical, audacious reversal of pre-Kantian epistemic criteria (for all their flaws) as he does to its consequence, humankind’s intemperately exalted cognitive status: the world, Nagel counter-argues, may contain not only what we don’t know and can’t yet conceive, but also what we could possibly never conceive.” This realist view espoused by Nagel, “amounts to a strong form of antihumanism:26 the world is not our world, even potentially,” since “it may be partly or largely incomprehensible to us not just because we lack the time or technical capacity to acquire a full understanding of it, but because of our natures.”27 Nagel, himself an agnostic intellectual, is actually reminiscent here of St. Paul in his sober reminder of the cognitive asymmetry between God and humankind: “But now that you have come to know God, or rather to be known by God…” (Gal. 4:9). In contemporary, secular idiom, this realist perspective upon which patristic apophaticism rests, is skillfully defended by Marsonet in an attempt to place language back to its natural place in the hierarchy of being. “As language is a relatively new entry in the history of reality,” Marsonet indicates,

“one cannot be an empiricist without being a foundationalist. Dancy, Introduction to Contemporary Epistemology (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985), 100-1. 25 Nagel, The View from Nowhere. 26 The transition from foundationalism and realism to holist theories of meaning, vastly aided by linguistic non-representationalism, signals an emphatic reaffirmation of humanism bordering on the new idealism repudiated by realists like Nagel. Nicholas Wolterstorff has given us an excellent summary of the “realism versus anti-realism” debate: “At issue is whether or not we are at home in the world. The anti-realist sees metaphysical realism as an alienating perspective; it regards the world and even ourselves as something out there, over against us and alien to us with which we have to cope [my italics]. The goal of the anti-realist is to show us that this is mistaken; we are not thus alienated. His path toward that goal is making us see that we are the makers of our world [italics in the original]. We are no more alien in the world than the artist is alien to his work which mirrors him back to himself as its maker … But to regard ourselves as world-makers is to regard the world as an expression of ourselves.” Wolterstorff, “Realism versus Anti-Realism: How to Feel at Home in the World,” in Realism: Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association, Vol. 59, ed. Daniel O. Dahlstrom, (Washington, D.C.: American Catholic Philosophical Association, 1984), 184. 27 Nagel, The View from Nowhere, 108.

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It cannot have any sort of ontological supremacy. Not only is this so: it is likely to hide the non-linguistic dimensions of human nature while, being restricted to [hu]mankind, it cannot explain a very large number of the features of reality as such. Let us then stress that science, instead, always tries to enlarge (and to deepen) as much as possible our vision of reality and, in order to do this, we must push our sight both toward the past— when [hu]mankind did not yet exist—and the future—when [hu]mankind perhaps will no longer be there. This in turn means trying to gain a good comprehension of reality as a whole: human and non-human, linguistic and non-linguistic. Certainly language has a role in this enterprise, although not a unique one. By trying to reduce an extremely complex reality to something much simpler, this approach cannot even explain why language was born and for what purposes. Language becomes a sort of divinity which is supposed to explain everything while, since it is a rather mundane and imperfect product of the human mind, it needs indeed to be explained by tracing its origins which, as we said, are both social and practical. So the authors who, like Quine—mean to replace any argument on reality with arguments on human language that talks about reality are bound to miss the richness of reality itself: this is the reason why we need a semantic descent replacing Quine’s ascent.28

It is to be expected, however, that the mere likelihood of intrinsically unpatterned ontological territories will appear intolerable to the insatiably inquiring human mind, so used as it is to domesticating all known or even unknown existents by framing them in humanly intelligible coordinates. Thus, among other reactions to it, the question of the possible usefulness of this metaphysical likelihood is also bound to be raised: what use is admitting the possibility of an unbridgeable disparity between the human ken and theoretically elusive aspects of reality, the existence of which we may never even become aware of? We reply: the true value of maintaining the apophatic asymmetry even if only as a theoretical possibility, lies in the difference it makes on our perception of ourselves and the world, of the inside as well as the outside universes; for, in disentangling an entity’s being from its being known (in direct contrast to Kantian and linguistic idealism), we shield it from reason’s reductive advances. Better yet, we become receptive to the self-designation of beings by liberating ontology from epistemology, with remarkably positive consequences for anthropology. It is against the backdrop of shattering linguistic fetters to being that apophaticism’s essential contribution can become apparent; for, by making room for conceptual inscrutability as an intrinsic part of an existent’s ontological integrity, we allow beings to unconditionally 28

Marsonet, “Linguistic Idealism,” 117-8.

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manifest themselves in ways other than those expected of them (it is for this reason that the philosophical idiom of Phenomenology is now increasingly seen as more appropriate for doing justice to the cause of otherness than alternative narratives). To the extent that beings, and especially persons, are spared the hegemony of conceptual or other categorization, ontology and truth are made identical with freedom. From the perspective of sheer epistemology, on the other hand, preserving the asymmetry broadens our sense of the real (even at the risk of occasionally voicing metaphysical nonsense) and puts human reason in critical perspective by keeping its reach disproportionate to its grasp. It is indeed one thing to desist the tempting metaphysical folly of essentialism, of seeking to attain God’s impossible viewpoint; it is quite another to delimit meaningful discourse (and, by extension, ontology) to what is humanly perceivable alone. For, the consistent pursuance of an overtly physicalist empiricism has a way of misleading us into confusing a reassuring, but in fact partial picture of reality for the whole. As we become increasingly aware of undomesticated and non-empirical states of being, such as the Freudian unconscious or the radically indeterminate quantum realm of sub-atomic particles, the tapestry of reality unfolds before us as larger and by far deeper than may be humanly fathomable, obviating the sheer inadequacy of human conceptualization to account for it in its entirety. But if non-empirical terrains such as these are not offhand dismissed as unreal for defying conceptual domestication, neither can the range of human perception be the true measure of reality at large or the limits of language coincide with the world’s, as Wittgenstein and the neopragmatists would have us believe. “Any conception of the world,” Nagel believes, “must include some acknowledgment of its own incompleteness.”29 Theological apophaticism, designated as the epistemological principle that “the truth is never exhausted in its verbal formulation,” insists that “definitions, whether positive or negative, are at best only approximations.”30 Thusly outlined, apophaticism is respectful of Nagel’s epistemological caveat: nowhere in the patristic corpus is language pronounced co-extensive with the world; on the contrary, as Basil of Caesaria pointed out, voicing a long line of Church writers on this issue, “All theological utterance is less than the 29

Nagel, The View from Nowhere, 108. Marios Begzos, “Apophaticism in the Theology of the Eastern Church: The Modern Critical Function of a Traditional Theory,” The Greek Orthodox Theological Review 41:4 (1996): 327-57, 356.

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thought of him who speaks it, and less than the intention of him who is conducting the discussion, because language is somehow inadequate to represent our thoughts.”31 Similarly, among the earlier Church Fathers, Gregory Nazianzus held that “for us the truth lies not in names but in things,”32 while for Athanasius words similarly “do not impact on nature [i.e., on what exists]; but nature rather changes the words as it draws them unto itself. Nor do words precede essences, but essences come first, and second to these come the words.”33 The same point was further elaborated upon centuries later by St. Gregory Palamas, in consort with the realism of his famed “essence-energies” distinction: “and should there be agreement among ourselves as regards things, I care not about words ... since for us the truth lies not in sayings but in things ... so that our task is not aimed at words, but the whole strife focuses [instead] on things.”34 A careful reading of these lines suggests that their authors were well aware of the totalizing tendencies of language, from its propensity to create noetic idols to the point of becoming itself an idol, rising above its natural place. A usurpation of this magnitude is always pernicious for ontology; for, if language is the House of Being, as Heidegger held, sometimes it can become its prison as well.35 As a more modest epistemological principle than its Wittgensteinian counterpart, Christian apophaticism does not condemn Christians to absolute silence, as if the limitations of language mandated the resignation from any and all theological endeavor. In effect, the similarity between the two forms of speechlessness—Christian and Wittgensteinian—before the Ineffable, is misleading. Several ecclesiastical writers have indeed praised silence as a noble means of respecting the mysteries of the Judeo-Christian God: the One who always stands as the “wholly Other,” inscrutable in His transcendence which is fully preserved even after the Incarnation. St. Basil exhorts us to honor what is ineffable with silence,36 while for St. Isaac the

31

Letter VII, 44. Oration 29, 13: MPG 36, 92. 33 MPG 26, 152C. 34 Gregory Palamas, “The Synodal Tome” (1351), in The Dogmatic and Symbolic Monuments of the Orthodox Catholic Church Vol. I, in Greek, ed. Ioannis Karmiris (Athens: 1960), 703. 35 Heidegger’s precise phrasing is, “Language is the house of being where man eksists by dwelling,” and comes from his essay “Letter to Humanism,” published in Basic Writings, ed. David Farell Krell (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 213. 36 St. Basil, On the Holy Spirit. 32

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Syrian, “silence is a mystery of the world to come.”37 Quietness, amidst a temporary seclusion from the white noise of worldly cries and concerns, has been a major component of hesychast mysticism in its attempt to turn the heart into a meeting place with God. Nevertheless, as John Panteleimon Manoussakis perceptively indicated, we should always remember, for balance, that in the beginning was the Word, not silence;38 after all, from the very outset, Christianity spread as the good news, as an announcement of world-shaking proportions: the apostles and other Gospel adherents proclaimed that the eternal Logos was born and dwelled among us in the flesh; that He conversed with us, reversing the dehumanizing priorities of the status quo, religious and secular; and that He completed His earthly ministry by undoing the physical process of death by His own death. The first preacher was actually Mary, who rushed to her cousin Elisabeth to share the good news of her pregnancy, an announcement causing joy to John, still in his mother’s womb—the same John who as an adult would become the Forerunner, destined to prepare by word the way for the Lord’s appearance in the flesh. The Christian narrative is one of proclamation, not reverential silence, and is arguably the most intrinsically theological of all three monotheistic faiths—theology is virtually at the heart of both scripture and worship: the earliest traces of Christian theology are to be found in the Gospels themselves (for example, in the opening lines of John’s Gospel). The New Testament documents aren’t the depositors of a naked, static revelation dropped from heaven; they were written rather in pastoral response to particular faith issues facing the early communities, factoring in the needs and circumstances of their targeted audiences. Scripture, while certainly God-inspired, should never be mistaken for divine revelation in the first place, for the latter is not a text but the person of Jesus Christ, the very icon and wisdom of the Father. Neither are the Gospels a bare chronicle of the life and earthly ministry of Christ; written (among other purposes) as a witness against spurious versions of Christology, they are replete with theology throughout. So is the liturgy, in fact: what else is the Creed recited before the Anaphora as a confession of faith, but a rudimentary 37

St. Isaac the Syrian, Ascetical Homily 65 (66). John-Panteleimon Manoussakis, “On the Flesh of the Word: Incarnational Hermeneutics” (draft paper, available at https://www.academia.edu/8971393/On_the_Flesh_of_the_Word_Incarnational_H ermeneutics_unedited_.

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creedal theology? The theological potential of the Christian faith would peak when the Apologists and especially the Church Fathers, all deeply versed in Greek culture, would attempt to address the challenges of their eras by resorting to Greek categories of thought, as the best available medium for furnishing bold answers to mounting concerns. For as long as history goes on and people inhabit earth, the Christian faith will be called upon to provide fresh answers to problems, new and old. Christianity is neither static, nor a finished project, not by a long shot; it is still and always shall be in the making, forever evolving, provided it stays open to the often unexpected trajectory of the Holy Spirit, who is always way ahead of us, and who ceaselessly refreshes history by creating new social and biological realities, and new forms of grace no less. It is the eschatological nature of Christianity that secures its open-ended character, barring any sense of closure. Several pieces in the Christian narrative are still missing and may never turn up, while others are due in the unspecified future, until the Church’s vessel finally reaches the shore of the eschata— the Kingdom of God, which shall entail many radical, even shocking, reversals of what we nowadays assume to be normal and acceptable. Prophetic discernment of the signs of the times is absolutely essential to Christian witness, demanding in turn the mobilization of a bold, creative theological hermeneutic worthy of the maximalist dogmatics of Orthodox Christianity that challenges conventional wisdom and thought. The core of this creative hermeneutic is the historical intersection of the Uncreated with creation, a juncture producing a lasting ripple effect across the ages that sheds ever fresh light on the mystery of life. Wittgenstein’s ardently dualist metaphysical blueprint, on the other hand, however interesting in its own right, is on opposite ends from Christianity’s incarnational hermeneutic, by not allowing God to touch creation from within, except only in metaphor, at best: The sense of the world [der Sinn der Welt] must lie outside the world … In it no value [keinen Wert] exists … How things are in the world is a matter of complete indifference for what is higher. God does not reveal himself in the world. (Tractatus 6.41, 6.432)

Evidently, as Conor Cunningham suggests, “such a transcendent cannot really make a difference to finite reality and therefore is far removed from the transcendents of active religions, with their myths,

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allegories, and creeds.”39 Here it is important to repeat that our grounds for critiquing Wittgenstein’s assumptions are not strictly theological but metaphysical in the broader sense: the assembled picture spilling off his treatises is unduly reductivist to the detriment of both immanence and transcendence, beginning with his theory of language as an allencompassing a priori. As already stated, the Church Fathers saw language as a conventional, not natural, phenomenon much like Wittgenstein did. But unlike him, they declared its disproportionality from reality at large; for only such an asymmetry40 devoid of separating a prioris preserves the possibility of a real meeting between God and humankind in the flesh. In his commentary on Gregory of Nyssa’s theory of language, Manoussakis draws due attention to this point: Concerning the hermeneutical understanding of language (especially in naming the divine), Gregory had to advance a theory of language that would convincingly avoid the popular (for the Mediterranean world of Late Antiquity) theory of naturalism without reverting to sophistic conventionalism. So far Gregory’s apophaticism could have been that of Wittgenstein’s or Plato’s; neither Wittgenstein nor Plato, however, could have gone beyond maintaining this distinction between a world, about which we can speak, and what lies beyond it or beneath it, that remains unspoken (das Mystische, the epekeina tes ousias, khora). Their thought knows of no chiasmus between the two sides of the ontological wall that could unite them “without confusion or change” and distinguish them “without division or separation.” To speak of such intertwining would require a language of Incarnation.41

Theologians would be well advised to take this last point to heart, as an exhortation to tirelessly incarnate the Gospel in their own cultural milieu. Contrary to the (understandable yet often lazy and unexamined) secular repudiation of them, Christian doctrines, properly understood, are not tightly sealed doors but open windows offering hints of a broader than human reality that needs to be hermeneutically unpacked, continuously. In 39 Conor Cunningham, “Wittgenstein After Theology,” in Radical Orthodoxy, eds John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock and Graham Ward (London & New York: Routledge, 1999), 86. 40 It is an intriguing thought that, perhaps, an analogue could be established between the aforementioned asymmetry and the asymmetric Christology of Cyril of Alexandria, in the sense that a full-fledged human hypostasis in the person of Christ would lead us back to Nestorius’ model of two parallel Christs, forever separated by their respective a prioris. 41 John Panteleimon Manoussakis, God after Metaphysics: A Theological Aesthetic (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2007), 96, 100.

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view of this exegetical exercise, neither silence (as recommended in early Wittgenstein) nor fideism (attributed, rightly or wrongly, to his later phase) is helpful. Fideism, in particular, is disastrous because it ossifies theological propositions and cuts them off from their much needed “crash test” against physical, biological, and social reality. This kind of test should be instigated by theology itself, whose real purpose must not be apologetics but its self-criticism and ceaseless exposure to new questions and problems.

Conclusion Wittgenstein’s insights stand as a watershed in contemporary philosophy of language, with deep and lasting repercussions for a number of kin disciplines, such as the philosophies of religion and mind, among others. Their popularity and influence are well justified, for they compelled us to review and reconsider long-held beliefs concerning linguistic reference, meaning, and the conceptual validity of religious claims. For all the immense profit that theologians can draw from a systematic perusal of Wittgenstein’s linguistic analysis, however, we believe that the metaphysical undercurrents irrigating his vision must be dismantled and critically assessed against the backdrop of Christianity’s “incarnational hermeneutic” and apophaticism, whose joint accomplishment is the liberation of ontology from epistemology—the reverse of what several strands in modern philosophy have sought to ordain, beginning with Kant and moving all the way to contemporary neonominalism, including the neo-pragmatists and Wittgenstein himself. When taken at face value, Wittgenstein’s tenets force a false polarity down our throats, imperviously suggesting that we can choose solely between reverential silence and pious nonsense. Theology is indeed often replete with nonsense and will always be subject to critiques targeting the soundness of its claims. But discourse about God is not intrinsically and a priori nonsensical on the grounds set by Wittgenstein. The problem with Wittgenstein (and part of his irresistible charm) is that his brilliant insights convey a half-truth: as far as Christian theology is concerned, the alluded to, missing part of his legendary Tractatus, the one he felt could only be authored by “what is higher,” has already been scripted; for “the higher” became historically manifest in the flesh, thereafter mandating His witness to the world—verbal as well as pictorial.

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References Barth, Karl. The Epistle to the Romans. Translated by Edwyn C. Hoskyns. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1968. Begzos, Marios P. “Apophaticism in the Theology of the Eastern Church: The Modern Critical Function of a Traditional Theory.” The Greek Orthodox Theological Review 4 (1996): 327-57. O’ Connor, Flannery. Three by Flannery O’ Connor. New York: Signet Classics, 1986. Cunningham, Conor. “Wittgenstein after Theology.” In Radical Orthodoxy, edited by John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock, and Graham Ward. London & New York: Routledge, 1999. Dancy, Jonathan. Introduction to Contemporary Epistemology. Oxford: Blackwell, 1985. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. —. “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials.” In Derrida and Negative Theology, edited by Harold Coward & Toby Foshay, 73-142. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 1992. George, Alexander. “On Washing the Fur without Wetting It: Quine, Carnap and Analycity.” Mind 433 (2000): 1-24. Heidegger, Martin. Basic Writings. Edited by David Farell Krell. New York: Harper & Row, 1977. Joy, Morny. “Conclusion: Divine Reservations.” In Derrida and Negative Theology, edited by Harold Coward & Toby Foshay, 255-82. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 1992. Kant, Immanuel. The Critique of Pure Reason, edited by Vasilis Politis. London and Vermont: Everyman, 1996. —. Lectures on Ethics. Translated by Louis Infield. New York: Harper and Row, 1963. Koethe, John. The Continuity of Wittgenstein’s Thought. Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, 1996. Manoussakis, John Panteleimon. God after Metaphysics: A Theological Aesthetic. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2007. —. “On the Flesh of the Word: Incarnational Hermeneutics.” Unedited paper, https://www.academia.edu/8971393/On_the_Flesh_of_the_Word_Inca rnational_Hermeneutics_unedited_.

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Marsonet, Michel. “Linguistic Idealism in Analytic Philosophy of the Twentieth Century.” In Current Issues in Idealism, edited by Paul Coates & Daniel D. Hutto. Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1996. Monk, Ray. Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius. London: Penguin, 1991. Nagel, Thomas. The View from Nowhere. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Palamas, Gregory. “The Synodal Tome” (1351). In The Dogmatic and Symbolic Monuments of the Orthodox Catholic Church Vol. I, in Greek, edited by Ioannis Karmiris. Athens: 1960. Putnam, Hilary. Representation and Reality. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1988. —. Words & Life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996. Quine, Willard. Theories and Things. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981. —. Word and Object. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1960. —. Ontological Relativity and Other Essays. New York: Columbia University Press, 1969. Romanos, George. Quine and Analytic Philosophy: The Language of Language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983. Rorty, Richard. Philosophy and Social Hope. London: Penguin, 1999. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Émile or On Education. Translated by Alan Bloom. New York: Basic Books, 1979. Sagan, Carl. Contact. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985. Sellars, Willfrid. Science, Perception and Reality. Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview, 1991. Ventis, Haralambos. “The Eloquent Sounds of Silence: Contrasting Intimations of the Ineffable.” ĬǼȅȁȅīǿǹ 3 (2009): 123-47. Ware, Bishop Kallistos. “The Transfiguration of the Body.” In Sacrament & Image: Essays in the Christian Understanding of Man, edited by Arthur M. Allchin. London: The Fellowship of St. Alban and St. Sergius, 1967. Wolterstorff, Nicholas. “Realism versus Anti-Realism: How to Feel at Home in the World.” In Realism: Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association, Vol. 59, edited by Daniel O. Dahlstrom. Washington, D.C.: American Catholic Philosophical Association, 1984. Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. Orlando: 1st Harvest edition, 2010.

CHAPTER SIX ǻǿ-ǼȃȃȅǾȂǹȉȍȈǿȈ, OR INTER-ȂEANINGFULNESS: RE-READING WITTGENSTEIN THROUGH GREGORY PALAMAS’ AND THOMAS AQUINAS’ READINGS OF ARISTOTLE NICHOLAS LOUDOVIKOS

It is undoubtedly true that, as he himself repeatedly asserted, Wittgenstein never read Aristotle. And it was also of course impossible for him to have read any Palamite text, since, first of all, he was unable to read Greek. However, it seems that there exist some fascinating proximities between the way the so-called second Wittgenstein understood the intersubjective constitution of meaning, and the Palamite understanding of the Aristotelian concept of energy in Metaphysics ȁ. It is also important to compare this reading with Thomas Aquinas’ assimilation of the same text, and search for the consequences of such readings for modern thought.

I Let us start our investigation from Palamas. As I have claimed elsewhere in some extension,1 in order to explain the Palamite definition of essence-energies distinction better, we must start with his initial 1

See my “Striving for Participation: Palamite Analogy as Dialogical Syn-energy and Thomist Analogy as Emanational Similitude,” in Divine Essence and Divine Energies. Ecumenical Reflections on the Presence of God in Eastern Orthodoxy, ed. Constantinos Athanasopoulos and Christoph Schneider (Cambridge: James Clarke & Co, 2013), 122-148.

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endorsement of the Patristic distinction between essence and will in God. Gregory starts here from Justin the Martyr and continues through Cyril of Alexandria, Athanasius the Great and Maximus the Confessor to John Damascene.2 Thus for Palamas “will is the energy of nature”3 for God, as well as for man. Gregory here consciously draws on Patristic sources. A whole series of Greek Patristic texts passes through his work, starting with the Cappadocians, along with Athanasius, Cyril, Dionysius the Areopagite, Maximus and John Damascene, and ending with the Fifth and Sixth Ecumenical Councils,4 postulating the distinction between uncreated essence and uncreated energies, and defining the latter as the multiple “names” of God (Basil), or “processions” (Dionysius), or “participations” (Dionysius and Maximus), or as “divinity” (Gregory of Nyssa, Anastasius of Sinai), or as the uncreated “things around God” (Maximus and Palamas), or as “natural symbols” of God, i.e. of the same uncreated nature with God (Palamas with reference to Maximus),5 or as “continual and eternal glory” (John Damascene),6 or as “philanthropy and providence and goodness of God” (Palamas with reference to Gregory of Nyssa),7 or as “wisdom and power and art” of God (Basil),8 or, finally, as the “divine logoi of things” (reference to Maximus again).9 Thus for the Hesychast saint, “if there is no difference between divine essence and divine energy, then giving birth [to the Son] or spirating [the Spirit] is no different from creating.”10 That means that for Palamas, following the Greek Patristic tradition, it is impossible to establish a real distinction between God and the world, as well as a deep connection between them, without the concept of divine energies. In Palamas’ vocabulary, however, this distinction does not compromise either the 2

Gregory Palamas, Against Acindynus, 1, 4, 10; 1, 7, 15-16; 2, 20, 97-98. Against Acindynus comprises vol. 3 of Gregory Palamas, Syngrammata, ed. Panagiotis Chrestou (5 vols., Thessaloniki: Kyromanos, 1966-92). My references to Gregory Palamas’ writings derive from Panagiotis Christou’s Syngrammata edition, but the reader could also consult Jean-Paul Migne’s Patrologia Graeca edition: Gregorii Palamae Opera Omnia, ed. Jean-Paul Migne, Patrologiae Cursus Completus— Series Graeca vols. 150 & 151 (Paris: Migne, 1865). 3 Palamas, To Dionysius, 8. All the translations of Palamite texts are mine. 4 Palamas, Against Acindynus, 2, 10, 37-53. 5 Palamas, Against Acindynus, 4, 5, 7-9. 6 Palamas, Against Acindynus, 2, 16, 73. 7 Palamas, Against Acindynus, 4, 9, 21. 8 Palamas, Theophanes, 9. 9 Palamas, Triads, 3, 2, 24. 10 Palamas, 150 Chapters, 97-98.

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divine unity or the divine simplicity, as it only means that, paradoxically, divinity is not exhaustively expressed in its communion with creation, although it is divinity in its totality that comes in communion with beings or, in other words, this distinction means that God is always more than his essential expressions. Furthermore, as we will later see, created beings do not participate in God by nature, but through their own created energies. However, this does not mean that energies are ontologically different from essence. On the contrary, there exists a fundamental ontological identity between essence and energies. For Gregory, When you hear the fathers calling the divine essence non-participated in [ਕȝȑșİțIJȠȞ], think that they mean that essence as it is in itself, without expressing itself to the world. When you hear them calling it participated in [ȝİșİțIJȒȞ] think that they thus mean the procession and the expression and the energy, which pre-exists in God (…) But if you think that, through this energy, it is the very divine essence that expresses itself, even not thoroughly, you are not out of the terms of piety.11

Thus, Palamas asserts that “it is possible to use the name of divine essence even for the energies,” and “it is impossible to consider energies as sorts of natures or beings different from the essence.”12 Furthermore, Palamas claims, God in his wholeness of divinity is present in each one of the energies and, consequently, anyone who participates in any of these energies participates truly in God as he is,13 since in each energy “there is God in his wholeness being present in his creatures, imparting himself to them and absolutely participated in, according to the image of the sunbeam, in a little part of which we can see the sun in its wholeness.”14 The final texture of the doctrine of energies is Christological. In his treatises Against Acindynus, Palamas refers explicitly to St John Chrysostom’s teaching on the fact that Christ’s possession of the Spirit does not mean anything different than the acquisition of the fullness of divine energies in his human nature.15 For Palamas, this goes in parallel with St. Cyril’s position that, through the hypostatic union, Christ gives his human nature all the energies of his divine nature,16 possessed by him 11

Palamas, Theophanes, 17. Palamas, Against Acindynus, 2, 17, 86; 2, 14, 63; 3, 13, 42. 13 Palamas, Against Acindynus, 5, 27, 114. 14 Palamas, Against Acindynus, 5, 26, 110. 15 Palamas, Against Acindynus, 3, 7, 17. 16 Palamas, Against Acindynus, 3, 5, 11. 12

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in common with the Father and the Spirit. This assertion is repeated in the Palamite oeuvre, thus establishing a Christology of the energies,17 as he understands the Christ-event as the very foundation of his ultimate understanding of energies as dialogical events: in Christ we do not have a confusion of natures but a hypostatic union through the perfect perichoresis of the two natures, through the complete dialogue of created and uncreated energies in him. Christ’s theandric energy is nothing other than a dialogical syn-energy of his two natures through their respective energies that make them perfectly co-exist and collaborate. In other words, while we can affirm that every energy comes from the Father, through the Son, by the Spirit, after the Incarnation, energies as donations of the Spirit to created nature are received through a dialogical syn-energy of Christ’s two natures in his unique hypostasis. It is thus crystal-clear that, for Palamas, the energies are not “essences and hypostases around God.”18 This is why Palamas insists, in many passages, that the energies are not enhypostatic, as only the three Persons of the Trinity are.19 There is only one sense in which the energies can be called enhypostatic, but not self-hypostatic: “they are called so, because the Spirit infuses the energy into another person’s hypostasis, where it can be seen,”20 or, in another understanding “because the energy remains forever in the beings where it is sent.”21 This stresses the permanently personal/dialogical/relational/participational character of the energies, something that we will discuss below.

II It is perhaps here that the discussion of Aristotle’s Metaphysics ȁ can start. The question which we are going to deal with is whether the prime mover forms only a transcendental pure actuality/final cause of creation, or both this actuality and also the efficient cause of creation. There exists an important discussion between experts concerning this problem. K. Oehler, S. Broadie, R. Brague, A. Kosman, E. Berti, are perhaps the most important between them, and even more, in my view, the last two of them, though my interpretation goes a little further, as will become apparent

17

See, for example, Palamas’ To Athanasius of Cyzicus. Palamas, Against Acindynus, 1, 7, 30. 19 Palamas, Against Acindynus, 1, 8, 22; 3, 13, 48. 20 Palamas, Triads, 3, 1, 9. 21 Palamas, Dialogue Between Orthodox and Varlaamite, 26. 18

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below. Thus for Kosman,22 the very notion of circular movement within the prime mover implies energy ad extra, while, at the very same moment, the Prime mover, precisely because of this internal circularity, can be conceived as “unmoving.” For Berti,23 the prime mover is also efficient cause, precisely because as an actus purus it can act ad extra in a perfect way. It seems that in the Greek East, concerning the question put in the first lines of the previous paragraph, the latter option is the case. Forming a line of thought which, concerning its philosophical part, also contains Iamblichus and Proclus, and, concerning its theological dimension, is articulated through the work of Basil the Great, Gregory of Nyssa, Dionysius the Areopagite, John Damascene, as this series of authors is referred by Palamas, in whose writings all this line of thought culminates. The passage that was read in such a way was initially, of course, Metaphysics 1071b.24 According to this text, “if there is something which is capable of moving things or acting on them, but is not actually doing so, there will not necessarily be movement; for that which has a potency need not exercise it,” and so we gain nothing concerning creation “unless there is to be in them (i.e. the Forms) some principle which can cause change.” Thus “there must, then, be such a principle, whose very essence is actuality. Further, then, these substances must be without matter; for they must be eternal, if anything is eternal. Therefore they must be actuality,” so that the prime mover “must, then, act in one way in virtue of itself, and in another in virtue of something else.” In this way, we clearly see that actuality in this text is twofold: it is the inner actuality/energy of the prime mover, and its creative actuality/energy ad extra: “For how will there be movement, if there is no actually existing cause?” Internally fulfilled existence becomes the efficient cause and energetic mover of creation (chapter 6 of Metaphysics):

22 Aryeh Kosman, “Aristotle’s Prime Mover,” in Self-Motion. From Aristotle to Newton, ed. Marie-Louise Gill and James G. Lennox (Princeton University Press, 1995), 135-53. 23 Enrico Berti, “Unmoved Mover(s) as Efficient Cause(s) in Metaphysics ȁ 6,” In Aristotle's Metaphysics Lamda: Symposium Aristotelicum, ed. Michael Fede and David Charles (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 181-206. 24 Book 12, chapter 6, in W.D. Ross’ translation.

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Chapter Six Therefore the first heaven must be eternal. There is therefore also something which moves it. And since that which moves and is moved is intermediate, there is something which moves without being moved, being eternal, substance, and actuality. And the object of desire and the object of thought move in this way; they move without being moved. The primary objects of desire and of thought are the same. For the apparent good is the object of appetite, and the real good is the primary object of rational wish.

The way this unmoving mover moves beings is thus already made apparent. Even clearer (chapter 6): That a final cause may exist among unchangeable entities is shown by the distinction of its meanings. For the final cause is (a) some being for whose good an action is done, and (b) something at which the action aims; and of these the latter exists among unchangeable entities though the former does not. The final cause, then, produces motion as being loved, but all other things move by being moved. Now if something is moved it is capable of being otherwise than as it is. Therefore if its actuality is the primary form of spatial motion, then in so far as it is subject to change, in this respect it is capable of being otherwise,-in place, even if not in substance. But since there is something which moves while itself unmoved, existing actually, this can in no way be otherwise than as it is.

Two other elements are thus added: that the final form becomes efficient cause through “being loved,” and that its external energy produces changeable beings. There is no textual witness that this “love” causing the world is reciprocal, but the unmoving mover, since he is mind, has life as his energy and this excellent life is imparted to beings: And life also belongs to God; for the actuality of thought is life, and God is that actuality; and God’s self-dependent actuality is life most good and eternal. We say therefore that God is a living being, eternal, most good, so that life and duration continuous and eternal belong to God; for this is God.

This life is ȞȩȘıȚȢ ȞȠȒıİȦȢ ȞȩȘıȚȢ (“thinking as a thinking on thinking,” in Ross’ perhaps not accurate translation, since the prime mover in this text seems not to think on thinking, but on himself as thinking). As it is further explained (chapter 9): But evidently knowledge and perception and opinion and understanding have always something else as their object, and themselves only by the way. Further, if thinking and being thought of are different, in respect of which does goodness belong to thought? For to be an act of thinking and to be an object of thought are not the same thing. We answer that in some cases the knowledge is the object. In the productive sciences it is the

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substance or essence of the object, matter omitted, and in the theoretical sciences the definition or the act of thinking is the object. Since, then, thought and the object of thought are not different in the case of things that have not matter, the divine thought and its object will be the same, i.e. the thinking will be one with the object of its thought.

However, it is impossible to think of knowledge, or perception, or opinion, or understanding, without at the very same moment thinking of the subject who knows, or understands etc., whether this subject is identified with the object or not. So the prime mover’s internal energy of thinking that realizes itself as life, through thinking on himself-as-thinking, moves beings, thus imparting this energy/life/thinking outside him, turning towards the world in an intentional way: that was, briefly, the way Palamas, following the Greek Patristic line of thought, understood Aristotle. The problem of dialogical reciprocity or syn-energy between God and creation (along with that of Providence) remains of course unsolved by the Greek philosopher. There also exist some other difficult problems here, as it is pointed out by some Aristotelian scholars. I do not simply mean the aforementioned problem of the existence of Providence here—it is true that only Franz Brentano was so bold as to claim such a position, which was convincingly refuted by Zeller and others—but also the problem of whether God possesses an objective knowledge of the world or not, according to Metaphysics. Starting from Hegel, this problem caused a great variety of answers, most important of which is perhaps that of Kosman,25 for whom the concept of ȞȩȘıȚȢ ȞȠȒıİȦȢ does not simply mean a self-thinking self-consciousness, but also a need for intentional reference ad extra. However, as I think, this reference, first, is not simply an act of—an objective or not objective—understanding, but an act of automatic radiation and imparting of life and, second, this reference seems to be only an internal requirement of Aristotle’s theo-logic, just in order for God’s self-thinking/acting to have an “audience,” a second “pole,” in order for it not to be arbitrary or irrational—and not an intentional relationship (reciprocal or not) with beings existing outside him. This is the collapsing point of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, and it is precisely here that Palamas can advance much further.

25

Aryeh Kosman. “Metaphysics ȁ9: Divine Thought,” in Aristotle's Metaphysics Lamda, 307-326.

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III For Palamas, the saints unite with God, “they become one with him.” If this happens “by essence,” it would result in Monophysitism (a confusion of created and uncreated essences); if this happens “by hypostasis,” it would result in Sabellianism (one essence in many hypostases). The only possibility that is left is to achieve union “by energy.”26 The term that is used to describe this union is ਕȞȐțȡĮıȚȢ,27 a term not easily translatable into English—we might say commixture, if we take into account that the meaning of the Greek word is that the elements commixed remain unconfused, although they indwell in each other; Palamas understands the deifying participation precisely as ਕȞȐțȡĮıȚȢ. This is the existential content of the baptismal ȣੂȠșİıȓĮ (adoption) of man, in Christ, through the Spirit, when this adoption is consciously elaborated through grace. The body and the soul in its absolute unity of mind, desire, and affectivity, become co-eternal in this transforming psychosomatic vision of the uncreated light,28 which is what we finally call union with God, a state where “man becomes light, and sees through light, and sees himself through light, and whatever he sees is also light,” or, in other words, a state where the eschatological status of human nature to God seems to start here and now, in order to be accomplished in the end times. This also changes our concept of historical becoming, which can thus become a becoming of creating common meaningfulness. But the most important thing concerning the Palamite concept of deification, as a participational ਕȞȐțȡĮıȚȢ/ascent to God through the divine energies manifested in Christ by the Spirit, is its absolutely relational/koinonetic character, beyond any monological Aristotelian/ Neoplatonic divine intentionality. The energies themselves are “relational and participational,”29 i.e. dialogical as analogical, for two reasons that are absolutely connected to one another. First because, for Palamas, following Dionysius and Maximus, the divine processions/participations/logoi as expressions of the divine loving will are deeply connected with the concept of analogy. This is a term which signifies a deep dialogue of synergy, or better syn-energy, since analogy for the above authors refers not to a similitude of essences but to 26

Palamas, Against Acindynus, 3, 14, 51. Palamas, Against Acindynus, 2, 9, 28; 5, 4, 11. 28 Palamas, Against Acindynus, 2, 3, 50. 29 Palamas, Against Acindynus, 1, 3, 6. 27

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an analogous action between different agents in order for them to achieve union.30 Thus, divine energy, as a participable expression of divine will, is dialogical, in the sense that it calls for an energetic/active response on the part of its recipients. This is the first way of understanding energies as dialogical/syn-energetic events of analogical participation, or, in our terms here, as events of creating common meaningfulness, or, much better, intermeaningfulness, between man and God. What I want to initially signify through the term inter-meaningfulness (which is the English translation, perhaps inaccurate, of the Greek term įȚ-‫݋‬ȞȞȠȘȝȐIJȦıȚȢ that I have in my mind) is precisely this syn-energetic process of making meaning, both created and uncreated, by God and man together, for the sake, initially, of each man’s personal life; on the other hand, it is also God’s offering to accept meaning by man, and become Abraham’s and Isaac’s and Jacob’s God, i.e. a God who respects and perpetuates human otherness without dissolving or absorbing it. The second way of understanding energies, and through them participation, as an analogical/dialogical syn-energy of inter- meaningfulness, is connected to the first. This again has to do with their relational character, as this is ultimately expressed in the ecclesial/koinonetic core of the Palamite understanding of participation. If energy exists only as an analogical syn-energy, this syn-energy does not have to do only with the vertical relation with God, but also with the horizontal relation of what we can call inter-meaningfulness between creatures. Gregory precludes any possibility of a merely intellectual analogical elevation/meaningfulness to God, as this is, for him, only imaginary. Any real elevation to God has to happen by the grace/energy of the Holy Spirit, in Christ, only as a promotion of reciprocal and not individual meaningfulness. And this means, in Palamas’ words, that a human person is to bring with him “every kind of creature, as he himself participates in everything and is also able to participate in the one who lies above everything, in order for the icon (image) of God to be completed.”31 In this remarkable passage, horizontal participation becomes an absolute prerequisite for the vertical. In metaphysical terms, that means that it is only in the process of the realization of the ecclesial dialogical/analogical synergetic communion/meaningfulness, that elevation to God can be achieved. There is no possibility of any private or solipsistic language or meaning before God, and furthermore 30

See chapt. 6, 3 of my Eucharistic Ontology: Maximus the Confessor’s Eschatological Ontology of Being as Dialogical Reciprocity (Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Press, 2010). 31 Palamas, Against Acindynus, 7, 11, 36.

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there is no possibility of any “individual” vision of uncreated light, or participation in the divine energies, i.e. of participation in any process of inter-meaningfulness with God, without progressing at the very same time in a consubstantial, dialogical perichoresis/inter-meaningfulness of all other beings in me. In other words, the absolute way for the vision of God is the dialogical realization of an authentic ecclesial communion, as intermeaningfulness, for example, through reciprocal prayer, friendship and Eucharistic commemoration. If the others cannot find their meaning in me, through the ways just mentioned, it is impossible for me “to see the divine light,” i.e. the final divine meaning-of-becoming-in-communion of all things in the Spirit, and enter into union with God. In order to become a syn-energy/dialogue/inter-meaningfuless with God, my action has to happen as a syn-energy/dialogue/inter-meaningfulness with the other, and with “every kind of creature.” This is why for Palamas, as we read in his Confession (§7), the Eucharist, which is also called by him communion and synaxis (gathering) of all creatures, is placed above any ecclesial activity, since it is precisely in the Eucharist where this double analogy of this inter-meaningfulness/dialogical syn-energy is accomplished.

IV But we can now introduce Wittgenstein to our discussion. In his second great philosophical work, the Philosophical Investigations,32 Wittgenstein tries to emerge from his logical atomism, from the solipsism which he essentially accepts in the Tractatus,33 creating a social phenomenology, one could say, of language.34 Thus in the Tractatus solipsism is essentially accepted with the correction that here language does not say the world but shows it via its limits, and the metaphysical subject is regarded as the limit of the world, a non-extended limit between beings and Being, through language, in such a way that solipsism is identified with a pure realism. However, in the Philosophical Investigations “private language” and any kind of solipsism are condemned. The concept 32

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations [PI], trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1953). 33 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and Brian F. McGuinness (London and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961). 34 See also the chapter entitled “From the Daydreams of a Private Religious Language to its Ecclesiology: Wittgenstein and Maximus the Confessor” in my forthcoming book Church in the Making: An Apophatic Ecclesiology of Consubstantiality (New York: St Vladimir’s Press, 2016), where the relevant bibliography is discussed.

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of the “language-game” is introduced,35 with common linguistic rules and criteria of meaning, which make common linguistic proposals purely empirical, i.e. non-“philosophical,” (PI 54), exercising a regulative pressure within the framework of specific “forms of life.” (PI 85). These dictate specific common linguistic usages and justify them absolutely, precisely within the set boundaries of their common usage. Being or the Good continue to remain inaccessible, hidden like hints in the surface grammar of the common language-games (PI 217-41), whereas philosophy continues to be unable to draw metaphysical conclusions apart from “affirming only that which all accept.” It is, I think, very interesting that although Wittgenstein appears to reveal the social character of language/meaning, he continues to deny it any access to the absolute. He is unable to discern any trace of ontology in this movement towards inter-meaningfulness (to use the term we have coined here) and consequently attribute to it an ontological base and function. Thus, this sort of apophaticism is in danger of working to the detriment of ontology. The radical criticism, at any rate, of private language in the Investigations is especially significant because it deals a fatal blow to solipsism and the foundations of a theory of language that would have served precisely as an instrument of an atomistic, metaphysical, ecstatic possession of meaningfulness on the part of the subject. Defining such a language as “those sounds that all the others do not understand although I appear to understand them,” (PI 269), Wittgenstein regards the private language, and, subsequently the private meaningfulness, as the greatest enemy of the common “forms of life,” which, as common social realities, constitute the common truth of human life. In our terms here, this double participational analogy of this intermeaningfulness seems to be close to what the second Wittgenstein wanted to signify by replacing any remnant of philosophical metaphysics with a deeper intersubjectivity-in-the-making, as I would like to call it, or as I already called it elsewhere, “interlinguality,”36 and by replacing metaphysical claiming with paying attention to everyday conditions where common meaning is created, in mutual understanding and responsibility, 35

See Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 259-68 (7a). The reader is once more directed to the chapter entitled “From the Daydreams of a Private Religious Language to its Ecclesiology: Wittgenstein and Maximus the Confessor” in my forthcoming Church in the Making. 36

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beyond any ecstatic solipsism.37 If thus the mature Wittgenstein would like to speak of Christian theology, his only concern would be the hidden presuppositions of doing theology, the practical (i.e. ascetic) everyday ways of creating common theological meaning, as a syn-energetic intersubjectivity-in-the-making, by means of an analogical, reciprocally achieved and verified, inter-meaningfulness. Which would be close, paradoxically, to what Palamas taught about the practical and applied (ascetic, precisely in the sense of an anti-narcissistic self-denial) way the personal energies, divine and human, converge into a reciprocal synenergetic meaning/life in Christ. Where both human self and divine being, along with human beings between them and between them and creation unite, actively and not passively, without confusion. Of course, Palamas clearly goes much further in this way and, beyond Wittgenstein, he refounds a (now non-metaphysical) ontology.

V And now let us say a few words on Thomas’ reading of Aristotle, in order to conclude this paper. For the reader of Quaestiones Disputatae de Potentia Dei38 it is clear that, on the one hand, Thomas strives to avoid the dark, narcissistic aspect of an overflowing divinity, which produces the universe in a more or less unconscious way, but, on the other hand, he seems to feel totally obliged to somehow combine the Biblical Creator with the Aristotelian Prime Mover. Thus the divine operation does not have any real external relationship with what it creates—this relationship only exists in the divine mind. This is another way for Thomas to express his Aristotelian conviction of Sententiae I, 35, 2, that since an object can be an object of knowledge by a subject in a twofold way, either in connection with the subject’s very being or simply as it is in itself, God knows everything only in the former way. Since his action is his substance, to return to our first text (q. 7, 10), everything that is included in this substance is totally alien to created realities. Thus it is impossible to claim that God receives any additional good through the fact that he produces beings—his action is pure generosity, continues Thomas, referring to Avicenna. Finally, “it is impossible for him [i.e. God] to be the subject of a real relation with a creature, even if a creature is the subject of 37 See Miltos Theodossiou, The Philosophy of Wittgenstein. The Turn in its Interpretation and its Evaluation, in Greek (Athens: Eurasia, 2007), 337. 38 Thomas Aquinas, Quaestiones Disputatae de Potentia Dei—On the Power of God, trans. by the English Dominican Fathers (Westminster, Maryland: The Newman Press, 1952), question 3, article 3.

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a relation of which he is the end, in the way an effect is bound to its cause.” This is quite the opposite of what Palamas seems to mean when he claims that “the energy remains forever in the beings where it is sent” (my emphasis), as we saw above. If the divine energy remains as it is, and forever where it is sent, that means that here a permanent reciprocal human-divine process of real and authentic inter-meaningfulness is possible. But in Thomas’ case, and in the terms that we have already created, we rather have (instead of inter-meaningfulness) a dictated meaningfulness on the part of God. And in response, a human, created meaningfulness, i.e. divine meaningfulness changed into a subjective, human event (supernatural albeit not clearly uncreated) precisely when it reaches man. This is implied by the fact that beatitude, while it is uncreated on the part of God, is decisively created on the part of man. In Thomas’ words (Sententiae IV, 49, quest. 2, 5, 3): “The created intellect does not see the divine essence according to the mode of this essence, but according to its [the created intellect’s] proper mode, which is finite.” When these views were secularized, some centuries later, God became the Lacanian false Other of ideology, or the Feuerbachean fantasy of God in human mind, a view which derives precisely from the conviction that the Infinite is simply a function or projection of human intellect. I do not claim that we cannot find a theory of participation in Thomas, but it seems that this theory also suffers from a strong philosophical/ metaphysical influence, even while it tries to get rid of it. Thomas’ reading of Aristotle is of course decisively Christian, but he nonetheless seems at times to need a Patristic complement, since he tends to exhaustively overstress God’s unity, something which is not wrong, but becomes controversial when it happens at the expense of God’s real and intentional energetic involvement in creation. If it is true, on the other hand, that as I have claimed elsewhere,39 when these views were secularized the modern self-referring subject appeared, then it is easy to think that Wittgenstein had precisely this sort of subject in his mind, along with this subject’s imaginary way of constructing (private) language and metaphysical meaning, when he made his decisive anti-metaphysical turn toward what I 39

See also my article “Consubstantial Selves; a Discussion between Orthodox Theology, Existential Psychology, Heinz Kohut, and Jean-Luc Marion,” in Theology of Personhood: Ancient, Medieval and Modern Perspectives, ed. Alexis Torrance (London: Ashgate, forthcoming), and my “Being and Essence Revisited: Reciprocal logoi and energies in Maximus the Confessor and Thomas Aquinas, and the Genesis of the Self-referring Subject,” Revista Portuguesa de la Filosofia 72:1 (2016), forthcoming.

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called inter-subjectivity-in-the-making or what, following Palamas’ understanding of dialogical syn-energy, we can, even better, call reciprocal meaning-creating įȚ-‫݋‬ȞȞȠȘȝȐIJȦıȚȢ/ inter-meaningfulness.

References Aquinas, Thomas. Quaestiones Disputatae de Potentia Dei—On the Power of God. Translated by the English Dominican Fathers. Westminster, Maryland: The Newman Press, 1952. Berti, Enrico. “Unmoved Mover(s) as Efficient Cause(s) in Metaphysics ȁ 6.” In Aristotle's Metaphysics Lamda: Symposium Aristotelicum, edited by Michael Fede and David Charles, 181-206. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000. Kosman, Aryeh. “Aristotle’s Prime Mover.” In Self-Motion. From Aristotle to Newton, edited by Marie-Louise Gill and James G. Lennox, 135-153. Princeton University Press, 1995. Kosman, Aryeh. “Metaphysics ȁ9: Divine Thought” In Aristotle's Metaphysics Lamda: Symposium Aristotelicum, edited by Michael Fede and David Charles, 307-326. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000. Loudovikos, Nicholas. “Striving for Participation: Palamite Analogy as Dialogical Syn-energy and Thomist Analogy as Emanational Similitude.” In Divine Essence and Divine Energies. Ecumenical Reflections on the Presence of God in Eastern Orthodoxy, edited by Constantinos Athanasopoulos and Christoph Schneider, 122-148. Cambridge: James Clarke & Co, 2013. —. Eucharistic Ontology: Maximus the Confessor’s Eschatological Ontology of Being as Dialogical Reciprocity. Translated by Elizabeth Theokritoff. Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Press, 2010. —. Church in the Making: An Apophatic Ecclesiology of Consubstantiality. New York: St Vladimir’s Press, forthcoming. —. “Consubstantial Selves; a Discussion between Orthodox Theology, Existential Psychology, Heinz Kohut, and Jean-Luc Marion.” In Theology of Personhood: Ancient, Medieval and Modern Perspectives, edited by Alexis Torrance. London: Ashgate, forthcoming. —. “Being and Essence Revisited: Reciprocal logoi and energies in Maximus the Confessor and Thomas Aquinas, and the Genesis of the Self-referring Subject.” Revista Portuguesa de la Filosofia 72:1 (2016), forthcoming. Palamas, Gregory. Gregorii Palamae, Thessaloniciensis Archiepiscopi, Opera Omnia Theologica, Homiletica, Hagiographica, Polemica,

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Ascetica. Edited by Jean-Paul Migne. Patrologiae Cursus Completus. Series Graeca 150 & 151. Paris: Migne, 1865. —. Syngrammata, 5 volumes. Edited by Panagiotis Chrestou. Thessaloniki: Kyromanos, 1966-92. Theodossiou, Miltos. Ǿ ijȚȜȠıȠijȓĮ IJȠȣ Wittgenstein. Ǿ ıIJȡȠijȒ ıIJȘȞ İȡȝȘȞİȓĮ IJȘȢ țĮȚ Ș ĮʌȠIJȓȝȘıȒ IJȘȢ, in Greek [The Philosophy of Wittgenstein. The Turn in its Interpretation and its Evaluation]. Athens: Eurasia, 2007. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. [PI] Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell, 1953. —. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. [TLP] Translated by D. F. Pears and Brian F. McGuinness. London and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961.

CHAPTER SEVEN WITTGENSTEIN AND THE LANGUAGE OF RELIGION MICHAEL GRANT

I want to begin by drawing to mind the sculptor Henri GaudierBrzeska, born in October 1891 and killed on the Western Front on 5 June 1915, at the age of twenty-three. Before joining the British Army, Gaudier had lived in London, where he had known Ezra Pound. He lived in conditions of extreme impoverishment, and for his sculpture used what oddments of stone came to hand, such as remnants left over from the monumental tomb carvings supplied by the undertakers of the time. One of his major sculptures, “the Cat,” came from just such a broken and left-over piece of marble. “He was definitely a visionary,” Pound records, “and ‘saw’ both in waking and in sleep.” (Pound places quotes around “saw” to emphasize the word.) He writes of Gaudier in Canto 27: as the sculptor sees the form in the air before he sets hand to mallet, and as he sees the in, and the through, the four sides not the one face to the painter

In “the Cat,” “lifeless air became sinewed,” as Pound has it in Canto 2: Gaudier could see the cat in the contours of a marble fragment, in the same way that he could at once see the horse in a Chinese ideogram he came across for the first time in a Chinese-English dictionary he opened when visiting Pound’s flat in London.1 I emphasize this matter because what Pound called Gaudier’s “vision” is closely related to what Wittgenstein was to consider under the heading of “aspect seeing,” and his discussion of aspect seeing is crucial for a grasp of his way of doing philosophy, what he calls his “method.” Clarification concerning his way of going about 1

See Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (London: Faber, 1975), 250.

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philosophy is indispensable for getting to grips with how he saw the language of religion. In the main, Wittgenstein discusses the seeing of aspects in relation to visual perception, and his interest here, for example in the second part of Philosophical Investigations, is to point out the differences between the concept of seeing and the concept of aspect-seeing, or seeing-as. His famous example of aspect-seeing is that of the duck-rabbit, a figure that seen under one aspect is seen as a rabbit, and seen under a second aspect is seen as a duck. There are, of course, many other examples: the Neckar cube, that flips flops back and forth, so that no sooner has one side appeared as the leading or front edge of the cube than the rear edge comes to the fore, replacing the first one. Seeing of aspects is also evident in how we respond to the expressions on faces, so that one may be struck by a look on someone’s face: “I suddenly saw great deceit in the way he looked at me, he suddenly struck me in that way.” One may suddenly be struck by the resemblance between two faces; “I had never noticed how alike those two are.” Aspect-seeing enters fundamentally into aesthetic judgment also. In any event, it is in relation to the distinction between seeing and seeingas that I wish to clarify a second distinction, that between the concept of describing concepts and the concept of proposing conceptions (the distinction between Begriff and Auffassung). In drawing attention to this latter distinction I should make it clear that I am following Gordon Baker, whose article “the Grammar of Aspects and Aspects of Grammar,” has made, I believe, a fundamental contribution to our understanding of Wittgenstein’s philosophy.2 Wittgenstein’s account of aspect-seeing starts from what seems to be a paradox: when an aspect dawns on me, nothing has changed in what I see, and yet everything looks different. In the shift from duck to rabbit, or viceversa, the figure on the paper does not alter, and yet what I see has altered radically. “I contemplate a face and suddenly I notice its likeness to another. I see that it has not changed; and yet I see it differently” (PI 193).3 “The expression of a change of aspect is the expression of a new perception and at the same time of the perception’s being unchanged” (PI 196). In one sense, what I see is unchanged (the diagram or drawing), while what I see (for example, a rabbit as opposed to a duck) is wholly 2

Gordon Baker, Wittgenstein’s Method: Neglected Aspects (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 279-93. 3 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 193. Hereafter cited in the text as PI.

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different. One might be inclined to say that there is a sense in which the aspect is not there and a sense in which it is very much there. There is “a sense in which to speak of ‘truth’ and ‘falsity’ with respect to it is to miss its point and yet another sense in which seeing it and giving it expression you are truer to the object than if you stick to objective terms—the terms, that is, of what Wittgenstein calls ‘the language-game of reporting,’ or ‘the language-game of information’.”4 It seems clear that one can recognize a closely analogous puzzle in respect of Wittgenstein’s discussion of the grammar of our language. I should perhaps make clear that by “grammar” Wittgenstein does not mean the declension of verbs, nouns and so on, as in what we usually refer to when we speak of the grammar of English or Greek, say. For him, a grammatical investigation, which is what a philosophical investigation essentially involves, is a matter of presenting different ways of seeing the use of our words, that is, the roles our words have in our lives with language. His principal goal in his descriptions of the workings of our language was not to establish any facts of grammar, but to reveal or bring to the attention of willing readers neglected aspects or unnoticed patterns in what we say. His intention is to leave language just as it is. Philosophy, on his conception of it, has no authority to interfere with the actual use of language (PI §124). What he is really after, I want to say, is to reveal aspects of things that are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity; “the problems are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have always known. Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language” (PI §109). “It is of the essence of our investigation that we do not seek to learn anything new by it. We want to understand something that is already in plain view. For this is what we seem in some sense not to understand” (PI §89). What we are concerned with—and by we here is meant Wittgenstein and those philosophers who also seek to practice his methods—is not the essence of language, an essence hidden from us, lying beneath the surface, but with “something that already lies open to view and that becomes surveyable by a rearrangement” (PI §91). The approach Wittgenstein is trying to get us to turn us away from can be characterized in the following way: “The essence is hidden from us”: this is the form our problem assumes [when we look at it from this point of view]. We ask: “What is language?,

4

Avner Baz, “What’s the Point of Seeing Aspects?” Philosophical Investigations 23:2 (2000): 106.

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Chapter Seven What is a proposition?” And the answer to these questions is to be given once for all; and independently of any future experience (PI §92).

What can be said of visual aspect-seeing can also be said of Wittgenstein’s approach to language: nothing is changed, yet everything appears differently. As Baker makes clear, the best way of making good sense of these remarks about Wittgenstein’s method of philosophizing is to recognize the pivotal importance to it of conceptions (Auffasungen), or ways of seeing things in the activity that he calls “describing grammar.” Wittgenstein suggests that philosophical problems are an impression of disorder in our concepts which is manifested in our not being able to find our way about: “A philosophical problem has the form: ‘I don’t know my way about’” (PI §123). Wittgenstein’s remedy is, according to Baker, to seek for what he calls the liberating word (das erlosende Wort) in the form of exhibiting an order which, as if by magic, transforms what seemed chaos into something that is intelligible. He tries to present language in such a way as to make his interlocutor see things in a new way, as though coming to see a particular “physiognomy” in our use of words, rather as one might see a particular face, a particular physiognomy, in a new light, under a new aspect. Success here is not a matter of imparting new information or conveying an opinion, and it is certainly not the construction of a theory. What is now to be grasped is not a discovery, since it was always in plain view, though previously unnoticed. In accepting a new conception, everything stays the same, and yet everything undergoes a metamorphosis. Here are some clarifications offered by Wittgenstein of the logic (or grammar) of purely visual aspect-seeing. 1) When we see something to be red or square, this excludes the possibility of our seeing it to be green or triangular. But when we see a picture as a duck, this does not exclude the possibility of our also seeing it as a rabbit (on another occasion). Aspects do not exclude one another. To acknowledge one way of seeing something does not make a different way of seeing it illegitimate. In this sense, then, aspects can be said to be complementary. They are, so to speak, essentially plural: to speak of one way of seeing something presupposes that there are other ways of seeing it. 2) It is impossible to see a picture simultaneously as a duck and as a rabbit. As Baker insists, following Wittgenstein, visual aspects are in

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essence non-additive. That is, there is no way of combining two ways of seeing something to produce a single more comprehensive way of seeing it. If one sees something as a duck, then this is going to interfere with one’s seeing it as a rabbit. To put this more generally, and with reference to the overall argument, an entrenched way of seeing something is going to make it very difficult, if not impossible, to see something in a new and unfamiliar way. 3) Aspects don’t teach us about the external world, if by “teaching about the external world” we mean giving (objective) information about the external world (PI 874). Wittgenstein says that an aspect is not “a property of the object” (PI 212a). He also says that the criterion for what you see, when seeing in the sense in which aspects are seen, is your representation of what you see. If I say to you that I see a resemblance between two faces, I may be lying to you (for whatever reason) but I cannot be mistaken. That aspects don’t teach us anything about the external world hangs together with another feature, which is that aspectseeing is, in contrast to seeing, in a certain sense voluntary. The aspect is subject to the will. This dependency on the will is not psychological, but grammatical. What makes aspects subject to the will is not that we can see this or that as we wish to (consider a puzzle-picture), but that it makes sense to say: “Now see the figure like this.” It makes sense for me to ask you to see the likeness between two faces. I can ask you to look for it, and give you hints as to how to go about it. The same holds for aesthetic judgments. As with aesthetic insight, an insight which requires the exercise of one’s imagination, no information is acquired in the dawning of an aspect. Nothing is discovered. Hence there is a sense in which aspects are not subject to dispute. They are not open to rational support or to disconfirmation by appeal to the facts. One might say that aspects are cognitively empty. 4) Much aspect-seeing presupposes the mastery of concepts. The dawning of an aspect is, one might say, half thought, half experience. We cannot see something as an X unless we have the concept of being an X. Wittgenstein’s example refers to a triangle, and is as follows: “In the triangle I can now see this as apex, that as base—now this as apex, that as base.—Clearly the words ‘Now I am seeing this as an apex’ cannot so far mean anything to a learner who has only just met the concepts base, apex, and so on.—But I do not mean this as an empirical proposition” (PI 208e). It is only if someone can use, is master of, such and such a technique, here of language, that it makes sense to say that he has had this experience.

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5) An aspect can only be displaced by another aspect. As Baker indicates, seeing-as belongs, as it were, to another dimension than seeing. It is the different aspects of the duck-rabbit that exclude each other. By contrast, no feature of the drawing (nothing to be seen in it) can logically exclude my seeing it as a duck, or a rabbit. Furthermore, nothing but seeing it as something different (a rabbit) can interrupt my seeing it as a duck. 6) There is the possibility of what can be called “aspect-blindness.” An aspect may be invisible to someone, even though what has this aspect is open to view. It may be seen by one person, but be invisible to another. One may think in this connection of someone who is color blind, or tonedeaf, or who lacks a “musical ear.” There is also the case of what Wittgenstein calls “meaning-blindness.” To take an English example, what would you be missing if you did not understand the request to pronounce the word “till” and to mean it as a verb—or if you did not feel that a word lost its meaning and became a mere sound if you repeated it ten times over? (PI 214d) Only someone who sees a particular aspect can ascertain that another is blind to this aspect of what is in plain view, and nobody can establish by himself that he is blind to an aspect (or aspect-blind). I cannot say of myself that I see the duck-rabbit as a duck unless I can also see it as a rabbit. 7) A crucial aspect of the discussion is this: I cannot demonstrate to someone that there is a possibility of seeing a particular aspect of something, of seeing this as that, without getting him actually to see this aspect. 8) There is a question that is likely to arise at this point: why not say that the aspect is purely subjective? Here one might follow Stanley Cavell, who addressed a similar question about “beauty” (and one should note the pertinence of considerations of aesthetic judgment to the understanding of aspect-dawning). If we say that aspect-dawning is subjective, we need still to register our sense that aspects seem to force themselves on us (PI 204g), that the different aspects are out there to be seen, open to view, and that if someone cannot see it then there is something he is blind to. To say “now it’s a duck for me” is not the same thing as saying “now it’s a duck,” and in many cases to say “Well, I can see the resemblance” is not to repeat my original statement but to withdraw it, withdraw its claim. Aspects are not imaginary, or mere creatures of the mind; unlike perceptual experiences, they are, as I have mentioned, subject to the will. For this reason, aspect-

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dawning might be said to be half perception, half imagination. An aspect is, one might say, neither subjective nor objective: the language of subjectivity and objectivity is not quite adequate to the experience of aspect-dawning. 9) Solving a picture puzzle, or engaging in aesthetic appreciation or judgment, may depend on getting someone to see an aspect to which he is now blind. For example, coming to see the significance of Eliot’s use of the fragment and syntactic rupture in The Waste Land may require the reader to change his whole attitude to literature, and to read in a new way. But what would be involved here would be distinctive: it would involve a form of rational discussion without the possibility of proof. This may involve various methods, none of which can be laid down in advance, such as the use of comparison with other writers, of analogy with writers from earlier periods and from Eliot’s contemporaries and immediate predecessors (such as Mallarmé), of getting the reader to listen, to hear, the poem’s language in a particular way. The general heading for all of this might be: suggesting objects for comparison. None of them guarantees success. None carries “the force of argument.” What has been said above about the concept of visual aspect-seeing would seem to hold also for a wider sense of “aspect” or “aspect-seeing” when applied to the idea of conceptions (Auffassung) in philosophy. A conception is a way of conceiving, a way of looking at, concepts. 1) As with visual aspects, no one conception, no one way of seeing or thinking about language in the activity of describing grammar, can claim to exclude another. No one can claim that only his conception is the right one. We can see language on the basis of what Wittgenstein’s commentators often call “the Augustinian picture,” and which Wittgenstein describes in PI §1 thus: “Every word has a meaning. This meaning is correlated with the word. It is the object for which the word stands.” This view does not exclude the possibility of our seeing things differently, for example, the possibility of our looking at language as use. The fact that we acknowledge one conception of meaning does not make a different conception of it illegitimate. On the contrary. To speak of one visual aspect is to presuppose that there are others. So with conceptions: to speak of one conception is to presuppose that there are others. Conceptions, like visual aspects, are essentially plural.

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2) As I noted above, it is impossible to see a picture simultaneously as a duck and as a rabbit. If one sees something as a duck, then this is going to interfere with one’s seeing it as a rabbit. Visual aspects are in essence non-additive. That is, there is no way of combining two ways of seeing something to produce a single more comprehensive way of seeing it. So with conceptions: it is impossible to see thinking simultaneously as an inner accompaniment to speaking and as operating with signs. One can’t add conceptions together, any more than one can add visual aspects together. The result is not a more comprehensive vision of things, but a muddle. This is of major significance for the conduct of philosophy as Wittgenstein practices it. As Baker makes clear, when a philosophical conception becomes entrenched, it affects the whole of one’s way of thinking, and so one’s conduct of philosophy. Wittgenstein sees something of this in the hold that dogma can have over men’s mind. He writes: Dogma is expressed in the form of an assertion, and it is unshakeable, but at the same time any practical opinion can be made to harmonize with it. .... It is not a wall setting limits to what can be believed, but more like a brake which, however, practically serves the same purpose; it’s almost as though someone were trying to attach a weight to your feet to restrict your freedom of movement. This is how dogma becomes irrefutable and beyond the reach of attack. (CV, 28e)

3) Like aspect-seeing, ways of conceiving are in a sense voluntary. Thus it makes sense for Wittgenstein to advise his readers: “try not to think of understanding as a ‘mental process’ at all.—For that is the expression that confuses you” (PI §154); or “don’t say: ‘there must be something in common, or they would not be called games’” (PI §66). Hence, to think of things differently is not to discover something. Or perhaps one should say, that if it is a discovery, it is not the kind of discovery we thought it was. To speak of language as a game, or to use the phrase “language-game” is not to state some hitherto unknown fact about language: it is to propose a new way of speaking, a new comparison or analogy. Wittgenstein puts it this way: “the language-games are set up as objects of comparison which are meant to throw light on the facts of our language by way not only of similarities, but also of dissimilarities” (PI §130). 4) Conceptions are, so to speak, ways of looking at concepts. He says: “We want to establish an order in our knowledge of the use of language: an order with a particular end in view; one out of many possible orders; not the order” (PI §132). This means that, even more clearly than

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is the case with visual aspects, the proposal and acknowledgement of conceptions presupposes the mastery of concepts. 5) A conception can only be displaced by another conception. So, for example, no feature of our actual use of a word (such as “meaning” or “thinking”) can logically exclude my “seeing,” say, meaning as naming on the Augustinian model or thinking as an inner process. It is only if I come to see the concept under another conception that my seeing it in this way can be interrupted. Here is another example, cited by Baker, this time not from Wittgenstein but Friedrich Waismann: someone might be inclined to say that every sentence, every statement, must be made up of parts. That is, if one believes that the individual words in a language name objects, then it will seem that sentences must be made up of a combination of such names; sentences must be composite (PI §1).5 And even in the case where a single word functions as a sentence, it might be maintained that here, too, the information must be conveyed, not by a single symbol alone, but by something which has at least two parts—namely, the single word and the situation in which it is embedded. One might try to refute this by a “counterexample” such as the word “Restaurant” on a sign above the entrance to a building. But the person gripped by this conception might reply, justifiably, that it is not the word alone but the word together with the whole situation in which it is integrated that makes up a sentence.6 Waismann offers various examples whose purpose is to get the person in the grip of such a view to see where it goes wrong. But, clearly, such a conception cannot be refuted by pointing to any fact of the matter, nor does Waismann do so. 6) As with visual aspects, there is the possibility of blindness. Conceptions may be visible to one person, invisible to another. Indeed, conceptions may be visible to one generation or culture, and invisible to another. Thus there can be conception-blindness, as well as aspectblindness: “the aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something—because it is always before one’s eyes.) The real foundations of his enquiry do not strike a man at all. Unless that fact has at some time struck him.—And this means: we fail to be struck by what, once seen, is most striking and powerful” (PI §129). Making such a conception visible 5

This picture derives from Augustine’s picture of the essence of language, addressed by Wittgenstein in §1 of PI. 6 Rom Harré, ed., The Principles of Linguistic Philosophy (London: Macmillan, 1997), 317.

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requires waging war on the habits of a lifetime, and, as Wittgenstein emphasized again and again, probably against the spirit of the culture in which one lives. We need, for example, to mount a resistance to our preoccupation with the method of science. We need to stand against the force of Western civilization and its fascination with the ideal of progress. Wittgenstein’s goal was nothing less than effecting a radical conversion, a transformation in our ways of thinking. 7) As seems to be implied by the foregoing, and as with visual aspects, I cannot demonstrate to someone that there is a possibility of seeing a conception in a particular way without getting him actually to see it in this new way. 8) The same issues concerning subjectivity and objectivity that were raised with respect of visual aspects apply to conceptions also. One might say, adapting Stanley Cavell on aesthetic judgment, that the problem of the philosopher, as understood here, is not to discount his subjectivity, but to include it; not to overcome it in agreement, but to master it in exemplary ways. The philosopher is looking for agreement in patterns (of support, objection, response), rather than of agreement in conclusions. The question being put is: don’t you see? 9) The possible conceptions of this or that concept cannot be exhaustively enumerated—anymore than all the possible objects of comparison can be enumerated. 10) The methods for getting someone to see things differently are similar to those needed for getting someone to see visual aspects. That is, emphasis, rearrangement, offering new objects of comparison, and so on. These, then, are some of the similarities between visual aspect-seeing and conceptions. But there are also vital differences. 1) Any conception can be articulated. It thus makes sense, as Wittgenstein does in PI §81, to speak of language as a calculus, so that anyone who means and understands it must be operating a calculus according to definite rules. 2) A philosophical conception may be unconscious yet operative. That is, a conception may be operative in the way someone thinks, and yet that person may be unaware of it. Unconscious conceptions may need to

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be brought to the subject’s awareness—perhaps despite resistance (the echo of Freud here is deliberate). This will require the articulating, the making clear, of what the unconscious conception is, and, just as importantly, it will require the winning of the subject’s acknowledgement that this picture has indeed been operative. 3) To develop this point. Conceptions are also comparable to pictures, and are capable of exerting great influence over how we think of things. As Wittgenstein puts it: “A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably” (PI §115). It is part of the effect of pictures to hold us in thrall, and to have power over how see we things, of how we understand our concepts, particularly if they are unconscious, unacknowledged. The influence they exert is prior to argument or investigation, and they are, like shadows, unshakeable, unassailable. “For we can avoid ineptness or emptiness in our assertions only by presenting the model as what it is, as an object of comparison—as, so to speak, a measuring-rod; not as a preconceived idea to which reality must correspond. (The dogmatism into which we fall so easily in doing philosophy.)” (PI §131). Pictures can become so entrenched in our ways of thinking that replacing one picture by another may well require great determination and effort. And the reward may be uncertain. Wittgenstein said of himself: “Forcing my thoughts into an ordered sequence is a torment for me. . . . I squander an unspeakable amount of effort making an arrangement of my thoughts which may have value at all” (CV, 28e). 4) It is also the case that we may wish to be enslaved to a particular way of thought. “these [problems] are, of course, not empirical problems; they are solved, rather, by looking into the workings of our language, and that in such a way as to make us recognize those workings: in despite of an urge to misunderstand them” (PI §109). What is involved in getting free of such enslavement is nothing less than implanting a whole new way of thinking. It is a kind of conversion, a turning of ourselves around the axis of our real need. 5) One may offer reasons for trying to see something in a particular way. But nothing is proved; rather, a discussion is undertaken, and it may be that the questions that obsessed us vanish. In lectures delivered in 19467, Wittgenstein gave a summary of his procedure by drawing attention to how I reacted to the question with which we started this term: “What is thinking?” In a way I tried to change your point of view: look at it this

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Chapter Seven way. We are inclined to compare some phenomena with something: I ask you to compare them with something else. The question vanished when we classified phenomena not with something happening. We change the concept we have.7

Wittgenstein’s method here is not to pinpoint a mistake in seeing thinking as an activity. Nothing is claimed to be discovered, but an alternative viewpoint is offered, a comparison put forward so that the question vanishes. That is, those troubled by the question no longer feel driven to ask it. They no longer want to ask it or to try to answer it. It seems to be what Wittgenstein had in mind when he originally chose as his motto for Philosophical Investigations a remark from Hertz: “our minds, no longer vexed, will cease to ask [the question as to the nature of force].” In Waismann’s words, in the practice of “our method,” “the discussion brings [someone] gradually to see things in a different light. ... [He] comes to see that something is wrong with the way he put his question, that the attainment of his object is no longer satisfying. ... he gives up because he “sees” the questions differently” (HISP 20).8 I will now turn to an example given by Stephen Mulhall that may go some way towards giving a summary of what I have been saying about aspect-seeing and conceptions.9 It has been argued that, by deliberately constructing nonsensical propositions, the author of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus means to direct our attention towards metaphysical insights which cannot be expressed in genuine propositions, but which genuine propositions nevertheless show by virtue of their intelligibility. According to the Tractatus, genuine propositions are composed of names that refer to objects. The way the names fit together in the proposition is the logical form of the proposition. Propositions have the same form (the same logical form) as the reality they depict or picture, and they depict this reality either truly or falsely. A genuine propositions is true if and only if there is a fact whose objects are named in the proposition, and which has the same 7 Wittgenstein’s Lectures on Philosophy of Psychology, 1946-7, ed. T. Geach (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1988), 168. 8 Friedrich Waismann, How I See Philosophy [HISP] (London; Macmillan, 1968), 20. 9 Stephen Mulhall, Wittgenstein’s Private Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 1-9. In this book, Mulhall employs to decisive effect the so-called “resolute” or “therapeutic” approach to Wittgenstein.

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logical form as the proposition. On this view, then, the proposition has a one-to-one isomorphism with what it represents. Propositions thus are either true or false (bipolar). It follows from this that any attempt to talk about logical form will result in nonsense (Unsinn): as Wittgenstein has it, “Propositions cannot represent logical form: it is mirrored in them. What finds its reflection in language, language cannot represent” (TLP 4.121).10 Wittgenstein was to make a very similar point in his lectures shortly after his return to Cambridge in 1929: “that p › q follows from p ˜ q is not a proposition: it has no use. What justifies the inference is seeing the internal relation. No rule of inference is needed to justify the inference, since if it were I would need another rule to justify the rule and that would lead to an infinite regress. We must see the internal relation” [my emphases].11 Now let us suppose that someone claims that the author of the Tractatus advances bipolarity as a condition for the sense or meaningfulness of a proposition, and so licenses us to say that any proposition that is not bipolar is nonsense. (It has often been argued that what we are given by the nonsensical propositions of the Tractatus is an ineffable insight into the nature of the relation between language and reality, and it is this ineffable metaphysical insight that the Tractatus aims at getting us, in some almost mystical sense, to understand, to see.) However, there are other conceptions possible. We must carefully distinguish between what, in the idiom of the Tractatus (3.33-3.321), we are to call signs (understood as orthographic units) and symbols (logical units, signs in use—items belonging to a given logical category). The question now arises: what is it that lacks bipolarity? A string of signs or a complex of symbols? Clearly, no mere string of signs could either possess or lack bipolarity. But if we are in a position to treat some given string of signs as symbolizing, then we must have already construed it as symbolizing in a particular way, and hence assigned specific logical roles to its components. If so, the question of bipolarity comes too late; and if not—if we have not settled on a particular construal of it—then the question simply does not arise. In effect, all the work is being done by the clarification of meaning, and not by the application of a general doctrine based on bipolarity (or anything else) to whatever is thereby clarified. As Juliet Floyd has put it:

10

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears & B. F. McGuinness (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974). 11 Wittgenstein’s Lectures, Cambridge, 1930-1932, ed. Desmond Lee (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982), 56.

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Chapter Seven One aim of the Tractatus is to depict such notions as “the inferential order,” “the logical grammar of language” and “the logical form of the proposition” as chimeras. ... Frege and Russell write as if ... there is a single context of expression within which we may discern the structure of thought ... within which we can use logical notation to make perspicuous the logical order. In contrast, I have emphasized Wittgenstein’s insistence in the Tractatus that no single imposition of a logico-syntactic order on what we say is or can be the final word, the final way of expressing or depicting a thought. On the Tractatus view (as I interpret it) there is thinking without thoughts, thinking without an inferential order.12

To think without thinking, to think without an inferential order, is what it is to come to see the Tractatus under a new aspect. Indeed, it is to see the Tractatus as both being about, and enacting, that reorientation of perception and understanding that philosophy—as Wittgenstein presents it—aims at being. Thus, if there is anything to this account, then the relation between philosophy and logic may well appear in a new light. What Wittgenstein is doing, here in his early work, the Tractatus, as in his later, is, in part, bringing us to see the difference between drawing a conclusion and seeing, or bringing one to see, a new aspect. He is attempting to disabuse us of the assumption that our everyday abilities to distinguish sense from nonsense require a philosophical foundation or grounding. It is a project, one might say, of acknowledging our finitude. To put this another way, in contrast to the presuppositions of Frege’s concept-script or of Principia Mathematica, the Tractatus shows that the analysis of language it presents in the form of an argument is not deducible from a single, authoritative law, embodying some homogeneous structure of representation, such as one based on a fundamental equivalence between the logical form of reality and the logical form of the proposition. The relation in Wittgenstein’s text between the experience of the limit—the meaningful proposition—and the limitlessness of experience—the recognition of nonsense—makes any such structure untenable. What Wittgenstein would have us recognize, when we come to understand him (TLP 6.54), is the unintelligibility of the attempt to subordinate our lives with language, whether that involves statements of fact, tautology, contradiction, ethical discord or difference, to any single, totalizing concept whatsoever, whether of logical form or of the general form of the proposition. What his method aims to bring us to see, here in 12

Juliet Floyd, “Number and Ascription of Number in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus,” in From Frege to Wittgenstein, ed. Erich H. Reck (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 340.

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the Tractatus, and also in his later work, though in a very different manner, is that any such attempt to establish an authoritative law in this sense involves us in an experience of the interruption of representation as such. In showing us such an attempt for what it is, the text of the Tractatus brings into play what one might call a vacant interval, a syncope, that suspends representation in order that we may respond to what might appear to be a law beyond the law, a law that enables but also disables representation as such. In our coming to see Wittgenstein’s propositions as nonsense, we are brought to respect, to see, both the limits of sense and the unintelligibility of the idea of going beyond those limits, that is, the unintelligibility of a step beyond into what one might call the limitlessness of the limit. “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” (TLP 7). * “I am not a religious man, but I cannot help seeing every problem from a religious point of view.” This remark of Wittgenstein’s indicates a doubleness or ambivalence in his relation to religion: he was drawn towards it and at the same time he was unable, or unwilling, to participate in it. There is a delicacy and hesitation here that is also manifest in his three Lectures on Religious Belief,13 lectures on which I shall base my account of his thought here. The published version of the lectures was not written by Wittgenstein himself. It is edited from notes taken down by his students, which he neither saw nor checked. As the editor, Cyril Barrett, points out, it is even doubtful if he would have approved of their publication, at least in their present form. Nevertheless, it is here that some part of the value of the notes resides. The notes were made during lectures delivered in the summer of 1938 to Wittgenstein’s students in Cambridge, who sometimes make objections or suggestions as to what Wittgenstein should say. His refusal to accept what they propose and argue for tells us a good deal about how he went about philosophizing, and also about the kinds of mistake even the best of his students were inclined to make. The first of the three lectures sets a problem of interpretation before us. To begin with, Wittgenstein considers a number of religious utterances, not about God, but about the afterlife, or the Last Judgment, such as this: “An Austrian general said to someone; ‘I shall think of you after my death, 13

Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief, ed. Cyril Barrett (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987). Hereinafter referred to in the text as LC.

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if that should be possible.’ We can imagine one group who would find this ludicrous, another who wouldn’t.” (The lecture notes the fact that during the First World War, when he was a soldier, Wittgenstein saw consecrated bread being carried in chromium steel. This struck him as ludicrous.) Again, Wittgenstein imagines someone asking him if he believes in a Last Judgment: Suppose that someone believed in the Last Judgment, and I didn’t, does this mean that I believe the opposite to him, just that there won’t be such a thing? I would say: “not at all, or not always.”

In same kind of vein, he goes on: Suppose I say that the body will rot, and another says, “No. Particles will rejoin in a thousand years, and there will be a Resurrection of you.” If some said: “Wittgenstein, do you believe in this?” I’d say: “No.” “Do you contradict the man?” I’d say: “No.” . . . Would you say: “I believe the opposite,” or “there is no reason to believe such a thing?” I’d say neither. (LC 53)

It seems clear from this that, for Wittgenstein, the religious man and the atheist talk past one another. What we shall see, I think, is that, so far as Wittgenstein is concerned in these lectures, when the religious person says “I believe in God” and the atheist says “I don’t believe there is a God,” they do not affirm and deny the same thing. Religious discourse is commonly viewed, by atheists, and others, as a pre-scientific or primitive discourse which has somehow, through human folly and superstition, survived into the age of computers and advanced technology. Wittgenstein clearly believes no such thing. He is trying to get us to change our picture of what religious discourse is; he wants us to come to see it under a different aspect from that dictated to us by the presuppositions of a certain idea of what science is and what demands it makes on us. Wittgenstein’s picture is not that the religious person makes a claim, and the atheist asserts its negation. However, it is important to say that, in setting the issue out in this way, Wittgenstein is not trying to make a case for religion per se: the opposition between what the atheist might say, as opposed to the religious man, is meant to bring us to see, in the sense of seeing something in a new light, of grasping a new conception, how religious language has its place in our lives. The opening lecture provides a number of pointers in this direction. Wittgenstein looks first, as an object of comparison, at how we might deal

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with an empirical question. Here, the appropriate response is often not to say “I believe” or “I don’t believe,” but to say, “probably not” or “probably yes,” or “Possibly. I’m not sure.” Wittgenstein uses the example of someone’s saying “there is a German plane overhead” (the lectures were given in the summer of 1938). If Wittgenstein were to reply, “Possibly, I’m not so sure,” one would be inclined to say that he and his interlocutor were fairly near. With respect to the Last Judgment, however, things are different: Suppose someone were a believer, and said: “I believe in a Last Judgment,” and I said “Well, I’m not so sure. Possibly.” You would say there is an enormous gulf between us. (LC 53)

Wittgenstein brings out the significance of this difference by summarizing the exchange in the following way: It isn’t a question of my being anywhere near him, but on an entirely different plane, which you could express by saying: “You mean something altogether different, Wittgenstein.” The difference might not show up in any explanation of the meaning. (LC 53)

To say that the difference between a religious and a non-religious use of language might not show up in any explanation of the meaning of what was said runs counter to many of our usual presuppositions in this area, and in this the remark seems to typify Wittgenstein’s approach here. His next step is to characterize religious beliefs partly by what he calls their unshakeability. He refers again to the man who has a belief in the Last Judgment: Suppose someone made this guidance for his life: believing in the Last Judgment. Whenever he does anything, this is before his mind. In a way, how are we to know whether to say he believes this will happen or not? Asking him is not enough. He will probably say he has proof. But he has what you might call an unshakeable belief. It will show, not by reasoning, or by appeal to ordinary grounds for belief, but by regulating for his whole life. (LC 53-4)

What Wittgenstein means by “unshakeable belief” in this context comes out in his following remarks: This is a very much stronger fact—foregoing pleasures, always appealing to this picture. This in one sense must be called the firmest of all beliefs, because the man risks things on account of it which he would not do on

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Chapter Seven things which are far better established for him. Although he distinguishes between things well-established and not well-established. (LC 54)

At this point, one of Wittgenstein’s students, Cassimir Lewy, intervenes: “surely, he would say it is extremely well-established.” Wittgenstein’s response is to say: “he may use “well-established” or not use it at all. He will treat this belief as extremely well-established, and in another way as not well-established at all.” Wittgenstein goes on to suggest that “there are instances where you have a faith—where you say “I believe”—and on the other hand this belief does not rest on the fact on which our ordinary everyday beliefs normally do rest” (LC 54). In order to get these remarks in perspective, one needs to acknowledge the extent to which Wittgenstein’s method in philosophy was to drive, not only others, but himself to self-examination and improvement—to drive others by driving himself. This is a matter of individual freedom and negotiation, whereby specific individuals negotiate and re-negotiate the meanings of their words. “Our method” is grounded in a conception of meaning which emphasizes individual freedom in the activity of conceptformation. We are thus free to adopt—or to discard—forms of representation. Wittgenstein rejected the notion that, as Waismann has it, “philosophy is an exercise of the intellect and that philosophical questions can be settled by argument, and conclusively if one only knew how to set about it” (HISP 21-2). This refusal to settle things by argument can be seen in these remarks, where Wittgenstein seems concerned to put off any definition of what religious discourse is, or must be. And it seems clear that in order to bring this about he is involving himself in the issues at hand and drawing on his own religious position. In these lectures, Wittgenstein presents himself as a non-believer, and yet, from other posthumous writings, including the text published as Culture and Value, we know that he had a profound respect for religious belief, and that he thought a great deal about religious belief, especially Christianity (he had been brought up as a Roman Catholic). He also held Kierkegaard in high regard, especially the Concluding Unscientific Postscript. So it would seem clear, then, as Hilary Putnam has indicated,14 that when Wittgenstein speaks of the “unshakeability” of religious belief, he is not saying that a genuine religious faith is always and at every moment free from doubt. Kierkegaard spoke of faith as a state to be repeatedly re-entered, not as a state in which one can permanently stay. It would seem, however, that 14

Hilary Putnam, Renewing Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass., London: Harvard University Press, 1992), 145.

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Kierkegaard—like Wittgenstein—would certainly assent to the view that religious belief “regulates for all” of the believer’s life, even though his religious belief may alternate with doubt. In this respect, a religious belief can be said to differ from an empirical belief. If I confidently believe that some course of action is the right way to set about completing a project, say, fixing my car, I will begin on fixing my car in that way. If something leads me to have doubts, I will stop what I am doing, and investigate the problem before going on, or doing things in an entirely different manner. Such an approach makes no sense when posited of a religious belief. Perhaps I can make this clearer by drawing on an example that Wittgenstein proposes: Suppose you had two people, and one of them, when he had to decide which course to take, thought of retribution, and the other did not. One person might, for instance, be inclined to take everything that happened to him as a reward or punishment, and another person doesn’t think of this at all. If he is ill, he may think: “What have I done to deserve this?” This is one way of thinking about retribution. Another way is, he thinks in a general way whenever he is ashamed of himself: “this will be punished.” Take two people, one of whom talks of his behavior and of what happens to him in terms of retribution, the other one does not. These people think entirely differently. Yet, so far, you can’t say they believe different things.

Wittgenstein then goes on to make it clear why you can’t say of the two people that, though they think entirely differently, you can’t say they believe different things. Suppose someone is ill and he says: “this is a punishment,” and I say: “If I’m ill, I don’t think of punishment at all.” If you say: “do you believe the opposite?”—you can call it believing the opposite, but it is entirely different from what we normally call believing the opposite. I think differently. I say different things to myself. I have different pictures.

He then goes on to amplify the point: It is this way: if someone said: “Wittgenstein, you don’t take illness as a punishment, so what do you believe?”—I’d say: “I don’t have any thoughts of punishment.”

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Chapter Seven There are, for instance, these two entirely different ways of thinking first of all—which needn’t be expressed by one person saying one thing, another person saying another. (LC 54-5)

What Wittgenstein means to bring out, I think, by the example of the man who thinks of his life in terms of retribution, and the one who doesn’t, is that our lives may be organized around very different pictures. What he is meaning to do is to get us to look at religion and the way we use religious language, at the role and place religion and the language of religion have in our lives, and see them as having more to do with the kind of picture that we organize our lives around, than it has to with expressions of belief. As Wittgenstein says, in relation to this example: “What we call believing in a Judgment Day or not believing in a Judgment Day—The expression of belief may play an absolutely minor role” (LC 55). Friedrich Waismann, in his commentary on Wittgenstein’s philosophy, has written: if I were asked to express in one single word what is [philosophy’s] most essential feature I would unhesitatingly say: vision. At the heart of any philosophy worth the name is vision, and it is from there it springs and takes its visible shape. When I say “vision” I mean it: I do not want to romanticize. What is characteristic of philosophy is the piercing of that dead crust of tradition and convention, the breaking of those fetters which bind us to inherited preconceptions, so as to attain a new and broader way of looking at things. (HISP 32)

The aim of such a way of thinking is to give a new direction to thought itself, and to open windows on the not-yet-seen. What is decisive is a new way of seeing. It is just such a new way of seeing that Wittgenstein sought to achieve. When he began philosophy, it was held by many philosophers that the nature of such things as hoping, thinking, meaning, intending and understanding, could be discovered by introspection, while others thought that answers could be reached by experiment. Wittgenstein changed the whole approach, by suggesting, and backing up his suggestion with many and differing examples, that what these words mean shows itself in how they are used—the nature of understanding shows itself in grammar, not in experiment or metaphysical speculation. Waismann, who knew him well, reports that this was at the time quite a revelation and “came to him, as far as I can remember, suddenly” (HISP 38-9).

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The quoted passages give some sense of the spirit in which Wittgenstein went about bringing about such a renewal of vision—in these lectures, the renewal of his students’ vision. For example, he draws a contrast between the basis on which one forms empirical beliefs and the basis upon which one forms religious beliefs. “Reasons look entirely different from normal reasons” in the case of religious belief. “they are, in a way, quite inconclusive” (LC 56). He contrasts two cases: first, there is a person who can foresee the future and make forecasts for years ahead. This person believes on the basis of what we might call scientific evidence that something that fits the description of a Last Judgment will in fact happen. The other is someone who has a religious belief, and “A religious belief might in fact fly in the face of such a forecast, and say ‘No. There it will break down’” (LC 56). Wittgenstein says that if a scientist told him that there was going to be a Last Judgment in a thousand years, and that he had to forego all pleasures because of such a forecast, that he, Wittgenstein, “wouldn’t budge.” But for the man whose belief in such a forecast was religious, and not scientific, things would be different: “[Such] a man would fight for his life not to be dragged into the fire. No induction. Terror. That is, as it were, part of the substance of the belief” (LC 56). So how does Wittgenstein try to get us to see religious language? He has set up, in this first lecture, a number of contrasts, including those between the atheist and the believer, between empirical or scientific statements and those of religion, and between what one might call justifiable belief and a different kind of belief, such as perhaps one finds in religion. One needs to note here that Wittgenstein is not offering any theory of religion or of religious language, nor does his method come to any definite conclusion, any decisive definition of the issues at stake. There are in the philosophy of religion a number of ways that one might discuss and categorize religious language. For example, one might say that religious language and empirical discourse are simply incommensurable, or incompatible, with one another. The non-religious person simply can’t understand the religious person. Or again, one might say that the religious and the non-religious person can understand each other, but that the nonreligious person is using language literally, while the religious believer uses language in non-literal way, perhaps emotively, or to “express an attitude” or feeling. One might equally well say, amplifying the last point, that ordinary discourse is “cognitive,” that is, concerned with statements of fact about the world, while the religious person is making use of some kind of “non-cognitive” language. What Wittgenstein is after is to avoid

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saying any of these things, and to suggest why all these approaches, in their different ways, are misguided. To see why he thinks so, I return to the example mentioned earlier, in which Wittgenstein imagines two people, the first of whom says “I believe in a Last Judgment,” while the second (whom Wittgenstein seems to think of as himself) says “Well, I’m not so sure. Possibly.” Here Wittgenstein says: “It isn’t a question of my being anywhere near him, but on an entirely different plane, which you could express by saying: ‘You mean something altogether different, Wittgenstein’” (LC 53). As Putnam has pointed out, this looks like the view according to which religious and nonreligious discourse are simply incommensurable with one another: they are just incompatible.15 Indeed, one might reinforce such an impression by citing the famous words from the beginning of the Philosophical Investigations (§43), where Wittgenstein wrote: “For a large class of cases—though not for all—in which we employ the word ‘meaning’ it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language.” If one ignores—as is usually done—the qualification “though not for all,” and ascribes to Wittgenstein the conception that meaning can always be defined as use, then it is only too natural to read this seeming “theory of meaning” back into the passage from the Lectures on Religious Belief. Then one can argue that he is saying that the religious and the nonreligious person are using words in a different way. On this view, the words “I believe in the Last Judgment” (or the Incarnation of Christ, etc.) have a different meaning for someone who can speak of the Last Judgment as a matter of “probability” and for a religious believer. But Wittgenstein does not say this. According to the notes of the lecture, it is Wittgenstein’s imaginary interlocutor who says “You mean something altogether different, Wittgenstein.” Wittgenstein himself responds to his imaginary interlocutor by saying: “the difference might not show up at all in any explanation of the meaning.” The interlocutor is, in effect, presupposing a view or theory of “meaning as use” that is often ascribed by commentators to Wittgenstein himself. The real Wittgenstein, however, is reminding his interlocutor that in this instance we don’t have to think of the word “meaning” in that way, and that the difference in these two uses is not something we have to see as a difference in meaning. Towards the end of the first lecture, Wittgenstein points out that as an educated man who has read the religious classics (and, as we know, has 15

Putnam, Renewing Philosophy, 150.

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thought deeply about them) there is a very good sense in which he knows what the religious person means, although there is another sense in which he is inclined to say “I [don’t] even know whether to say I understand him or not” (LC 58). If Mr. Lewy [Cassimir Lewy, one of the students present at the lectures] is religious and says he believes in a Judgment Day, I won’t even know whether to say I understand him or not. I’ve read the same things as he’s read. In a most important sense, I know what he means. (LC 58)

Wittgenstein is warning us against supposing that talk of “meaning the same” and “not meaning the same” will clarify anything here. So what then is he saying? Perhaps it is something like this: that religious discourse can be understood in any depth only by understanding the form of life to which it belongs. To say this is to echo Philosophical Investigations §19: “to imagine a language means to imagine a form of life.” What this amounts to is clarified in part by Wittgenstein’s use of the term “languagegame”: “Here the term ‘language-game’ is meant to bring into prominence the fact that speaking a language is part of an activity, or of a form of life” (PI §23). Wittgenstein gives this example, in Part Two of Philosophical Investigations, regarding the possibility of an animal being hopeful: One can imagine an animal angry, frightened, unhappy, happy, startled. But hopeful? And why not? A dog believes his master is at the door. But can he also believe his master will come the day after tomorrow?—And what can he not do here?—How do I do it?—How am I supposed to answer that? Can only those hope who can talk?—How am I supposed to answer this? Can only those hope who can talk? Only those who have mastered the use of a language. That is to say, the phenomena of hope are modes of this complicated form of life. (If a concept refers to a character of human handwriting, it has no application to beings that do not write.) (PI 174)

A few pages later, he insists that “What has to be accepted, the given, is—so one could say—forms of life” (PI 226). This point is emphasized by Stanley Cavell, in a gloss on the question of what Wittgenstein means to be saying here. Cavell writes: “What has to be accepted, Wittgenstein says, is forms of life.” It may be worth noting before going on further that, while Cavell puts his emphasis on “accepted,” Wittgenstein’s italics fall on “form of life.” Cavell, I think, wants to bring home to us here that a form of life and its acceptance are inseparable, an emphasis that accords with the spirit of Philosophical Investigations §242, where the following

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remark occurs: “It is what human beings say that is true and false; and they agree in the language they use. This is not agreement in opinions but in forms of life.” Cavell writes: What has to be accepted, Wittgenstein says, is forms of life. This is not the same as saying that our lives as we lead them—in particular, for Wittgenstein, our lives of theory—must be accepted. What it says, or suggests, is that criticism of our lives is not to be prosecuted in philosophical theory, but continued in the confrontation of our lives with their own necessities. He also says that language, and life, rests on conventions. What he means is, I suppose, that they have no necessity beyond what human beings do. He does not mean, for example, that we might convene and decide or vote on what our human forms of life shall be, choose what we find funny or whether we shall continue finding loss and comfort where we do. If we call these arrangements conventional, we must also call them natural. The thought was perhaps expressed by Pascal when he said of human beings, “Custom is our nature.” It is from such an insight that Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard explicitly avoid explanations of our lives and concentrate on descriptions of them as they are, together with the alternatives which present themselves at given moments. Or perhaps we should say: for them a philosophical explanation takes the form of a description, unlike explanations in science.16

In the light of this understanding of the phrase “forms of life,” one can make some suggestions as to what Wittgenstein has in mind with respect to the form of life with which religious language is informed. On the basis of his remarks thus far in the Lectures on Religious Belief, what appears to characterize that form of life is not the expressions of belief that accompany it, but a way—a way that includes words and pictures, but is far from consisting only in words and pictures—of living one’s life, of regulating all one’s decisions. Cavell mentions Kierkegaard, and what Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein have in common is the idea that understanding the words of a religious person properly—whether you want to speak of understanding their “meaning” or not—is inseparable from understanding a religious form of life. And this is not a matter developing a theory, but of understanding a human being, a human person. To take this onward a little, one might note that Wittgenstein has said in the course of his lectures that the religious person “uses a picture,” and so it seems important that we get clear as to how we are to take this idea. It 16 Stanley Cavell, Themes out of School (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1988), 224.

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might, for instance, seem that in talking about the use of pictures in this context Wittgenstein is, at least implicitly, endorsing some kind of “noncognitive” view of religious language, that is, that the religious person uses language, not to say something that is true or false, but to express an attitude or feeling or emotional outlook. (For example, it has been held in the discussion of ethics initiated by “emotivists” like C. L. Stevenson that the literal meaning of “it is good” is identical with its emotive meaning, the positive attitude it expresses.) That this is a view that Wittgenstein strongly repudiates is, I hope, clear. For him, religion is not a feeling. Belief in God is not a feeling. There is little or no sense in asking, as one might ask about a feeling, whether someone’s belief in God has been going on all the time, or when it started or when it stopped. This, then, is why it is so pre-eminently worthwhile looking at what he has to say about pictures and the use we make of them. It is a discussion crucial to his understanding of religious language. During the course of the second lecture, Wittgenstein talks about the painting by Michelangelo of God creating Adam: Take “God created man.” Pictures of Michelangelo showing the creation of the world. In general, there is nothing which explains the meaning of words as well as a picture, and I take it that Michelangelo was as good as anyone can be and did his best, and here is the picture of the Deity creating Adam. If we ever saw this, we certainly wouldn’t think this the Deity. The picture has to be used in an entirely different way if we are to call the man in that queer blanket “God,” and so on. (LC, 63)

The painting by Michelangelo of God creating Adam only has the meaning it has in the context of a certain kind of significant use, that is, as part of an activity, or form of life. And yet what is involved in understanding the painting is not necessarily an interpretation. The following remarks come from late in the third lecture: Suppose someone, before going to China, when he might never see me again, said to me: “We might see one another after death”—would I necessarily say that I don’t understand him? I might say [want to say] simply, “Yes. I understand him entirely.” (LC, 71)

At this juncture, Wittgenstein’s student, Lewy, interjects: “In this case, you might mean only that he expressed a certain attitude.” Wittgenstein’s reply is:

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Another student, Yvor Smythies, intervenes here to oppose Wittgenstein, saying: “this isn’t all he does—associate a use with a picture.” Wittgenstein’s reply is: “Rubbish”—not the most encouraging of responses. He goes on to repeat his point that the man could not just as well have said something else. At the same time, he admits that it is perfectly true that there are certain kinds of picture that can be replaced by another. For example we could under certain circumstances have one projection of an ellipse drawn rather than another. But, in this case, there is nothing else that can do quite what this picture can do: “the whole weight may be in the picture” (LC, 71). When I say he’s using a picture I’m merely making a grammatical remark: [What I say] can be verified only by the consequences he does or does not draw. If Smythies disagrees, I don’t take notice of this disagreement. All I wished to characterize was the conventions [sic] he wished to draw. If I wished to say anything more I was merely being philosophically arrogant. (LC, 72)

To say the religious person is using pictures is simply to describe what we can see for ourselves. Religious people do employ pictures, and they draw certain consequences from them, but not the same consequences that religious and non-religious people alike draw when they are using similar pictures in other contexts. If one says of someone that he has an eye, then one is probably prepared to say that he has an eyebrow. But when I speak of the Eye of God, I am not prepared to speak of the eyebrow of God. But perhaps the most significant thing here is not so much what Wittgenstein says, as the limits that he places on his own observation, the limits to “philosophical arrogance.” Pictures are important in life. The whole weight of a form of life may lie in the pictures that are inseparable from that form of life (a major theme of On Certainty). In Culture and Value, Wittgenstein comments “It is true that we can compare a picture that is firmly rooted in us to a superstition; but it is equally true that we

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always eventually have to reach some firm ground, either a picture or something else, so that a picture which is at the root of all our thinking is to be respected and not treated as a superstition” (CV, 83e).17 The very next remark is: “If Christianity is the truth then all the philosophy that is written about it is false.” This goes wholly against the common misconception that Wittgenstein was against pictures as such. There are, of course, those pictures that have philosophers in their grip, bewitching them. However, he speaks in other contexts of pictures as being good ways of explaining the meanings of words (a point he makes during his discussion of Michelangelo, as well as elsewhere), and he also wishes to insist that they may also have “weight”—that they may be “at the root of all our thinking.” For Wittgenstein, such a conception of pictures can illuminate religious language (as well as language more generally) and bring us to see it in a new light. So it is in these terms that one might want to consider the question of “truth”: of the right or wrong way of thinking about, of worshipping, God. Perhaps one could compare this with the right way or the wrong way of playing a piece of music. Or again, thinking of death as something important, awesome, is not the same as being afraid for one’s life.

* I have been discussing Wittgenstein’s way of looking at pictures, and especially at the various ways in which pictures are used in the context of religious language. I have also raised the question as to whether religious language can be described as “non-cognitive.” The traditional realist— metaphysical—account of non-cognitivism and religious language is to say that ordinary descriptive terms like “my brother” and “America” and “the Parthenon” all refer to something, but words used in the religious contexts Wittgenstein discusses do not refer to anything. That is, the realist would say that when Wittgenstein is speaking of the Eye of God or the Last Judgment he isn’t actually referring to anything at all. In the third of his lectures on religion, Wittgenstein interrupts his discussion of explicitly religious language and experience to consider what it is for a thought to be about “my brother in America.” At the same time, he speaks about referring per se, about words that can be thought of as “referring” and “designating.” Now, although the discussion of reference 17

Culture and Value, ed. G. H. Von Wright, with Heikki Nyman, trans. Peter Winch (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), 83e.

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may look like a digression, it is, I think, central to his account of religious language. During the discussion, he does not, however, take any examples from religion; the only example he uses is thinking about “my brother in America.” The issue which the discussion is intended to clarify—and to dissolve—is the notion that, as Hilary Putnam has it, “in ordinary language we have pictures (and, of course, words) and uses of pictures and words and something beyond the pictures and words, while in religious language we have only pictures and words and uses of pictures and words.”18 Wittgenstein is struck by the fact that he can think of his brother in America without there being any causal interaction between him and his brother taking place now. He can’t see or speak to his brother directly, for example. So how can he think about him if he isn’t there, before him? In fact, we don’t usually think about reference as a causal relation at all (unless we are in the grip of some kind of causal theory of meaning). Our natural temptation, when philosophizing about these matters, is to think that the intentionality of our words is something given in the experience of thought itself. (One can see here the intrusion of a picture derived from the so-called Augustinian picture, whereby the object designated by a word is the meaning of that word—words are names, designating objects.) Wittgenstein puts the issue this way: If you are asked: “How do you know that it is a thought of such and such?” the thought that immediately comes to mind is one of a shadow, a picture. You don’t think of a causal relation. The kind of relation you think of is best expressed by “picture,” “shadow,” etc. (LC, 66)

Wittgenstein then goes on to talk, in ways familiar from the Philosophical Investigations, about how we simultaneously tend to think of thoughts as mental pictures and to ascribe to them powers that no actual picture could possibly have: The word “picture” is even quite all right—in many cases it is even in the most ordinary sense, a picture. You might translate my very words into a picture. But the point is this, suppose you drew this, how do I know it is my brother in America? Who says it is him—unless it is here ordinary similarity? What is the connection between these words, or anything substitutable for them, with my brother in America?

18

Hilary Putnam, Renewing Philosophy, 159.

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The first idea [you have] is that you are looking at your own thought, and are absolutely sure that it is a thought that so and so. You are looking at some mental phenomenon, and you say to yourself “obviously this is a thought of my brother being in America.” It seems to be a super-picture. It seems, with thought, that there is no doubt whatever. With a picture, it still depends on the method of projection, whereas here it seems that you get rid of the projecting relation, and are absolutely certain that this is a thought of that. (LC, 67)

In Philosophical Investigations §680 Wittgenstein considers the case of cursing someone and meaning him. “When you tell me that you cursed and meant N. as you did so it is all one to me whether you looked at a picture of him, or imagined him, or uttered his name, or what. The conclusions from this fact have nothing to do with these things” (PI §680). If meaning were some kind of process like picturing it would make sense to ask how one meant that person when one cursed him. And yet the question makes no sense: it makes no sense to ask how one meant the man whom one cursed, for meaning is not an activity or act, which one might engage in or perform in different ways, and at which one might be more or less successful. One might indeed say that cursing was effective only when one had a clear image of the man or spoke his name out loud. But still we would not say, “the point is how the man who is cursing means his victim.” In uttering a sentence like “I am thinking of my brother in America” and meaning what one said, one means, usually at least, what the sentence one uttered means. One is speaking seriously, not joking or quoting. And yet that does not mean that one is engaging in multiple acts of meaning, nor yet in a continuous activity of meaning. Mental images or pictures are irrelevant to word meaning, and equally irrelevant to whether a speaker understands the words he uses or hears. To give another example, deriving from Frege, if not Kant: the sentence “the cat is on the mat” consists of exactly the same words as the mere list, “the,” “cat,” “is,” “on,” “the,” “mat.” Yet the sentence has a truth value, in an appropriate situation, while the list has no truth value. What constitutes the difference between the sentence and the list? As Wittgenstein drew to our attention time and time again, what makes it the case that a sentence can have reference and truth value, while a mere list of words has neither reference nor truth value, is that we use sentences in very different ways from how we use mere lists. Referring enters into our lives in any one of a variety of ways. Thus I may repeat the word “cat” over and over, but in doing so I will not be referring to cats, whereas if I

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use the word in certain ways, and in certain contexts, this will be referring to cats. In his account of referring in the third lecture, Wittgenstein speaks of the referring use of language as a “technique of usage.” He suggests that the illusion of intrinsic intentionality, that is, the illusion that reference is some kind of mysterious inner event or thing that exists while we think and about which nothing can be said, is due to the fact that we pay attention only to our subjective experience and not to the technique of using the word. Suppose that we say that the thought we have is some kind of process in the mind, and the thought is “my brother is in America,” how are we to say what the connection is between this thought and the brother in America? Is thinking of something like painting or shooting at something? It seems like a projection connection, which seems to make it indubitable, although there is not a projection relation at all. If I said “My brother is in America”—I could imagine there being rays projecting from my words to my brother in America. But what if my brother isn’t in America?—then the rays don’t hit anything. (LC, 67)

Wittgenstein reduces the notion of there being rays, that is, some kind of mysterious connection, between the thought and what is thought about, to absurdity here. The stronghold of the idea of there being some sort of mysterious connection between our words and what they refer to is due to the idea that one can say: “Well, I know what I mean.” It is as though I could look at something happening while I am saying what I have it in mind to say, something which is entirely independent of what comes before or after what is actually said. “It looked as though you could talk of understanding a word, without any reference to the technique of usage [or, perhaps better, use]. It looked as though Smythies said he could understand the sentence, and that we then had nothing to say” (LC, 68). One has to see that Wittgenstein is speaking here out of a highly complex and dynamic conception of grammar, of the kinds of lives we lead with language. It is a conception according to which it makes no sense for us to try to “explain” language in terms of rules, of grammar. Speaking in a lecture given in Cambridge in the Lent Term of 1931, he refers to the logical rule of inference, dealing with how one proposition follows from another, and says of it: It is a rule of grammar dealing with symbols alone, it is a rule of a game. Its importance lies in its application; we use it in our language. When we talk about propositions following from one another we are talking of a

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game. Propositions do not follow from one another as such; they simply are what they are. We can only prepare language for its usage [use]; we can only describe it as long as we do not regard it as language. The rules prepare for the game which may afterwards be used as language. Only when the rules are fixed can I use the game as a language.19

As two recent commentators, James Guetti and Rupert Read, have pointed out, What is remarkable here is the insistence that “language” is not even language until it is used, that whatever our “preparations” are—whatever purely grammatical considerations may be anterior to the employment of [the] same—we do not so much as regard these as language until they are used. And, most important, we cannot take language as language—that is, use it—and continue to describe it: which means that while we are explaining, justifying, drawing-out, or otherwise considering grammatical relations, these are just not active linguistic rules.20

The same may be said of the grammar of referring. It makes no sense to look for necessary and sufficient conditions that will determine in advance whether or not a particular use of words is or is not a “referring” use. There are many varying ways of using words to refer, and it makes no sense to try to find some position from which they can all be surveyed or laid down in advance. It is in Philosophical Investigations that Wittgenstein decisively undermines the presupposition that one can only use a word if one possesses a necessary and sufficient condition for its application. He takes the word “game” as an example. In the case of this word, we don’t have necessary and sufficient conditions laid down for its use. To quote Putnam, “[w]e have some paradigms—paradigms of different kinds—and we extend the word “game” to new contexts because they strike us as having similarities to cases where we have used the word before.”21 To do this is, Wittgenstein says, a “natural reaction.” In a famous simile, he speaks of the kind of resemblance there is between different games as being like the resemblance there is between the different members of a family. He also uses the image of a rope. The rope is made up of fibers, 19

Wittgenstein’s Lectures, 1930-1932, ed. Desmond Lee (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982), 57. 20 James Guetti and Rupert Read, “Acting from Rules,” International Studies in Philosophy 28:2 (1996): 53-4. 21 Putnam, Renewing Philosophy, 167.

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but there is no one fiber running the entire length of the rope. There are only overlapping fibers. Analogously, one can say there are similarities between games, but there is no one feature common to all games. This conception of games is a good example of how a new, and striking, picture can open our eyes to new aspects of language, of language that already lies open to view. What this amounts to is summarized by Cavell: “it makes no sense at all to give a general explanation for the generality of language, because it makes no sense at all to suppose words in general might not recur, that we might possess a name for a thing (say ‘chair’ or ‘feeding’) and yet be willing to call nothing (else) ‘the same thing’.”22 In other words, Wittgenstein was not just making an empirical point about games, that in addition to words like red, which apply to all things which are similar in a particular respect, there are words like game which are not all similar in some one respect. As his further development of the analogy between games and language—in the conception of the “language-game”—makes clear, his primary interest was not in words like game, but in words like language and proposition and reference. The language-game of referring does not have an “essence”; there isn’t some one thing that can be called referring. Like the fibers of a rope, there are overlapping similarities between one sort of referring and another, and that is all. Because of this, Wittgenstein is not puzzled, as many philosophers have been, about how we can refer to abstract entities. Thus, there might seem to be a puzzle about how we can refer to a number, for example. Do we even know that there is such an object at all? For Wittgenstein, the use of number words is simply a use that is different from the use of words like “cow” or “cat.” As we see from the opening section (§1) of Philosophical Investigations, we should stop thinking about “five” as an “object” or “abstract entity,” and attend to how the number word “five” is used. The pertinence of all this to a consideration of religious language can now, perhaps, be seen. Just as questions as to whether religious language is commensurable or compatible with other kinds of language, or whether it is cognitive or non-cognitive, have no purchase on the issues at stake, so with the question as to whether religious language refers or not. The way religious language works is both like and unlike ordinary cases of reference. There is no essence of reference. To refer to one’s brother in America is one kind of reference; to speak of God, “in Whom we live and move and have our being,” is not like this at all. On this showing, and 22

The Claim of Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 188.

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assuming that there is something in it, it would seem true to say that, at the very least, Wittgenstein is engaged in showing us what religious language is not—in showing us how not to approach it. I would like to develop this last point a little further. I shall do by drawing on the work of one of Wittgenstein’s most able commentators and translators, Peter Winch. In an essay entitled “Meaning and Religious Language,” Winch considers the position, advocated by certain philosophers of religion, that praying to God makes sense only if it is presupposed that God exists. There is the ordinary practice of talking to people and making requests of them, and the rationality of this practice is clearly not in question. Our ordinary practice can, of course, be criticized on particular occasions, as when the person addressed does not exist, or is no position to hear the request, or can do nothing about fulfilling it. For a philosopher who takes the view that one must presuppose the existence of God before the notion of prayer can be made intelligible, praying is to be treated as a special case of our general practice of making requests, and so on, and therefore to understand it is to understand it in a way that is similar to the way we understand those ordinary practices. The method of establishing God’s existence or non-existence may be a peculiar one, but that can be taken as a separate issue. Winch wishes to contest this position. He wants to say that there is a difference in grammar between “asking something of God” and “asking something of another human being.” Here, in this account of “requesting” and “asking,” Winch is following the method of Wittgenstein, who drew attention to distinctions of a similar kind in relation to “referring.” Winch says: I mean that there is a difference not merely in the method it is appropriate to use in the two cases or in the nature of the requests it is appropriate to make, though both these things are true. I mean that what constitutes asking (and also answering) is different; or that the point of prayer (presupposed in any discussion of the rationality of particular cases of prayer) can only be elucidated by considering it in its religious context; that it cannot be elucidated by starting simply with the function “making requests to “x,” substituting “God” for “x,” and then asking what difference is made by the fact that God has different characteristics from other xs. “Making requests of x,” that is, is not a function which retains the same sense whether “God” or some name or description of a human being is substituted for “x.”23 23

Peter Winch, Trying to Make Sense (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), 119.

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Winch’s point is that it is certainly wrong to say that the existence of the addressee is presupposed in the one case and not in the other. But this does not mean that the existence of the addressee is presupposed in both cases. One should rather say that the question of “existence” does not arise in the one case in the way it can arise in the other, any more than the question of the existence of meters can arise in the case of someone wondering how tall a certain person is. The question simply makes no sense here. What the questioning of God’s existence amounts to is something quite different from what is involved in questioning the existence of a man. My ceasing to ask anything of someone I believe to exist no longer is a consequence of my ceasing to believe in that person’s existence. Ceasing to see any point in continuing to pray to God is an aspect of ceasing to believe in God. As Winch puts it, “there are internal connections between ceasing to believe in God’s existence and ceasing to see any point in prayer” of a sort which do not hold between ceasing to believe in a human being’s existence and ceasing to make requests of him. (An internal relation [or connection] between two things can be defined as a relation that could not fail to hold, since it is given with or is (partly) constitutive of the terms (objects or relata) which make it up, as in the case of white’s being lighter than black. One might also put it this way: an internal property is a property a thing could not fail to have, because it is essential to its being the thing it is.)24 This is not to say that seeing a point in praying is identical with belief in God. But, as Winch points out, ceasing to see any point in prayer is one form which ceasing to believe in God may take. It is one aspect of that loss of belief. Thus certain attitudes towards prayer need not be seen as an external consequence, or result, or effect, of the belief or lack of belief in God. As did Wittgenstein, Winch considers Michelangelo’s painting of the creation of Adam. When Michelangelo represented the creation did he presuppose that something like this event had actually taken place? When we respond to the painting in a way which respects the religious ideas which it expresses, what kinds of consideration are relevant for us? Well, one might speak here of how the power of God the Father and Adam’s dependence are, on both sides, inseparably linked with love. God’s

24

Hans Glock, A Wittgenstein Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 189. One might consider Socrates to be wise or not. But one could not even conceive of him without thinking of him as a human being.

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power is not simply combined with his love; it is his love. And likewise with Adam’s dependence on and love for his Creator: they are one.25

For Winch, the point of the representation has to be seen in the way in which worship and love are combined—internally connected, one might say—in the life of a believer. It is here that the picture is related to reality—not by reference to an external event, depicted in the painting. Winch insists that the kind of connection the painting has with reality is wholly different from what we might see in, say, a diagram of an accident presented with an insurance claim. The crucial difference shows in the kind of question it is right to ask in the one case as contrasted with the other. The point is not that there cannot or should not be any relation or confrontation between a person’s religious convictions and the understanding of the world he has in other circumstances. But this does not mean that the confrontation with reality that a religious man undertakes is to be expressed in terms of “evidence for God’s existence or non-existence.” Reality makes itself felt in how we use language—both in our ordinary dealings with the world and in the case of religious language—in terms of the factual circumstances in which language is applied. This is to repeat the point made earlier, that language is not even language until it is used in a context, that whatever our preparations are— whatever purely grammatical considerations may be anterior to the employment of language—none of these rules or grammatical considerations are part of language until they are used in language. This is to say that the reality which the word “God” expresses is to be found in the conditions of its application. Winch quotes Simone Weil: “the Gospel contains a conception of human life, not a theology.” And: “Earthly things are the criterion of spiritual things.” She continues: “Only spiritual things are of value, but only physical things have a verifiable existence. Therefore, the value of the former can only be verified as an illumination projected on to the latter.”26 To return to a point made earlier: the force of this latter comment appears only if we see how the grammar of our language—the role of a concept, say, in our use of language—is inseparable from the actual use of that language. Thus the grammar of the function “x loves his children” is altered when “my brother” or “God” 25

Winch, Trying to Make Sense, 121. Quoted in Winch, Trying to Make Sense, 122. For a rather different view of these matters, see Brian R. Clack, An Introduction to Wittgenstein’s Philosophy of Religion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 73-4. 26

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respectively is substituted for “x.” What would count as an explanation of the sense of the one—“my brother loves his children”—is of a different kind from what would count as an explanation of the sense of the other— ”God loves his children.” As Winch indicates, what would be relevant to the genesis of a doubt about the one is very different from what would support a doubt about the other. This is the case even though the two uses of the word “love” are connected: one would hardly be able to speak about God’s love for his children if one could not speak about the love of human fathers for their children. Conversely, our notion of what human love is will alter if the notion of God as a loving father comes to occupy a central place in our thought. Thus, in the painting by Michelangelo of Adam’s creation, it is perfectly intelligible for us to say that what we see in the painting is that God’s power and love are combined into a single whole. God’s power here is his love. And similarly for Adam—his dependence on his Creator is his love for him. To see this is to see the painting’s “relation to reality,” and perhaps in so doing we can experience, or undergo, an alteration in our vision such that we can get free of the need, or compulsion, or urge, to see the painting as being a depiction of some other “realm of reality” distinct from that to which empirical structures belong. And analogously to that change in vision, we can perhaps come to see that religious uses of language are not descriptions of an “order of reality” distinct from the earthly life with which we are familiar. If we want to understand the way a system of ideas is related to reality, we had best proceed by examining the actual application in life—in contexts of significant use—of these ideas, rather than, as it were, fastening our attention on the peculiar nature of the “entities referred to” by them. Such an approach may appear more persuasive if we can come to recognize how it coheres with certain of Wittgenstein’s remarks concerning what it might be to see language as emerging from instinctive behavior. In Zettel §545, he writes: Being sure that someone is in pain, doubting whether he is, and so on, are so many natural, instinctive kinds of behavior towards other human beings ... Our language-game is an extension of primitive behavior. (For our language-game is behavior.) (Instinct.)27

This suggests that our primitive behavior is, from the start, a languagegame. We are, so to speak, born into language, into the language-game. It 27 Zettel, ed. G. E. M. Anscome and G. H. Von Wright, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981), §545.

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is not incumbent on us to see the language-game as being the result of reflection, or ratiocination. A similar attitude is evident in On Certainty: You must bear in mind that the language-game is so to say something unpredictable. I mean: it is not based on grounds. It is not reasonable (or unreasonable). It is there—like our life. (OC §559)

In this context, it would make no sense to ask, “From what did it emerge?” and even less sense to ask, “From what did language emerge?” The question of the origin of language is not, at least in this context, intelligible. Language is not the outcome of reasoning, or of the transcendental capacity of reason. But nor does Wittgenstein say that it was the outcome of instinct, or that it emerged from instinct. Nor does he speak of any development from something prior to a language-game (Sprachspiel). The primitive reactions—that is, the natural, instinctive behavior towards other human beings—have their importance within the language-game, the Sprachspiel. They show up, as it were, in the character they have by being certain moves within it. He says: The origin and the primitive form of the language game is a reaction, only from this can more complicated forms develop. Language—I want to say—is a refinement. “In the beginning was the deed.”28

The language-game is in its beginning already the language-game, the deed. There is nothing prior to it. Language can be seen as a refinement on primitive reactions, which are already language-games. Remarks of this kind, it should be emphasized, are not factual claims or statements about language, nor do they try to lay out a theory about the origin of language itself—they are reminders only, ways of looking—no more than that. This conception, or vision, of language as being from the beginning a “deed,” is, I think, crucial. In any event, it is against the background of these remarks on the matter, remarks that are (I should perhaps emphasize again) purely transitional and therapeutic, that I would like to return to Wittgenstein’s account of what it is to follow a rule, in order to bring out further—and, I hope, pertinent—aspects of it. As a first point, it is important to note that, though one may list the rules of a game, one cannot 28

Philosophical Occasions, ed. James Klagge and Alfred Nordmann (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett, 1993), 395. “In the beginning was the deed” is from Goethe’s Faust I, opening scene in the Studierzimmer.

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explain what playing a game is by any such listing. Playing a game is “a part of our natural history” (PI §25), and until one is an initiate of this human form of activity, even the preliminary procedure—the human gesture, the human deed—of “citing a rule” can mean nothing. Just as there is no one set of characteristics which everything that we call “games” shares, so there is no one characteristic shared by all the activities we call “being determined by rules.”29 Language has no essence (PI §66). Following a rule is a practice (PI §202), as is playing a game. And what are the rules for following a rule? There are none, and yet, as Cavell puts it, it can be done correctly or incorrectly—which just means that it can be done or not done. And whether it is done or whether it is not done cannot therefore (logically) be a matter of rules. It is a matter of what Wittgenstein has called “forms of life.” This is what Wittgenstein is appealing to when he writes: If I have exhausted the justifications I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: “this is imply what I do.” (PI §217) What has to be accepted, the given, is—so one could say—forms of life. (PI 226)

It thus makes no sense to say either that there is, or that there is not, a ground of mutual intelligibility between human beings. In a passage from a later work, taking up precisely this question of what the ground or foundation of human reason might be, Cavell offers the following remarks: Am I saying that human reason has, or that it has not, a foundation? . . . Am I saying that explanations come to end somewhere, each in its time and place, to be discovered philosophically, let us say, time after time, place by place? ... I can put my question this way: Is the issue one of a leap [not of faith but, let us say, of reason] from a ground that is itself implied or defined by the leap? Or is the leap from grounds as such, to escape the wish for such definition [as if reason itself were a kind of faith]?30

Cavell’s idea is, it would seem, that the ground from which one leaps or steps (in speaking, or, more narrowly, in the practice, the action, of following a rule) is itself implied or defined, retrospectively, as it were, by 29

I am drawing here on Stanley Cavell’s discussion of rules and rule-following in “The Availability of Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy” in his book, Must We Mean What We Say? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 30 Stanley Cavell, “The Division of Talent,” Critical Inquiry 11:4 (1985): 530-31.

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that very leap. It is not that in order to speak intelligibly we must locate ourselves upon some given ground of the possibilities of sense, on some already given ground made up of logical or grammatical rules. The idea is that to speak intelligibly is to define the ground from which we are speaking; it is that in speaking we are, in that very act, articulating the position that we are assuming and from which we speak.31 There is no mediating structure—of forms, system, structure, rules—that justifies my position in speaking, nor need I seek, philosophically, that is, for any such mediating structure to act as the ground of my intelligibility. Thus, for each one of us, it must be that, if I am to speak intelligibly, I must articulate my point or position; I must draw a connection between what I say and what is before me—whether this be what I have to say about God, or about any other phenomenon, person, or experience, that concerns me, or even about previous remarks of my own or of someone else. In speaking, I project behind me and before me the ground of my intelligibility. There are no grounds other than this for our mutual intelligibility and acknowledgement, one of another. To conclude, I would like to consider some remarks of Wittgenstein’s on ritual. Wittgenstein had a special interest in J.G. Frazer’s massive and magisterial The Golden Bough, completed in 1915. He wrote notes on it, and these were edited and first published in 1967 by Rush Rhees. The remarks in Part II probably come from sometime after 1948, towards the end of Wittgenstein’s life, and in them he considers, amongst other things, the Beltane or May-Day fire-festivals celebrated by Scottish children in the eighteenth century. Frazer tells us that the traces of human sacrifice were particularly clear and unequivocal in them. These traces are to be seen from the way the festival would develop towards its close, when the master of the feast would produce a large cake baked with eggs and scalloped around the edge. It was divided and distributed to those present. There was one special piece of cake, and whoever received it was called the Beltane carline, a term of great reproach (“carline” means “witch” in Old Norse and in Middle English). Part of the company would try to put this person into the fire, but others interposed to save him. In some villages, he was laid flat, and the company made as if to quarter him. 31

This is very close to what Lacan called the act: the act is a move that defines its own conditions; it retroactively produces the grounds that justify it. As John Forrester puts it: “the true reason for deciding only becomes apparent once the decision has been taken” (The Seductions of Psychoanalysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 198, cited by Slavoj Žižek, For they know what they do (London: Verso, 1994), 191).

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Wittgenstein wonders whether what we find sinister in the festival is something to do with the festival itself, or whether we shall find it sinister only if the conjecture that it originated in human sacrifice has been well established: I believe it is clearly the inner nature of the modern practice itself which seems sinister to us, and the familiar facts of human sacrifice only indicate the lines along which we should view the practice. When I speak of the inner nature of the practice, I mean all the circumstances under which it is carried out and which are not included in a report of such a festival, since they consist not so much in specific actions which characterize the festival as in what one might call the spirit of the festival; such things as would be included in one’s description, for example, of the kind of people who take part in it, their behavior at other times, that is, their character; the kinds of games they otherwise play. And one would then see that the sinister quality lies in the character of these people themselves.32

A few pages later, he writes: The fact that lots are drawn by the use of a cake is particularly horrible (almost like betrayal with a kiss), and that it strikes us this way is again of fundamental importance for the investigation of such practices. When I see such a practice, or hear of it, it is like seeing a man speaking harshly to someone else over a trivial matter, and noticing from his tone of voice and facial expression that this man can on occasion be terrible. The impression that I receive here can be very deep and extraordinarily serious.33

He sums up his response here in the following way: what I see in these stories is . . . acquired through the evidence, including such evidence as does not appear to be directly connected with them,— through the thoughts of man and his past, through all the strange things I see, and have seen and heard about, in myself and others.34

Wittgenstein is responding to the murky world of the sinister and obscene rituals of eighteenth century Scotland, a country which had been ravaged by civil war and foreign invasion, resulting in forced expulsions of the rural population, land clearances and land grabbing. The rituals described by Frazer in this section of his book are to be seen as the 32

Philosophical Occasions, 145. Philosophical Occasions, 147. 34 Philosophical Occasions, 151. 33

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shadowy doubles of the legal power relations recently imposed upon the conquered nation by the victorious power, Hanoverian England. The rituals are, in effect, so many forms of enjoyment (jouissance). While the rituals apparently transgressed and subverted the power of the English legal disposition, they were actually serving as the fantasmatic background to that power, as its ultimate support. There is thus something paradoxical and uncanny about the activities Frazer describes, which Wittgenstein picks up in the word “sinister,” a word, like “carline,” that suggests that what he saw attaching to the practices was evil. Wittgenstein’s responsiveness to what is at stake here is evident from an extraordinary conversation Tania Pascal recalls having with him. She remembers how he picked up a volume of Grimm’s tales and read out “with awe in his voice” Ach, wie gut ist, daß niemand weiß, daß ich Rumpelstilzchen heiß!

“‘Profound, profound’ he said.” She adds that, though she liked the tale of Rumpelstiltskin, and understood that the dwarf’s strength lay in his name being unknown to humans, she could not share Wittgenstein’s vision: “to watch him in a state of hushed, silent awe, as though looking far beyond what oneself could see, was an experience next only to hearing him talk.”35 The question is like that posed by Lohengrin: why can the dwarf exert his power only so long as his name is unknown? Rumpelstiltskin is destroyed—split in two—the moment his identity is publicly revealed. The reason is that the dwarf functions as a spectral apparition that cannot sustain its disclosure in the public domain of speech. No sooner is he named than he is divided in language, split between his symbolic identity and what is in him more than himself. Rumpelstiltskin’s evil is unapproachable and terrible, as Cora Diamond has made clear, and as such irreducible to psychological or moral judgment. Wilhelm Grimm himself spoke of the evil in his tales as something terrible, black and wholly alien that one cannot even approach.36 When, in the notes on Frazer, Wittgenstein refers to the sinister and dark, it is something of this order that he has in mind. Stanley Cavell has said of what Wittgenstein calls forms of life that “human speech and activity, sanity and community, rest upon nothing more, but nothing less, than this.” 35

Cited by Cora Diamond, The New Wittgenstein, eds Alice Crary and Rupert Read (London: Routledge, 2000), 171. 36 Diamond, The New Wittgenstein, 166.

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On this showing, one might say that seeing an aspect, being struck by it, makes present, by provoking, as it were, the taking place of language itself. That is, to be struck by an aspect is to be struck by the existence of language itself, by the event or taking place of language as such, rather than by anything expressed in it. The verbal response to a change of aspect draws attention to the specific condition of the utterance itself: it foregrounds the very act of producing what is uttered, rather than what is said or meant by it. The prominence of pronouns and temporal indicators, i.e. of deixis, operate to indicate that language is taking place: in other words, they allow reference to the very event of language. Part of the significance of this is to make it apparent that to engage in this way with the taking place of language brings one to see that language can only be understood from within. Thus, one might say, following Cavell with respect of the application of a rule, that in the moment of application of a rule there is a moment of what Paul Livingston calls “an essentially ungrounded projection”37 that cannot itself be determined by any further rule, a point crucial also to Guetti and Read’s account of rule-following. Finally, it may need to be emphasized in closing that this gives no grounds for imputing relativism (or skepticism) to Wittgenstein. As Cavell has made clear again and again, and Putnam in the article on which I have drawn earlier in this paper, relativism shares with skepticism the demand for some overarching metaphysical justification for our lives with language. In Putnam’s words, “[s]omething in us both craves more than we can possibly have and flees from even the certainty that we do have.”38 We find ourselves in the grip of a fantasy which we cannot traverse. To invoke the notion of fantasy is, of course, to invoke psychoanalysis, and it is precisely in this context (of Lacanian analysis) that Slavoj Žižek has addressed the distinction between “subjective” and “objective” certainty as Wittgenstein sets it out in On Certainty. “Subjective” certainty has to do with certainty subjected to doubt, and it concerns those situations where the usual criteria of ignorance and knowledge apply. However, The attitudes and beliefs that constitute “objective certainty” are not submitted to test and doubt. ... It is superfluous and wrong [nonsensical?] even to say that “objective certainty” concerns things about which “we undoubtedly know they are true.”39

37

Paul M. Livinston, The Politics of Logic (New York, London: Routledge 2013), 173. 38 Putnam, Renewing Philosophy, 178. 39 Slavoj Žižek, For They Know What They Do (London: Verso, 1994), 150.

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From a Lacanian point of view, what Wittgenstein calls “objective certainty” corresponds to what Lacan calls “the big Other,” the field of the symbolic which we have always already accepted, the field which is internal, as it were, to our language-games. For someone not to believe in the big Other, and to be excluded from it, is, as Lacan argued throughout his career, to be in the condition of the psychotic. Now, while Wittgenstein clearly understands this condition of psychotic disbelief in the place language can have in our lives, as his examples show, his crucial concern is with what appears as an irreducible gap separating “objective certainty” from “truth.” While he insists that although a language game is only possible if one trusts something, he also wants to say that “it is not that on some points men know the truth with perfect certainty. But perfect certainty is only a matter of their attitude.”40 As Norman Malcolm has put it, regarding this remark: Being perfectly certain (i.e. objectively certain) of something—in the sense of regarding it as unintelligible that one might be wrong—is an attitude, a stance, that we take towards various matters; but this attitude does not necessarily carry truth in its wake.41

Our forms of life float, as it were, in empty space, or, as Lacan would have it, there is an irreducible distance between the Symbolic and the Real. In Žižek’s words, “we cannot pinpoint any positive, determinate fact that would call ‘objective certainty’ into question since all such facts alwaysalready appear against the unquestioned background of ‘objective certainty’.” In other words, the irreducible distance that Wittgenstein brings out here is a gap made evident “by means of a radical discontinuity between certitude and ‘truth;’ of positing a certainty which, although unquestionable, does not guarantee its ‘truth’.”42 It is in this way that one can make out how radically misconceived—how fantasmatic—are charges of relativism (or skepticism) when leveled against Wittgenstein.

40 On Certainty, trans. Denis Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1979), §404. 41 Norman Malcolm, Wittgenstein: Nothing is Hidden (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), 216. 42 Žižek, For They Know What They Do, 152.

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References Baker, Gordon. Wittgenstein’s Method. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. Baz, Avner. “What’s the Point of Seeing Aspects?.” Philosophical Investigations 23:2. 2000: 97-121. Cavell, Stanley. Must We Mean What We Say? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. —. The Claim of Reason. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982. —. “The Division of Talent.” Critical Inquiry 11 (1985): 511-25. —. Themes out of School. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1988. Clack, Brian R. An Introduction to Wittgenstein’s Philosophy of Religion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999. Floyd, Juliet. “Number and Ascription of Number in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus.” In From Frege to Wittgenstein, edited by Erich H. Reck, 308-52. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Forrester, John. The Seductions of Psychoanalysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Glock, Hans. A Wittgenstein Dictionary. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996. Guetti, James, and Rupert Read, “Acting from Rules.” International Studies in Philosophy 28:2 (1996): 43-62. Kenner, Hugh. The Pound Era. Faber, 1975. Livingston, Paul M. The Politics of Logic. New York, London: Routledge 2013. Malcolm, Norman. Wittgenstein: Nothing is Hidden. Oxford: Blackwell, 1988. Mulhall, Stephen. Wittgenstein’s Private Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Putnam, Hilary. Renewing Philosophy. Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 1992. Crary, Alice and Rupert Read, eds. The New Wittgenstein. London: Routledge, 2000. Waismann, Friedfrich. How I See Philosophy. London; Macmillan, 1968 —. The Principles of Linguistic Philosophy. Edited by Rom Harré. London: Macmillan, 1997. Winch, Peter. Trying to Make Sense. Oxford: Blackwell, 1987. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Culture and Value. Edited by G.H. Von Wright with Heikki Nyman, translated by Peter Winch. Oxford: Blackwell, 1988. —. Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief. Edited by Cyril Barrett. Oxford: Blackwell, 1987.

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—. On Certainty. Translated by Denis Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell, 1979. —. Philosophical Investigations. Translated by G. E. M. Anscome. Oxford: Blackwell, 1986. —. Philosophical Occasions. Edited by James Klagge and Alfred Nordmann. Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett, 1993. —. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Translated by D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuinness. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974. —. Wittgenstein’s Lectures, Cambridge, 1930-1932. Edited by Desmond Lee. Oxford: Blackwell, 1982. —. Wittgenstein’s Lectures on Philosophy of Psychology, 1946-7. Edited by P.T. Geach. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1988. —. Zettel. Edited by G. E. M. Anscome and G.H. Von Wright, translated by G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell, 1981. Žižek, Slavoj. For They Know What They Do. London: Verso, 1994.

CONTRIBUTORS

Michael Grant was, until his retirement, Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Kent at Canterbury, UK. He studied English literature at the University of Cambridge and has edited T. S. Eliot: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982) and The Modern Fantastic: The Films of David Cronenberg (Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 2000). He is the author of Dead Ringers (Wiltshire: Flicks Books, 1997). Pui Him Ip is currently a doctoral candidate in divinity at the University of Cambridge. He has studied philosophy and Christian theology at Heythrop College (University of London) and theoretical physics at Imperial College London. He is currently writing a thesis on the history of divine simplicity in Greek Patristic Trinitarian thought up to 381. The Very Reverend Nicholas Loudovikos is Professor of Dogmatics at the University Ecclesiastical Academy of Thessaloniki, Greece, Ǿonorary Research Fellow at the University of Winchester and Visiting Professor at the Institute for Orthodox Christian Studies, Cambridge. His recent monographs in English include: A Eucharistic Ontology: Maximus the Confessor’s Eschatological Ontology of Being as Dialogical Reciprocity, trans. Elizabeth Theocritoff, HC Press (Brookline Mass.: HC Press, 2010) and the forthcoming Church in the Making: An Apophatic Ecclesiology of Consubstantiality (New York: St Vladimir’s Press). Sotiris Mitralexis received a doctorate in Philosophy from the Freie Universität Berlin, and a degree in Classics from the University of Athens. He has taught Philosophy at Bo÷aziçi University (Istanbul), Berlin and Athens, and has co-organized the international conferences “Maximus the Confessor as a European Philosopher” (September 2014, Berlin) and “Ontology and History” (May 2015, Delphi). His doctoral thesis, entitled Ever-Moving Repose: The Notion of Time in Maximus the Confessor’s Philosophy Through the Perspective of a Relational Ontology (2014), is currently being prepared for publication.

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Contributors

Chryssi Sidiropoulou is Assistant Professor at the Philosophy Department of Bo÷aziçi University, Istanbul, Turkey. After graduating from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, she continued with postgraduate studies at the University of Wales. Her PhD thesis entitled Wittgenstein, the Self and Religious Life investigates Wittgenstein’s critique of the Cartesian picture of the self and its bearing on fundamental religious claims. Her main interests are the later Wittgenstein and philosophy of religion. George Sivrides is currently working as an architect independently and for Sivrides Ltd. He has studied architecture at the National Technical University of Athens, philosophy at Paris I Sorbonne and sociology at Paris V Réné Descartes. Miltiades Theodossiou has studied at the National Technical University of Athens and is the author of The Philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Turning-Points in Interpretation (in Greek, Athens: Eurasia Publications, 2007). He has edited and translated several of Wittgenstein’s shorter works in Greek and is currently preparing a new Greek translation of Wittgenstein’s On Certainty to be published by Crete University Press. Haralambos Ventis has studied philosophy and theology, and holds doctorates from Boston University School of Theology and the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Institute of Philosophy. He has published papers in various theological journals and is the author of two books, Eschatology and Otherness (Athens: Gregoris, 2005), and The Reductive Veil: PostKantian Non-representationalism Versus Apophatic Realism (Katerini: Epektasis, 2005).

INDEX aesthetic, 50, 65, 68, 110, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 168, 171, 172, 173, 176 apophaticism, 49, 52, 56, 58, 64, 76, 81, 82, 83, 84, 95, 99, 100, 101, 104, 105, 107, 109, 122, 123, 124, 137, 140, 141, 142, 143, 146, 147, 160, 161, 164, 213, 214 Aquinas, Thomas, 151, 162, 163, 164 Aristotle, 57, 151, 154, 155, 157, 162, 163, 164, 214 Baltas, Aristides, 15, 33, 44, 47 Bild, 59, 60, 61, 62, 73, 110 coffee, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 75, 108 Conant, James, 8, 13, 14, 16, 17, 18, 19, 21, 22, 23, 25, 26, 27, 30, 31, 37, 42, 43, 44, 45 conceptualist, 2, 8, 11, 12, 13, 19, 20, 21, 22, 27, 29, 32, 33, 36, 37, 41, 42, 44 contradiction, 8, 23, 91, 124, 180 Culture and Value, 79, 81, 86, 102, 103, 106, 107, 126, 174, 177, 184, 192, 193, 210 Damascene, John, 152, 155 Diamond, Cora, 28, 13, 14, 18, 21, 26, 27, 28, 30, 31, 33, 38, 42, 43, 44, 45, 207 discursivity, 1, 3, 4, 5, 11, 13, 20, 29, 30, 32, 33, 37, 39, 40 epistemology, 2, 9, 10, 50, 134, 137, 139, 141, 142, 143, 147 ethical, 5, 6, 19, 50, 51, 81, 83, 90, 91, 92, 94, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 104, 109, 110, 113, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 123, 124, 180

formal syntax, 14 Frege, Gottlob, 5, 7, 18, 19, 31, 44, 45, 85, 86, 88, 89, 99, 105, 180, 195, 210 God, 57, 62, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 84, 86, 105, 109, 117, 121, 122, 123, 124, 127, 128, 130, 132, 136, 137, 140, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 151, 152, 153, 154, 156, 157, 158, 159, 162, 163, 164, 181, 182, 191, 192, 193, 198, 199, 200, 201, 205 grammar, 27, 38, 54, 55, 56, 57, 59, 112, 136, 161, 169, 170, 173, 180, 186, 196, 197, 199, 201 Hacker, P. M. S., 4, 5, 6, 7, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 46, 61, 77, 106 Heidegger, Martin, 33, 107, 136, 143, 148 immanentism, 50, 134, 139 ineffability, 1, 3, 5, 6, 12, 30, 37, 53, 57, 58, 62, 69, 70, 71, 72, 75, 76, 113, 120 ineffable, 1, 7, 8, 13, 17, 18, 20, 21, 22, 23, 25, 30, 31, 35, 37, 51, 52, 53, 56, 57, 58, 59, 62, 64, 65, 66, 69, 70, 71, 72, 75, 109, 130, 132, 143, 179 Kant, Immanuel, 7, 10, 11, 18, 19, 40, 44, 46, 85, 109, 111, 129, 130, 131, 133, 134, 137, 140, 141, 147, 148, 195, 214 Kenny, Anthony, 77, 86, 106 Kerr, Fergus, 49, 64, 65, 66, 70, 71, 73, 75, 77 Kierkegaard, Søren, 89, 106, 107, 109, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118,

216 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 184, 185, 190 knowledge, 7, 9, 22, 33, 34, 49, 103, 117, 122, 124, 130, 137, 156, 157, 162, 174, 208 language, 3, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 24, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 56, 58, 59, 60, 62, 63, 64, 66, 67, 70, 73, 74, 75, 76, 82, 83, 91, 92, 96, 97, 98, 100, 101, 102, 104,105, 108, 110, 112, 119, 121, 124, 128, 129, 132, 133, 134, 135, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 146, 147, 159, 160, 161, 163, 168, 169, 170, 171, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 179, 180, 182, 183, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 193, 196, 197, 198, 201, 202, 203, 207, 208, 209 language-games, 14, 102, 137, 161, 174, 203, 209 Lecture on Ethics, 81, 82, 83, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 100, 104, 106, 120, 122 logic, 15, 24, 34, 36, 40, 44, 46, 47, 51, 109, 110, 208, 210 logical proposition, 2, 24, 41 logical syntax, 2, 6, 11, 13, 15, 17, 18, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 34, 37, 39 Loos, Adolf, 86, 110, 119, 125 Marx, Karl, 33 Maximus the Confessor, 109, 152, 159, 160, 161, 163, 164, 213 McDowell, John, 2, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 33, 46 metaphor, 56, 61, 122, 145 metaphysics, 146, 148, 151, 154, 155, 157, 164 Mystical, 4, 5 Myth of the Given, 2, 9, 11, 12, 19, 32, 33, 36, 37, 40, 44, 46

Index non-propositional, 32, 33, 34, 35, 37, 129 nonsense, 4, 7, 8, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 38, 40, 82, 85, 91, 92, 100, 118, 129, 130, 135, 142, 147, 179, 180 ontology, 50, 87, 90, 93, 130, 134, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 146, 147, 153, 161, 162 pain, 31, 36, 53, 54, 56, 57, 59, 60, 61, 62, 65, 74, 112, 202 Palamas, Gregory, 143, 149, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 157, 158, 159, 160, 162, 163, 164 Phillips, D. Z., 42, 45, 62, 63, 64, 78, 79 Philosophical Investigations, 3, 6, 9, 16, 22, 41, 42, 43, 45, 46, 49, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 59, 60, 61, 62, 64, 65, 73, 74, 75, 76, 79, 86, 102, 106, 111, 112, 119, 124, 126, 130, 132, 133, 135, 137, 160, 161, 165, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 188, 189, 194, 195, 197, 198, 204, 210, 211 picture, 11, 24, 25, 29, 38, 49, 50, 53, 54, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 64, 67, 69, 72, 73, 74, 75, 86, 95, 99, 127, 133, 135, 138, 139, 142, 146, 170, 171, 173, 174, 175, 177, 178, 182, 183, 186, 190, 191, 192, 194, 195, 198, 201, 214 Putnam, Hilary, 109, 126, 134, 139, 149, 184, 188, 194, 197, 208, 210 Quine, Willard van Orman, 133, 134, 135, 137, 139, 141, 148, 149 religion, 49, 50, 56, 57, 58, 62, 63, 64, 70, 71, 74, 77, 78, 89, 100, 106, 115, 116, 118, 119, 120, 122, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 136, 137, 144, 147, 167, 181,

Ludwig Wittgenstein between Analytic Philosophy and Apophaticism 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 193, 194, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 210, 214 Resolute Interpretation, 2, 8, 9, 13, 30 Rhees, Rush, 42, 45, 49, 78, 79, 111, 114, 205 Russell, Bertrand, 3, 5, 12, 24, 47, 49, 85, 86, 99, 180 Sachverhalt, 50 saying/showing, 1, 2, 3, 5, 11, 13, 20, 32, 34, 44 Sellars, Wilfrid, 2 semantics, 127 sign-language, 6, 14, 34, 37 sinnlos, 5, 38, 50, 51, 91 sinnvoll, 31, 50, 51 solipsism, 4, 5, 160, 161, 162 subjective, 53, 55, 56, 57, 58, 60, 61, 62, 64, 65, 69, 70, 71, 75, 112, 163, 172, 196, 208 tautology, 4, 6, 24, 29, 34, 35, 36, 38, 39, 51 theology, 82, 107, 109, 128, 129, 132, 136, 138, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 155, 162, 214 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 49, 50, 51, 52, 54, 75, 79, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93,94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 104, 105, 106, 109, 110, 118, 128, 130, 132, 133, 137, 145, 147, 160, 165, 178, 179, 180, 181, 210, 211

217

transcendence, 3, 6, 7, 8, 13, 14, 19, 20, 25, 35, 36, 37, 40, 41, 42, 50, 58, 62, 63, 70, 72, 73, 74, 76, 105, 132, 143, 145, 146 Unaussprechliches, 4, 30 unsinnig, 4, 22, 31, 38, 50, 51, 82, 91, 179 Vorstellung, 59, 61 Weininger, Otto, 86, 109, 126 Wilfrid Sellars, 9, 11, 46, 134, 149 Winch, Peter, 33, 42, 45, 59, 60, 79, 106, 107, 126, 193, 199, 200, 201, 202, 210 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 142, 143, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 151, 160, 161, 162, 163, 165, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 193, 194, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211, 214 Yannaras, Christos, vii, 49