Wittgenstein, Religion and Ethics: New Perspectives from Philosophy and Theology 9781350050211, 9781350050242, 9781350050228

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Wittgenstein, Religion and Ethics

Also available from Bloomsbury Beauty, Wittgenstein and the End of Art, by Sonia Sedivy Contemplating Religious Forms of Life: Wittgenstein and D. Z. Phillips, by Mikel Burley Portraits of Wittgenstein: Abridged Edition, edited by F. A. Flowers III and Ian Ground Rebirth and the Stream of Life: A Philosophical Study of Reincarnation, Karma and Ethics, by Mikel Burley The Selected Writings of Maurice O’Connor Drury: On Wittgenstein, Philosophy, Religion and Psychiatry, edited by John Hayes

Wittgenstein, Religion and Ethics New Perspectives from Philosophy and Theology Edited by Mikel Burley

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2018 Paperback edition published 2020 Copyright © Mikel Burley, 2018 Mikel Burley has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editor of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p.xi constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Irene Martinez Costa Cover image © Wittgenstein Archive, Cambridge All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-­party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Burley, Mikel, 1972– editor. Title: Wittgenstein, religion, and ethics : new perspectives from philosophy and theology / edited by Mikel Burley. Description: New York : Bloomsbury, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018003704 (print) | LCCN 2018015802 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350050228 (ePDF) | ISBN 9781350050235 (ePub) | ISBN 9781350050211 (hardback) Subjects: LCSH: Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1889-1951. | Religion. | Ethics. | Religious ethics. Classification: LCC B3376.W564 (ebook) | LCC B3376.W564 W5765 2018 (print) | DDC 192—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018003704

ISBN: HB: 978–1–3500–5021–1 PB: 978–1–3501–5134–5 ePDF: 978–1–3500–5022–8 eBook: 978–1–3500–5023–5 Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

In memory of Dewi Z. Phillips (1934–2006), who, in a Wittgensteinian spirit, encouraged us to seek to do conceptual justice to the world in all its variety and to recognize that doing so makes ethical demands of the inquirer.

Contents Notes on Contributors Acknowledgements Abbreviations Introduction: Wittgenstein, Religion and Ethics: Seeing the Connections Mikel Burley

1

viii xi xiii

1

The Early Wittgenstein on Ethical Religiousness as a Dispositional Attitude  Chon Tejedor

13

‘The Problem of Life’: Later Wittgenstein on the Difficulty of Honest Happiness  Gabriel Citron

33

Wittgenstein and the Study of Religion: Beyond Fideism and Atheism  Mikel Burley

49

4

Wittgenstein, Kierkegaard and Chalcedon  Rowan Williams

77

5

On the Very Idea of a Theodicy  Genia Schönbaumsfeld

93

6

Wittgenstein, Analogy and Religion in Mulhall’s The Great Riddle  Wayne Proudfoot

113

7

Riddles, Nonsense and Religious Language  Stephen Mulhall

129

8

Wittgenstein and the Distinctiveness of Religious Language  Michael Scott

147

Number and Transcendence: Wittgenstein and Cantor  John Milbank

169

2 3

9

10 What Have I Done?  Sophie Grace Chappell

195

11 Wittgenstein and the Value of Clarity  Duncan Richter

219

Bibliography Index

237 255

Notes on Contributors Mikel Burley is Associate Professor of Religion and Philosophy at the University of Leeds, UK. His publications include Contemplating Religious Forms of Life: Wittgenstein and D. Z. Phillips (Continuum, 2012), Rebirth and the Stream of Life: A Philosophical Study of Reincarnation, Karma and Ethics (Bloomsbury, 2016) and a volume co-­edited with Niklas Forsberg and Nora Hämäläinen entitled Language, Ethics and Animal Life: Wittgenstein and Beyond (Bloomsbury, 2012). He is currently completing a monograph entitled Expanding Philosophy of Religion: A Radical Pluralist Approach. Sophie Grace Chappell is Professor of Philosophy at the Open University, UK. Previously known as Timothy Chappell, she began living openly and officially as a woman in autumn 2014. She was educated at Magdalen College, Oxford, and Edinburgh University, and has published widely on ethics, moral psychology, epistemology, ancient philosophy and philosophy of religion. Her books include Understanding Human Goods (Edinburgh University Press, 2003), Reading Plato’s Theaetetus (Hackett, 2005), Ethics and Experience (Acumen, 2009) and Knowing What to Do: Imagination, Virtue, and Platonism in Ethics (Oxford University Press, 2014). She has also edited or co-­edited four collections of essays in ethics, most recently Intuition, Theory, and Anti-Theory in Ethics (Oxford University Press, 2015). From 2017 to 2020 she is a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellow, and a Visiting Fellow in the Department of Philosophy, University of St Andrews. Her main current research is about epiphanies, immediate and revelatory encounters with value. She lives with her family in the north-­east of Scotland. Gabriel Citron is Assistant Professor in Religion and Critical Thought at Princeton University, USA. His extensive Wittgenstein editing work includes publishing notes by Rush Rhees and Norman Malcolm in Mind and co-­editing (with David Stern and Brian Rogers) Wittgenstein: Lectures, Cambridge 1930–1933: From the Notes of G. E. Moore (Cambridge University Press, 2016). His authored work includes articles in Philosophers’ Imprint, Philosophical Investigations and Faith and Philosophy. John Milbank is Emeritus Professor in Religion, Politics and Ethics at the University of Nottingham, UK. His many books include Theology and Social

Notes on Contributors

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Theory (Blackwell, 1990; second edition, 2006), The Word Made Strange (Blackwell, 1997), Truth in Aquinas (co-­authored with Catherine Pickstock; Routledge, 2001), Being Reconciled (Routledge, 2003), Beyond Secular Order (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013) and The Politics of Virtue: Post-Liberalism and the Human Future (co-­authored with Adrian Pabst; Rowman and Littlefield, 2016). He has also published two collections of poetry and co-­authored two books with Slavoj Žižek and Creston Davis. Stephen Mulhall is Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy at New College, University of Oxford, UK. His publications include Inheritance and Originality: Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Kierkegaard (Oxford University Press, 2001), On Film (Routledge, 2002; second edition, 2008; third edition, 2016), Wittgenstein’s Private Language (Oxford University Press, 2006), The Conversation of Humanity (University of Virginia Press, 2007), The Wounded Animal: J. M. Coetzee and the Difficulty of Reality (Princeton University Press, 2009), The Self and Its Shadows (Oxford University Press, 2013) and The Great Riddle: Wittgenstein and Nonsense, Theology and Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 2015). Wayne Proudfoot is Professor of Religion at Columbia University, USA, with research interests that encompass contemporary philosophy of religion, conceptions of religious experience and mysticism, classical and contemporary pragmatism and modern Protestant thought. His publications include God and the Self: Three Types of Philosophy of Religion (Associated University Presses, 1976), Religious Experience (University of California Press, 1985), an edited volume entitled William James and a Science of Religions: Reexperiencing ‘The Varieties of Religious Experience’ (Columbia University Press, 2004) and some recent articles on the thought of Friedrich Schleiermacher. Duncan Richter is Professor of Philosophy at the Virginia Military Institute, USA. His publications include Ethics after Anscombe: Post ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’ (Kluwer, 2000), Wittgenstein at His Word (Continuum, 2004), Why Be Good? A Historical Introduction to Ethics (Oxford University Press, 2007), Anscombe’s Moral Philosophy (Lexington, 2011) and Historical Dictionary of Wittgenstein’s Philosophy (Lexington, 2014; first edition, 2004). He has also published articles on philosophy’s relation to poetry and the emotions as well as on Wittgenstein and religion. Genia Schönbaumsfeld is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southampton, UK. Specializing in Wittgenstein, epistemology, Kierkegaard and philosophy of religion, her publications include Transzendentale Argumentation

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und Skeptizismus (Peter Lang, 2000), A Confusion of the Spheres: Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein on Philosophy and Religion (Oxford University Press, 2007) and The Illusion of Doubt (Oxford University Press, 2016). From 2003–6 she held a prestigious Hertha Firnberg research grant awarded by the Austrian Science Fund. Michael Scott is Reader in Philosophy at the University of Manchester, UK. He is the author of Religious Language (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), co-­editor (with Andrew Moore) of Realism and Religion: Philosophical and Theological Perspectives (Ashgate, 2007) and has published articles on the philosophy of language, the senses and action as well as on realism and antirealism in the philosophy of religion. His current research focuses on faith and on apophaticism in the context of religious language. Chon Tejedor is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Hertfordshire and Philosophy Research Fellow at Regent’s Park College, University of Oxford, UK. Specializing in the history of philosophy (especially Wittgenstein and Hume), philosophy of language, ethics and epistemology, her publications include Starting with Wittgenstein (Bloomsbury, 2011), The Early Wittgenstein on Metaphysics, Natural Science, Language and Value (Routledge, 2014) and a forthcoming collection, Wittgenstein on Science, co-­edited with Adrian Moore. Rowan Williams is Master of Magdalene College, University of Cambridge, UK, a position that he took up in 2013 after having been Archbishop of Canterbury from 2002 to 2012. An accomplished theologian and poet, his major theological works include Grace and Necessity: Reflections on Art and Love (Continuum, 2005), Wrestling with Angels: Conversations in Modern Theology (SCM Press, 2007), Dostoevsky: Language, Faith and Fiction (Continuum, 2008), A Margin of Silence: The Holy Spirit in Russian Orthodox Theology (Éditions du Lys Vert, 2008), Faith in the Public Square (Bloomsbury, 2012), The Edge of Words: God and the Habits of Language (Bloomsbury, 2014; based on the author’s Gifford Lectures of 2013–14) and The Tragic Imagination (Oxford University Press, 2016).

Acknowledgements Nine of the eleven chapters in this volume are based on papers presented at the Eighth British Wittgenstein Society Annual Conference, which took place at Hinsley Hall in Leeds on the 6th and 7th of September 2016. I am grateful to colleagues of mine at the University of Leeds who assisted and encouraged me in the organizing of that conference and to staff at Hinsley Hall who enabled it to run so smoothly. I am also, of course, obliged to the speakers and delegates who attended, without whose contributions it could not have been the success that it was. Since its founding in 2007 the British Wittgenstein Society (BWS) has been active in promoting deeper and wider understanding of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s ideas and methods, with a particular focus on displaying their relevance to major themes not only in philosophy but also in contemporary society and culture at large. My thanks are due to the Executive Committee of the BWS, especially its President, Danièle Moyal-Sharrock, and Vice-President, Ian Ground, for their tireless support of the conference and of this volume. I also thank them for inviting me to present the Thirteenth British Wittgenstein Society Lecture at the Bloomsbury Institute, London, in May 2015, an embellished version of which constitutes Chapter 3 of the present volume. The other contribution to this volume that is not based on a paper presented at the 2016 BWS conference is Chapter 10 by Sophie Grace Chappell. This is a significantly amended version of a paper first published in the online journal Diametros (No. 38, December 2013), though not previously available in print. I am sure readers will agree that the issues addressed in the chapter, including those of intention and the doctrine of double effect, are highly pertinent to the present volume’s themes. The conference was dedicated to the late D. Z. Phillips, who died slightly over ten years previously. Phillips’ prodigious efforts at advancing Wittgenstein-­ influenced approaches to the study of religion and ethics made him an inspiration to many, and his name was mentioned numerous times at the conference. It is likely that he would have taken issue with most, probably all, of the chapters in this volume to a greater or lesser degree, as Phillips had a sharp eye for what he saw as weaknesses in others’ arguments. But insofar as the contributions collected

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here exemplify that same spirit of critical engagement, combined with attentiveness to Wittgenstein’s work and ideas, Phillips would surely have appreciated the project. It is a pleasure to dedicate this book, like the conference, to Dewi, who is remembered with enormous affection by those who knew him, whether they concur with his philosophical ideas or not. I also here wish to acknowledge the encouragement I received prior to the conference from Hilary Putnam, who sadly died in March 2016. His work exploring both the significance of Wittgenstein’s published ‘Lectures on Religious Belief ’ (especially in Putnam’s Renewing Philosophy, Ch. 7) and Wittgenstein’s relation to Jewish thought (in Putnam’s Jewish Philosophy as a Guide to Life, Ch. 1) made an important contribution to contemporary thinking about Wittgenstein in relation to religious and ethical matters. In email correspondence prior to his death, Putnam had expressed warm appreciation that the conference was going ahead. He, too, will be greatly missed. At an early stage of the production of this volume two anonymous reviewers for Bloomsbury Publishing provided helpful comments on draft material. On behalf of all the contributors, I express my gratitude to them. And finally, let me thank Colleen Coalter, Helen Saunders and their colleagues at Bloomsbury, along with the production team at RefineCatch, for their geniality and efficiency in seeing this book through to publication. It has, as ever, been a pleasure working with them; their painstaking efforts are much appreciated. Mikel Burley Leeds, October 2017

Abbreviations (See the Bibliography for full publication details.)

Works by Ludwig Wittgenstein BB

The Blue and Brown Books: Preliminary Studies for the ‘Philosophical Investigations’, second edition, 1969.

BT

The Big Typescript: TS 213, 2005.

CE

‘Cause and Effect: Intuitive Awareness’, Philosophia, 1976.

CV

Culture and Value, 1980.

CV R

Culture and Value, revised edition, 1998.

GB

‘Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough’, trans. John Beversluis, in Philosophical Occasions, 1912–1951, 1993.

GB M

Remarks on Frazer’s ‘Golden Bough’, trans. A. C. Miles, revised by Rush Rhees, 1979.

LC

Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief, 1966.

LE

‘A Lecture on Ethics’, Philosophical Review, 1965.

LFM

Wittgenstein’s Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics, Cambridge, 1939, 1976.

LW I

Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology, Vol. 1, 1982.

LW II

Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology, Vol. 2, 1992.

NB

Notebooks 1914–1916, second edition, 1979.

OC

On Certainty, 1974.

PG

Philosophical Grammar, 1974.

Abbreviations

xiv

PI

Philosophical Investigations, second edition, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, 1958.

PI 4

Philosophical Investigations, fourth edition, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte, 2009. [The subscript ‘4’ will be included in citations only when the translation quoted differs from that in earlier editions.]

PPF

‘Philosophy of Psychology – A Fragment’ [formerly known as Philosophical Investigations, Part 2], 2009.

PPO

Public and Private Occasions, 2003.

PT

Prototractatus, 1971.

RFM

Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, third edition, 1978.

RPP I

Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, Vol. 1, 1980.

RPP II Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, Vol. 2, 1980. TLP

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness, revised edition, 1974.

TLP O

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. C. K. Ogden, 1922.

WLC

Wittgenstein’s Lectures, Cambridge, 1930–1932, 1980.

Z

Zettel, second edition, 1981.

Works by Other Authors EW

Rowan Williams, The Edge of Words: God and the Habits of Language, 2014.

FT H

Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling [1843], trans. Alastair Hannay, 1985.

FT L

Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling [1843], trans. Walter Lowrie, 1994.

GR

Stephen Mulhall, The Great Riddle: Wittgenstein and Nonsense, Theology and Philosophy, 2015.

PF

Søren Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments [1844], 1985.

Abbreviations

ST

Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae [composed c. 1265–1274], ed. Brian Davies and Brian Leftow, 2006.

WVC

Friedrich Waismann, Ludwig Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle: Conversations Recorded by Friedrich Waismann, 1979.

xv

Introduction Wittgenstein, Religion and Ethics: Seeing the Connections Mikel Burley

A main source of our failure to understand is that we don’t have an overview of the use of our words. – Our grammar is deficient in surveyability. A surveyable representation [übersichtliche Darstellung] produces precisely that kind of understanding which consists in ‘seeing connections’. Hence the importance of finding and inventing intermediate links. PI4 §122 Ludwig Wittgenstein was a philosopher and a human being who evades simple classifications. He ploughed his own furrow in his work and in his life, coming to eschew general theories in favour of sustained and rigorous attention to the nuances and intricacies of particular cases. To say that Wittgenstein was most deeply concerned with the workings of language in our lives is a legitimate starting point for considering his approaches to philosophy, but it only begins to do justice to the prodigious range of his thinking when one notices how pervasively intermeshed language and human life are. The intellectual tools that Wittgenstein developed for investigating our language-­pervaded lives lend themselves to being deployed in relation to an unlimited number of phenomena and indeed to ‘proto-­phenomena’ (PI §654) – to the very conditions of our being able to do or say anything at all. Thus, regardless of the fact that he wrote relatively little that makes direct reference to religion or ethics, Wittgenstein’s ideas have inspired and continue to inspire an abundance of insightful work in the study of these areas, among not only philosophers but also practitioners of many other disciplines, including theology, sociology, anthropology and the multidisciplinary field known as religious studies. The present volume brings together new or newly revised pieces by eleven eminent scholars who work in philosophy or theology or across these two broad

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disciplinary areas. Each chapter engages with or carries forward ideas from Wittgenstein – in most cases directly, though in some cases more obliquely. Taken together, they demonstrate something of the diversity of forms that such engagement is taking in the contemporary period. My task in this introduction is to set the context for those chapters by providing a concise overview of the connections between Wittgenstein’s thought on the one hand and inquiry into religion and ethics on the other. I shall also, in the final section, offer summaries of each of the chapters.

From passing over in silence to the elucidation of grammar The famous final proposition of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus – the only book of Wittgenstein’s to be published during his lifetime – states that ‘What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence’ (TLP 7).1 Regardless of how one interprets the purpose of the Tractatus as a whole, it is generally agreed that, for Wittgenstein at that time, the matters about which we cannot speak in any intelligible manner include the religious and the ethical dimensions of our lives. ‘[I]t is’, Wittgenstein writes, ‘impossible for there to be propositions of ethics. | Propositions can express nothing that is higher. | It is clear that ethics cannot be put into words. | Ethics is transcendental’ (TLP 6.42–6.421). By affirming that ethics exceeds the expressive capacities of language, Wittgenstein is not, of course, denying the importance of ethics. On the contrary, by characterizing it as ‘higher’ and ‘transcendental’, Wittgenstein is declaring ethics to be of absolute importance in our lives. It is just that one cannot say anything about it.2 When Wittgenstein returned to academic philosophy over a decade after having completed the Tractatus, he was invited to give a lecture by a group at Cambridge called The Heretics. Accepting the invitation, Wittgenstein presented his lecture on 17 November 1929, and the text of the lecture was eventually to be published as ‘A Lecture on Ethics’ in 1965. In certain respects, the lecture represents a moment of transition in Wittgenstein’s thinking. While still tied to the Tractarian contention that attempts to say anything about ethics or religion inevitably run up against the limits of language, Wittgenstein was clearly pulled towards wanting to make space for ethical and religious locutions. To indicate what he means by a value that is ‘ethical’ or ‘absolute’, Wittgenstein mentions three of his own experiences. The first he describes as ‘wonder at the existence of the world’ (LE 8),3 the second is ‘the experience of feeling absolutely safe’

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regardless of what might happen (LE 8) and the third is the experience of ‘feeling guilty’ (LE 10). Searching for forms of language in which such experiences might be expressed, Wittgenstein reaches for a religious vocabulary. He suggests that wondering at the existence of the world is ‘exactly what people were referring to when they said that God had created the world’, ‘the experience of absolute safety has been described by saying that we feel safe in the hands of God’ and the feeling of guilt is what ‘the phrase that God disapproves of our conduct’ is describing (LE 10). While seeing a place for these forms of words in our lives, Wittgenstein cannot find a way of formulating them as propositions with a straightforward correspondence to actual or possible states of affairs in the world. He therefore feels compelled to call them nonsensical, despite maintaining a deep respect for them (LE 11). Over the remainder of his career and life, Wittgenstein came to see how corresponding to (or picturing) what he had in the Tractatus regarded as states of affairs is not the only way in which a form of words can gain a sense. It is, he came to think, precisely by having a role in a form of life – a role that might, but need not, involve picturing states of affairs – that our modes of language come to have the sense that they do. If it is practice that ‘gives the words their sense’ (CV R 97e), then insofar as a form of words is deployed within the ‘stream’ or ‘weave’ or ‘hurly-­burly’ of human life, it has a sense to be looked for;4 and the place to look, at least in ‘a large class of cases’, is how it is used ‘in the language in which it is at home’ (PI 4 §§43, 116). From this revised vantage point, the philosophical task ceases to be that of driving a sharp wedge between sense and nonsense in any general sense of these terms, and becomes instead that of attending to particular cases of things that are said – whether by oneself or by others – which generate difficulties of understanding. In struggling to overcome those difficulties it is not, Wittgenstein thought, a general theory of language that will help us, but close attention to the problematic cases themselves. The form of investigation required is ‘grammatical’ in the sense that it seeks to elucidate, by means of description, how particular words or phrases cohere with the linguistic and behavioural surroundings in which they have a place: it is a returning of the words to their rough, often messy, everyday locations as opposed to the abstracted, decontextualized, rarefied environments typical of much philosophical theorizing. There is no reason in principle why ethical or religious uses of language should be exempt from these grammatical inquiries. Indeed, if ethical and religious discourse tends often to trip us up, it may be that precisely these uses are among the ones to which careful consideration will need to be given.

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Thinking about religion and ethics in Wittgenstein’s wake The majority of the remarks of Wittgenstein’s that refer most directly to religious or ethical matters are scattered throughout his notebooks, lectures and conversations. Many of them have appeared in edited collections published subsequent to Wittgenstein’s death, some of these being based on students’ partial transcriptions of his lectures or on notes of informal conversations written down by his friends. Notwithstanding the fragmentary nature of the remarks, they, along with the general orientation of Wittgenstein’s methods, have provided inspiration to many philosophers, theologians and other thinkers who have inherited and pursued those methods along their own particular trajectories. Among the themes characteristic of Wittgenstein’s work that have been influential upon inquirers into religion and ethics are those of family resemblance, language-­games and forms of life, plus the importance of the instinctive (‘primitive’, ‘animal’) sources of much of our bodily and verbal behaviour. From the 1950s onwards, for example, philosophers and other scholars of religion began to see the value in viewing the concept of religion in terms of the ‘family resemblances’ between its multiple uses. In other words, it was noticed that terms such as ‘religion’ and ‘religious’ apply to a diverse range of human phenomena not by virtue of those phenomena all possessing some essential set of shared properties, but rather by virtue of the complex overlapping similarities that they collectively comprise.5 Adopting such a perspective helps to free the scholar from the grip of a twofold assumption: first, that wherever a single word or cluster of words is in play (such as ‘religion’, ‘religious’, ‘religiosity’, etc.), there must be some core or essence to which the words in question apply; and second, that the relevant concept must therefore be definable in terms of individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for its correct application. Being freed from the grip of this craving for definitions has repercussions for many areas of philosophy, including but far from limited to philosophizing about religion and ethics. Nor should it be construed as a rejection of definitions tout court: there is a world of difference between, on the one hand, defining one’s words when necessary or useful to do so, and on the other hand assuming that unless and until we have precisely defined our terms, we cannot possibly proceed with any inquiry into the phenomena to which those terms are applied. The notions of language-­games and forms of life have been appropriated and adapted in various ways. Some appropriators have got into trouble for making apparently sweeping claims, such as that religion is both a form of life and a language-­game that can be contrasted with others such as science.6 As Peter

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Winch came to recognize, this way of putting things can be simplistic, as it not only implies that these different aspects of human life do not overlap, but it neglects the fact that ‘they are frequently internally related in such a way that one cannot even be intelligibly conceived as existing in isolation from others.’7 More recently, Stephen Mulhall, a contributor to this volume, has highlighted the danger of turning terms such as ‘language-­games’ and ‘forms of life’ into pieces of jargon that might just as readily serve to obscure as to illuminate the phenomena that lie before us.8 The solution is to retain a critical self-­awareness about our use of vocabulary, whether that vocabulary be borrowed from Wittgenstein or from anywhere else. When that is done, the concepts of language-­games and forms of life – or perhaps other concepts that develop or modify them in particular context-­sensitive ways – can, as Wittgenstein intended, serve to remind us of the extent to which our life with language is integrated into our lives and activities more generally, with all their religious and ethical and multifarious other dimensions. While it would be mistaken to conflate the grammar of one form of language with that of another – to suppose, for example, that talk of hearing God’s call (in religiously relevant circumstances) is not significantly different from talk of receiving a call from one’s mother – so too is it erroneous to assume, in advance of any inquiry, that one area of human discourse is entirely unrelated to others. The Wittgensteinian trick is to cultivate sufficient attentiveness to the particularities of different discursive situations to appreciate where the continuities and where the discontinuities obtain. With regard to the instinctive basis of much of what human beings do, one of the principal contexts in which Wittgenstein ruminates upon this theme is the notes that he wrote in response to reading portions of James Frazer’s great work of comparative anthropology, The Golden Bough. In those notes Wittgenstein criticizes Frazer for assuming too hastily that the ritual activities he is describing must be explicable in terms of theories held by the participants, or by the participants’ forebears, concerning how the performance of the ritual will expedite some instrumental effect (GB, esp. 119–25). To counteract such an assumption, Wittgenstein encourages us to reflect upon the many actions we perform not because we possess a theory or even a belief about how they will engender a desired result but merely because, as it were, ‘this is what human life is like’ (GB 121) and is simply what we do (cf. PI §217; LC 25). Others have developed Wittgenstein’s suggestion in relation to their own examples. Frank Cioffi, for instance, reminds us that someone’s speaking to a dead relative at the graveside of the deceased is intelligible to us without our needing to impute to the person any theory of an afterlife.9 D. Z. Phillips, meanwhile, has noted how

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distaste at the thought of sticking pins into a picture of a loved one need have nothing to do with a belief that the pins will cause physical harm to the person depicted; rather, the distaste is apt to be part of a moral reaction.10 Such reactions or forms of behaviour are not universal, and may in many instances be culturally inflected. But neither Wittgenstein nor those who have been influenced by him are proposing a general theory of the origin of religious and moral attitudes. On the contrary, they are recommending caution in the face of any would-­be general theory, inviting us always to look for exceptions and alternative possible accounts. Occasionally an eagerness to resist general theories might prompt an excitable author such as Wittgenstein to deploy incautious wording himself, thereby implying that he does wish to advocate a rival theory of his own. Critical readers of Wittgenstein, alert to these slips, will endeavour to go beyond them rather than becoming mere apologists for Wittgenstein even in his most ‘unWittgensteinian’ moments.11 Wittgenstein’s thoughts about the instinctive or animal depths of our nature are part of a sensibility that seeks to disabuse us, and especially those of us with a certain academic bent, of an overly intellectualistic picture of what human beings are. ‘I want to regard man here as an animal’, Wittgenstein writes in one of his final notebooks, ‘as a primitive being to which one grants instinct but not ratiocination’ (OC §475). In particular he wants to draw attention to the variegated panoply of dispositions and commitments – the ‘inherited background’ (OC §94) – that constitutes the precondition for having any intellectual life at all. Contrary to those philosophers who suppose that we could in principle suspend all our beliefs without exception, Wittgenstein insists that such a supposition overlooks the deep-­rootedness of the kinds of beliefs without which we simply could not function in the world. Indeed, ‘beliefs’ (Glauben), for Wittgenstein, fails to capture the depth at issue, though the idea of ‘religious belief ’ comes closest (OC §459). For what is really at issue are the ways of acting that are logically prior to, and make possible, the ratiocinative activities that include surmising, speculating, doubting, deciding between alternatives and so on. It is this emphasis in Wittgenstein’s thought that has spurred some philosophers to ponder the extent to which our moral lives might be grounded in ‘basic moral certainties’ that are themselves groundless, not in the sense of lacking a foundation that really ought to be in place if the moral commitments in question are to be justified, but rather in the sense that there is absolutely nowhere deeper to go: the basic (moral) certainties are simply ‘there – like our life’ (OC §559).12 All that I have alluded to above barely scratches the surface of the rich resources available in Wittgenstein’s work for thinking through and about the

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religious and ethical aspects of human life. As will be seen from the contributions to this volume, the variety of ways, both constructive and critical, in which one might explore and utilize those resources eludes neat encapsulation. The following concise chapter summaries should thus be regarded as little more than invitations to read and engage with the chapters themselves.

Summary of chapters In Chapter 1, ‘The Early Wittgenstein on Ethical Religiousness as a Dispositional Attitude’, Chon Tejedor discusses some of the shifts in Wittgenstein’s early thinking on religion and ethics, as he transitions from the views rehearsed in his Notebooks 1914–1916 to an altogether different approach in the Tractatus. During this period Wittgenstein moves away from the view that ethics and religiosity are conditioned by a transcendental subject and comes to endorse an understanding of the ethical-­religious attitude as non-­transcendental. The attitude, Tejedor argues, is dispositional rather than emotive: it is bound up in language, thinking and action and yet, at the same time, ineffable. Chapter  2, ‘ “The Problem of Life”: Later Wittgenstein on the Difficulty of Honest Happiness’, sees Gabriel Citron examining Wittgenstein’s battles with the profound anxiety that can arise in response to a sense of the radical contingency of everything one is and everything one cares about. By giving particular attention to entries in Wittgenstein’s ‘Koder Diaries’ from the 1930s, Citron discusses the nature of ‘the problem of life’ both as it manifested in Wittgenstein’s own life and as a universal problem. He also reflects on how Wittgenstein might respond to questions about whether life really is as problematically precarious as many of his most self-­revealing remarks seem to presume. Chapter  3, ‘Wittgenstein and the Study of Religion: Beyond Fideism and Atheism’, takes as its starting point the observation that there remains confusion over the implications of Wittgenstein’s work for the study of religion. On the one hand Wittgensteinians and sometimes Wittgenstein himself are lambasted as ‘fideists’ seeking to isolate religion from legitimate critique; on the other hand Wittgenstein’s naturalistic tendency is said to result in atheism. Interrogating the assumptions underlying these interpretations, I aim in the chapter to clarify existing debates and make space for a reinvigorated utilization of Wittgenstein’s ideas. I argue, first, that the charge of ‘Wittgensteinian fideism’ conflates two distinct principles – one acceptable to Wittgensteinians, the other not – and second, that Wittgenstein’s invocation of instinctive aspects of human life

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threatens to undermine faith only if one begins with an unnecessarily secularized conception of the natural. The chapter ends with remarks on the terrifying (and wondrous) phenomenon of radical epistemic contingency that Wittgenstein’s approach highlights. In Chapter  4, ‘Wittgenstein, Kierkegaard and Chalcedon’, Rowan Williams reflects both sympathetically and, at times, with a critical eye upon the various remarks in which Wittgenstein refers either directly or indirectly to the Christian gospels. Drawing connections between these remarks and Wittgenstein’s thinking about ethics and aesthetics, Williams considers both the similarities between Wittgenstein’s and Kierkegaard’s thought and the ways in which each of these thinkers helps to identify the error of treating the divinity of Christ as being merely one further ‘item of information about him’. Coming to see Christ as truly divine as well as truly human – as stated in the Definition of Chalcedon – involves not perceiving an additional fact in the world, but undergoing a transformation of, as Wittgenstein puts it, one’s entire ‘system of reference’ (CV 64e). In Chapter 5, ‘On the Very Idea of a Theodicy’, Genia Schönbaumsfeld brings the themes of religion and ethics vividly together by highlighting the moral implications of a pervasive assumption in contemporary analytic philosophy of religion, that it makes sense to try to justify the ways of God to humankind by devising a theodicy. Arguing that this assumption is erroneous, Schönbaumsfeld contends that theodicies worsen rather than alleviate the purported ‘problem of evil’. In addition to conceptualizing God in unduly anthropomorphic terms, theodicies turn out to be morally pernicious on account of their efforts to vindicate the existence of evil and suffering. Schönbaumsfeld thus proposes that instead of constructing putative theoretical justifications for the state of the world, the lesson should be learnt from Wittgenstein that the solution to the ‘problem of evil’ lies in the ‘vanishing of the problem’, and from Kierkegaard that faith consists not in excusing the world’s predicament but in accepting it in a joyous spirit. Chapters 6 and 7 closely complement each other, with Chapter 6,‘Wittgenstein, Analogy and Religion in Mulhall’s The Great Riddle’, comprising a sustained examination by Wayne Proudfoot of key themes from recent work by Stephen Mulhall, some of which are reiterated and developed further by Mulhall himself in Chapter  7. Of the issues that emerge out of Mulhall’s engagement with Grammatical Thomist theology, notable among those that Proudfoot illuminates and perceptively questions are: first, the idea that austere nonsense may be motivated by a refusal to assign available kinds of sense to language about God;

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second, the contention that the analogical projection of words into new contexts is guided not by rules but by a natural projective trajectory; and third, the relation between philosophy and theology. All of this is not only apt to prompt further thinking about the issues themselves, but also helpfully sets the scene for the subsequent chapter. In Chapter 7, ‘Riddles, Nonsense and Religious Language’, Stephen Mulhall, after summarizing the distinction that he, following Cora Diamond, draws between riddles and great riddles, fruitfully explores the relation between his own concerns and certain of those articulated in Rowan Williams’ Gifford Lectures, which were published in 2014 under the title The Edge of Words. A first or even a second glance at Williams’ book may suggest an antagonism between, on the one hand, Williams’ conception of God-­talk as a mode of representation and, on the other hand, Mulhall’s insistence that such talk is radically discontinuous with both descriptive and representational discursive practices. Ultimately, however, Mulhall sees a significant consonance between Williams’ willingness to endorse certain versions of negative theology and his own contention that great riddles, far from being solvable, serve to open up a space in which we are called to ‘absolutely or unconditionally cede control of our speech and forms of living’. In Chapter  8, ‘Wittgenstein and the Distinctiveness of Religious Language’, Michael Scott investigates why it might be that Wittgenstein’s ideas about religious language have endured but not prevailed in the philosophy of religion. Drawing especially upon Wittgenstein’s 1938 lectures on religious belief and on notes published in Culture and Value, Scott identifies four key themes in Wittgenstein’s thinking. By locating those themes in relation both to the dominant philosophical view of religious discourse – a view that Scott calls the face value theory – and to several rival theories that challenge the dominant view in various ways, Scott develops an intricate comparative analysis that highlights weaknesses as well as strengths in Wittgenstein’s treatment of how religious language differs from other regions of human discourse, most notably scientific and historical but also empirical forms of discourse more generally. Chapter 9, ‘Number and Transcendence: Wittgenstein and Cantor’, by John Milbank exhibits immense historical and intellectual range, exploring intersections between philosophy, theology and mathematics and situating thoughts from Wittgenstein on these matters within a longer trajectory from ancient Greece to the contemporary world. Picking up on critical remarks made by Wittgenstein in response to Cantor’s set theory, Milbank diagnoses why Wittgenstein may have regarded Cantor’s theory as mystery mongering.

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While acknowledging that there is a sense in which both Cantor and Wittgenstein can be viewed as partially, but not entirely, right, Milbank proceeds to engage critically both with what he regards as an ‘arbitrary transcendentalism . . . about rules’ in Wittgenstein’s rejection of a realist conception of set theory and with Wittgenstein’s retention of a distinction between intension and extension. Ultimately, Milbank sees these aspects of Wittgenstein’s thought on mathematics as tied to a more general aversion to speculative metaphysics that, in Milbank’s view, impedes the usefulness of Wittgenstein’s work to theological reflection. In Chapter 10, ‘What Have I Done?’, Sophie Grace Chappell first develops an externalist view of intention on broadly Wittgensteinian grounds and then applies this view to show that the classic Thomist doctrine of double effect, though it has good uses in casuistry, has also been overused because of the internalism about intention that has generally been presupposed by its users. Arguing that we clearly need a good criterion to determine the nature of our intentional actions, Chappell proposes (again on Wittgensteinian grounds) that the best criterion comes not from foresight, nor from foresight plus some degree of probability, nor from any metaphysics of ‘closeness’, but simply from our ordinary shared understanding of what counts as doing a given action, and what does not. Finally, in Chapter 11, ‘Wittgenstein and the Value of Clarity’, Duncan Richter focuses on Wittgenstein’s ethic of clarity and the related opposition both to reductionism and to the obscuring of differences in language and thought. Rather than merely discussing Wittgenstein’s work itself, the chapter reflects upon clarity and upon the ethical and political ramifications of valuing it. Choosing one’s words on the basis of their expected effects, for example, suggests a deliberate evasion of saying what one means. Anyone who values clarity in communication is likely to oppose this kind of consequentialist choice. On the other hand, the consequences of a particular choice of words might be significant. It could be lazy or cowardly or otherwise irresponsible simply to insist on ‘calling a spade a spade’ in the name of honesty or clarity. Proponents of blunt speech are not always on the side of the angels. So the rights and wrongs of clear communication are not simply obvious. Rather than proposing simplistic solutions to these conundrums, the chapter aims to make the conundrums more visible. Since the issues of clarity and honesty in language are central to matters of religious and ethical meaning more generally, this chapter constitutes a fitting finale to the volume as a whole. It also points in the direction of further themes that might usefully be developed in future research.

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Notes 1 Or, in Ogden’s more poetic rendition: ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent’ (TLP O 7). 2 For important qualifications concerning what it might mean to say that, for example, ethics (or religion) is ‘transcendental’, see Chon Tejedor’s chapter in the present volume. 3 Cf. TLP 6.44: ‘It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists.’ 4 For phrases such as ‘stream of life’, ‘weave of life’, ‘hurly-­burly’, etc., see, e.g.: Z §§173, 567–8; LW I §§211, 913; LW II 30e; PPF §2; RPP II §629. 5 See, e.g., Ninian Smart, ‘Numen, Nirvana, and the Definition of Religion’, Church Quarterly Review 160, no. 2 (1959), 216–25, at 222–3. For Wittgenstein’s enunciation of the idea of family resemblances, see PI §§66–7 and also BB 17–20. The idea was to some extent anticipated by William James, who proposed that ‘religion’ be thought of as ‘a collective name’ rather than as denoting a ‘single principle or essence’ (The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature, 2nd edn [New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1902], 26). For further discussion of the influence of the idea of family resemblances in the study of religion, see Mikel Burley, ‘ “Being Near Enough to Listen”: Wittgenstein and Interreligious Understanding’, in Interpreting Interreligious Relations with Wittgenstein: Philosophy, Theology and Religious Studies, ed. Gorazd Andrejč and Daniel H. Weiss (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming). 6 See, e.g., Norman Malcolm, ‘The Groundlessness of Belief ’, in his Thought and Knowledge (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 199–216, at 212; Peter Winch, The Idea of a Social Science and Its Relation to Philosophy, 2nd edn (Abingdon: Routledge, 2008), 94. 7 Winch, The Idea of a Social Science, xv. 8 Stephen Mulhall, The Great Riddle: Wittgenstein and Nonsense, Theology and Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 2015), 49–50. 9 Frank Cioffi, Wittgenstein on Freud and Frazer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 168. 10 D. Z. Phillips, ‘Primitive Reactions and the Reactions of Primitives: The 1983 Marett Lecture’, Religious Studies 22, no. 2 (1986), 165–80, at 176–7. 11 Cf. Cioffi, Wittgenstein on Freud and Frazer, 156. 12 For applications of ideas from On Certainty to moral philosophy, see esp. Nigel Pleasants, ‘Wittgenstein, Ethics and Basic Moral Certainty’, Inquiry 51, no. 3 (2008), 241–67; idem, ‘If Killing Isn’t Wrong, then Nothing Is: A Naturalistic Defence of Basic Moral Certainty’, Ethical Perspectives 22, no. 1 (2015), 197–215; Julia Hermann, On Moral Certainty, Justification and Practice: A Wittgensteinian Perspective (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

1

The Early Wittgenstein on Ethical Religiousness as a Dispositional Attitude Chon Tejedor

In his early writings, Wittgenstein explores an approach to religiousness that is deeply personal to him: it is a form of religiousness he finds ethically appealing, one he aspires to and with respect to which he repeatedly finds himself to fall short. His preoccupation with this form of ethical religiousness pervades many of his early writings, from the Notebooks 1914–1916 (NB), through the Prototractatus (PT) and the Tractatus (TLP), to ‘A Lecture on Ethics’ (LE).1 In this chapter, I continue developing my reading of Wittgenstein’s early approach to religiousness – which I call the Dispositional Reading – and consolidate my critique of the major alternative available in the literature – the Transcendental Reading.2 In so doing, I argue that, in the Tractatus, Wittgenstein aims to dissolve – not endorse – three major Schopenhauerian commitments: to transcendentalism; to choice; and to the abandonment of desire. The approach to religiousness that emerges once these commitments disappear is both intriguing and telling of Wittgenstein’s own character. I begin by presenting a series of arguments against the Transcendental Reading; I then defend my own alternative Dispositional Reading.

The Transcendental Reading Although I have argued against the Transcendental Reading (TR) in detail elsewhere, I would like to begin by summarizing some of my reasons for rejecting it. This seems necessary since TR remains dominant in key sections of the literature. TR presents the early Wittgenstein as endorsing (at least some of) the following three views: firstly, that the metaphysical subject is a transcendental condition of ethical religiousness (‘religiousness’ for short, hereafter); secondly,

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that religiousness consists in choosing one particular emotive attitude towards the world, i.e. the attitude of abandoning (rather than holding on to) desires; and thirdly, that religiousness is ineffable in that it can only be conveyed by means of nonsensical propositions.3 I will consider each of the three strands of TR in turn.

First strand: A transcendental subject4 It is often assumed that the Notebooks, the Prototractatus and the Tractatus advance one, mostly homogeneous position on religiousness. I suggest instead that Wittgenstein’s views are in flux at this time and that, although he toys with transcendentalism in some sections of the Notebooks, he finally abandons this view: by the time he writes the Tractatus, far from endorsing transcendentalism, Wittgenstein is seeking to dissolve it. I will not defend this claim in detail in this section, but will highlight my main arguments for it. In the Notebooks, Wittgenstein discusses three notions of the subject: the ‘thinking subject’ (e.g. NB 4.8.16 and 5.8.16), the ‘willing subject’ (e.g. NB 2.8.16 and 5.8.16), and the ‘metaphysical subject’ (NB 4.8.16 and 2.9.16). NB 5.8.16 and other entries make it clear that the phrase ‘thinking subject’ relates to the notion of an object-­like, thinking (or – more generally – representing) self: a simple self located in the world, acting as a condition for representation. The phrase ‘willing subject’, in turn, relates to the notion of a transcendental condition – a necessary unit (or unified perspective) at the limits of the world, acting as a condition for representation and religiousness. Both of these notions of the self are‘philosophical’, insofar as they come to Wittgenstein from the history of philosophy: the notion of a thinking subject comes to him through the works of Descartes and Russell; that of a willing subject, though Kantian in origin, comes to him primarily through Schopenhauer. The third notion of the subject discussed by Wittgenstein is that of a ‘metaphysical subject’. It is often assumed that Wittgenstein uses the phrases ‘willing subject’ and ‘metaphysical subject’ interchangeably in these early texts. In my view, this is a mistake. Note indeed that, although the expressions ‘willing subject’ and ‘metaphysical subject’ both appear in the Notebooks, they never appear together in the same entries. And there is nothing in the entries in which they do appear – i.e. separately – to suggest that the expressions are interchangeable for Wittgenstein. I will return to this notion of ‘metaphysical subject’ below. It is generally agreed in the literature that Wittgenstein discards as nonsensical the notion of a thinking subject located in the world. However, a significant

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number of commentators argue that he endorses, throughout this early period, the notion of a willing subject at the limits of the world – that is, the Schopenhauerian notion of a transcendental condition.5 I propose that this is misleading. Although Wittgenstein toys with this notion in entries such as NB 5.8.16, his Notebooks discussion of the transcendental willing subject ends with two entries that challenge this claim: Is belief a kind of experience? Is thought a kind of experience? All experience is world and does not need the subject. NB 9.11.16 What kind of reason is there for the assumption of a willing subject? Is not my world adequate for individuation? NB 19.11.16

NB 9.11.16 suggests that experience – that is, here, mental representation – does not require a subject, including (as is made clear by the context) a willing subject. In the next entry (NB 19.11.16), Wittgenstein moves to an even stronger view: he suggests that there is in fact no reason whatsoever to posit such a subject. The idea that, having toyed with the notion of a transcendental subject, Wittgenstein abandons it around this time is further corroborated by his correspondence with Paul Engelmann, whom he meets for the first time in Olmütz in October 1916. In the autumn of 1916, Wittgenstein and Engelmann have a series of discussions in which they explore their respective understandings of religiousness. This period coincides with the more strongly transcendentally flavoured entries from the Notebooks, which end abruptly in late November 1916 with the two entries mentioned above (NB 9.11.16 and 19.11.16). In December, Wittgenstein leaves Engelmann and travels to Vienna for Christmas, before returning to the Front. Wittgenstein and Engelmann meet again one year later, in December 1917. By then, it is clear to Engelmann that Wittgenstein has had an important change of heart. In January 1918, Engelmann writes a letter in which he expresses his concern over Wittgenstein’s spiritual condition and states: ‘It seemed to me as if you – in contrast to the time you spent in Olmütz [in the autumn of 1916], where I had not thought so – had no faith.’ To this, Wittgenstein replies: If you tell me now I have no faith, you are perfectly right, only I did not have it before either. . . . I am clear about one thing: I am far too bad to be able to theorize about myself; in fact I shall either remain a swine or else I shall improve, and that’s that! Only let’s cut out the transcendental twaddle when the whole thing is as plain as a sock on the jaw. [My italics in the last instance – CT]6

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I shall return to Wittgenstein’s reply to Engelmann towards the end of this chapter. For now, let us simply note that this supports the view that, by the winter of 1917–18, when Wittgenstein is writing the Prototractatus, he has already given up on the ‘transcendental twaddle’: he has abandoned as nonsensical the Schopenhauerian notion of a transcendental willing subject. It is highly significant from this point of view that the phrase ‘willing subject’ is never used again in the Prototractatus or indeed in the Tractatus. The only distinctively ‘philosophical’ notion of the subject that Wittgenstein continues to endorse throughout this period and into the final version of the Tractatus is that of a ‘metaphysical subject’ (PT 5.33552, TLP 5.641; cf. NB 4.8.16 and 2.9.16). I suggest that this notion of a metaphysical subject is altogether separate from that of a transcendental willing subject. The ‘metaphysical subject’ is a philosophical notion that is not transcendental and of which we can sensefully speak. Note indeed that, according to TLP 5.641, ‘there really is a sense in which philosophy can [“must” in NB 11.8.16] talk about’ the metaphysical subject. If the metaphysical subject were the willing subject of the Notebooks, TLP 5.641 would be advancing both that the willing subject is a transcendental condition of the world and that philosophers can – even perhaps must – talk about it. Such a claim would be deeply problematic, especially since there is nothing in the sections of the Tractatus in which Wittgenstein discusses the role of philosophy (notably TLP 4.112, 4.114, 4.115, 4.116 and the Preface) to suggest that the task of philosophy is to talk about transcendental conditions by means of nonsensical propositions. Far from encouraging philosophers to do this, Wittgenstein consistently suggests in the Tractatus that the task of philosophy is to dissolve nonsense. Since there are no persuasive, independent reasons for assuming that ‘metaphysical subject’ is interchangeable with ‘willing subject’ for Wittgenstein, and since this assumption renders TLP 5.641 impossible to parse, we should seek an alternative interpretation of ‘metaphysical subject’. I have argued in detail elsewhere for such an alternative.7 In my view, Wittgenstein rejects, in the Tractatus, any metaphysically restrictive notion of the self or subject, that is to say, any notion of the self or subject understood as imposing necessary conditions – i.e. restrictions – on representation, the world or ethics. He therefore rejects both the notion of ‘thinking subject’ and that of ‘willing subject’. Having discarded these two metaphysically restrictive notions of the self, Wittgenstein moves on to endorse a different, metaphysically non-­restrictive, philosophical understanding of the self: the self understood as the totality of possible thoughts – the ‘metaphysical subject’ of TLP 5.641. As we will see in the second half of this chapter, the notion

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of totality (all senseful thoughts, all senseful language) is closely associated with Wittgenstein’s early understanding of religiousness.

Second strand: Choosing the emotive attitude of abandoning desire In the Transcendental Reading, religiousness involves making a choice: the choice between adopting an attitude of acceptance of reality (the religious attitude) or adopting an attitude of non-­acceptance of – or resistance to – reality (contrary to genuine religiousness). Desire, insofar as it is associated with attempts to change or control – rather than simply accept – reality, is thus presented as contrary to religiousness. In this reading of Wittgenstein, the religious attitude involves choosing to abandon one’s desires and accepting the facts of reality as they are (rather than as we would desire them to be). The religious attitude is thus an emotive response to reality that consists in letting go of desire and easing oneself into acceptance. Whilst aspects of this view certainly echo Wittgenstein’s early thinking – notably, as we will see, the idea that a certain form of acceptance is central to religiousness – the emphasis on choice and on the abandonment of desire misrepresents his position. In Schopenhauer’s view, freedom and choice are possible by virtue of the transcendental willing subject, located at the limits of – rather than within – the causally necessitated phenomenal world.8 Insofar as I am part of the phenomenal world, I am causally determined and unfree. Insofar as I am also conditioned by the transcendental, willing subject, I am free to choose to the following extent: I can will to adopt either an attitude of resistance to reality or an attitude of acceptance of it. Key here is the idea that, by virtue of the transcendental subject (i.e. through its willing), I can necessitate a change in my attitude: a shift from desire (and resistance to reality) to the abandoning or letting go of desire (and acceptance of reality). The idea of necessitation is pivotal here: freedom and choice are only present if the will can necessarily generate or necessarily entail the abandonment of desire. If desire could happen – contingently – to persist when its abandonment has been willed, we would not be looking at free willing, nor indeed at a choice. This reading is problematic for a number of reasons. Firstly, it is predicated on the assumption that Wittgenstein endorses the notion of a willing subject in the Tractatus, an assumption which is not warranted, as we have just seen. Secondly, this understanding of freedom and choice rests on a notion of necessity and entailment that Wittgenstein rejects as nonsensical. This emerges in the

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(significantly: the only) entry of the Tractatus in which Wittgenstein mentions freedom of the will, namely TLP 5.1362: ‘The freedom of the will consists in the impossibility of knowing actions that still lie in the future. We could know them only if causality were an inner necessity like that of logical inference.’ Choice and freedom of the will – as conceived by Schopenhauer as Wittgenstein understands him – involve the will’s capacity to necessitate the abandoning of desire, where desire is a mental fact. In other words, Wittgenstein finds implicit in Schopenhauer’s notion of transcendental entailment (as, indeed, in his notion of deterministic phenomenal causation) the idea that facts can be necessitated – necessarily brought about – in the absence of internal relations. This, in Wittgenstein’s view, is problematic.9 For Wittgenstein, internal relations hold by virtue of the truth-­functional structures of propositions (TLP 5.2, 5.22). Hence, if q results from applying the operation of logical conjunction to p and r, q is internally related to both p and r. Indeed, q necessarily entails p (as well as r) (TLP 5.131). This, as we know, is seen clearly when we consider the truth functions that emerge, for logical entailment, when p and q are internally related as described and when they are not internally related at all: when p and q are not internally related to each other, the truth function for q → p is (TFTT)(p, q); when p and q are internally related as described above, the truth function for q → p is (TTTT)(p, q) and thus tautologous (see TLP 5.101). Imagine that q is the proposition ‘John desires to travel’ and p the proposition ‘John abandons his desire to travel’ and that we apply to these propositions the operation q → p. Since these propositions are not internally related, we understand their truth function to be (TFTT)(p, q) and not (TTTT)(p, q). Most importantly, we come to this understanding by attending to the propositions alone, simply by noting that they are not internally related to each other. Implicit in the Schopenhauerian view is the idea that some relations of necessary entailment hold, not by virtue of the internal relations between propositions, but by virtue of the willing of the transcendental subject: if, by virtue of the willing of the transcendental subject, John abandons his desire to travel, the relation between ‘John desires to travel’ and ‘John abandons his desire to travel’ becomes one of transcendental (necessary) entailment. Let us indicate this relation of transcendental (rather than ordinary logical) entailment with the sign ‘⇒’. Although the two propositions in question are not internally related to each other, we find that, through the willing of the transcendental subject, ⇒ rather than → comes to apply to them and their entailment truth function thus becomes tautological.

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In Wittgenstein’s view, this is fundamentally confused. Insofar as ⇒ turns crucially on our understanding of necessity and entailment, it exploits our ordinary idea of a logical operation. The transcendental view does not purport to replace ordinary logic with an altogether different one, but to retain ordinary logic whilst restricting some of its applications. The view suggests that, when certain circumstances pertain (i.e. when the transcendental subject wills in specific ways), then, for some possible senses (i.e. for senses relating to the having and the abandoning of desire), the relevant entailment operation becomes ⇒, rather than →. Implicit in this idea seems to be that the results of q ⇒ p should have a bearing on any other logical combination into which p and q may enter and that the ordinary logical operation of entailment → should remain applicable to propositions in all other circumstances. In other words, the implication seems to be that our logical practices should remain untouched, except in the restricted domain of those propositions affected by transcendental willing (e.g. propositions concerning desire). This, however, betrays a confusion. For the understanding of logical operations associated with entailment and necessity – i.e. the understanding associated with those very notions from which the idea of transcendental entailment derives its apparent force – turns crucially on treating logical operations as applying across propositions with different senses in a uniform manner. More specifically: it is central to the very notion of a logical operation that the processes involved in (and results drawn from) applying an operation to propositions should only depend on the truth-­functional structures of these propositions – structures that are expressible from within logic alone, in purely symbolic notation. This is precisely the notion of an operation that lies behind the use of truth functions and truth tables for Wittgenstein: truth functions and tables express relations between propositional forms – forms to which many different propositions (with different senses, but bearing the same truth-­ functional relations to each other) belong (cf. TLP 5.24). Hence, when p and q are not internally related to each other, the truth function for the ordinary logical operation q → p remains identifiably the same, irrespective of the particular senses of q and p (cf. TLP 5.4, 5.41). As a result, ‘there can never be surprises in logic’ (TLP 6.1251): in particular, there can be no surprises in logic by virtue of factors external to logic. The notion of transcendental entailment attempts to gloss over what are in fact two very different approaches to logic: in the first, the processes involved in applying operations to propositions depend exclusively on the truth-­functional

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structures of propositions and can be completed by attending to these structures alone; in the second, this is not so. In the second approach, the application of operations also depends on the particular senses of the propositions in question (whether or not they concern, for instance, desire) and on whether the transcendental subject has engaged in the relevant form of willing. In other words, in the second approach, the application of logic depends on attending to factors external to logic. The first approach does not allow for ‘surprises’ in logic; the second does: I might be surprised to discover tomorrow that ‘John desired to travel and failed to abandon this desire’ has suddenly become necessarily false because the transcendental subject has, unbeknownst to me, willed it so. Clearly, this approach would make a nonsense of our ordinary linguistic and thinking practices. In Wittgenstein’s view, there would, under such circumstances, be nothing that would count as senseful thinking or speaking at all. For Wittgenstein, the notion of transcendental entailment implicit in the idea of a willing subject dissolves into nonsense. For, as soon as we attend to it, we realise that this notion subverts the very understanding of logic that it attempts to exploit; it stultifies itself. One of the upshots of this is that the purported operation of transcendental entailment is in fact no operation at all: it is not a form of entailment, one that can be integrated into the rest of our logical practices; it is a departure from logic. Hence: ‘There is no possible way of making an inference from the existence of one situation to the existence of another, entirely different situation’ (TLP 5.135).

Third strand: Ineffability as illuminating nonsense The Transcendental Reading coincides with other readings in suggesting that, according to Wittgenstein, religious insights cannot be represented in senseful language. However, according to TR, Wittgenstein holds that religious and ethical insights can be shown, notably by means of nonsensical propositions.10 This attempt to align the notion of nonsense to that of showing is, however, highly problematic. The Tractatus uses the term ‘show’ in a variety of different contexts (e.g. in connection to: the application of signs in TLP 3.262; sense in TLP 4.022; negation in TLP 4.0641; logical form in TLP 4.121; the contrast with saying in TLP 4.1212; formal concepts in TLP 4.126; tautologies and contradictions in TLP 4.461; operations and variables in TLP 5.24; etc.).11 Differences notwithstanding, showing is generally presented in a positive light, as contributing to clarity. In

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contrast, the remarks relating to nonsense (‘unsinn’) are for the most part negative in tone (TLP 4.003, 4.124, 4.1272, 4.1274, 5.5351, 5.5422, 5.5571). This tonal discrepancy should be read as indicative of a misalignment – not an alignment – between the Tractarian notion of showing and that of nonsense. Indeed, other than in the highly contested TLP 6.54, where Wittgenstein does seem to allude to some sort of connection between the positive notion of ‘elucidation’ and that of ‘nonsense’, I see little evidence to suggest that Wittgenstein endorses the idea of illuminating nonsense at all. Note that there is nothing in the remarks in which Wittgenstein discusses philosophy to suggest that the task of philosophy is to convey insights by means of illuminatingly nonsensical propositions. On the contrary, nonsense is consistently presented as something that philosophers should seek to avoid or dissolve (TLP 3.324, 3.325); even in the contested TLP 6.54, nonsense remains something to be thrown away and discarded. In view of all this, the case for illuminating nonsense – and for the associated understanding of the saying/showing distinction – seems very slim indeed. The notion of illuminating nonsense should, I suggest, be abandoned.12 This is not to say that we must, for this reason, altogether abandon the idea of a Tractarian commitment to some version of the saying/showing distinction. Abandoning this in its entirety would be problematic for a number of reasons. Amongst them is Wittgenstein’s claim, in a 1919 letter to Russell, that ‘the cardinal problem of philosophy’ lies precisely in this distinction between saying and showing. In this letter, in which he responds to some of Russell’s queries about the Tractatus, Wittgenstein writes: I’m afraid you haven’t really got hold of my main contention, to which the whole business of logical prop[osition]s is only a corollary. The main point is the theory of what can be expressed (gesagt) by prop[osition]s – i.e. by language – (and, which comes to the same, what can be thought) and what can not be expressed by prop[osition]s, but only shown (gezeigt); which, I believe, is the cardinal problem of philosophy.13

There has, in recent years, been a degree of convergence, amongst readers on different sides of the New Wittgenstein debate, on an understanding of the saying/showing distinction that presents showing as associated with a form of practical – rather than theoretical or representational – understanding. Showing involves a form of know-­how: knowing how to use signs and knowing how to recognize the use of signs.14 This proposal is, I think, highly promising.15 As we will now see, this notion of know-­how and the related notion of disposition are crucial to understanding Wittgenstein’s approach to religiousness.

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The Dispositional Reading There is no doubt that Wittgenstein regards the Tractatus as having an important ethical-­religious dimension. In the autumn of 1919, he writes to Ludwig Ficker: [T]he point of the book is an ethical one. I once wanted to include in the preface a sentence that is now actually not there, but that I will write to you now since it might be a key for you: I wanted to write that my book consists of two parts: of the one that is present here and of everything I have not written. Precisely this second part is the important one. For the ethical is delimited as it were from the inside by my book; and I am convinced that strictly speaking it can ONLY be delimited in this way. In short I think: everything of which many nowadays are blethering, I have defined in my book by being silent about it. . . . I would recommend you to read the preface and the conclusion since these express the point most directly.16

That the Tractatus has an ethical-­religious dimension is also noted by Engelmann and Russell who, alongside Frege and Ramsey, are amongst the first to read the final version of the book and discuss it with Wittgenstein.17 When Russell reads the Tractatus for the first time and then meets Wittgenstein in December 1919, he writes to Lady Ottoline Morrell: ‘I had felt in his book a flavour of mysticism, but was astonished when I found that he has become a complete mystic’.18 Similarly, reminiscing about his conversations with Wittgenstein following the completion of the Tractatus, Engelmann writes: ‘[Wittgenstein] believed – rightly – that the essential points on these [“aesthetic and ethical-­religious”] questions had already been made, though implicitly, in the Tractatus.’19 In what respect, precisely, does the Tractatus have an ethical-­religious dimension though? In order to answer this question it is worth returning to the letter that Wittgenstein writes to Engelmann in January 1918 – a letter he composes whilst he is working on the Prototractatus and about to start drafting the final version of the Tractatus. In this letter, Wittgenstein uses a striking metaphor: the metaphor of ‘the machine for becoming decent’. He writes to Engelmann: If you tell me now I have no faith, you are perfectly right, only I did not have it before either. It is plain, isn’t it, that when a man wants, as it were, to invent a machine for becoming decent, such a man has no faith. [My italics in the second instance – CT]20

I suggest that, for Wittgenstein, the Tractatus is precisely such a ‘machine for becoming decent’. I will defend this claim in the remainder of this chapter.

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The Tractatus as ‘machine’ Part of the aim of the Tractatus is to effect a transformation in its reader: the book aims to train our dispositions to speak and think away from particular forms of nonsense and, in so doing, to alter our practical understanding of the position we occupy in the world.21 This process, when successful, amounts to an ethical-­ religious transformation. In order to shed light on these claims, we need briefly to consider the question of the philosophical method at work in the Tractatus. For Wittgenstein, philosophy aims at the clarification of language and thought. In his view, our ability to judge how (linguistic and mental) signs are used is not dependent on our being presented with a theory of language, thought or representation – and the Tractatus does not attempt to present us with such a theory. On the contrary, insofar as we already have mastery of everyday language and thought, we already have the ability to make apt judgements with respect to our use of signs (TLP 4.002). Hence, ‘Our problems are not abstract, but perhaps the most concrete that there are’ (TLP 5.5563). Our problems are not to be resolved by getting to grips with an abstract theory of representation, for they do not stem from the lack of such a theory. Instead, our problems result from the fact that, although we already possess the know-­how needed to use signs and recognize their use (insofar as we already have mastery of everyday language and thought), our disposition to act on this know-­how has become eroded by our distorting philosophical practices. Most propositions and questions, that have been written about philosophical matters, are not false, but senseless. We cannot, therefore, answer questions of this kind at all, but only state their senselessness. Most questions and propositions of the philosophers result from the fact that we do not understand the logic of our language. (They are of the same kind as the question whether the Good is more or less identical than the Beautiful.) And so it is not to be wondered at that the deepest problems are really no problems. TLP O 4.003

Our failure to ‘understand the logic of our language’ is not the kind of failure that results from the unavailability of an abstract theory of language; it is a failure in our practical understanding, a failure in our disposition to use linguistic and mental signs in particular ways. It is our disposition to act – in particular, to use signs – that needs to be corrected. And, for Wittgenstein, only an activity can

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help correct such a floundering disposition to act. In his view, philosophy – properly understood – is precisely such an activity: The object [purpose – ‘Zweck’ in the original] of philosophy is the logical clarification of thoughts. Philosophy is not a theory but an activity. A philosophical work consists essentially of elucidations. The result of philosophy is not a number of “philosophical propositions”, but to make propositions clear. Philosophy should make clear and delimit sharply the thoughts which otherwise are, as it were, opaque and blurred. TLP O 4.112

The aim of philosophical activity is to enable us to fine-­tune our thinking and linguistic abilities, to orient our dispositions to use mental and linguistic signs away from the production of philosophical nonsense and towards the production of senseful pictures. Ideally, this philosophical task would be performed in a face-­ to-face, interpersonal, dialectical manner, so that our individual dispositions to produce nonsense (the dispositions that each of us – philosophers – has to produce nonsense in particular ways) could be worked on as soon as they broke surface:22 The right method of philosophy would be this. To say nothing except what can be said, i.e. the propositions of natural science, i.e. something that has nothing to do with philosophy: and then always, when someone else wished to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had given no meaning to certain signs in his propositions. This method would be unsatisfying to the other—he would not have the feeling that we were teaching him philosophy— but it would be the only strictly correct method. TLP O 6.53

Since such a direct approach is not always practical, however, Wittgenstein produces a ‘machine’ – the Tractatus – that aims to achieve a similar result. This ‘machine’ is intended to be similarly interactive: it aims to engage the reader in an internal dialogue, similar to that which would take place in the more direct approach.23 Implicit here is the idea that it is only by personally engaging in such a dialectic struggle that the required transformation – a transformation in our dispositions to use signs – can be achieved. The Tractatus ‘machine’ uses a number of techniques to this purpose: some of its propositions serve as direct instructions that aim to recall us to a know-­how we already possess (e.g. TLP 2.21);24 others present us with nonsensical puzzles against which we can test our thinking and linguistic abilities.25 In both cases, the aim is to help us identify our philosophical

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dispositions – our personal vulnerabilities – towards nonsense so as to loosen the hold it has on us. I suggest that Wittgenstein regards the more strongly ethically flavoured propositions of TLP 6.4–6.522, not as illuminatingly nonsensical propositions that show us ineffable insights, but as precisely such puzzles – puzzles we can engage in so as to test our (endlessly recurrent) susceptibility to nonsense, with a view to weakening it. When successful, this process helps to reinforce our ordinary thinking and linguistic know-­how, it orients our dispositions to use signs away from nonsense, toward senseful language and thought. Note indeed that Wittgenstein presents the ethically flavoured remarks following TLP 6.4 as comments on TLP 6.4: ‘All propositions are of equal value’. Indeed, if all propositions are of equal value, no propositions enjoy the privileged status of conveying ethical insights better than others. There are no specifically ethical propositions: all propositions are ethically – strictly – on a par. Interestingly, both Engelmann and Ramsey (who, as we saw above, are amongst the first to read the Tractatus and discuss it with Wittgenstein) mention that the book deliberately includes ambiguous sentences as part of its method.26 In his Memoir, for instance, Engelmann makes the following remark concerning Wittgenstein’s use of brackets in ‘(Ethics and aesthetics are one and the same.)’ (TLP 6.421): But the statement [in TLP 6.421] is put in parentheses, said by the way, as something not really meant to be uttered, yet something that should not be passed over in silence at that point. And this is done as a form of a reminder recalling to the understanding reader an insight which he is assumed to possess in any case.27

The Tractatus ‘machine’ aims to train our dispositions away from the production of nonsense and to return us to a pre-­philosophical know-­how in the use of signs. In so doing, it aims to impress upon us that certain philosophical notions – such as that of the willing subject and that of transcendental necessary entailment – simply disintegrate in our hands upon close inspection. With the recognition that these notions are nonsensical comes an important shift in our understanding of our own position in the world: the illusion that we occupy a metaphysically privileged position – either through being a necessary condition of the world or through being able to necessitate changes in the world (e.g. the abandonment of desire) – vanishes. This illusion vanishes when the training – the activity of clarification, of honing our dispositions to use signs – bears fruit: we then come to ‘see the world aright’ (TLP 6.54).

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Wittgenstein tells us that, in his case, such moments of clarity tend to be accompanied by an experience of ‘[wondering] at the existence of the world’, an experience that makes him inclined ‘to use such phrases as “how extraordinary that anything should exist” or “how extraordinary that the world should exist” ’ (LE 8). For Wittgenstein – i.e. for him personally – achieving the dispositional attitude of ‘seeing the world aright’ is often accompanied by a sense of wonder: the wonder that any possible state should obtain, at all, as a fact. This sense of wonder attaches itself to all facts: physical facts (the rocks, plants, animals, human physical bodies we encounter in reality), but also mental facts (such as desires, beliefs, wishes, etc.). Whilst this experience of wonder tends to accompany moments of accrued clarity for Wittgenstein, it should not be confused with this very clarity or – indeed – with the religious attitude itself. For particular emotions – even emotions of wonder – are mental facts. As such, they are entirely devoid of ethical value.

Emotions and wonder In Wittgenstein’s view, emotions are describable mental facts – facts that are on a par with all other facts in the world. That mental facts have no special ethical currency is made clear in the following passage from ‘A Lecture on Ethics’: But what I mean is that a state of mind, so far as we mean by that a fact which we can describe, is in no ethical sense good or bad. If for instance in our world-­book we read the description of a murder. . . . Certainly the reading of this description might cause us pain or rage or any other emotion, or we might read about the pain or rage caused by this murder in other people when they heard of it, but there will simply be facts, facts, and facts but no Ethics. LE 6–7; my italics

It follows that, for him, the religious attitude cannot be an emotive response – not even an emotive response of wonder. Instead, the religious attitude is dispositional. Having a religious attitude does not involve experiencing certain emotions: it involves being disposed to use linguistic and mental signs (as well as more generally to act) in ways that reflect that we are clear with respect to our position in the world. Having such a dispositional attitude might be associated for us with experiencing certain emotions, but these emotions – e.g. in Wittgenstein’s own case, emotions of wonder – in and of themselves do not constitute the attitude. The emotions are epiphenomenal to the ethical-­religious attitude: they

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are phenomena that tend to accompany the attitude (at least, in Wittgenstein’s own case), but which are neither constitutive nor in any way necessary to the attitude.

Choice-­less ethics and desire This leads us to our final question: the question of Wittgenstein’s treatment of the Schopenhauerian notions of choice and desire. For, as we saw above, Schopenhauer holds that we can and should choose the attitude of abandoning our desires. In Schopenhauer’s view (or, at least, in Wittgenstein’s understanding of Schopenhauer’s view), I cannot freely choose what desires I have, but I can choose to abandon those desires I do have. Imagine that I have a desire for warmth. Although I cannot choose to have a desire for coldness instead, I can choose to let go of – i.e. to abandon – my desire for warmth. To this limited extent, and by virtue of the will of the transcendental subject, freedom is possible in Schopenhauer’s view: I am free to choose to let go of those desires I have and doing so is the ethically correct choice. Wittgenstein’s position is different. To begin with, there is in his view no suggestion that we are faced with an ethical choice here. He allows that there are two possible attitudes towards the world (one religious or ethical, the other not), but he does not suggest that we choose (let alone freely choose) between them. There is no choice to be made between these two attitudes: it is not as if I can decide between two attitudes that are both available to me at any one point, or as if I can necessitate either one of them to obtain at will. Instead, Wittgenstein simply notes that our attitude towards the world goes hand in hand with our religiousness or lack thereof. Hence, the claim, in his January 1918 letter to Engelmann: ‘I shall either remain a swine or else I shall improve, and that’s that!’ Either he will come to adopt the religious attitude or he will not – ‘that’s that!’ Furthermore, for Wittgenstein, desires are mental facts – they are part of the fundamentally contingent reality, of the world as totality of facts. Seeing desires ‘aright’ involves, not striving to abandon them, but treating them as the fragile gifts that they are: it involves holding them in sight whilst acknowledging that they may contingently persist or disappear and that, if they do persist, attempting to fulfil them may prove entirely futile. In this respect, Wittgenstein’s treatment of religiousness does indeed involve a notion of acceptance, but it is a notion of acceptance radically different from Schopenhauer’s. For Wittgenstein, acceptance of reality does not involve trying to abandon desire, but involves acknowledging both the reality of our desires and their fundamental contingency. Desires are

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mental facts and, as such, part of that very reality that we are trying to accept: all facts, like all propositions, are, from the point of view of ethics, strictly on a par. Acknowledging the fundamental contingency of reality includes acting and using signs in a way that reflects that the only necessary relations between facts arise from internal relations. It involves resisting the illusion that I can (causally or transcendentally) necessitate – independently of any internal relations – changes in the facts (e.g. in my desires).28 This presents us with an unsettling picture. Indeed, we could be forgiven at this point for asking: if we cannot necessitate any changes in reality, if we cannot even necessitate our own ethical improvement, why strive towards anything at all? Why impose any ethical demands whatsoever on ourselves? This is puzzling, especially in the light of the stringent ethical demands that Wittgenstein did impose on himself, during his lifetime.29 In the event, Wittgenstein’s response to this question is both stark and strangely liberating. For his suggestion is that, whilst we cannot necessitate ethical change, we may well be presented with opportunities to train for such change. This training may be successful, or not: the ‘machine’ may end up working, or it may not. If it does work, it will effect an ethical-­religious transformation in us; if not, it will not – ‘that’s that!’ Portraying the Tractatus as a ‘machine’ betrays both Wittgenstein’s impatience with his own ethical-­religious condition and his tendency towards self-­ deprecation. Perhaps it also betrays the worry that he may, in essence, never have moved on from being an engineer, someone who designs and builds machines – even if, in this particular case, the machine in question turns out to be a most important one: ‘a machine for becoming decent’.

Notes 1 Although ten years separate the writing of the Tractatus and that of ‘A Lecture on Ethics’, Wittgenstein’s approach to religiousness and the ethical remains almost identical in these two texts. 2 I have developed different and related aspects of this discussion in Chon Tejedor, The Early Wittgenstein on Metaphysics, Natural Science, Language and Value (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015), esp. Chs 2, 3 and 6; ‘The Earlier Wittgenstein on the Notion of Religious Attitude’, Philosophy 88, no. 1 (2013), 55–71; and ‘The Ethical Dimension of the Tractatus’, in Doubt, Ethics and Religion: Wittgenstein and the Counter-Enlightenment, ed. Luigi Perissinotto and Vicente Sanfélix (Frankfurt: Ontos, 2010), 85–103.

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3 Martin Stokhof, in his World and Life as One: Ethics and Ontology in Wittgenstein’s Early Thought (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), defends a version of TR that includes all of these views. Stokhof writes: ‘Ethically speaking we face a choice between trying to mold the world according to our desires and detaching ourselves from it, refraining from wishing and craving’ (219). This emphasis on choice is absent in other transcendental readings of the Tractatus, which are, in my view, greatly strengthened by this absence. See notably Julián Marrades Millet, ‘Subject, World and Value’, in Doubt, Ethics and Religion: Wittgenstein and the Counter-Enlightenment, ed. Luigi Perissinotto and Vicente Sanfélix (Frankfurt: Ontos, 2010), 63–83. 4 I defend some of the following arguments in more detail in Tejedor, The Early Wittgenstein on Metaphysics, Natural Science, Language and Value, Chs 2 and 3. 5 As mentioned in note 3 above, see esp. Stokhof, World and Life as One. 6 Engelmann’s letter and Wittgenstein’s reply from 16 January 1918 are cited in Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (London: Vintage, 1990), 152–3. In the original, Wittgenstein’s reply reads: ‘Wenn Sie nun sagen daß ich keinen Glauben habe, so haben Sie ganz recht, nur hatte ich ihn auch früher nicht. Es ist ja klar, daß der Mensch der, so zu sagen, eine Maschine erfinden will um anständig zu werden, daß dieser Mensch keinen Glauben hat. Aber was soll ich tun? Das eine ist mir klar: Ich bin viel zu schlecht um über mich spintisieren zu können, sondern, ich werde entweder ein Schweinehund bleiben oder mich bessern, und damit basta! Nur kein transzendentales Geschwätz, wenn alles so klar ist wie eine Watschen’ (my italics in the last instance). See Paul Engelmann, Ludwig Wittgenstein: Briefe und Begegnungen (Vienna: Oldenbourg, 1970), 18–19. 7 Tejedor, The Early Wittgenstein on Metaphysics, Natural Science, Language and Value, Ch. 3. 8 See, e.g., Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. E. F. J. Payne (New York: Dover, 1969), esp. Vol. 1, §§28 and 56; and Arthur Schopenhauer, Prize Essay on the Freedom of the Will, ed. Günter Zöller, trans. E. F. J. Payne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), esp. §§III and V. 9 Wittgenstein suggests that a similar confusion is at play in the causal view characteristic of the kind of determinism that would, according to Schopenhauer, govern the phenomenal world. On this see Tejedor, The Early Wittgenstein on Metaphysics, Natural Science, Language and Value, Ch. 4. 10 See, for instance, Stokhof, World and Life as One, Ch. 4, esp. 211. 11 Floyd highlights the Tractatus’ ‘daunting variety of cases of showing’ in Juliet Floyd, ‘Wittgenstein and the Inexpressible’, in Wittgenstein and the Moral Life: Essays in Honor of Cora Diamond, ed. Alice Crary (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 177–234, at 182–5. 12 On this point, several metaphysical readers (opposed to resolute or austere interpretations) agree; see, notably, Howard Mounce, ‘Reply to Read and Deans’,

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Philosophical Investigations 26, no. 3 (2001), 267–70; and 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), 22–66. 13 Letter sent from Cassino, 19 August 1919, in Ludwig Wittgenstein, Cambridge Letters: Correspondence with Russell, Keynes, Moore, Ramsey and Sraffa, ed. Brian McGuinness and G. H. von Wright (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 98. 14 This proposal can, I think, be traced back to A. W. Moore, ‘On Saying and Showing’, Philosophy 62 (1987), 473–97. Different approximations to it can be found in the literature on different sides of the New Wittgenstein debate; see: A. W. Moore, ‘Ineffability and Nonsense – Part I’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes 77, no. 1 (2003), 169–93, at 190–1; White, ‘Throwing the Baby Out with the Ladder’, 44; Marie McGinn, Elucidating the Tractatus: Wittgenstein’s Early Philosophy of Logic and Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 172–3; Michael Kremer, ‘The Purpose of Tractarian Nonsense’, Noûs 35, no. 1 (2001), 39–73; Michael Kremer, ‘The Cardinal Problem of Philosophy’, in Wittgenstein and the Moral Life: Essays in Honour of Cora Diamond, ed. Alice Crary (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 143–76. 15 For this debate, see: Peter M. Sullivan, ‘On Trying to be Resolute: A Response to Kremer on the Tractatus’, European Journal of Philosophy 10, no. 1 (2002), 43–78; James 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), 42–97; and Kremer, ‘The Cardinal Problem of Philosophy’. 16 Quoted in Stokhof, World and Life as One, 5–6. The letter is also cited in Brian McGuinness, Young Ludwig: Wittgenstein’s Life, 1889–1921 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), Ch. 9, and in Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein, 178. 17 For Frege’s response to the Tractatus, see Burton Dreben and Juliet Floyd, ‘Frege– Wittgenstein Correspondence’, and Juliet Floyd, ‘The Frege–Wittgenstein Correspondence: Interpretive Themes’, in Interactive Wittgenstein: Essays in Memory of Georg Henrik von Wright, ed. Enzo De Pellerin (Dordrecht: Springer, 2011), 15–74, 75–107. For Ramsey’s response, see Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein, 215–24. 18 Quoted in McGuinness, Young Ludwig, 279. Around this time, Wittgenstein considered devoting himself to a religious life. It was also around this time that he made the decision to give up the family fortune he had inherited. See McGuinness, Young Ludwig, 278–80. 19 Paul Engelmann, ‘A Memoir’, in Portraits of Wittgenstein, ed. F. A. Flowers III and Ian Ground, Vol. 1 (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 309–59, at 335. 20 Engelmann’s letter and Wittgenstein’s reply from 16 January 1918 are cited in Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein, 152–3. For the original text in German, see note 6 above.

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21 There is no difficulty with the idea of causally producing a change or an effect, according to Wittgenstein, so long as we are clear that this does not involve necessary relations between facts in the absence of internal relations. So, whilst the ideas of causal necessity and of causal necessary entailment are problematic in his view, other understandings of causation are not. On this, see Tejedor, The Early Wittgenstein on Metaphysics, Natural Science, Language and Value, Ch. 4. 22 On this, see Brian McGuinness, ‘Two Cheers for the “New” Wittgenstein?’, in Wittgenstein’s Early Philosophy, ed. José L. Zalabardo (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 260–72, at 264–5. 23 This is also highlighted in Juliet Floyd, ‘The Uncaptive Eye: Solipsism in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus’, in Loneliness, ed. Leroy S. Rouner (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1998), 79–108, at 82. 24 Propositions that provide us with instructions (or, as I call them, ‘instruction-­ propositions’) are not regarded by Wittgenstein as nonsensical, as is shown by his treatment of the principles of the natural sciences in the Tractatus. See Tejedor, The Early Wittgenstein on Metaphysics, Natural Science, Language and Value, Chs 4 and 5. 25 This notion of a puzzle draws on Cora Diamond’s notion of a riddle, but differs from the latter in key respects. See Cora Diamond, ‘Riddles and Anselm’s Riddle’, in The Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy, and the Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 267–89, and Tejedor, The Early Wittgenstein on Metaphysics, Natural Science, Language and Value, 156–68. 26 Ramsey remarks on this in a letter to his mother dated 20 September 1923. Extracts from this letter can be found in Brian McGuinness, Wittgenstein in Cambridge: Letters and Documents 1911–1951, 4th edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 139 (no. 99, note), and in Joachim Schulte, ‘Ethics and Aesthetics in Wittgenstein’, in The Darkness of This Time: Ethics, Politics, and Religion in Wittgenstein, ed. Luigi Perissinotto (Milan: Mimesis International, 2013), 1–17, at 16. 27 Engelmann, ‘A Memoir’, 352; also quoted in Schulte, ‘Ethics and Aesthetics in Wittgenstein’, 6. 28 For Wittgenstein’s discussion of causal necessity, see Tejedor, The Early Wittgenstein on Metaphysics, Natural Science, Language and Value, Chs 4 and 5. 29 See esp. the biographical material in McGuinness, Young Ludwig, and Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein.

2

‘The Problem of Life’ Later Wittgenstein on the Difficulty of Honest Happiness Gabriel Citron

But philosophy is after all perhaps only the recognition of the abysses which lie on each side of the footpath that the vulgar follow with the serenity of somnambulists. Georges Sorel1

Introduction: The personal and the universal In G. H. von Wright’s ‘Preface’ to Culture and Value – his anthology of Wittgenstein’s miscellaneous remarks – he describes his principle of selection as follows: I excluded from the collection notes of a purely “personal” sort – i.e. notes in which Wittgenstein is commenting on the external circumstances of his life, his state of mind and relations with other people . . . . Generally speaking these notes were easy to separate from the rest and they are on a different level of interest from those which are printed here. CV R xe

It seems to me, however, that precisely when you get to the most personal sections of Wittgenstein’s writings – those diaries in which he lays bare his soul and records his spiritual struggles most nakedly – it is hardest to draw a line between the personal on the one hand, and the philosophical and universal on the other. For Wittgenstein thought that the struggles he was undergoing were struggles that every serious and honest person ought to be going through too. Wittgenstein once said to Rush Rhees that, ‘whether you tr[y] to keep from it or not, your own

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difficulties and conflicts [a]re bound to appear in what you are writing in philosophy.’2 And the same was certainly true the other way round as well: Wittgenstein was a philosopher through and through, and therefore constitutionally incapable of keeping philosophy out of his reflections on his inner life. In this chapter I would like to examine Wittgenstein’s thoughts on the most central and unifying of his inner difficulties – namely, what in February 1937 he called ‘the problem of my life’ (PPO 169; my italics). On other occasions Wittgenstein spoke of ‘the problem of life’ simpliciter (e.g. TLP 6.521; CV R 6e), as a universal problem, without the first-­person possessive. I think that a helpful way to approach Wittgenstein’s understanding of the nature of the universal problem of life, however, is to begin by examining the specifics of how he saw what was so problematic in his own life, and from there to move on to thinking about the degree to which that problem might be generalized to some or even all other people. In what follows, therefore, I will chart the following course: First of all I will illustrate the nature of the problem of Wittgenstein’s own life as he understood it in his later period. Next I will show how his considerations about the problem of his own life naturally opened up towards factors that would be relevant to everyone’s lives. Then I will defend Wittgenstein’s claim that there really is a significant universal problem here, against what is probably the principal potential objection that might be levelled against the existence of the problem. Finally, I will conclude with a few words about the difficulty of truly facing the problem that Wittgenstein describes, given its power to radically destabilize our lives. Unfortunately, examining and evaluating Wittgenstein’s cluster of proposed solutions to the problem of life will have to be left for another occasion. In this chapter I hope only to convince you that there is a genuine need for some sort of solution, because Wittgenstein has identified a real and serious problem.

The problem of Wittgenstein’s life: The insidious poison of anxiety What, then, was the problem of Wittgenstein’s life? In the 1937 diary entry from which I quoted above, he glossed his reference to the problem of his life by saying ‘I am not good & not happy’ (PPO 169). Thus it seems that the problem of Wittgenstein’s life had two aspects. And indeed, sometimes rather than talking about a single problem of life, Wittgenstein referred to ‘the problems of life’ in the plural (e.g. TLP 6.52; CV R 84; my italics).

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The relationship between Wittgenstein’s not being good and his not being happy, however, is a complex one – and I will not be able to explore both these aspects of the problem here. In what follows I will therefore concentrate on Wittgenstein’s complaint that he is not happy. Let’s ask, then: why was Wittgenstein so unhappy in February 1937? The best source we have for understanding Wittgenstein’s state of mind at this time is Manuscript 183, commonly known as the ‘Koder Diaries’. This manuscript notebook contains entries – including many very personal ones – dating from 1930 to 1932 and from 1936 to 1937. The diaries reach their climax in February 1937 when Wittgenstein underwent the peak of a spiritual crisis, alone in his Norwegian cabin. On reading the diaries, one of the chief themes that emerges – speaking to Wittgenstein’s unhappiness – is that of his anxiety. Let’s take his relation to his philosophical work as an example. As is surely true of a lot of people, Wittgenstein alternated between two states in this regard. The first was that of being unable to work, or at least being unable to work well. Unsurprisingly, Wittgenstein often found this condition to be acutely painful. Thus, for example, in March 1937 he wrote: ‘In a hideous state of mind: Without any thoughts, gaping vacantly. . . . I am here in the wasteland without rhyme or reason. As if someone had played a joke on me, brought me here & left me sitting here’ (PPO 217). But of course these states of inability to work alternated with times when he could work, and indeed could work well. The 1930s was, after all, a phenomenally fruitful decade for Wittgenstein’s philosophizing. We might think, then, that in those periods during which Wittgenstein was able to work, he would be free from the ‘hideousness’ of his sterile periods. But this was not so. For when he was able to work – rather than enjoying it, being excited by it, or even just being satisfied – he was instead mainly plagued by the anxiety that this ability might falter again at any moment. Thus, just a little earlier in the same day in March 1937, when he was actually working fairly well, he worried: Will it be granted to me that I keep working? I work, think & write some daily now, most of it only tolerably good. But is that now the draining away of this work or will the brook continue to flow, & swell? Will the work so to speak lose its meaning? I do not want that; but it is possible! PPO 217

The same proneness to anxiety dogged him in connection with his lectures too. Thus in October 1930:

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Wittgenstein, Religion and Ethics When something is wrong with me like today’s sore throat I get very anxious right away, [and I] think, what’ll happen if it gets worse & I need a doctor & the doctors here are worthless & perhaps I must cancel my lectures for a long time etc. PPO 63

Again and again, we find that – at times when things were going well with his philosophical writing and teaching – Wittgenstein would be possessed by a terrible anxiety about the possibility of the imminent collapse of this good fortune: ‘Before my lectures I am always anxious even though so far it has always gone quite well. This anxiety then possesses me like an illness’ (PPO 37).

Moving towards the universal problem of life: From anxiety over philosophical work to anxiety over everything Wittgenstein’s obsessive anxiety over the possibility of having the tools and talents necessary to his philosophical vocation taken from him, however, did not remain contained. Rather, it often snowballed into a much more general anxiety: I am very often or almost always full of anxiety. . . . It always strikes me frightfully when I think how entirely my profession depends on a gift which might be withdrawn from me at any moment. I think of that very often, again and again, & generally how everything can be withdrawn from one & one doesn’t even know what . . . one has & only . . . becomes aware of the most essential when one suddenly loses it. And one doesn’t notice it precisely because it is so essential, therefore so ordinary.3 PPO 9–11; my italics

Indeed, imagining the things that might be withdrawn from him, and the ways in which they might be so withdrawn, came exceedingly naturally to Wittgenstein. On the one hand these anxieties could be of a fairly common sort, such as worry about the loss of loved ones. Thus, for example, on noting in his diary in April 1930 that he has received handkerchiefs from his girlfriend, Marguerite, for his birthday, and how pleased he is at this, he seamlessly and immediately – and with no particular prompt – segues into the reflection that ‘[o]f all the people now alive the loss of her would hit me the hardest’ (PPO 11). This morbid thought was completely unprovoked – or rather, was provoked by nothing other than by his being happy. Thus, even when he was contented in his relationship with Marguerite, her potential loss was constantly on his mind.

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On the other hand, however, Wittgenstein’s anxieties could also be of a far from common sort. For his talent for noticing the background conditions of our forms of life, conditions that are so ordinary that they are therefore often most hard to see (BT 300; PI §129) – a talent that he used with such power in his philosophy – was just as potent in uncovering those unnoticed conditions upon which most of us obliviously depend for our basic equilibrium, but which we could so easily lose. Consider, for example, this particularly horrific insight from January 1932: Mutilate a human being all the way, cut off his arms & legs nose & ears & then see what remains of his self-­respect & of his dignity & to what extent his concepts of such things still remain the same. We have no idea how these concepts depend on the ordinary, normal, condition of our body. What becomes of them when we are led by a leash with a ring through our tongues & tied-­up? How much of a human being then remains in him? Into what sort of state does such a human being sink? We don’t know that we are standing on a high and narrow rock & around us chasms in which everything looks completely different. PPO 147–9

The most basic tolerability of our lives depends on our retaining at least some remnant of dignity and self-­respect, but – observes Wittgenstein – it is terrifyingly easy for a person to be robbed of these. In fact, all one needs to do is watch the news to be confronted with actual cases of people being mutilated by others almost beyond human recognition, or of prisoners being fundamentally humiliated, even by being led around on a leash. The point here is that these are not difficult realities to actualize, and yet their actualization would utterly destroy most of us. Thus, even when we stand in a tolerable reality, we are surrounded by vast expanses of logical space, the actualization of which would make life a living horror – and as Wittgenstein observes, for the most part we are completely oblivious to this fearsome logical geography: ‘We don’t know that we are standing on a high and narrow rock & around us chasms’ (PPO 149). Wittgenstein, however, tended to notice these chasms, and to brood upon them. This brings us to Wittgenstein’s identification of what is perhaps the most subtle of those preconditions of a minimally tolerable life that usually go unnoticed due to their very essentiality. In February 1937 – that month of profound crisis and illumination – he observed in his diary that: A human being lives his ordinary life with the illumination of a light of which he is not aware until it is extinguished. Once it is extinguished, life is suddenly

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Wittgenstein, Religion and Ethics deprived of all value, meaning, or whatever one wants to say. One suddenly becomes aware that mere existence—as one would like to say—is in itself still completely empty, bleak. It is as if the sheen was wiped away from all things, [everything is dead. . . . One has then died alive. . . .4] Really, the horrible that I wanted to describe is that . . . “There is no blessing with anything.” . . . Why does it say: “The Lord is wrathful.”5—He can ruin you. Then one can say that one is descending to hell. . . . You hang trembling, with all you have, above the abyss. It is horrible that such a thing can be. PPO 207–9

A month later, in March, he returned to describing this condition. This deadness and emptiness was not merely an absence of good-­feeling, but rather a state of pain and suffering that was positively felt in its own right: ‘Have been sleeping quite badly for a few nights & feel dead, can’t work; my thoughts are dim & I am depressed but in a glowering way’ (PPO 235). William James once tried to make the same point by stressing that serious melancholy is more than just an ‘incapacity for joyous feeling’, but rather, is ‘a positive and active anguish’.6 As Wittgenstein said, until a person has experienced the ground of all sense, value, and bearableness in their life collapsing beneath them, and experienced how when that is gone life can become a positive torment to its unlucky bearer, it is very hard to realize or even acknowledge that such a ground is needed at all. For it is usually simply taken for granted that living in itself is a basically tolerable or even enjoyable matter, as long as nothing particularly bad is happening. But once one has experienced the loss of that ground of life’s tolerability – as, for example, is often experienced by those who have suffered from severe depression – one becomes all too aware of how very thin the mysterious divide is between a perfectly pleasant life and one of unremitting anguish. Importantly, it is possible for those of otherwise robust mental health to nonetheless gain an appreciation for how close even they are to such states of anguish, and for how very easy it is to tip over the edge of the abyss that Wittgenstein insists we are all hanging over – namely, by means of certain psychedelic drugs. Sam Harris describes this very well: My “bad trips” were, without question, the most harrowing hours I have ever endured, and they make the notion of hell . . . seem perfectly apt. . . . On my first trip to Nepal, I took a rowboat out on Phewa Lake in Pokhara, which offers a stunning view of the Annapurna range. It was early morning, and I was alone. As the sun rose over the water, I ingested 400 micrograms of LSD. . . . For the next several hours my mind became a perfect instrument of self-­torture. All that remained was a continuous shattering and terror for which I have no words.7

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From these bad trips Harris drew the following very relevant conclusions: There is no getting around the role of luck here. If you are lucky, and you take the right drug, you will know what it is to be enlightened . . . . If you are unlucky, you will know what it is to be clinically insane. While I do not recommend the latter experience, it does increase one’s respect for the tenuous condition of sanity . . . .8

Once the veil has been pulled back, and a person has seen how little it takes to hurl them – sturdy mental constitution and all – from the side of sanity to the side of dark insanity, it is hard to forget how close that other state lies, even when one no longer inhabits it. Those who have suffered from severe depression – or even just from a harrowing drug trip – have had revealed to them just how tenuous life’s tolerability is. And having recognized this radical tenuousness they might well find it difficult to rest easy, even when life is fine. After all, what is to stop the ground of life’s tolerability from giving way at any moment? This was precisely Wittgenstein’s situation, renewed and intensified each time he noticed yet another way in which the bearableness of our lives is dependent on yet another rickety support. He was continually compelled to say: ‘I feel a dependency which I hadn’t recognized before . . . . That which was firm for me seems adrift now & capable of going under’ (PPO 189). And the recognition of the profound ricketiness of his situation kept on provoking in him renewed anxiety, fear, and sometimes terror – even when things were ostensibly going well. After all this, it should not come as a surprise to find the following staccato sentences in Wittgenstein’s November 1946 notebook. They could act as a bullet-­ point summary of the core of the universal problem of life as Wittgenstein saw it – namely: ‘The fundamental insecurity of life. Misery, everywhere you look’ (CV R 63e). This misery, presumably, was disjunctive in nature: either what was valuable in people’s lives had collapsed and they suffered because of that, or else it had not, but then they might nonetheless suffer from the very natural and not unreasonable anxiety engendered by worrying about if, when, and how the collapse might happen. Both disjuncts of this miserable dilemma are undergirded by the single fact of life’s fundamental insecurity or fragility: the fact that absolutely everything we value can so easily ‘go under’. Note that this insight is no longer limited to Wittgenstein’s personal circumstances – to the fact that his philosophical talent was particularly prone to disturbance or that Marguerite was less invested in their relationship than he was. Rather, Wittgenstein’s observations have broadened out to universally

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applicable factors about the fragility of the often unobserved conditions that make any life good or bearable. To sum up – and to perhaps bring a little more order to these reflections – it seems that we might characterize what Wittgenstein calls ‘the problem of life’ in three increasingly broad ways: l

l

l

At its narrowest, the problem of life might simply be the fact that (i) our lives and all their goods are fundamentally fragile and insecure. Taken somewhat more broadly, the problem might be considered to include the fact of fragility plus the two further considerations that (ii) we can be, and often are, aware of this fact; and that (iii) awareness of this fact all too naturally – and not unreasonably – tends to lead people to react with anxiety, fear, and even terror. At its most capacious, the problem of life might be taken to include the three considerations already mentioned, along with the conclusion that (iv) many people’s lives will therefore often involve alternating swings between, on the one hand, periods when things are going badly, and on the other hand, periods when things are ostensibly going well but which are undermined by anxiety over how easily they could collapse. The result is that for these people, life is never going well – because the bad is bad, and the good is poisoned by anxiety.

If we are to be able to think in an orderly manner about whether or not there is a solution to the problem of life then it will be most helpful to take it in this last, broadest, four-­point form. Points (i) to (iii) should then be seen as necessary conditions for the unfortunate alternating result described in (iv). Thus, in order to try to rid ourselves of the problem, we will need to undermine one or more of its three conditions. There are two kinds of undermining that we could engage in: theoretical on the one hand, and practical on the other. A theoretical undermining would deny the truth of a given one of the three points, whereas a practical undermining would grant its truth but seek to overturn it, to make it no longer true. In other words, theoretical responses to the problem of life deny that there is a problem at all, while practical responses grant that there is a problem and turn their attention to trying to solve it. Thus, for example, a theoretical response might deny that life really is as fragile as Wittgenstein claims it to be, whereas a practical one would suggest various ways in which life could perhaps be stabilized so as to make it less fragile than it currently is. Or a theoretical response might deny that we are ever really aware of life’s fragility in the way that Wittgenstein describes,

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whereas a practical one might recommend that we distract ourselves from our awareness of life’s fragility by means of entertainment or medication.9 The bulk of Wittgenstein’s discussions of the problem of life were practical in orientation – exploring and experimenting with numerous potential ways to try to solve what he took to be a significant existential challenge. But before it can make sense to examine his practical responses, we must first be sure that the problem is real and not merely apparent. In the next section, therefore, I will turn to what is perhaps the most basic theoretical attack on the problem of life as Wittgenstein formulated it.

Is life really as insecure as all that? And is its insecurity really significant enough to be worthy of such great anxiety? At this point, then, we must ask: Is life really quite as insecure as Wittgenstein makes out? And is its insecurity really as significant as he seems to think? If not, then Wittgenstein’s problem of life will not gain much purchase. Perhaps Wittgenstein’s writings on these matters are less the result of an accurate appreciation for how things actually are, and more a manifestation of some kind of hypochondria or gratuitous morbidness on his part. One fairly natural way to react to Wittgenstein’s claims, after all, is simply to observe that while, of course, there are many ways in which one’s life might possibly be undermined at any given moment, the chances of this happening – especially in its most radical forms – are relatively slim, and therefore oughtn’t to be taken to be of such awesome significance. Even if we take the possibility of my life, one day, simply losing all its sense and becoming a horrific burden to me – something which actually does happen to ordinary people all too often – what are the chances of it happening to each of us, right now? The fragility of life should not be measured according to what is logically or metaphysically possible, but rather, according to how likely it is that the worst will actually befall me. And judging by how seldom truly devastating and irreparably terrible things happen to those around me, this does not seem all that likely. Certainly not likely enough to constitute a major and constant existential crisis. How would Wittgenstein respond to this line of thought, and defend the truth and relevance of his claims regarding the fundamental insecurity of life? At this point I will need to be rather speculative, because he never addressed objections like this explicitly. But I think that one can pull together from his various remarks at least three significant lines of response.

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First defence of the problematicness of life: From the inapplicability of probabilistic calculation The first response Wittgenstein might offer could be seen coming out of a rather surprising passage in the Koder Diaries from February 1937. He wrote: It is strange that one says God created the world & not: God is creating, continually, the world. For why should it be a greater miracle that it began to be, rather than that it continued to be. One is led astray by the simile of the craftsperson. That someone makes a shoe is an accomplishment, but once made (out of what is existing) it endures on its own for a while. But if one thinks of God as creator, must the conservation of the universe not be a miracle just as great as its creation,—yes, aren’t the two one and the same? PPO 215

This passage is surprising because it sounds so much like Wittgenstein is engaging in unreconstructed metaphysical argumentation of the kind that he usually rejects. But regardless of that, he is echoing a theme that had long been an important aspect of his thought – namely, the idea that the existence of the world at every moment is a miracle, and something to be wondered at. As he said in his 1929 ‘Lecture on Ethics’: ‘I will . . . describe the experience of wondering at the existence of the world by saying: it is the experience of seeing the world as a miracle’ (LE 11). But part of seeing the existence of whatever exists as a miracle is putting it outside the realm of what could legitimately be expected or relied upon. So if my existence – and so too the existence of the mysterious preconditions of the meaningfulness and bearableness of my life – are miracles, then these are not things that one could legitimately approach by means of statistics or probability. On this view, at each new moment the balance is poised utterly equally between whether my life will be illuminated with meaning, on the one hand, or whether it will be a harrowing experience devoid of all sense, on the other; and how my life has gone until now, and the statistics regarding how people’s lives tend to go, will be no basis at all for expecting things to continue that way into the future. Wittgenstein might well say, therefore, that life is insecure down to its very core, and to think that we can consider any aspect of it to be a likelihood or a fairly sure thing is to miss the rather terrifying corollary of the miraculous nature of existence: that nothing can be expected. Now, while Wittgenstein would not have thought it possible to provide any arguments that everyone ought to consider the existence of the world to be miraculous, he might nonetheless have thought that anyone who failed to see the miracle was blind to something immensely important.

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This line of thought touches on something very deep in Wittgenstein’s approach to the fundamental insecurity of life, but it seems to come at quite a cost. For on this view of things it’s not just life’s important goods which cannot be counted on and for which calculating probabilities makes no sense, but surely it would be absolutely everything – including whether I will fall, float, or disappear if I step out of the window, and whether I will be nourished, poisoned, or turn polka-­dotted, if I drink this water, and the like. Given that this approach seems to entirely undermine our standard reliance on inductive reasoning in daily life,10 we might therefore wonder whether Wittgenstein had any other ways to defend his claim about the insecurity of life against the objection that life is not really all that insecure and that the probabilities are with us rather than against us.

Second defence of the problematicness of life: From decision theory and the possibility of infinite negative utility A second approach could, then, be for Wittgenstein to grant that many of the ways in which our lives might collapse are indeed not all that likely, but to insist that the significance of a given potential collapse is a function both of how likely that potential collapse is and also of how bad the collapse would be if it happened. In a move analogous to Pascal’s handling of infinite disutility in his famous wager (at least on some readings), we might say that if the potential awfulness is sufficiently great, then that possibility will be of great significance even if the chance of it coming to pass is fairly small.11 And indeed, Wittgenstein repeatedly stresses that the potential for positive suffering in life – indeed in any one moment of any one life – is infinite. Thus, in February 1937 he wrote: [I]n an instant one can experience all terror . . . . If you want to imagine hell you don’t need to think of unending torment. I would rather say: Do you know what unspeakable dread a human being is capable of? Think of that & you know what hell is even though this is not at all a matter of duration. PPO 179

And in 1944: A cry of distress cannot be greater than that of one human being. Or again no distress can be greater than what a single person can suffer. Hence one human being can be in infinite distress . . . . The whole Earth cannot be in greater distress than one soul. . . . There is no greater distress to be felt than that of One human being. For if someone feels himself lost, that is the ultimate distress. CV R 52e–53e

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On this approach the point about life’s fundamental insecurity is neither that all the goods in our lives are very likely to collapse at any moment, nor even that they are always perfectly equally poised between the possibilities of collapse and of stability – but rather, that given the enormity of the potential suffering, the fact that collapse is possible at all, even if not overwhelmingly likely, should be enough to make anxiety about that chance a very natural and not unreasonable response. And even if decision theorists are right to tell us that we can ignore vanishingly small possibilities for all practical purposes – even vanishingly small possibilities of enormous catastrophes – that is not the case with the kinds of collapse that Wittgenstein has in mind: for they are not vanishingly rare. Many people right now are in states of infinite torment – often people who seem to be living in perfectly comfortable circumstances – and no one is in a position to think themselves immune from such states. In short, this kind of collapse is perhaps not common, but it is a very live possibility. And given the stakes, a possibility that we might think ought to greatly concern us.

Third defence of the problematicness of life: Shifting from anxiety to outrage Wittgenstein’s third potential response could go in another direction. On this line of thought Wittgenstein could grant that the likelihood of the worst befalling each of us at any moment is not extremely high, and he might even grant that anxiety is therefore not an entirely natural response to life’s fundamental insecurity. But granting all this does not undermine the problem of life, because even if anxiety is no longer so plausibly in the offing, another family of very negative states is, and this family will simply replace the role of anxiety in the problem as I laid it out earlier. These alternative negative states I have in mind are anger and outrage. Consider, for example, that one day my neighbour tells me that he has bought a gun, and that he has decided that it’s quite possible that one morning when he sees me coming out of my apartment he will simply shoot me dead. Whether or not he will do this, he explains, will depend on a decision made randomly by his computer, and he has set it so that the chances that it will tell him that he should shoot me are one in ten million. In this case, we might think that given these odds (they are far better than the odds of me getting hit by a car as I cross the road) it is not anxiety that would be foremost amongst my responses, but rather: something like outrage. Outrage at the affront to my autonomy, outrage at the

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apparently pointless malice of my neighbour, outrage that something of such great significance to me could be decided so capriciously, and outrage at my own impotence in the face of this threat – all this, even while recognizing that the chances of my actually being shot by my neighbour are very small indeed. Moreover, a good number of the reasons why I might naturally feel anger or outrage at my neighbour’s plan do not depend on the fact that it is a person who is doing this to me. For it is perfectly natural and common to feel anger and outrage at entirely impersonal forces when they put us in a similar position. For example, towards the end of a long and dark Norwegian winter in 1937, when Wittgenstein was daily and desperately waiting for the reappearance of the sun, he chided himself for his tendency to ‘get angry with fate’ (PPO 225). Thus the mere fact of the insecurity of all life’s goods, the mere fact that in a moment, everything of value to me could be taken from me, and that I could be left lost and bereft – regardless of the degree of likelihood – is a fact that might naturally provoke in us anger and outrage. It should not surprise us, then, that in that key month of February 1937 it was, in fact, outrage that plagued Wittgenstein more than anxiety. When, one night, the fact of his absolute dependence on external forces was brought home to him particularly sharply, he wrote: ‘I was now simultaneously in a sort of shock & outrage as so often during the last 10 days’ (PPO 185–7). Given these three avenues of response to the attempt to deny either the truth or the significance of the insecurity of life – and especially given the second and the third – I think we can conclude that Wittgenstein has a genuinely strong case for the problem of life being truly problematic.12

Conclusion: The difficulty of acknowledging the problem There is, of course, good reason why we would avoid admitting the reality of the problem to ourselves, why we would turn away from recognizing just how unstable everything we value actually is. After all, to acknowledge this would be to open ourselves up to precisely the overwhelming anxiety and outrage which Wittgenstein describes, and from which he suffered. Remarkably, at almost exactly the same time as Wittgenstein was grappling with these issues in his diaries, Simone Weil was working through almost the very same things in her own notebooks – the two of them entirely unaware of one another. What Wittgenstein called ‘the problem of life’, Weil called ‘the

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problem of affliction’. And Weil expresses very well the near impossibility of genuinely facing up to life’s profound insecurity: To acknowledge the reality of affliction means saying to oneself: ‘I may lose at any moment, through the play of circumstances over which I have no control, anything whatsoever that I possess, including those things which are so intimately mine that I consider them as being myself. There is nothing that I might not lose. It could happen at any moment that what I am might be abolished and replaced by anything whatsoever of the filthiest and most contemptible sort.’ To be aware of this in the depth of one’s soul is to experience non-­being. It is the state of extreme and total humiliation . . . . This is why the naked spectacle of affliction makes the soul shudder as the flesh shudders at the proximity of death. . . . Only by the supernatural working of grace can a soul pass through its own annihilation to the place where alone it can get the sort of attention which can attend to truth and to affliction.13

As I said in my introduction, making a case for the significance of the problem of our fragility will have to suffice for this chapter, and investigating potential practical solutions will need to be left to another occasion. If this leaves us hanging – at least for the time being – in a state of existential angst, perhaps that is not such a bad thing. For I think that Wittgenstein might have approved of Georges Sorel’s remark that ‘philosophy is after all perhaps only the recognition of the abysses which lie on each side of the footpath that the vulgar follow with the serenity of somnambulists.’14,15

Notes 1 Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence, trans. T. E. Hulme (London: Allen & Unwin, 1925), 6. 2 Rush Rhees, Letter to Maurice O’Connor Drury, 6 November 1966, in The Rush Rhees Collection, Richard Burton Archives, University of Swansea, call mark: ‘UNI/SU/PC/1/1/3/4’. 3 Paragraph breaks have been omitted here and in some subsequent quotations. 4 Wittgenstein crossed out the words enclosed by square brackets here. 5 See, perhaps, the Book of Nahum 1:2. 6 William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature, 2nd edn (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1902), 147. 7 Sam Harris, Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014), 194–6. 8 Ibid., 189.

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9 It should be noted that the sharp distinction between theoretical and practical responses may break down somewhat when it comes to responding to condition (iii). 10 An undermining which early Wittgenstein supported (see TLP 5.134–5.1361, 6.3631–6.37), but which later Wittgenstein did not (see PI §§466–90). 11 For an illuminating discussion of these matters, see Jeff Jordan, Pascal’s Wager: Pragmatic Arguments and Belief in God (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), 105–8, 115–18. 12 Of course, to make this case fully it would be necessary to say a great deal more about each of these points than I have just said. I intend to do this in future publications. 13 Simone Weil, ‘Human Personality’, in her Selected Essays, 1934–1943: Historical, Political, and Moral Writings, ed. and trans. Richard Rees (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2015), 9–34, at 27–8. 14 Sorel, Reflections on Violence, 6. 15 I am grateful to the organizers of both the Eighth British Wittgenstein Society Annual Conference (Mikel Burley) and the Ryerson University Philosophy Colloquium (Paula Schwebel and Klaas Kraay) for the opportunity to present earlier versions of this chapter, and to the participants in those events for very helpful comments and discussion. And for extremely fruitful conversations about – and comments on – various drafts of this chapter, I would like to thank: Lochin Bruillard, Mikel Burley, Richard Gipps, Sol Goldberg, Elisha Mallard, Stephen Mulhall and Nick Stang.

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Wittgenstein and the Study of Religion Beyond Fideism and Atheism Mikel Burley

The impact of the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein on the multidisciplinary field known as the study of religion has been extensive since the 1960s, albeit sometimes a little way beneath the surface. His significance has been especially discernible in the philosophy of religion, where his votaries have been highly vocal despite being relatively few in number. Most notable among these is D. Z. Phillips, whose prodigious output kept Wittgensteinian philosophy of religion centre stage until his death in 2006.1 Even though the majority of other philosophers disagreed with Phillips on most points, they generally recognized him as a hard figure to ignore, and his influence persists through the work of those who continue to reflect upon and respond to his ideas.2 In the study of religion more broadly, Wittgenstein’s influence has seeped in through filters such as the work of certain anthropologists and social theorists,3 to the point where some of the central themes of his later thought, especially the ideas of forms of life, language-­games and of the ‘family resemblance’ character of concepts, have been absorbed into the vocabulary of many academics, both in the study of religion and elsewhere.4 Getting clear about Wittgenstein is therefore of considerable importance if we are to understand what is going on in a good deal of work in the study of religion; and yet the most prevalent interpretations of Wittgenstein’s ideas, and of their implications for how we think about religion, exhibit radical divergences. According to one persistent line of interpretation, Wittgenstein, having sought ‘to insulate religious beliefs’ from external critique,5 inspired a whole cohort of philosophical protectors of faith, whom Kai Nielsen notoriously dubbed the school of ‘Wittgensteinian fideism’.6 According to other commentators, meanwhile, Wittgenstein’s thought displays forms of ‘naturalism’

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and ‘anthropocentrism’ that ‘contribute to the erosion of belief in transcendence’.7 Indeed, at least one prominent scholar has asserted of Wittgenstein that ‘the consequence of his later thought on religion is an unavoidable acceptance of atheism’.8 What are we to make of these competing claims? Can Wittgenstein’s work be both a resource for those who want to immunize faith against rational criticism and, at the same time, something that undermines religious belief, precipitating an inevitable slide into atheism? Far from being of merely exegetical interest, a study of Wittgenstein on these matters can open up important ways of thinking about such issues as philosophy’s relation to religion and the interplay between the concepts of faith and naturalism. It thus has the potential to focus our thoughts on what it is to be religious and, moreover, on what it means to be living a human life. My procedure in this chapter will be as follows. Beginning with a critical examination of the debate over ‘Wittgensteinian fideism’, I distinguish between two principles that have come to be conflated under this heading. I argue that one of these, which I call the non-­interference principle, is benign and consistent with Wittgenstein’s conception of philosophy, whereas the other, which I call the incomprehensibility principle, is both pernicious and far from anything that Wittgenstein or Wittgensteinians have endorsed.9 In view of the latter principle, Wittgensteinians such as D. Z. Phillips are right to repudiate the label of fideism, though not for all the reasons that Phillips advances. Turning to Wittgenstein’s alleged naturalism, I focus on the question of whether his contention that ‘primitive’ (or ‘instinctive’) reactions can be thought of as the source of much human cultural and linguistic activity has the deleterious implications for religious belief that some commentators have supposed. After explaining why it has become common to characterize Wittgenstein’s thought as naturalistic, I draw upon and elaborate ideas from Peter Winch in order to argue that talk of instinctive reactions has the imagined deleterious implications only if one begins with reductively antireligious assumptions in one’s conception of what is ‘natural’. Once these assumptions are recognized to be unnecessary, the possibility is opened up of a naturalism that is neither reductive nor atheistic. I end, however, by highlighting a further worry that some proponents of religious belief might have in response to Wittgenstein’s thought, namely the worry that what Wittgenstein terms ‘the groundlessness of our believing’ (OC §166) cannot avoid leaving us with a profound sense of uneasiness – albeit perhaps expressible as a sense of wonder – about the radical contingency of our epistemic, and hence about our religious, lives.

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The ‘Wittgensteinian fideism’ debate When Kai Nielsen concocted the term ‘Wittgensteinian fideism’ he did not mean to assert that Wittgenstein himself was a fideist. He meant merely, or at least primarily, that ‘Wittgenstein’s work has been taken in that way and it is thought in many quarters that such an approach will give us a deep grasp of religion and will expose the shallowness of scepticism’.10 Since then, however, some of the principal ideas that Nielsen intended to indicate by means of the term have been ascribed to Wittgenstein as well as to several philosophers who apply his methods to the study of religion. The term ‘fideism’ – or its French equivalent, fidéisme – can be traced to nineteenth-­century France, where it was initially used in a Catholic periodical in 1854 to characterize the thought of the Catholic priest Hugues-Félicité Robert de Lamennais.11 It was subsequently taken up, or perhaps coined afresh, by the Lutheran theologian Eugène Ménégoz, who employed it ‘in Schleiermacherian fashion to define the core of religious life, a pure state of faith, which would exceed the historical particulars and symbols of different religions’.12 Only a year later the term also appeared in a work by the Catholic philosopher Léon OlléLaprune, this time to designate ‘what he took to be a distressing overreliance on moral faith in establishing the existence of God in Kantian and post-Kantian idealism’.13 Thus, from its beginnings the notion of fideism has been treated by some as an affirmative self-­description and by others as a pejorative term of critique. In Nielsen’s appropriation of the pejorative usage, ‘fideism’ comes to be associated with the idea that religion, either in general or in the sense of some particular religion, is a sui generis ‘form of life’ with ‘its own norms of intelligibility, reality and rationality’.14 When conceived in these terms, Nielsen complains, religion is immunized against philosophical attack by being artificially removed from the sphere of legitimate interrogation. Nielsen sees this isolative strategy as part of a more general tendency among Wittgensteinians to ‘compartmentalise’ aspects of human culture, such as religion and science, on the presumption that the standards of rationality internal to each are incommensurable with those of the others.15 What Nielsen attributes neither to Wittgenstein nor to Wittgensteinians is the claim that any given religion can be understood only by people who actively participate in it. He is alert to the difference between, on the one hand, the idea that to understand a religion requires consideration of how participants understand it, and on the other hand the idea that understanding a religion

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requires being a participant in it oneself. Drawing an analogy with ethnographic fieldwork, Nielsen endorses the view that considering a participant’s perspective is essential to understanding a culture or an aspect of a culture; what he rejects is the view that understanding precludes criticism.16 Thus when Norman Malcolm asserts that a ‘deep understanding’ of the concept of God cannot be achieved ‘without an understanding of the phenomena of human life that give rise to it’,17 Nielsen has no reason to demur. Similarly, when Malcolm says of Anselm’s ontological argument that he suspects it ‘can be thoroughly understood’ only when viewed from ‘inside’, by those with ‘at least some inclination to partake in [the] religious form of life’ from which it emerges,18 Nielsen would disagree only if this were taken to mean that one must actually partake of that form of life if any understanding of it is to be achieved. But what Malcolm is talking about is a kind of hermeneutical sympathy, a willingness to see the point in a religious practice or attitude to life.19 He is proposing that such sympathy is likely to be necessary if one is to gain a thorough understanding of certain aspects of the religion, which is very different from asserting that one must belong to the religion if one is to understand it at all. Nielsen appreciates this difference. In the wake of Nielsen’s essay, however, other critics have made the accusation that Wittgensteinian philosophers deploy notions such as those of forms of life and language-­games to portray religions as capable of being understood ‘only from within, by those who actually play the game in question’.20 If this were in fact what Wittgensteinians are doing, then Anthony Kenny’s lament that ‘Wittgenstein’s influence on the philosophy of religion has been disastrous’ would not be out of place.21 But it is highly questionable whether anyone has ever, in Wittgenstein’s name, declared that such radical autonomy applies to religions. As Ninian Smart has observed, supposing that belief is necessary for understanding would make it a ‘waste of time’ to study any religion other than one’s own.22 Yet Smart is among those who think that D. Z. Phillips exemplifies precisely this supposition, neglecting to notice that Phillips, from his earliest work onwards, insists that ‘religious concepts are not inaccessible to non-­religious understanding’, for they are connected with such things as ‘joy and sorrow, hope and despair’,23 which constitute ‘the common experience of human life’.24 It is precisely for the latter reason that it is feasible to elucidate the meanings of religious concepts, a point which Phillips reiterates and elaborates in numerous places.25 What we see, then, in the debate over Wittgensteinian fideism is a tendency on the part of some critics to slide between or conflate two distinct charges. One of these, which Nielsen emphasizes, is the charge that Wittgensteinian

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philosophers of religion assert or assume a non-­interference principle, the principle that religions are not amenable to philosophical criticism. The other is the charge that the Wittgensteinian philosophers in question affirm an incomprehensibility principle, according to which religions cannot be understood by anyone other than active practitioners. This latter principle entails the former, for if one cannot even satisfy the condition for understanding something then one is hardly in a position to legitimately criticize it; but the former principle does not entail the latter. In the light of the distinction between two dissociable aspects, or strengths, of the charge of Wittgensteinian fideism, it becomes possible to see why philosophers sympathetic to Wittgenstein’s methods sometimes react very differently to the charge. The reaction is liable to be coloured by which version of the charge is being emphasized and by how it is interpreted. Moreover, it becomes possible to see why someone might affirm that Wittgenstein and Wittgensteinians are fideists in one sense while denying that they are fideists in another sense. To illustrate this point, let us consider some contrasting reactions.

Rejecting and affirming Wittgensteinian fideism One reaction is typified by Phillips, who rejected the whole idea of ‘Wittgensteinian fideism’ as ‘simply a scandal in scholarship’.26 Others have concurred, maintaining that owing to the term’s misleading connotations, ‘it does not belong in academic discourse’.27 An alternative reaction is illustrated by Duncan Richter, who, having noted Nielsen’s contention that a fideistic approach to philosophy seeks only to ‘display the workings, the style of functioning, of religious discourse’, attests that this is indeed a fair summary of a genuinely Wittgensteinian method.28 Richter therefore accepts and endorses part of what the term ‘Wittgensteinian fideism’ has come to stand for, namely the part that I have called the non-­interference principle. I shall now examine each of these contrasting reactions more closely. Phillips responds to the accusation that he and other Wittgensteinians are fideists chiefly by highlighting passages in his own writings, such as those which I mentioned in the previous section, where he explicitly controverts the view that religious forms of language are logically disconnected from other areas of human life. Though implicitly aware of the distinction between the non-­interference and incomprehensibility aspects of the fideism charge, Phillips finds neither of them acceptable. He thus goes to considerable lengths to show not only that a Wittgensteinian approach does not assume religions to be

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comprehensible only to their practitioners, but also that such an approach can include criticisms of religious mistakes and confusions.29 Philosophical criticism is especially called for, Phillips maintains, when beliefs or activities fail to ‘take the world seriously’, tending instead to ‘ignore or distort what we already know’.30 When, for example, someone proposes of suffering that it is not ultimately real or that it always has a purpose, or when death is spoken of as though it were merely a prolonged sleep, Phillips deems it appropriate for philosophy to point out that suffering and death are not being treated with due sobriety and that the lack of sobriety reveals confusion.31 Critics of Wittgensteinian approaches are apt to welcome this embracement by Phillips of philosophy’s critical ambitions, while perhaps remaining suspicious that Phillips and other Wittgensteinians are still, despite appearances, wedded to a thoroughly uncritical position. The latter suspicion might be nourished by remarks that Phillips makes elsewhere to the effect that philosophy is a purely ‘disinterested’ and ‘contemplative’ pursuit, which seeks merely to do ‘conceptual justice’ to the many ‘possibilities of sense’ that inhere within human forms of life, both religious and non-­religious, without trying to adjudicate between them in the name of a supposedly universal rationality.32 Some Wittgensteinians, too, may be glad of Phillips’ insistence that a Wittgenstein-­inspired approach possesses a critical edge, perceiving it as a vindication against false accusations of ‘quietism’ or ‘conservatism’.33 Others, meanwhile, will harbour their own suspicions that in his enthusiasm to placate the snarling horde of anti-­fideists, Phillips has lurched dramatically away from an authentically Wittgensteinian path. Reading Phillips’ cursory dismissal of talk of death as a kind of sleep, for example, they might wonder why he gives no consideration to the specific religious contexts in which such talk has its place, both in the Bible and elsewhere.34 In a letter penned in 1522, Martin Luther asks rhetorically on whose authority it can be denied that ‘the souls of the dead . . . sleep out the interval between earth and heaven, or hell, or purgatory, in the same way that the living pass in profound slumber the interval between their down-­ lying at night and their uprising in the morning’.35 Phillips might, of course, want to place Luther among those who, failing to treat death with sufficient earnestness, fantasize in ways that overlook ‘what we already know’. But others will hear words such as those of Luther precisely as a challenge to common assumptions, both religious and secular. Whatever the case may be, it can hardly be settled in advance of a carefully contextualized investigation, which would need to take account of, among other things, the conceptual connections between talk of death as a sleep and talk of spiritual revival and awakening.36

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Phillips has provoked particular antagonism from philosophers otherwise sympathetic to Wittgensteinian methods by offering what some see as an over-­ interpreted reading of a remark made by Wittgenstein about the scapegoat ritual outlined in Leviticus 16:20–22. In his Big Typescript of 1933 Wittgenstein writes: ‘The scapegoat, on whom one lays one’s sin, and who runs out into the desert with it – a false picture, similar to those that cause errors in philosophy’ (BT 317e).37 Although I have insufficient space here for a full discussion of the controversy surrounding this remark, a concise summary might run as follows. Phillips, in the light of speculations by Rush Rhees, understands Wittgenstein to be saying that the scapegoat ritual is confused, its confusion consisting in the assumption of those who perform it that an animal, which obviously lacks the capacity to experience such feelings as remorse for its wrongdoings, could nevertheless carry the burden of a people’s sins. While acknowledging how the idea of a human being taking on the sins of others can gain a foothold in many societies, Phillips sees little hope of making sense of a ritual that accords this role to an animal.38 Berel Dov Lerner and Brian Clack regard the elaboration of Wittgenstein’s remark proffered by Rhees and Phillips as having been biased by a ‘Christian sensibility’,39 which assumes Christ’s crucifixion to be the paradigmatic instance of someone’s unburdening others by taking their sins upon himself.40 On Clack’s interpretation, what Wittgenstein considers to constitute a false picture is the idea of sins being transferrable, as though they were akin to physical objects; the picture resembles ones that give rise to errors in philosophy in the sense that, in philosophy too, there is a tendency to assume that a substantive must be correlated with an object or substance, if not a physical then at least an ‘abstract’ one.41 Since Clack considers the sort of picture involved in the scapegoat ritual – a picture that portrays as a transferrable substance something that is not really a substance at all – to be widespread in religious thought and practice, not least in the Christian conception of atonement, he infers that Wittgenstein’s ‘apparently throwaway remark’ is ‘in fact deeply subversive of humanity’s religious life’.42 Thus, having begun by noting the oddity of Wittgensteinians such as Rhees and Phillips seeming to go out of their way to be critical of an ancient religious rite, Clack ends up concluding that an approach in keeping with that of Wittgenstein would go even further in a critical direction, much further than is assumed by Rhees or Phillips or by most other readers of Wittgenstein. Finally in this summary of interpretations of Wittgenstein’s enigmatic scapegoat remark, I should mention Christopher Hoyt’s recent claim that the analogy Wittgenstein is drawing does not depend on our regarding the scapegoat

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ritual as itself confused or as being based on confused ideas; what Wittgenstein is insinuating is that the ‘ritual is a sort of trap that leads to misunderstanding’ in a way analogous to how certain features of the grammar of our language set traps generative of conceptual confusions, which in turn are the source of many errors in philosophy.43 Rescuing Wittgenstein’s remark from the clutches of those who would use it to portray Wittgenstein as a critic – or even an arch destroyer – of religious practices, Hoyt indicates how it can be read as suggesting that it is those who misinterpret the ritual that are confused, not the ritual itself.44 We construe it confusedly when we assume that the ritual’s enactors must be conflating sins with transferrable objects, just as we construe our own language confusedly when, for example, we assume that psychological terms must refer to ‘metaphysically peculiar things locked away in a metaphysically peculiar place’.45 What is needed to dissolve our confusions in each case is a properly contextualized investigation of the role of the practice (i.e. the role of the ritual or of psychological expressions) in the lives of those who perform it. An analysis such as Hoyt’s facilitates the incorporation even of the scapegoat remark into an account that regards Wittgenstein’s approach as generally uncritical of religion. It is thus consistent with a perspective that welcomes rather than rebuts the description of Wittgenstein, and of Wittgensteinian methods, as fideistic, at least in the sense embodied in the non-­interference principle. Richter exemplifies such a perspective when he affirms that the task of philosophy of religion is to do no more than bring to the surface the grammatical operations of religious forms of language.46 For the most part, Richter’s exegetical strategy involves distinguishing between, on the one hand, the written material that Wittgenstein prepared most carefully and which was eventually published as the Philosophical Investigations, and on the other hand the assortment of personal opinions and only half-­formed ideas that Wittgenstein jotted down in diaries and notebooks or tried out in lectures and in conversations with friends. Although some of these thoughts may be of considerable interest in their own right, Richter admits, they do not represent Wittgenstein’s most developed philosophical work.47 This distinction facilitates a conception of Wittgensteinian philosophy as purely descriptive, with the more judgemental and opinionated remarks from Wittgenstein’s corpus being relegated to the category of the nonor pre-­philosophical. There are, of course, many passages that can be cited in support of a reading of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy as purely descriptive, among which are Wittgenstein’s famous – or notorious – pronouncements that ‘Philosophy must not interfere in any way with the actual use of language, so it can in the end only

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describe it. . . . It leaves everything as it is’ (PI 4 §124) and that ‘Philosophy just puts everything before us, and neither explains nor deduces anything’ (§126).48 Although in these and similar passages it is not specifically philosophy’s relation to religion that is at issue, it hardly requires an extravagant inference to see that if, by Wittgenstein’s lights, philosophy ‘leaves everything as it is’, then a fortiori, by those same lights, it leaves religion as it is. And given that Wittgenstein is reported to have said of his later philosophy that, unlike the work of other philosophers, it interferes in no way ‘with what you can believe in religion’,49 it appears that Wittgenstein would concur with the inference. Although there continue to be heated disputes over how to put Wittgenstein’s descriptive conception of philosophy into effect – and there is hardly space even to begin trying to resolve those disputes here50 – it nevertheless has to be admitted that the non-­interference principle, or something very much like it, is thoroughly in tune with Wittgenstein’s most decisive pronouncements on the nature of philosophy, some of which I have cited above. In this light, Phillips’ efforts to repudiate the non-­interference principle appear misplaced. This appearance is strengthened when we recall that Phillips himself is well known for characterizing the ‘contemplative task’ of philosophy of religion as that of ‘showing what it means’ to hold or to reject a religious belief, without taking sides on the matter.51 If we accept such a conception of philosophy’s task, little room is left for an approach that invokes what we purportedly ‘already know’ in order to oppugn certain religious beliefs or forms of words as being confused. To do so in Wittgenstein’s name is to overreact to the charge of fideism. It is to neglect the possibility of rejecting only one aspect of the ‘Wittgensteinian fideism’ label – the aspect that I have termed the incomprehensibility principle – while affirming the other aspect, namely the non-­interference principle. Overall, we might still agree with Phillips that the label ought to be spurned entirely. It ought to be spurned precisely because of the ambiguity that I have been discussing, an ambiguity that enables ‘Wittgensteinian fideism’ to be heard as implying that a Wittgenstein-­influenced approach to the study of religion invariably attempts a defence of faith. As I, following Richter, have been arguing, a credible reading of Wittgenstein’s least equivocal statements on philosophical methods shows that a Wittgensteinian approach is in the business neither of attacking nor of defending faith; it ‘just puts everything before us’. If, in response to what has been put before us, we then adopt a religious form of life, or renounce it, so be it; but Wittgenstein’s point – and indeed Phillips’ point, for the most part – is that whichever course one takes, it will not be philosophy that has told one to take it.

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If this picture of a descriptive, contemplative, disinterested style of philosophizing is aptly attributed to Wittgenstein, however, how are we to account for the contention that pursuing Wittgenstein’s methods results in what Clack describes as ‘an unavoidable acceptance of atheism’? If Wittgenstein is not a defender of faith, could he nevertheless be its saboteur? Addressing these questions will require careful attention to the idea that Wittgenstein espouses a version of naturalism.

Wittgenstein’s naturalism It has become somewhat commonplace to describe Wittgenstein’s later philosophy as naturalistic, albeit naturalism of a ‘weak’ or ‘minimal’ or ‘liberal’ kind, one which steers clear of reductionism.52 In a relatively early instance of this tendency, David Pears coins the term ‘linguistic naturalism’ to distinguish Wittgenstein’s approach from the ‘psychological naturalism’ of David Hume.53 According to Pears, Wittgenstein’s philosophy is both naturalistic and anthropocentric insofar as it views ‘ordinary human life’ as the proper locus of investigation. It is specifically a linguistic form of naturalism in the sense that it conceives of language as continuous with natural nonverbal human behaviour, yet it avoids reductionism by refusing to privilege any particular area of human discourse above another.54 It thus refuses, for instance, to treat a restrictedly scientific conception of the ‘natural’ as that which is ultimately true.55 With regard to the phenomena of religion and ritual, it has been argued that Wittgenstein’s naturalism comes through most vividly in his Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough, in which he counters James Frazer’s ‘intellectualist’ account of ritual activities by maintaining that there is no need to suppose that rituals are based on theoretical modes of cognition; rather – and this is a point to which I return below – they can be viewed as arising naturally out of instinctive forms of human behaviour.56 Notwithstanding the reluctance on the part of many commentators to attribute to Wittgenstein a full-­bloodedly reductive form of naturalism, there remain suspicions in some quarters that his naturalistic tendencies sit uncomfortably with religious belief and practice. These suspicions have melded with other considerations – most notably the observations that Wittgenstein, despite seeing things ‘from a religious point of view’, could never commit himself to a religious form of life,57 and that he shared with Oswald Spengler a deep pessimism concerning the viability of genuine religion in the modern age58 – to

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generate a theory that Wittgenstein’s philosophy and outlook on life are not merely incompatible with religious faith but are subversive of its very possibility. In the next section I argue that it is mistaken to suppose that atheism is the destination to which Wittgenstein’s later philosophical thought inexorably leads. Here, however, it is important to acknowledge the elements in Wittgenstein’s thinking that might tempt us in the direction of the latter supposition. Central among these elements are the notion of primitive or instinctive reactions on the one hand and the distinction between ‘surface grammar’ and ‘depth grammar’ on the other, each of which I discuss below. Wittgenstein’s emphasis upon the instinctive level of human life is evident in many of his writings from the 1930s onwards. In contemplating how human beings learn the terms for particular sensations, for instance, Wittgenstein famously offers as ‘one possibility’ the suggestion that ‘words are connected with the primitive, natural, expressions of sensation and used in their place.’ With regard to the word ‘pain’, for example, it could be the case that its use comes, within particular social contexts, to replace the cries and groans that are the natural pre-­linguistic expressions of pain (PI 4 §244). Stressing that it is not merely in relation to our own sensations that terms such as ‘pain’ are learnt, Wittgenstein observes that tending the injured part of someone else who is in pain is also a primitive reaction, by which he means that ‘it is the prototype of a way of thinking and not the result of thought’ (Z §§540, 541; cf. RPP I §§915, 916). Invoking a maxim from Goethe’s Faust – ‘im Anfang war die Tat’ (‘In the beginning was the deed’)59 – Wittgenstein proposes that language ‘is a refinement’ (CE 420; CV R 36e; cf. OC §402), a development from the primitive reactions that underlie it, not a product of ‘ratiocination’ (OC §475).60 In view of Wittgenstein’s frequent insistence that he is not advancing theories or explanations, we should be wary of expecting from his remarks on primitive reactions a theory of how human beings came to be language-­using animals.61 So too should we be mindful not to ignore the ‘modal qualifications’ (‘Here is one possibility . . .’, ‘Here we might say . . .’, and so on) that are scattered throughout Wittgenstein’s oeuvre.62 Yet, even so, it does not appear to be going too far to propose that there is a prominent strand of Wittgenstein’s thinking in which he maintains, as Malcolm has argued, that our initial ‘learning of words is an outgrowth of unthinking, instinctive behaviour’ and that ‘something of the same kind permeates and surrounds all human acting and all use of language, even at sophisticated levels’.63 It is this strand of Wittgenstein’s thinking that is evident in his reflections on ritual in the light of what he perceives as Frazer’s over-­ intellectualized account. Whether or not Wittgenstein’s criticisms do an injustice

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to Frazer can be set aside here,64 our immediate purpose being to illustrate how the notion of instinctual or primitive reactions informs Wittgenstein’s alternative suggestions. What Wittgenstein chiefly objects to in Frazer’s treatment of ritual behaviour is the very idea that such behaviour could be explained by reference to some belief or theory that the participants supposedly hold. Thus, in response to Frazer’s surmise that in the ancient rite of succession at Nemi, the priest-­king had to be killed in his prime by the would-­be successor because this was believed to preserve the freshness of the king’s soul, Wittgenstein complains that all we can really say about such matters is that ‘where that practice and these views occur together, the practice does not spring from the view, but they are both just there’ (GB 119). Instead of assuming that rites must be explicable in terms of beliefs or opinions, Wittgenstein urges us to look for analogous forms of behaviour in our own lives and to thereby come to see resemblances. The analogies that Wittgenstein himself adduces involve what he calls ‘Instinct-­ actions’ (GB 137), one of his best-­known examples being that of someone’s kissing the picture of a loved one (123). Patently not believed to have any particular effect upon the person in the picture, this act is simply something we (or some of us) do, and if it happens to bring some satisfaction, that is not because it was done with any intention of feeling satisfied. Wittgenstein’s intimation is that examples of this sort help us to see that a ritual action such as burning an effigy need not be thought of in instrumental terms either, for it too can just as well be understood as arising from an instinctive urge rather than as a consequence of deliberative reasoning, whether theoretical or practical. A further example of Wittgenstein’s is the act of venting his anger by beating the ground or a tree with a walking stick (GB 137): just as it would be out of place to suppose that this is done because of a belief that the ground is guilty of some offence or that beating it will rectify what one is angry about, so, again, Wittgenstein’s thought seems to be that there is no reason to invoke such instrumental intentions in giving an account of more organized forms of ritual activity. It is in the light of examples of the sort just outlined – and especially on account of occasional incautious remarks that Wittgenstein makes in connection with them, such as that ‘all rites are of this kind’ (GB 137) – that Wittgenstein has been characterized as an ‘expressivist’ or ‘emotivist’.65 According to this interpretation, Wittgenstein is very much a reductionist who, despite his disavowals, is offering explanations that reduce actions with an ostensibly instrumental motivation to the mere expressions of emotions, wishes, desires and

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so on.66 Once this attribution to Wittgenstein of an emotive or expressive theory of ritual has been made, then a way is opened up for attributing to him a more general conception of religion as ‘a thoroughly human product, an expression of human nature rather than a relationship with transcendent realities’.67 This latter attribution is assisted by a particular reading of the distinction, introduced by Wittgenstein in the Investigations, between ‘surface grammar’ and ‘depth grammar’. There, Wittgenstein initially illustrates the distinction by reference to the verb ‘to mean’ (PI §664). Although our talk of meaning something might at first be assumed to amount to only one kind of thing – owing to a certain commonality of sentence structure, and hence of surface grammar, when we speak of meaning such-­and-such – Wittgenstein points out that meaning something by a certain form of words can itself take many forms; coming to understand what ‘meaning’ means in any given instance will require attention to the context of what is said. To investigate the depth grammar of a word (or concept or phrase) is to examine the range of types of context into which it enters, observing how it interacts with its linguistic and behavioural surroundings. As one commentator has put it, it is to turn from ‘what can be taken in at a glance’ to ‘the overall geography [or ways of using] an expression’.68 However, if one thinks of attending ‘to the depth grammar of religious discourse’ as revealing the ‘true nature’ of that discourse69 – and, furthermore, if one thinks Wittgenstein takes himself to have revealed that what religious discourse really consists in is the expression of primitive reactions to a world which, in itself, contains nothing spiritual or transcendent – then one is liable to share Clack’s scepticism about whether anyone could ‘accept all that Wittgenstein has to say about religion in his later period and yet still be able to continue in his or her faith’.70 As Clack sees it, it is precisely the surface grammar of religious faith that has to be affirmed if one is to participate in a religious form of life; if, upon analysis, a confession of belief in God, or in an afterlife or miracles, is disclosed to consist in nothing more than the expression of a feeling, which in itself is devoid of propositional content, then there is no sense in which the putative confession can be either true or false. This is why Clack maintains that genuine belief in God cannot withstand Wittgenstein’s account of religious belief: not because the account commits one to a denial of God’s reality, but because it commits one to the view that what appears to be an affirmation of God’s reality is really nothing of the sort; it is, beneath the surface, an expression of non-­cognitive feeling, a linguistic refinement of an instinctive reaction to the natural, nonspiritual world. The very idea of God’s reality as being spiritual and transcendent therefore evaporates.

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There are, however, good reasons for denying that the sort of naturalism displayed in Wittgenstein’s philosophy has the atheistic implications that these latter suggestions portray it as having. In the next section I develop this point in relation to some ideas from Peter Winch.

The natural and the religious In his essay ‘Meaning and Religious Language’ Winch invites us to imagine a small-­scale community whose language has yet to include any terms equivalent to ‘religious belief ’ or ‘religious practice’ but who nevertheless engage in activities that Winch thinks we should want to describe as religious. Without presuming any historical veracity for his imagined scenario, Winch sketches a possible context in which religious concepts could begin to form. One of the characteristics of the depicted community is that they live among mountains. When someone within the community dies, the body is cremated or buried with a degree of solemnity. ‘The ceremony includes perhaps some moment of silent contemplation of the mountains, perhaps prostration of their bodies before the mountains’, Winch writes. Comparable acts are performed at other significant moments: ‘at a marriage, on the occasion of a birth, when an adolescent is initiated into adult life’.71 Elaborating the thought experiment, Winch imagines further ritualistic behaviour being directed towards other features of the community’s environment, features with particular salience in the people’s lives, such as the sea and various species of animal. He proposes that, provided certain expectations of ours are met concerning what religious practices typically involve, we might feel compelled to describe the behaviour of the imagined community as religious, ‘even in the absence of any recognizably religious talk or belief ’.72 Without trying to offer anything approximating necessary or sufficient conditions for something’s being religious, the sorts of characteristics that Winch thinks we are apt to expect of a religious ritual include: its involving stylized and conventional actions, performed with a sense of awe for purposes that are not directly instrumental; its being associated with longstanding traditions; and its having the potential to be treated with varying degrees of seriousness by different members of the community.73 By prompting us to entertain the thought that identifiably religious practices could occur among people who lack an explicitly religious vocabulary, Winch is arguing that the religious vocabulary might constitute a natural outgrowth of the

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practices, in a way analogous to that in which articulate verbalizations of pain might plausibly be held to develop, given suitably conducive social conditions, from inarticulate yells. Much like Wittgenstein’s remarks on Frazer, one of Winch’s principal aims is to challenge the assumption that religious forms of language – what religious people say in connection with the things they do – necessarily serve to explain the practices in which the people engage. What Winch is suggesting is that to describe the people in his imagined community as showing reverence for their gods by looking to the mountains ‘is not to explain why they look to the mountains, but to point to a conceptual connection between what they understand by their gods and their ritualistic practice’.74 It is, perhaps, not hard to envisage a critical commentator seizing upon Winch’s argument as a telling example of how the view that religious beliefs and practices are based on instinctive reactions entails a reductive naturalistic, and hence atheistic, conception of religion. It entails this, it might be argued, because it involves the claim that religious beliefs derive from responses to purely natural phenomena – mountains, seas, animals and so on – and this claim leaves no logical room for a connection with anything beyond the natural world. As Clack says of what he takes to be Wittgenstein’s position, religion comes to be viewed as no more than ‘an expression of human nature’, devoid of any ‘relationship with transcendent realities’. Does Winch’s imaginary scenario not encourage us to see the origins and indeed the continuation of religion in precisely these narrow naturalistic and anthropocentric terms? Resisting an affirmative answer to the latter question requires elaborating what a nonreductive naturalism could be. To characterize Winch’s account in reductive terms would be to assume that when he writes of such actions as silently contemplating the mountains and prostrating before them, the notion of what a mountain is must be exclusively secular with no inherently religious or spiritual content. But there is no obvious reason why this assumption should be accepted. The feeling of reverence displayed by members of the community might be internal to their understanding of what mountains are, and it is far from evident why any non-­religious conception of mountains should be regarded as, necessarily, logically prior to a conception that includes this inherently religious element. When Wittgenstein speaks of language as a refinement or extension, he is not claiming that language adds something entirely new that was not already there, to some extent, in the primitive reaction.75 He is suggesting that the lines of demarcation between the pre-­linguistic and the linguistic are not fully determinate, that language facilitates greater subtlety of articulation, perhaps

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embellishing and elaborating what was previously present in embryonic form. Thus if we imagine Winch’s small-­scale community coming to use words such as ‘worship’, ‘sacred’, ‘divine’, ‘gods’, etc. in the context of bowing down before the mountains, we need not assume that these words are merely giving a religious gloss to a non-­religious activity or that they are ultimately empty of genuine religious significance merely because they grew out of a ‘natural’ mode of behaviour. From the sort of perspective exemplified by Wittgenstein and Winch, one can say that in order to see what worshipping their gods means for the community in question, we must observe how they behave in relation to the mountains – and to other things, such as the sea and animals, perhaps across a broad range of situations. But this is not to imply that there is ‘nothing more’ to their form of worship than bowing down before entities that are ‘in reality’ simply large elevated mounds of earth. Nor need one be implying that the religious dimension of the act is only a psychological projection, a kind of fictional narrative superimposed upon the raw material of the mountains by the people who bow down before them. Rather, one may say, it is in the acts of contemplation and prostration that the people do in fact worship their gods – it is by these acts that they actualize and consolidate their ‘relationship with transcendent realities’.

Concluding remarks Here I shall sum up what I have been arguing. A Wittgensteinian approach to the study of religion, and to the philosophy of religion in particular, has repeatedly been labelled in unsympathetic portions of the critical literature as fideistic, in the sense that such an approach purportedly seeks to immunize faith against the legitimate scrutiny of reason. Paradoxically, it is also the case that Wittgenstein’s emphasis on the primitive or instinctive sources of our linguistic activities has been held to be incompatible with faith and, if treated with due seriousness, to lead inevitably to atheism. This chapter has explored the two sides of this paradox and has argued that each of its constitutive claims is suspect. The charge of fideism is ambiguous, since the notion of fideism it relies upon comprises two distinct principles. Having designated these the non-­interference and incomprehensibility principles respectively, I have argued that the former – notwithstanding attempts by Wittgensteinians such as D. Z. Phillips to oppugn it – is in fact benign and consonant with Wittgenstein’s conception of philosophy, a conception that envisages philosophy as a grammatical inquiry, one which

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elucidates concepts and assuages confusions about those concepts without either defending or attacking the forms of life in which the concepts have their natural home. The incomprehensibility principle, meanwhile, is not one that Wittgenstein himself or practitioners of his methods would endorse, maintaining as it does that religious forms of life can be understood only by those who actively participate in them. My challenge to the claim that Wittgenstein’s appeal to the primitive and instinctual in our lives undermines the conditions for faith has comprised an exploration and elaboration of some important ideas from Peter Winch. The contention that ‘the consequence of [Wittgenstein’s] later thought on religion is an unavoidable acceptance of atheism’ (Clack) and an ‘erosion of belief in transcendence’ (Malcolm Diamond) relies on a reductive construal of Wittgenstein’s approach to religious forms of language. It presupposes that when Wittgenstein speaks of religious beliefs and practices as being based on or developing from natural instincts, he is thereby insinuating that the phenomena which are being reacted to – and indeed the reactions themselves – must be natural in a sense that is thoroughly reductive and scientistic. The presupposition is unwarranted, however, as there is no good reason to assume that a purely secular model of the world is logically prior to one that is imbued with religious and spiritual significance from the outset. What Winch’s imagined scenario helps us to see is how religious concepts could be formed in the process of a people’s deepening engagement with the world around them, as opposed to being merely superadded to a pre-­existing irreligious base. In the light of the considerations I have brought forward, we should view the contributions, both extant and potential, of Wittgenstein and Wittgensteinians to the study of religion as extending far beyond fideism and atheism. It is no accident that many anthropologists have taken up and appropriated ideas from Wittgenstein, and also from Winch, in their studies of complex cultural phenomena, including religion,76 for there is much in those ideas that encourages a heightened attentiveness to conceptual nuances and to the intimate relation between a people’s understanding of their world – and of their gods or God – and the modes of behaviour in which they engage. Before completing this chapter, however, I should sound a less sanguine note for those who seek an accommodation between Wittgensteinian methods and a confident faith. Although I have not had space to discuss it in detail here, a further aspect of Wittgenstein’s thought that may harbour unsettling implications for faith is the radical contingency in our epistemic lives that it brings to light.77 This contingency consists in the fact that regardless of what particular beliefs we hold, those beliefs

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could have been different, and indeed would have been different if our forms of life had developed differently. As Wittgenstein emphasizes, ‘The difficulty is to realize the groundlessness of our believing’ (OC §166).78 Several commentators, including Winch, have proposed that the relativistic implications of Wittgensteinian contingency can be staved off by means of an appeal to our common biological inheritance: the system of beliefs with which any given individual operates might well be dependent upon the form of life she inhabits, but that need not threaten us with epistemic relativism because everyone, after all, inhabits an overarching form of life, namely that of being human. Winch, for example, speaks of there being certain ‘limiting notions’ that constrain any conception of a human life, notions that include the fact that we undergo such things as birth and death and engage in sexual relations.79 Others have highlighted Wittgenstein’s references to shared modes of human behaviour as indicative of a basis for overcoming the drift towards relativism.80 But even if we were to concur that there are some basic biological and behavioural features that facilitate a degree of transcultural understanding, it remains the case that, from a Wittgensteinian perspective, any person’s or community’s epistemic framework is radically contingent upon the way in which human life happens to have evolved – ‘the natural history of human beings’ (PI §415). It is the thought that one’s most cherished beliefs and values partake of that contingent status that is liable to disconcert many religious believers; and not only religious believers, for atheism and secular naturalism are, as it were, in the same boat.81 In short, while Wittgensteinian approaches to the study of religion certainly take us far beyond any simplistic conceptions of fideism and atheism, they also open up a huge can of worms concerning the extent to which we can ever escape the epistemic constraints of our bio-­socio-cultural predicament. As Stanley Cavell recognized, ‘It is a vision as simple as it is difficult, and as difficult as it is (and because it is) terrifying’.82 It is also, I should add, a vision capable of inspiring a sense of wonder, that we are the sorts of beings we are.83

Notes 1 For a comprehensive bibliography of Phillips’ works up to 2002, see John H. Whittaker, ed., The Possibilities of Sense: Essays in Honour of D. Z. Phillips (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), 290–303. For a list of his more recent works, see Andy F. Sanders, ed., D. Z. Phillips’ Contemplative Philosophy of Religion: Questions and Responses (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 220.

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2 See, e.g., P. F. Bloemendaal, Grammars of Faith: A Critical Evaluation of D. Z. Phillips’s Philosophy of Religion (Leuven: Peeters, 2006) and Ingolf U. Dalferth and Hartmut von Sass, eds, The Contemplative Spirit: D. Z. Phillips on Religion and the Limits of Philosophy (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010), as well as some of my own work, such as Contemplating Religious Forms of Life: Wittgenstein and D. Z. Phillips (New York: Continuum, 2012). 3 These include: Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), Ch. 1; Clifford Geertz, Available Light: Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), xi–xiii; Rodney Needham, Belief, Language, and Experience (Oxford: Blackwell, 1972); and Veena Das, ‘Wittgenstein and Anthropology’, Annual Review of Anthropology 27 (1998), 171–95. See also Jason A. Springs, ‘What Cultural Theorists of Religion Have to Learn from Wittgenstein; Or, How to Read Geertz as a Practice Theorist’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 76, no. 4 (2008), 934–69. 4 Illustrative examples include: Gabriella Eichinger Ferro-Luzzi, ‘The PolytheticPrototype Approach to Hinduism’, in Hinduism Reconsidered, ed. Günther-Dietz Sontheimer and Hermann Kulke, 2nd edn (New Delhi: Manohar, 1997), 294–304; John Hick, An Interpretation of Religion: Human Responses to the Transcendent, 2nd edn (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 3–5; Ralph W. Hood, Jr, ‘Spirituality and Religion’, in The World’s Religions: Continuities and Transformations, ed. Peter Clarke and Peter Beyer (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009), 665–78, at 665–6. For critical discussion of such vocabulary, see Benson Saler, ‘Family Resemblance and the Definition of Religion’, Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques 25, no. 3 (1999), 391–404. 5 John Hyman, ‘Wittgenstein’, in A Companion to Philosophy of Religion, ed. Charles Taliaferro, Paul Draper and Philip L. Quinn, 2nd edn (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 176–88, at 185. 6 Kai Nielsen, ‘Wittgensteinian Fideism’, Philosophy 42 (1967), 191–209. 7 Malcolm L. Diamond, ‘Hudson’s Wittgenstein and Religious Belief’, Religious Studies 15, no. 1 (1979), 107–18, at 118. 8 Brian R. Clack, An Introduction to Wittgenstein’s Philosophy of Religion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 127. 9 Terms similar to ‘non-­interference principle’ have been used by other commentators on Wittgenstein; see, e.g., Jonathan Lear, ‘Leaving the World Alone’, Journal of Philosophy 79, no. 7 (1982), 382–403, at 383; Bob Plant, Wittgenstein and Levinas: Ethical and Religious Thought (Abingdon: Routledge, 2005), 69, 209 n. 170. The term ‘incomprehensibility principle’ is, as far as I am aware, original to me in this context. 10 Nielsen, ‘Wittgensteinian Fideism’, 193–4. 11 See Thomas D. Carroll, Wittgenstein within the Philosophy of Religion (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 112.

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12 Olli-Pekka Vainio, Beyond Fideism: Negotiable Religious Identities (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 9. See Eugène Ménégoz, Reflexions sur L’évangile du salut (Paris: Sandoz et Fischbacher, 1879). 13 Carroll, Wittgenstein within the Philosophy of Religion, 112. See esp. Léon OlléLaprune, De La Certitude Morale (Paris: Belin, 1880), Ch. 4, in which the author argues that the idea, deriving from Kant, that we can know only appearances and not things in themselves – and hence can reach beyond appearances only by means of faith – is a ‘doctrine of fideism’, whose legacy is scepticism. 14 Nielsen, ‘Wittgensteinian Fideism’, 193. 15 Ibid., 201. 16 Ibid., 192–3. 17 Norman Malcolm, ‘Anselm’s Ontological Arguments’, Philosophical Review 69, no. 1 (1960), 41–62, at 60. 18 Ibid., 62. 19 Cf. Colin Lyas, Peter Winch (Teddington: Acumen, 1999), 131: ‘If I did not have the possibility of religion in me, I could not begin to understand its sense in the lives of those who are religious.’ 20 Frederick C. Copleston, Religion and Philosophy (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1974), viii. Copleston is here, in part, echoing a complaint first made by John Hick, who characterizes Wittgenstein-­influenced approaches as adopting an ‘autonomist position’, an ‘unacceptable feature of [which] is that by treating religious language as autonomous – as a language-­game with its own rules, or a speech activity having meaning only within its own borders – it deprives religious statements of “ontological” or “metaphysical” significance’. John Hick, ‘Sceptics and Believers’, in Faith and the Philosophers, ed. John Hick (London: Macmillan, 1964), 235–50, at 239. 21 Anthony Kenny, ‘In Defence of God’, Times Literary Supplement, 7 February 1975, 145. 22 In Bryan Magee, Modern British Philosophy (London: Secker & Warburg, 1971), 173. 23 D. Z. Phillips, ‘Moral and Religious Conceptions of Duty: An Analysis’, Mind, n.s. 73 (1964), 406–12, at 411. 24 D. Z. Phillips, The Concept of Prayer (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965), 40. 25 See, e.g., Phillips, ‘Faith, Scepticism, and Religious Understanding’, in Religion and Understanding, ed. D. Z. Phillips (Oxford: Blackwell, 1967), 63–79, at 71; Belief, Change and Forms of Life (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1986), 10; ‘Wittgenstein and Religion: Some Fashionable Criticisms’, in Kai Nielsen and D. Z. Phillips, Wittgensteinian Fideism? (London: SCM Press, 2005), 39–52, at 46–7. 26 D. Z. Phillips, ‘On Wittgenstein: VIII’, Philosophical Investigations 24, no. 2 (2001), 147–53, at 150. 27 Carroll, Wittgenstein within the Philosophy of Religion, 168. 28 Duncan Richter, Wittgenstein at His Word (London: Continuum, 2004), 173, quoting Nielsen, ‘Wittgensteinian Fideism’, 193. Cf. Béla Szabados, ‘Introduction:

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Wittgensteinian Fideism 1967–89: An Appreciation’, in Nielsen and Phillips, Wittgensteinian Fideism?, 1–18, at 15: ‘[T]he attitude and substance of Wittgenstein’s philosophical works show a fideist orientation. So it sheds light on our understanding of his work, and works done in his legacy, to say that they belong to this family of [fideistic] thinkers.’ 29 See, e.g., D. Z. Phillips, ‘Religious Belief and Philosophical Enquiry: A Reply to Dr Hick and Dr Palmer’, Theology 71 (1968), 114–22, at 120; Belief, Change and Forms of Life, 13; ‘Wittgenstein and Religion: Some Fashionable Criticisms’, 48. 30 D. Z. Phillips, ‘Religious Beliefs and Language-Games’, Ratio 12, no. 1 (1970), 26–46, at 39–40. See also Phillips, Belief, Change and Forms of Life, 13–14; ‘Wittgenstein and Religion: Some Fashionable Criticisms’, 48–9. 31 Phillips, ‘Religious Beliefs and Language-Games’, 40. 32 See, among many other places: D. Z. Phillips, Religion and Friendly Fire: Examining Assumptions in Contemporary Philosophy of Religion (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 55; ‘Philosophy, Piety and Petitionary Prayer – A Reply to Walter van Herck’, in D. Z. Phillips’ Contemplative Philosophy of Religion: Questions and Responses, 139–52, at 139–40; Religion and the Hermeneutics of Contemplation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 33, 201. 33 Though not making specific reference to Phillips, a recent instance of an ostensibly anti-­quietist interpretation of Wittgenstein, occurs in Phil Hutchinson, Rupert Read and Wes Sharrock, There is No Such Thing as a Social Science: In Defence of Peter Winch (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), esp. 124–31. Upon inspection, however, it appears that Hutchinson, Read and Sharrock are arguing not that Wittgensteinian philosophy is directly critical of what people think or say, but rather that such philosophy provides a kind of ‘self-­therapy’ that enables people to cease saying what they come to recognize as lacking the sense that they had previously supposed it to have. 34 Biblical instances are plentiful; see, e.g., Job 3:13, 17; Daniel 12:2; Matthew 27:52; John 11:11–14; Acts 7:60, 13:36; 1 Corinthians 15:20; 1 Thessalonians 4:13–15. 35 Quoted in M. Michelet, The Life of Luther (London: Bogue, 1846), 133. 36 See, e.g., Ephesians 5:14 (King James Version): ‘Awake thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light.’ See also George MacDonald’s sermon ‘Awakening’, 13 April 1873, in George MacDonald in the Pulpit: The ‘Spoken’ Sermons of George MacDonald (Whitehorn, CA: Johannesen, 1996), 9–24. 37 The same remark occurs in two earlier typescripts (TS 211: 394; TS 212: 1205) and is based on a manuscript entry dated 8 November 1930 (MS 109: 210); for these sources, see Ludwig Wittgenstein, Wittgenstein’s Nachlass: The Bergen Electronic Edition, ed. Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Bergen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 38 D. Z. Phillips, ‘Wittgenstein’s Full Stop’, in Perspectives on the Philosophy of Wittgenstein, ed. Irving Block (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981), 179–200, at 189–90. See also

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Phillips, Belief, Change and Forms of Life, 29–32; Faith after Foundationalism (London: Routledge, 1988), 307–8; and Rush Rhees, ‘Wittgenstein on Language and Ritual’, in Essays on Wittgenstein in Honour of G. H. von Wright, ed. Jaakko Hintikka (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1976), 450–84, at 460–2; Rush Rhees on Religion and Philosophy, ed. D. Z. Phillips (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 75–7. 39 Brian R. Clack, ‘Scapegoat Rituals in Wittgensteinian Perspective’, in Thinking through Rituals, ed. Kevin Schilbrack (New York: Routledge, 2004), 97–112, at 104. 40 Berel Dov Lerner, ‘Wittgenstein’s Scapegoat’, Philosophical Investigations 17, no. 4 (1994), 604–12, at 609; Clack, ‘Scapegoat Rituals in Wittgensteinian Perspective’, 102–3. 41 Clack, ‘Scapegoat Rituals in Wittgensteinian Perspective’, 107. See, e.g., Ludwig Wittgenstein and Friedrich Waismann, The Voices of Wittgenstein: The Vienna Circle (Abingdon: Routledge, 2003), 491: ‘A substantive misleads us into looking for a substance’. See also BB 5; PG 108; Waismann, The Principles of Linguistic Philosophy (London: Macmillan, 1965), 81. 42 Clack, ‘Scapegoat Rituals in Wittgensteinian Perspective’, 110. 43 Christopher Hoyt, ‘Wittgenstein on the Language of Rituals: The Scapegoat Remark Reconsidered’, Religious Studies 48, no. 2 (2012), 165–82, at 166. 44 Ibid., 172. 45 Ibid., 174. 46 Richter’s position could be seen as ambivalent. In some places he endorses the view that a ‘properly’ or ‘truly’ Wittgensteinian approach refrains from criticizing religion, whereas in other places he implies the weaker claim that it is simply not inevitable that a Wittgensteinian investigation of religious beliefs will expose them as incoherent (see Richter, Wittgenstein at His Word, 174). The apparent ambivalence largely dissolves, however, when we notice the emphasis he gives to philosophy’s being ‘a personal process’, the purpose of which is to clarify the sense of human discourse (ibid., 162–3). The process of reflecting upon the sense of one’s own words could, though need not, lead some individuals to relinquish their use of particular religious vocabulary. In these instances philosophy has facilitated the relinquishment but has not been directly critical. Compare note 33 above on Hutchinson, Read and Sharrock. 47 Richter, Wittgenstein at His Word, 153. 48 These remarks of Wittgenstein’s were first formulated in the early 1930s; see Peter Hacker, ‘Turning the Examination Around: The Recantation of a Metaphysician’, in Wittgenstein at Work: Methods in the ‘Philosophical Investigations’, ed. Erich Ammereller and Eugen Fischer (Abingdon: Routledge, 2004), 3–21, at 3. As some commentators have noted (e.g. Stephen Mulhall, ‘Philosophy’s Hidden Essence: PI 89–133’, in Wittgenstein at Work: Methods in the ‘Philosophical Investigations’, 63–85, at 66), the tone of these remarks is strikingly authoritative, even authoritarian,

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compared with the highly qualified character of many of Wittgenstein’s other remarks. The variety of tones internal even to the Investigations might place in doubt any attempt to sharply demarcate it, conceived of as a single work, from other instances of Wittgenstein’s writings. However, for the purposes of this chapter I shall not be challenging Richter’s broad distinction between the personal and the philosophical. 49 Wittgenstein, quoted in G. E. M. Anscombe, ‘Misinformation: What Wittgenstein Really Said’, The Tablet, 17 April 1954, 373; see also Richter, Wittgenstein at His Word, 176–7. 50 A useful entry point into the variety of ways of inheriting Wittgenstein’s legacy is the collection of essays in Guy Kahane, Edward Kanterian and Oskari Kuusela, eds, Wittgenstein and His Interpreters: Essays in Memory of Gordon Baker (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007). 51 Phillips, Religion and the Hermeneutics of Contemplation, 144; Philosophy’s Cool Place (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 130, 163. I discuss Phillips’ contemplative approach at further length in ‘Approaches to Philosophy of Religion: Contemplating the World or Trying to Find Our Way Home?’, Religious Studies 51, no. 2 (2015), 221–39. 52 See, e.g., Hilary Putnam, Renewing Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 175: ‘Wittgenstein has a naturalistic (but not a reductionist) view of man’. For the ascription to Wittgenstein of ‘a very weak form of naturalism’, see John Fennell and Bob Plant, ‘Ludwig Wittgenstein’, in The New Century: Bergsonism, Phenomenology, and Responses to Modern Science, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson and Alan D. Schrift (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), 287–318, at 294. For ‘minimal naturalism’, see esp. Plant, Wittgenstein and Levinas, 10, 95. For the notion of ‘liberal naturalism’, see Marie McGinn, ‘Liberal Naturalism: Wittgenstein and McDowell’, in Philosophical Methodology: The Armchair or the Laboratory?, ed. Matthew C. Haug (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), 62–85. See also Hoyt, ‘Wittgenstein on the Language of Rituals’, 174, on Wittgenstein’s ‘naturalistic, even animalistic, account of language’. 53 David Pears, Wittgenstein (London: Fontana, 1971), 172. 54 Ibid., 173. 55 Cf. McGinn, ‘Liberal Naturalism’, 65, who, comparing the respective approaches of Wittgenstein and John McDowell, observes there to be ‘a clear parallel between the view that McDowell develops and the sort of naturalism that is central to the Philosophical Investigations. In particular, there is a shared commitment to avoid both a reductive approach to meaning and what McDowell calls “supernaturalism”, that is, the idea that meaning and thinking are “strange” processes that are fundamentally alien to ordinary nature.’ 56 See, e.g., John Churchill, ‘The Squirrel does not Infer by Induction: Wittgenstein and the Natural History of Religion’, in Philosophy and the Grammar of Religious Belief,

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ed. Timothy Tessin and Mario von der Ruhr (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995), 48–78, at 70: ‘I think Wittgenstein shows us how to look for the roots of ritual and religious behaviour in humanity’s repertoire of apparently shared behaviours and capacities for response to the environment and to each other.’ See also Bob Plant, ‘Religion, Relativism, and Wittgenstein’s Naturalism’, International Journal of Philosophical Studies 19, no. 2 (2011), 177–209, esp. 183, 189. For the characterization of Frazer’s approach as ‘intellectualist’, see E. E. Evans-Pritchard, ‘The Intellectualist (English) Interpretation of Magic’, Bulletin of the Faculty of Arts 1, no. 2 (1933), 282–311; John Churchill, ‘Something Deep and Sinister’, Modern Theology 8, no. 1 (1992), 15–37, at 21–2; Berel Dov Lerner, Rules, Magic, and Instrumental Reason: A Critical Interpretation of Peter Winch’s Philosophy of the Social Sciences (Abingdon: Routledge, 2002), 76. 57 See Wittgenstein, quoted in M. O’C. Drury, ‘Some Notes on Conversations with Wittgenstein’, in Recollections of Wittgenstein, ed. Rush Rhees (Oxford University Press, 1984), 76–96, at 79: ‘I am not a religious man but I cannot help seeing every problem from a religious point of view’. For book-­length ruminations on this remark, see Norman Malcolm, Wittgenstein: A Religious Point of View? (London: Routledge, 1993) and Tim Labron, Wittgenstein’s Religious Point of View (London: Continuum, 2006). 58 For critical discussion of Wittgenstein’s reception of Spengler’s thesis, see Patricia Sayre, ‘Wittgenstein and the Possibility of Religious Belief ’, Pre-Proceedings of the 26th International Wittgenstein Symposium (Kirchberg am Wechsel: Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society, 2003), 308–10, and William James DeAngelis, Ludwig Wittgenstein – A Cultural Point of View: Philosophy in the Darkness of This Time (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007). In a manuscript note from 1931 (CV R 16e), Wittgenstein includes Spengler in a list of authors by whom he considers himself to have been influenced. 59 See J. W. von Goethe, Faust (London: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1880), Part 1, Scene 3. 60 Cf. Z §545: ‘Our language-­game is an extension of primitive behaviour. (For our language-­game is behaviour.) (Instinct).’ 61 For cautionary remarks of this kind, see Lars Hertzberg, ‘Primitive Reactions – Logic or Anthropology?’, Midwest Studies in Philosophy 17, no. 1 (1992), 24–39, at 26; Rush Rhees, ‘Language as Emerging from Instinctive Behaviour’, Philosophical Investigations 20, no. 1 (1997), 1–14, at 3, 7; Elizabeth Wolgast, ‘Primitive Reactions’, Philosophical Investigations 17, no. 4 (1994), 587–603. 62 For discussion of the importance of these qualifications, see Katherine Morris, ‘Wittgenstein’s Method: Ridding People of Philosophical Prejudices’, in Wittgenstein and His Interpreters: Essays in Memory of Gordon Baker, 66–87, at 80–1. 63 Norman Malcolm, ‘Wittgenstein: The Relation of Language to Instinctive Behaviour’, Philosophical Investigations 5, no. 1 (1982), 3–22, at 17. Malcolm’s reading of

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Wittgenstein on this matter has been much contested. For discussion and further references, see D. Z. Phillips, ‘ “In the Beginning Was the Proposition,” “In the Beginning Was the Choice,” “In the Beginning Was the Dance” ’, Midwest Studies in Philosophy 21, no. 1 (1997), 159–74, at 162–4. Nevertheless, even Rhees, who raises some doubts about the scope of Malcolm’s interpretive claims, concurs ‘that Wittgenstein thought of instinctive reactions as fundamental for language’ (Rhees, ‘Language as Emerging from Instinctive Behaviour’, 13). 64 For a nuanced evaluation of the points of similarity as well as difference between Wittgenstein and Frazer, see Brian R. Clack, Wittgenstein, Frazer and Religion (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), esp. Ch. 8. 65 See, e.g., Paul O’Grady, ‘Wittgenstein and Relativism’, International Journal of Philosophical Studies 12, no. 3 (2004), 315–37, at 329; John W. Cook, ‘Magic, Witchcraft, and Science’, Philosophical Investigations 6, no. 1 (1983), 2–36. For critical discussion, see Brian R. Clack, ‘Wittgenstein and Expressive Theories of Religion’, International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 40, no. 1 (1996), 47–61; Wittgenstein, Frazer and Religion, 21–50; and Plant, ‘Religion, Relativism, and Wittgenstein’s Naturalism’, 197–200. As an indication that the attribution of expressivism to Wittgenstein has infected even school textbooks, see Michael Lacewing and Jean-Marc Pascal, Revise Philosophy AS Level (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007), 138. 66 See Cook, ‘Magic, Witchcraft, and Science’, 3–4. 67 Clack, An Introduction to Wittgenstein’s Philosophy of Religion, 125. 68 Hans-Johann Glock, A Wittgenstein Dictionary (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1996), 155. And we should not assume that, in a living language, ‘the overall geography’ is ever fixed: ‘The description of grammar remains open-­ended.’ Daniel Steuer, ‘Sketches of Landscapes: Wittgenstein after Wittgenstein’, in Wittgenstein at the Movies: Cinematic Investigations, ed. Béla Szabados and Christina Stojanova (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2011), 49–77, at 74 n. 19. 69 Clack, An Introduction to Wittgenstein’s Philosophy of Religion, 125. 70 Ibid. See also idem, ‘Postscript’, in Faith and Philosophical Analysis: The Impact of Analytical Philosophy on the Philosophy of Religion, ed. Harriet A. Harris and Christopher J. Insole (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 71–5, at 75: ‘While it is feasible that the non-­religious might embrace Wittgenstein’s view as a plausible account of the nature of religion, it is doubtful that religious believers could accept it.’ Cf. M. Diamond, ‘Hudson’s Wittgenstein and Religious Belief’, and also the following remark from John Searle in conversation with Bryan Magee: ‘You have to be a very recherché sort of religious intellectual to keep praying if you don’t think there is any real God outside the language who is listening to your prayers.’ In Bryan Magee, The Great Philosophers: An Introduction to Western Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 1987), 345; cited with approval in Clack, An Introduction to Wittgenstein’s Philosophy of Religion, 125, and in ‘Postscript’, 75.

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71 Peter Winch, ‘Meaning and Religious Language’, in his Trying to Make Sense (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), 107–31, at 110–11. 72 Ibid., 112. 73 Ibid., 111–12. 74 Ibid., 112–13. 75 Cf. John V. Canfield, ‘Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy’, in Philosophy of Meaning, Knowledge and Value in the Twentieth Century, ed. John V. Canfield (London: Routledge, 1997), 247–84, at 262: ‘The passage to speech does not cross some great ontological divide’. 76 See, e.g., Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1983), Ch. 4; Rodney Needham, ‘Polythetic Classification: Convergence and Consequences’, Man, n.s. 10, no. 3 (1975), 349–69; Stanley Jeyaraja Tambiah, Magic, Science, Religion, and the Scope of Rationality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), esp. Ch. 3; Gopāla Śarana, ‘Do ˙ Anthropologists Explain?’, in Discourse and Inference in Cognitive Anthropology: An Approach to Psychic Unity and Enculturation, ed. Marvin D. Loflin and James Silverberg (The Hague: Mouton, 1978), 239–56; Robert C. Ulin, Understanding Cultures: Perspectives in Anthropology and Social Theory, 2nd edn (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001), Ch. 3. 77 For uses of the term ‘radical contingency’ in connection with Wittgenstein’s thought, see, e.g., Newton Garver, ‘Philosophy as Grammar’, in The Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein, ed. Hans Sluga and David G. Stern (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 139–70, at 159; Nuno Ornelas Martins, The Cambridge Revival of Political Economy (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), 194, and Martin Kusch, ‘Wittgenstein and the Epistemology of Peer Disagreement’, www.academia. edu/1517295/Wittgenstein_and_the_Epistemology_of_Peer_Disagreement. See also Michael P. Hodges, ‘Faith: Themes from Wittgenstein, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche’, in Wittgenstein and Philosophy of Religion, ed. Robert L. Arrington and Mark Addis (London: Routledge, 2001), 66–84, at 79, on the ‘radical possibility of the contingency, and therefore the non-­existence, of religious discourse’. 78 Cf. Norman Malcolm, ‘The Groundlessness of Belief ’, in his Thought and Knowledge (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 199–216; Duncan Pritchard, Epistemic Angst: Radical Skepticism and the Groundlessness of Our Believing (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016). 79 Peter Winch, ‘Understanding a Primitive Society’, American Philosophical Quarterly 1, no. 4 (1964), 307–24, at 322; cf. GB 127. 80 An especially relevant passage is PI 4 §206: ‘Shared human behaviour is the system of reference by means of which we interpret an unknown language.’ For discussion, see Plant, ‘Religion, Relativism, and Wittgenstein’s Naturalism’, 184. See also the idea of ‘a shared background of commitments’ in Duncan Pritchard, ‘Epistemic Relativism,

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Epistemic Incommensurability, and Wittgensteinian Epistemology’, in A Companion to Relativism, ed. Steven D. Hales (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 266–85, at 283; cf. idem, Epistemic Angst, 110. 81 Cf. Thomas Nagel, ‘The Absurd’, Journal of Philosophy 68, no. 20 (1971), 716–27, at 718, on ‘the collision between the seriousness with which we take our lives and the perpetual possibility of regarding everything about which we are serious as arbitrary’. 82 Stanley Cavell, ‘The Availability of Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy’, Philosophical Review 71, no. 1 (1962), 67–93, at 74. 83 Substantial portions of this chapter were presented at the In Wittgenstein’s Footsteps conference, University of Iceland, 15 September 2012, and as the Thirteenth British Wittgenstein Society Lecture, Bloomsbury Institute, London, 12 May 2015. I am grateful to the organizers of and participants in those events for the opportunity to present and discuss the material. For encouraging comments on written drafts, I thank Brian Clack, Chris Hoyt, Bob Plant and Duncan Richter.

4

Wittgenstein, Kierkegaard and Chalcedon Rowan Williams

Wittgenstein, ethics and aesthetics Some modern discussions of Wittgenstein and ethics note the paradox that, while he has very little to say explicitly about what are traditionally thought of as ethical questions, there is a strong and pervasive assumption being made about the ethical character of his entire philosophical enterprise.1 The brief but significant ‘Lecture on Ethics’ which he delivered in 1929 helps to clarify some aspects of this tension.2 Ethical utterances are not, he insists, statements of fact: ‘No state of affairs has, in itself, what I would like to call the coercive power of an absolute judge’ (LE 7). That is to say, an ethical judgement (‘such and such an action is unequivocally good’) cannot be the outcome of either a series of empirical/deductive steps or a chain of logical reasoning. Ethical utterance, Wittgenstein argues, belongs in the same territory as the experience of wonder at the existence of the world or of the sense of absolute security beyond all contingent possibility of hurt or failure. Both these experiences are different in kind from others which are described in a seductively similar vocabulary: I wonder at this phenomenon or set of phenomena (it could be otherwise, I’ve never seen anything like this before); I feel safe here (in a way I don’t feel safe there). If I wonder at the world, it isn’t because I’ve never seen anything like it; it isn’t a thing in a series of things, a new bit of information. If I feel absolutely secure, it isn’t because this situation makes me feel more comfortable than that; this isn’t one state of affairs in a succession of possible states of affairs in which I feel varying degrees of safety. And so as soon as we try to find appropriate words for such sensations, or, better, such dispositions towards our environment, we are likely to talk nonsense. Ethical judgement is the same kind of nonsense: an action is not good because something in the world makes it so, and to speak of its goodness is not to add anything to the sum total of facts. Thus it is not a

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judgement which has the ‘necessary’ force of a conclusion in an argument, a demonstration that a course of action is unconditionally required in order to fulfil the definitional requirements of the terms being used. Judgements of relative value have the form, ‘If this is the goal you propose, this must be the way to attain it’: ‘if you want to go to X by the shortest route, this is the way you must take’. In contrast, nothing makes ethical judgements true, and they don’t have the conditional structure possessed by the kind of utterance just quoted (if this is what you want, this is how to get it). In that regard, we could say that they have another sort of ‘necessity’ which is significantly different from logical necessity, in that they cannot be understood as products of any sequence of events. In 1929, still more or less committed to the thought world of the Tractatus, Wittgenstein provocatively concludes that all systematized ethical and religious discourse must be ‘nonsense’ – not in the reductive sense such a word would have in the mouth of a straightforward logical positivist, but in a far more complex manner. It represents the human desire to go beyond language itself; that is itself a fact, and as such cannot have ‘absolute value’. But all this means is that there is no way of so describing the fact of this obstinate anomaly in human speech as either to make it an argument for a particular judgement of value or to give grounds for prohibiting it as something that shouldn’t be said. Wittgenstein remarks that he is ‘tempted to say’ that ‘the existence of language itself ’ is the only adequate expression of the sense of the miraculous (or, presumably, the sense of impregnable spiritual security or of unconditional moral summons); if this is the case, then once again we cannot argue or describe systematically, since ‘language itself ’ is not a subject that can be spoken about – except ‘nonsensically’. But the 1929 lecture shows us Wittgenstein already on the edge of a different kind of analysis: having said very plainly in the lecture that direct speech about ethics or religion is bound to deal in ‘similes’, and that a simile can be recognized as such when we are able to say what it’s a simile for, he presents an intriguingly different (but not wholly discontinuous) approach in the ‘Lectures on Aesthetics’ in the late 1930s (LC 1–40), as well as in his notes from the 1930s and various reported conversations. The aesthetics lectures begin by addressing the question of the ‘discontent’ we experience in viewing certain phenomena, including artefacts: we feel uncomfortable with what we see (hear, etc.) and identify a ‘cause’ for that discomfort – but only in a very unusual sense of ‘cause’. We are looking not for a fact or set of facts that will explain why I feel uncomfortable, but for what Wittgenstein seems to have called a ‘direction’ of feeling in our response: ‘that’s where it doesn’t work’. He compares it with the processes around composition,

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looking for the ‘right’ word or phrase, and even with the question of what makes a joke work. And in speaking about a work of art, we look for comparisons until we find one that ‘clicks’ or fits, even though we know that this is a very blunt-­ edged metaphor: what we are really saying is that we are satisfied, we recognize something. In a lecture from 1940 ‘belonging to a course of lectures on description’, he returns to the same point: ‘[Y]ou say of a certain phrase of music that it draws a conclusion,“Though I couldn’t say for my life why it is a ‘therefore’!” ’ (LC 37).3 It is hard to imagine that Wittgenstein did not have in mind the famous ‘Muss es sein? Es muss sein!’ in Beethoven’s notes on his String Quartet no.16: the way the music unfolds displays an inevitability, a move towards resolution that feels natural or organic, connected without force, argument or strain with all that has preceded. Later, in a note from 1947, Wittgenstein strongly repudiates the idea that this means no more than that we find the transition angenehm,‘pleasant’: we want to exclaim ‘Of course!’, he says (CV 57e). That is, what we seek to say is not that there is a psychological explanation of why the transition seems good to us; that we feel ‘satisfied’, to use the word he favours earlier, is not at all an observation of the fact that we are emotionally pleased. This illustrates something of what Wittgenstein is feeling towards in the 1929 lecture: there are judgements that we can intelligibly call ‘necessary’, while being clear that they are not necessitated: they do not come at the end of a chain of evidence or argument such that we can say that this or that stage of argument or this or that state of affairs makes it inevitable that this conclusion has to be accepted. The later notes suggest that we convey how such judgements work not by locating them within a scheme of causal relations but by directing someone’s attention towards a very variegated practice: a person will come to understand music (and so to understand why some musical transitions seem ‘necessary’) by attending to the conventions of sequencing and harmony in a particular musical tradition, by observing the gestures and facial expressions of performers, by reflecting on the images a musician may use to describe musical activity. Why music works like this is something we can only clarify by accumulating instances of what we recognize as music; why this ‘has’ to follow from that we can clarify only as we attend to someone who navigates musical practice and shows signs we should, in other circumstances, see as characteristic of a response to constraint or obligation. There are obvious parallels with the treatment of rule-­following in the Philosophical Investigations: we could point, for example, to PI §490 on how I know that such and such a line of thinking brought me to this particular action. ‘Well, it is a particular picture: for example, of a calculation leading to a further experiment in an experimental investigation. It looks like this——and now I

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could describe an example.’ And all this is a move on from the lecture on ethics to the extent that Wittgenstein is no longer confident that the use of a simile is vacuous if we cannot specify what we should want to say in ‘plain’ language. If the only real representation of the miraculousness of the world is language itself, this later development seems to say that ‘language itself ’ is already diverse and metaphorically charged in a number of ways that can’t be reduced to or translated into a speech that is free from simile and image and indeed physical gesture – bearing in mind that the issue of the logical form of communicative physical gesture was (anecdotally at least) one of the worries that moved Wittgenstein on from the philosophy of the Tractatus. It remains true for him that an ethical judgement cannot add any new fact to the world, and that the recognition of the world as miraculous is not the deposit of an argument, let alone an assessment of probabilities. And the 1940s discussions in Wittgenstein’s Vermischte Bemerkungen notebooks (translated as Culture and Value) imply that the form of an ethical education may be the description of a series of events in such a way that the learner recognizes what to do next, how (in the language of the Philosophical Investigations) a person may intelligibly ‘follow’ the acts being displayed or described: ‘then that would be the right thing to do next’. And in a related sense, the awareness of an imperative of a certain kind can itself be a claim about how things irreducibly and necessarily are: ‘[T]he utterance of a command, such as “Don’t be resentful!”, may be like the affirmation of a truth’ – or, to translate more exactly, ‘A command . . . can be articulated as the affirmation of a truth’ (CV 61). The boundary between a narration and a sense of what is imperative is being deliberately blurred here, not in a way that represents any reversal or qualification by Wittgenstein of his early disjunction between ethical judgement and statements of fact but so as to make the point that the mode in which fact is spoken of tells us what kind of comprehensive ontological claim is being made – and such a claim cannot be made in the form of any claim as to specific extra states of affairs in the universe.

Wittgenstein, Christian belief and Kierkegaard This rapid tour of Wittgenstein’s thinking about ethics and aesthetics is designed to locate more precisely the way in which he reflects on both theology in general and the foundational texts of Christian belief in particular. The Culture and Value notebooks contain a cluster of entries on the gospels and related matters, in which Wittgenstein compares the style of the gospels to a ‘mediocre’ stage set

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for a drama: the staging does not distract from the actual drama. It is important that there is no way in which the literary excellence of the gospel narrative can be deployed as a covert or overt argument for taking the content with appropriate seriousness (CV 31). Equally, the claim articulated by the gospels, the claim on our faith or obedience, cannot be dependent on the historical accuracy of the texts: ‘The historical accounts in the Gospels might, historically speaking, be demonstrably false and yet belief would lose nothing by this’ (CV 32e). And this does not mean that their truth is a matter of reason or logic – nor, presumably (though Wittgenstein doesn’t quite say this in so many words) that it is a matter of some eternal ‘message’ symbolized or encoded in the narrative. The point throughout is that there is nothing in or about the gospels that would persuade us of their claim in any terms not intrinsic to their own language. They offer no information to justify what they say, and it is a category mistake to try and quarry their historical basis to reinforce the claims made; all this would do is to establish or otherwise certain facts in the world, certain bits of information. As Wittgenstein puts it, ‘Christianity . . . offers us a (historical) narrative and says: now believe!’ (CV 32e) – that is, not ‘Believe that this is a true historical narrative!’, but ‘Believe that your life can and must change!’ ‘It is love that believes the Resurrection’ (CV 33e). What Wittgenstein is asserting is that religious conviction belongs precisely with ethical and aesthetic judgement in being, grammatically speaking, a transition between narrative and judgement that is ‘necessary’ in the terms of the process of a certain kind of discourse, yet not explicable as something caused by that process. Hence Wittgenstein’s provocative remark that it would not matter if the gospel records were ‘false’: if the story of Jesus (including the Resurrection) were a fiction, the relationship between narrative and judgement would be unaltered because historical certainty is not the basis of the judgement that follows, the judgement which we call faith or obedience and which changes my life’s conditions. It is worth noting that this is something of a loose end in Wittgenstein’s reflection, and not in any obvious way consistent with his comments on the impossibility of thinking that Christ’s body is ‘dead and decomposed’ while having hope or confidence in Christ.4 If the gospel narrative is what we usually mean by a fiction, it is presumably a deliberate fiction; and if it is a deliberate fiction designed to produce faith, what is produced cannot be faith but only a capitulation to some other individual’s purpose of persuasion. Even if we were to say that it is not a deliberate fiction but a series of half-­conscious misrepresentations or distorted traditions, we should have to imagine a process whereby the narrative was constructed in response to various historical conditions; and this takes us back

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to Wittgenstein’s basic problem – here as in the ethical and aesthetic sphere – of the relation between contingent fact and absolute significance. To put the point as Wittgenstein does in terms of the ‘falsity’ of the narrative allows us – awkwardly, in terms of Wittgenstein’s basic argument – a kind of space into which we can slip to view the narrative independently of its actual relation to the believing hearer; so to consider this perspective is already to deny the ‘necessity’ of the response. Faith does not guarantee the historical accuracy of the text; equally, lack of faith is not the same as scepticism about the history.5 In that sense, we can say that historical accuracy is immaterial to faith; but this is not the same as saying that faith exists in direct and deliberate contradiction to historical veracity (‘alternative facts’, to borrow the singular language of an American political communicator . . .). Considering the text as an imperative is a distinct kind of discourse, where assent or refusal is not determined by a judgement of historical fact. An inability to believe cannot be dealt with by reinforcing historical claims. All we know is that the story is told, as a story about events in this world, in such a way as to lead up to the imperative: believe! Consequently Wittgenstein’s aporia is – as he expresses it in the note on belief in the Resurrection – that in order to believe and to be changed, you must already have been changed; you must already ‘no longer rest your weight on the earth but suspend yourself from heaven’ (CV 33e). He implies strongly here and elsewhere that there is, in effect, no way in which religious commitment could be ‘learned’, no possibility of induction into faith. This relates to his statement that no one can truthfully speak of herself in terms of absolute self-­disgust – either this is the mark of (or the beginning of) madness, or it heralds radical change (CV 32). Thus, to speak at all of the imperative embodied in the gospel story is to move away from any kind of simply descriptive language; it impels us into a frame of, or mode of, discourse where stating the truth is inseparable from obeying an imperative. The transition from narrative to judgement in respect of the gospel leaves no room for an account in third-­person terms of what the story might mean to a hypothetical hearer: I either hear or don’t hear, I either respond or don’t respond. When the Wittgenstein of 1937 objects to the language of St Paul, as opposed to that of the gospels, it is because he reads it as attempting such a third-­person account (CV 30, 32). This makes Paul’s writings schäumlich – not simply ‘frothy’, as the published translation implies, but literally ‘scummy’, what you see on standing water rather than flowing. And Paul’s discussion of predestination is a cardinal instance of a sort of category mistake (CV 32): it cannot be understood in an authentically ‘religious’ way – or if it can, it can only be by someone who has learned to read it quite differently. Later on, according to

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Con Drury, Wittgenstein had second thoughts on this, and allowed that gospels and epistles witnessed to ‘the same religion’;6 but in the context of the earlier notebooks it is not difficult to see why he turns away from what he thinks is the Pauline approach. He reads Paul as trying to imagine God’s purposes in a sort of narrative of divine agency; and this is obviously another attempt to slip away from responding to an imperative into the realm of description. If I were to venture a guess as to why the later Wittgenstein changed his mind, I suspect that he had come to see that his own analysis of impotence to respond in the face of the gospel narrative, his recognition that you would already have to have changed in order to respond, might correspond to Paul’s anguished arguments in Romans about both his personal awareness of imprisonment (‘Wretched man that I am!’ in Romans 7) and about the ‘resistance’ of Israel to Christ (9–11). ‘The way you use the word “God” does not show whom you mean – but, rather, what you mean’ (CV 50e); similarly, and famously, in §373 of the Investigations, ‘Grammar tells what kind of object anything is. (Theology as grammar.)’ There is a way of speaking about God which clearly cannot be speaking about God, in Wittgenstein’s eyes: he notes that stories of the Greek gods of Olympus allow us to frame the question, ‘What would it be like if they existed?’ – i.e. what difference would it make to the world if it happened to have these agents within it? (see CV 82). We can’t ask what difference it would make if the world ‘contained’ God, any more than we can ask what difference it makes in the world that we perceive it and describe it in terms of colour. We are proposing a comprehensive scheme of perception and of ‘reading’ the facts of the world, not speculating about what the world might or might not contain.7 Thus the grammar of belief in the Resurrection, say, is manifest in narratives of how a person’s life is radically and comprehensively altered by belief in the Resurrection. ‘It looks like this’, in the language of the Investigations. Just as ‘God’ does not pick out an agent or an individual among others, in the way a proper name does, so ‘resurrection’ does not pick out a specific event in chronicled history – which does not mean that the Resurrection of Jesus is without any historical correlate, so to speak, but that no account of it in terms of information is adequate. Like belief in God overall, believing in the Resurrection is positing a ‘system of reference’, as Wittgenstein puts it in a note of 1947 (CV 64e), which I can find my way into only as it is repeatedly portrayed in connection with ‘an appeal to conscience’ – until the point at which I connect the narrative with what I now recognize I need and want. What it is that brings me to that point of seeing a response as natural, ‘necessary’ or imperative cannot be systematized or generalized. But, as the discussion so far has spelled out, it is going to be comparable to the varied ways

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in which I am inducted into a moral or an aesthetic practice, a system of reference. If the early Wittgenstein is inclined, as we have seen, to characterize ethical and aesthetic judgement as more or less inaccessible for speech, his developing sensitivity to the diversity of speech itself and the beginnings of his analysis of what it is to ‘follow’ a mode of discourse, a language game, gives him some space to grant that what we could call a process of induction is not unthinkable; we can reflect on how in fact people come to believe, come to occupy a stance, without thereby sacrificing the fundamental point, that this process is not an acquisition of information or the conclusion of an argument. By now it will be very clear how close Wittgenstein is throughout his reflections in this area to the Kierkegaard of the Philosophical Fragments. Kierkegaard’s concern is almost precisely the same anxiety about ways of speaking about God that are in fact grammatically incapable of doing what they purport to do. Thus Kierkegaard can argue, in his chapter on ‘The Absolute Paradox’ (PF 37–48), that if the human subject comes to know the unknown and unconditional truth that surrounds her, she can only know it as that which is without qualification different: the knowing individual is ‘untruth’, and thus cannot realize for herself the very fact of her untruthfulness. We can be taught about the unconditional, about ‘the god’, in Kierkegaard’s terms, only by what is not ourselves; which implies the recognition of ‘sin’, the endemic state of self-­ deceit in which we live. Reason confronts its downfall; if it passionately wills its downfall, desiring not to be untruthful, it confronts its difference from the unconditional not with terror but with faith or love (PF 46–8). If we are to be confident that we have not created the difference in the terms that suit us, we must be clear that the way in which we are taught the difference is precisely not by the god manifesting himself exhibiting a particular kind of worldly difference. It is this which puts the revelation to faith of the divine difference on a different level both to the teaching of a human sage, a Socrates, and to the putative revelation of a god, a divine agent intelligible in the same terms as finite agents. The absolutely different god can confront us with our own untruth only as the anonymous saviour who does not seek to convince us, let alone compel us, to submission, since that would be to abandon his difference in favour of a kind of power or freedom directly competing with our own, different in degree not kind (PF 29–33). We might plead for the god to reveal himself in a clearer way, but we should have to be prepared to hear the god reproaching us: ‘so you love only the omnipotent one who performs miracles, not him who humbled himself in equality with you’ (PF 33). This has consequences for how we read the gospel narrative. Kierkegaard, in his discussion of the ‘contemporary follower’ and the

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‘follower at second hand’, insists that the only advantage of the contemporary is in terms of information; but information is not what occasions encounter with truth and acknowledgement of untruthfulness. The god must provide the condition for such recognition, whether for the contemporary or the non-­ contemporary (e.g. PF 65–6). And if some immensely powerful contemporary or near-­contemporary brought to bear all possible resources of research and testimony to establish a dependable and universally acceptable report of the events around the god’s manifestation, this – although producing an historical certainty ironically greater even than that of the contemporary – would have nothing to do with faith. If an infallibly comprehensive historical record put before us miraculous events at which we were invited to ‘wonder’, this would not be the wonder of faith itself (PF 92–3). Rather like Wittgenstein speaking of the sense of the world being ‘miraculous’, the wonder of faith is radically different from finding aspects of the world amazing. The follower, in Kierkegaard’s schema, is not amazed at certain events in the life of the incarnate god (and therefore not at others), but wonders at what is done in the entire reality that is the god’s incognito in the world, whose effect is the new and converting self-­ reflection that is the recognition of untruth. If faith requires the veracity of the contemporary’s witness as its condition, faith will have as its object not the god but the reliable contemporary (PF 100–1). Wittgenstein’s general debt to Kierkegaard is regularly acknowledged; but their closeness in this particular connection still needs some further explication. Wittgenstein’s throwaway remark about the possible historical falsity of the gospels as a matter indifferent for belief makes a good deal more sense if read against the background of Kierkegaard’s analysis of what the contemporary follower can and cannot claim: Wittgenstein is in his own idiom clearly repeating Kierkegaard’s point about what is the condition for belief. In his notes in 1937, he explicitly wrestles with Kierkegaard in regard to the eternal consequences of faith: if the consequences are such, why is God not clearer in communicating what has to be said? But if God sets out all this in a riddle or in the form of four not obviously consistent records, is this not because the appropriate form simply is a riddle, or a set of ‘quite averagely historically plausible’ narratives (CV 31e)? As Wittgenstein remarked to Drury, ‘It is impossible for me to say what form the record of such an event should take.’8 The excellent discussion of the two philosophers by Genia Schönbaumsfeld, A Confusion of the Spheres,9 notes that both see the philosophical task as the removal of illusions about the thinking subject, a task which is not achieved by information or by erecting a ‘world-­view’. Their shared suspicion of metaphysics is a suspicion of any claim to a ‘God’s eye’

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view of reality,10 or of the idea that we can ‘think ourselves out of ’ illusion, untruthfulness.11 But what is especially interesting is their convergence on the questions we have been examining – the nature of Christology, of faith in Christ as risen, and the role of the gospel witness in generating faith. If Kierkegaard clears the ground for understanding what the grammar of ‘God’ requires in this connection, Wittgenstein in effect applies the same kind of argument to the whole discourse of value. It is not that he is arguing a textbook disjunction of fact and value, in which ‘value’ becomes simply a judgement that cannot be backed up by fact: it is rather that he seeks to clarify the grammar of value itself as the result of the wide variety of ‘cultural inductions’ in which human beings engage with each other, in a way for which the mere transfer of information is of limited importance. As he acknowledges with increasing clarity, this means that we are constantly bound up in the exchanging of narratives, continuously being reworked to draw out their ‘compelling’ aspects, so that we can see why certain transitions are natural within the terms of the discourse. And in this respect at least, Wittgenstein is very far from suggesting that religious language is a special case among discourses: what marks it out is not that it is somehow more inaccessible to fact or ‘reason’ than other kinds of discourse, but that it insists on the most radical kind of self-­dispossession, the recognition of some fundamental lack of truthfulness in our self-­perception. Kierkegaard is manifestly a major presence in the background of all he has to say about the error of linking conversion to information.

Chalcedon and the grammar of ‘God’ But there is a further point worth making in relation to these two philosophers and their responses to the gospels and to the figure of Christ, a point that connects them – surprisingly – to the mainstream of Christian doctrinal reflection. Wittgenstein certainly and Kierkegaard probably would have seen the history of Christological debate and clarification as ‘grammatically’ odd – as claiming the territory that cannot be claimed, from whose vantage point we can describe the ways of God in the third person. But there is a way of reading the tradition which echoes precisely this central grammatical anxiety of both philosophers. The classical doctrinal definition of the Council of Chalcedon declares that Christ is complete in both divinity and humanity; and much of the monumentally complex argument of the centuries that followed turned upon what was meant by completeness in humanity. In the debates leading up to

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Chalcedon the point had already been made that it was improper to associate some of Jesus’ activities with his divinity and some with his humanity; and by the eighth century, the majority of the Church had agreed that the Chalcedonian Definition entailed the unbroken exercise of created activity and will in Christ. In other words, the divine indwelling in Christ, the presence of the eternal Word united with the humanity of Jesus, cannot be conceived or described in terms of anything that looks like a divine ‘interruption’ of the human narrative. Kierkegaard’s argument that any such interruption would – paradoxically – signal not the omnipotence of God but its opposite is a typically counter-­intuitive and teasing version of this. Referring back to his earlier parable of the king who seeks to woo the beggar maid (PF 26–30), Kierkegaard explains how the god has, in a crucial sense, less ‘freedom’ than such a king: ‘He cannot betray his identity; . . . he does not have the possibility of suddenly disclosing that he is, after all, the king – which is no perfection in the king (to have this possibility) but merely manifests his impotence and the impotence of his resolution, that he actually is incapable of becoming what he wanted to become’ (PF 55). For God to interrupt the human life with which he has united himself in order to communicate with humanity is for God to admit defeat, to admit that what is said and done humanly cannot communicate in a manner that transforms and saves. Even more, it undermines the very principle of the god’s action in ‘descending’ to the level of equality with us: that is itself the thing that has to be communicated, the freedom of the god to be what he is not for the sake of uniting human beings to the truth they repudiate. All we can say about the visible sign of divinity in the human Jesus is that his mission consumes him; he understands himself as identical with his work (PF 56–7). But this is a matter of what can be said of an uninterrupted humanity, not of any epiphany of Godhead. An epiphany would necessarily in this context be an epiphany of something less than God: an agency that was not sufficiently free or self-­sustaining to be wholly itself in the humble and formally anonymous shape of the human (‘formally’ anonymous in the sense that there is nothing odd or imperfect in the way Jesus satisfies the criteria for being recognized as human). Connecting this with Wittgenstein’s discussion of ethics, we could say that the point made in the shape of Chalcedonian Christology is that the divinity of Christ is not an item of information about him. Divinity is not a predicate that can be added to the sum total of what is true of Jesus as human individual (‘Jewish, male, brown-­eyed, divine . . .’). His divinity is thus not something that can figure in any argument about how we should respond to him; and the theologian is not free to use the affirmation of divinity as any sort of explanation

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of either certain facts in Jesus’ life or of the response of faith itself. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, whose Christology is arguably more deeply shaped by Kierkegaard’s approach than that of any other modern theologian, insisted that – for example – the use of the miraculous elements in the narrative of Jesus to confirm his divinity would be a kind of category mistake; after all, miraculous deeds were the stock in trade of plenty of wandering sages in the classical world.12 But there is a deeper point to be drawn out. Classical Christology has to be understood as itself part of the process of clarifying the grammar of ‘God’. If God acts fully and without restraint in the human life of Jesus yet does not in any way ‘break the surface’ of that humanity or replace some aspect of it, it is clear that there can be no sense in which finite agency and infinite are in competition with each other. As some have put it, the religious believer does not claim that there are any more facts in the universe than the unbeliever allows; they may disagree about the status of various reports of fact, they may offer radically divergent readings of fact, but in principle their difference is not about the presence in the world of some extra agency called divine. The believer will no doubt maintain that there are events and outcomes that would have been radically different in a different kind of universe, one that was not permeated by or sustained by divine agency, but cannot claim that belief gives certain access to extra matters of fact within the realm of contingent and finite causes. And, as we have seen, this is precisely Wittgenstein’s claim about ethics: the person making an ethical judgement does not have access to extra information that would clinch an argument about what to do; she is simply someone who inhabits a culture in which certain ‘moves’ have become clear, certain connections have been acknowledged and must be acted upon. As Schönbaumsfeld explains with admirable clarity, this does not mean that the religious believer or the ethical agent has no beliefs about what is true of the world and is simply adopting a willed set of policies: ‘no such thing as a fully fledged understanding of any domain of discourse is possible without both aspects of understanding [sc. what Schönbaumsfeld calls “external” and “internal” understanding, doctrinal assertion and personal or “mystical” involvement] being present.’13 The difficult notion for some philosophers is that of ‘beliefs about what is true of the world’: these are not beliefs about what is true of states of affairs in the world but about how adequately to operate what Wittgenstein calls a ‘system of reference’ affecting every specific claim about matters of fact (remember Wittgenstein’s comparison with the language of colour: we don’t ask what would be different if it were not the case that things had colour because things having colour is not a fact among others in the list of actually prevailing states of affairs).

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In sum, what Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard have to say about the gospel narrative and about the nature of the grammar of claims about divinity – divinity in general and Christ’s in particular – offers a novel and clarifying perspective on some of the features of classical doctrinal language about Christ. Any qualification of the Chalcedonian insistence on the completeness of the two ‘natures’ will in fact compromise the grammar of ‘God’: it will imply that God acts in the world by displacing finite agency and thus cannot coexist in the same logical space as finite agency. But if this is the case, then divine agency becomes a rival fact in the universe; and as such it cannot make upon us the unconditional claim that it purports to. Unless religious discourse is of a piece with the judgements of ethics and aesthetics that Wittgenstein analyses, it becomes something that can in principle be refuted by evidence: it has been ‘made to be true’ by a certain causal process and thus can be made untrue by another process. To recognize this is not to say that religious (or ethical or aesthetic) conviction is beyond challenge; only that such challenge has to be about a global shift in the framing of reference, not the production of a new piece of evidence. Thus the confession of Christ as divine – or simply as risen from the dead – has the form of a proposed global ‘reading’ of facts; one such fact being the narratives of those who have responded in a certain way, those who have created the culture of faith. To put it in more theological terms, it is a reminder that the acknowledgement of Christ’s divinity is inseparable from the reality of the Church. The imperative to which the Church’s gathering is a response is the way in which ‘the affirmation of a truth’ about Christ is encountered. Does this mean that explicit Christological doctrine is an inappropriate exercise? Not necessarily: as we have seen, clarifying the grammar and avoiding reductive, unbalanced or mythologizing ways of talking about God is not a waste of time; we need ways of checking whether it is indeed God we are still talking about, and this must apply to what we say about God in Christ. But Wittgenstein would, I think, insist that Christ’s divinity is essentially what is affirmed by the practice of repentance, radical change of life or obedience or, most simply, love. And if anyone should be tempted to say, ‘Is that all?’ it is not difficult to imagine a derisively incredulous reply from the philosopher, ‘All?’

Notes 1 The literature on Wittgenstein’s ethics is still a bit patchy, but it is worth noting in this connection James C. Edwards, Ethics without Philosophy: Wittgenstein and the Moral Life (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1985) and J. Jeremy

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Wisnewski, Wittgenstein and Ethical Inquiry: A Defense of Ethics as Clarification (London: Continuum, 2007). Sabina Lovibond, Realism and Imagination in Ethics (London, Blackwell, 1983), remains perhaps the most creative engagement with ethical issues from a broadly Wittgensteinian point of view in recent decades. 2 There is now a critical edition of this text with notes and comments in Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lecture on Ethics, ed. Edoardo Zamuner, Ermelinda Valentina Di Lascio and D. K. Levy (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014). 3 See also Ludwig Wittgenstein, Wittgenstein’s Whewell’s Court Lectures: Cambridge, 1938–1941: From the Notes by Yorick Smythies, ed. Volker A. Munz and Nernhard Ritter (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2017), 149. 4 ‘What inclines even me to believe in Christ’s Resurrection? It is as though I play with the thought. – If he did not rise from the dead, then he decomposed in the grave like any other man. He is dead and decomposed. In that case he is a teacher like any other and can no longer help’ (CV 33e). 5 Wittgenstein’s approach to these issues had a substantial impact on the theological writing of the Yale theologian, Hans Frei, whose influential book, The Identity of Jesus Christ: The Hermeneutical Bases of Dogmatic Theology (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1975; enlarged edition, Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2013), argues for just such a position. The meaning of the text is what it narrates, not its correspondence with otherwise-­establishable ‘fact’. But this does not mean that historical claims are irrelevant or that historical scepticism is mandated: if the narrative works in a certain way, the believer understands that the required response is belief – not conviction about historical probabilities or possibilities, but commitment to the text’s presenting meaning as a true depiction of the reality which reader and text alike inhabit. 6 M. O’C. Drury, ‘Conversations with Wittgenstein’, in Recollections of Wittgenstein, ed. Rush Rhees (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 97–171, at165. 7 The point has been made that for an ancient Greek this might not be so straightforward a question. We can imagine after a fashion a world in which certain supernatural agents might or might not be present (do ghosts exist? pixies? dragons?). But what would a Greek of the fifth century bce have made of this? Or a contemporary educated Hindu, say, for that matter? This does not invalidate the grammatical point about the difference between speaking of the divine and speaking about the contents of the universe, but invites some further refinement of the argument. 8 Drury, ‘Conversations with Wittgenstein’, 164. 9 Genia Schönbaumsfeld, A Confusion of the Spheres: Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein on Philosophy and Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 10 Ibid., 46. 11 See ibid., 50–1.

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12 See, for example, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, ‘Lectures on Christology’ [1933], in The Bonhoeffer Reader, ed. Clifford J. Green and Michael P. DeJonge (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2013), 261–313, at 311. The impact of Kierkegaard on Bonhoeffer’s argument in these lectures and elsewhere deserves further study, and the parallels with Wittgenstein’s comments are striking. 13 Schönbaumsfeld, A Confusion of the Spheres, 188.

5

On the Very Idea of a Theodicy Genia Schönbaumsfeld

It is, for the most part, an unchallenged assumption in contemporary analytic philosophy of religion that it makes sense to justify the ways of God to humankind by constructing a theodicy.1 In this chapter I will argue that this assumption is severely flawed: far from solving the so-­called ‘problem of evil’, theodicies do nothing but exacerbate it. Not only do they presuppose an incoherent, anthropomorphic conception of God as a kind of invisible ‘super-­person’ who inhabits the same moral universe as ordinary human beings, but the attempt to turn God into such a ‘super-­agent’ morally backfires as well. For anyone who thinks that allowing the Holocaust to happen, for instance, is something that a decent moral agent can, in some sense, tolerate – by, for example, viewing it as an opportunity for character development or the exercise of moral responsibility – thereby turns God into a monster. I propose, therefore, that we should abandon the wrongheaded project of offering a justification for the state of the world in favour of learning from Wittgenstein that the solution to the ‘problem of evil’ (like that of the ‘problem of life’) is seen in the ‘vanishing of the problem’ (TLP 6.521), and, above all, from Kierkegaard that to have faith means to learn to accept – not to exonerate – the way the world is in a spirit of joy. I will start my discussion by considering the Book of Job, as this furnishes us with one of the oldest ‘theological’ challenges to the whole idea that God can be anthropomorphized into an ordinary – albeit ‘omnipotent’ – moral agent on whose behalf philosophers of religion need to plead. This will put us on the path towards seeing why it makes no sense to suppose that God shares a moral community with human beings, as well as what the implications of this insight might be.

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A critique of the anthropomorphic view In the Book of Job, Satan2 contends that faith cannot withstand extreme suffering and wagers with God that even the hitherto righteous Job will abandon the faith once death and destruction visit him and his kin (Job 1–2).3 God, confident of Job’s steadfastness, allows Satan to proceed with the wager, and so Satan takes Job’s children, his property, and, in the end, Job’s health. During the first of these trials, Job is able to remain faithful, but when his misfortunes prevail, he starts arguing with God in despite of his soi-­disant friends’ best attempts to convince him that his suffering must serve some penitentiary or expiatory purpose. Although God apparently joins Job in rejecting the friends’ accounts, Job’s own legalistic quarrel with God is shown, in the end, to be blasphemous and to constitute a reductio of the very notion that it makes sense to describe God’s ‘actions’ in ordinary moral terms such as just deserts.4 For, as Job presciently declares, while then going on to ignore his own insight: ‘For he [God] is not a man, as I am, that I might answer him, that we should come to trial together. There is no arbiter between us, who might lay his hand on us both’ (Job 9:32–33).5 In this ‘text of terror’, which, according to Tilley, ‘offers no solutions to problems of suffering’,6 Job makes two important points: first, that God is not a man as Job himself is, and, second, that there is no higher court of appeal from whose vantage point one could judge God’s ‘actions’ (‘there is no arbiter between us, who might lay his hand on us both’). Taking the first point first, Job is rightly drawing our attention to the fact that attempts to ‘put God on trial’, and hence, theodicies that seek to exculpate God from the indictment, presuppose a skewed, anthropomorphized conception of God. This kind of view, however, seems endemic in contemporary analytic philosophy of religion. One need only turn to the writings of Richard Swinburne to find a prime exponent of the conception that Job appears to be criticizing. In his essay, ‘Philosophical Theism’, for example, Swinburne describes the ‘theory that there is a God’ in the following way: ‘God is supposed to be roughly a person without a body, essentially omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly free, perfectly good, creator and sustainer of any universe there may be, a source of moral obligation, eternal and necessary.’7 Given that (ordinary) persons, according to Swinburne, are ‘beings with power to bring about effects intentionally, beliefs (true or false) about how things are, and some degree of freedom to exercise their power’, God, on Swinburne’s conception, ‘is postulated as a being with zero limits to his power, to his true beliefs, and to his freedom’.8 In other words, God

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is conceived of as being just like a human being, albeit one who happens to be ‘bodiless’, invisible, infinitely powerful and good. It is for this anthropomorphic God that the so-­called ‘problem of evil’ emerges as a pressing concern: for how can an infinitely powerful and good person possibly permit the kind of horrendous evils that are ubiquitous in the world? Since even averagely good human beings would presumably shrink from allowing them, the theist is confronted by a serious dilemma here: If God can’t prevent the evil, then He isn’t omnipotent, and if He doesn’t want to prevent it, then He isn’t omnibenevolent. Traditional theodicies standardly seek to deny the second horn (as we shall see below). This dilemma won’t arise at all, however, if it makes no sense to conceive of God in this anthropomorphic manner. So, the question that needs to be settled before the moral implications of theodicies can even be considered is whether the God-­conception of analytic theism is coherent. For if it turns out that it isn’t, then this would seem to undermine the whole idea of theodicies before they have even got off the ground. To this end, I will focus on two central problems that cause trouble for a Swinburne-­type view: the attempt to assign probability values to supernatural causes and events, and the conception of God as a being of ‘limitless’ power.9 According to Swinburne, there is no qualitative difference between being God and a human being, but merely a quantitative one: God, as Swinburne says, is just an (invisible) entity with ‘zero limits to his power’, as opposed to an entity (such as a human being) with very many limits to its power. Furthermore, Swinburne contends, the claim that there is a God is a very simple claim, because it is a claim for the existence of the simplest kind of person there could be . . . a being with zero limits to his power, to his true beliefs, and to his freedom. Scientists and others always prefer on grounds of simplicity hypotheses which postulate one entity rather than many, and entities with zero or infinite degrees of their properties rather than some finite degree thereof. They postulate that photons have zero mass (rather than some very small mass, equally compatible with observations) . . . . Although the existence of anything at all is perhaps enormously improbable a priori, the existence of a very simple being has a far higher prior probability than does the existence of anything else.10

These are quite striking claims and we need to unpack them in piecemeal fashion. First of all one might wonder what notion of ‘simplicity’ Swinburne is operating with in this passage, as one wouldn’t ordinarily think that the idea of a

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being who is omniscient, omnipotent, perfectly free, perfectly good, bodiless and everlasting, is a conception of a ‘simple entity’ at all (rather, one might think the reverse). Swinburne is clearly meaning to give the impression that he is operating with the same concept of ‘simplicity’ that scientists use, but this turns out, on closer inspection, not in fact to be the case. For Swinburne’s example of ‘simplicity’ in God’s case – possessing ‘zero limits to his power’, say – is not remotely analogous to scientists postulating, for instance, that photons have zero mass (or no weight), as possessing a property in unlimited form (having ‘unlimited’ power) is quite different in kind from not having a property (having no weight or ‘zero mass’). Consequently, Swinburne is relying on equivocation on the meaning of the word ‘zero’ in order to generate his analogy (‘zero limits’ and ‘zero mass’ are quite different things), which means that he has not managed to show in what sense the ‘hypothesis’ that there is the God of analytic theism is supposed to be a ‘simple’ one.11 Even were one to let that pass, however, Swinburne would need to get over the next hurdle: the very idea of assigning probability values to supernatural events and causes. Swinburne just takes for granted that this is possible given that he claims that the existence of a ‘simple being’ (i.e. the God of theism) has a ‘far higher prior probability than does the existence of anything else’. But the notion that one can assign probability values to the existence of supernatural causes (God as creator of the universe, for example) cannot just be assumed without argument. Rather, Swinburne first needs to tell us how one might avoid the following three insuperable-­seeming problems: (1) we don’t have any experience of supernatural events on the basis of which a comparison with natural ones might be made, such that we could say ‘supernatural event A’ is more likely to occur than ‘natural event B’ or, indeed, ‘supernatural event A’ is more likely to occur than ‘supernatural event C’; (2) we have no criteria available that would tell us at which point it becomes ‘likely’ that a natural event (or set of events) has a supernatural cause rather than a merely natural one (Bayes, for example, has not investigated this); (3) it would first have to be independently establishable not only that there are supernatural events or causes at all, but also that these are able to bring about effects in the natural world, which seems impossible.12 In the absence of adequate responses to these difficulties, Swinburne’s appeal to probability and ‘inference to the best explanation’ is doomed. Reiteration of the point that God as cause is ‘more likely’ because of God’s alleged ‘simplicity’ does not help in the slightest, even if one grants the cogency of Swinburne’s analogy, as this response also just assumes that we have ways of comparing the likelihood (or unlikelihood) of ‘simple’ supernatural causes with the likelihood

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(or unlikelihood) of ‘simple’ natural ones. But if we have no ways of doing so, as I have just argued, the mere addition of the word ‘simple’ is not going to get us any further. Finally, let’s turn to the idea of ‘unlimited power’ itself: Is this a coherent notion? If ‘unlimited power’ is supposed to describe the possibility of being able to do anything at all, then this seems, when applied to God, either to be a false or a self-­undermining concept. The latter, because ‘the ability to do anything’ is really the ‘ability’ to do nothing in particular – without constraints that set the parameters within which one can choose to do one thing rather than another, no choice, and, hence, no freedom, is possible at all. This is why Kierkegaard’s AntiClimacus, the pseudonymous author of The Sickness unto Death, says that the person who is ‘free’ of any possible constraint is like ‘a king without a country, actually ruling over nothing; his position, his sovereignty, is subordinate to the dialectic that rebellion is legitimate at any moment.’13 Rebellion is legitimate at any moment, because without limits and constraints of any kind – without contingencies that independently constrain my choices and give me reasons to act or not to act in various ways – I have no reason to choose to do x rather than y. Any ‘choice’ I do make would be a ‘reasonless choice’ in the sense that it is entirely haphazard and subject to whim (as there are no external constraints at all that make certain courses of action available while limiting others, only my own ‘private’ intentions). Hence, ‘rebellion’ against one’s own idiosyncratic choices is legitimate at any moment, and any choice can, at any time, be overthrown by another, equally reasonless, whim. Kierkegaard’s point here anticipates Wittgenstein’s famous discussion in Philosophical Investigations that one cannot follow a rule ‘privately’ (i.e. without independent constraints): That’s why ‘following a rule’ is a practice. And to think one is following a rule is not to follow a rule. And that’s why it’s not possible to follow a rule ‘privately’; otherwise, thinking one was following a rule would be the same thing as following it. PI 4 §202

In other words, if no distinction can be drawn between following a rule and merely believing that one is doing so, because whatever one says or chooses is at the same time law, then there is no such thing as genuine choice or compliance with rules at all. Without independent standards that determine whether my behaviour is in accordance with a rule or not, thinking one is following a rule and actually doing so collapse into each other, thus undermining the very idea of

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a rule.14 If this is right, then Swinburne’s God who has ‘zero limits’ to his power is like Anti-Climacus’s king – an apparently all-­powerful monarch who is really ruling over nothing.15 Even were one to set aside the previous considerations, however, one would still be left with the problem that the idea of ‘unlimited power’ attributes not only a self-­undermining notion to God (as we saw above), but also a false one, as there are many (non-­logically contradictory) things that God cannot do: e.g. lick an ice-­cream, have sexual intercourse, ride a bicycle.16 Of course one might counter that God’s ‘inability’ to do these things does not constitute a genuine limitation, as these are not activities that God can meaningfully be said to engage in at all, but, if so, then this just exposes another flaw in the anthropomorphic conception. For what this shows is that we cannot understand what it means to speak of God’s power simply by infinitely magnifying human power (otherwise we would have to grant that not being able to lick an ice-­cream is a limitation on God’s power) – we also need to attend to the distinctive grammar of the concept ‘God’, which tells us what it does and does not make sense to say of Him. For example, although God’s eye is often spoken of, nobody thinks it makes sense to enquire about the whereabouts of His eyebrows (cf. LC 71). Neither does anyone believe that we cannot hear God speaking to someone else because He is normally out of earshot or a creature with an extremely low voice. None of these features are contingent descriptions of God as they would be if, per impossibile, they happened to apply to a human person. Rather, they serve to constitute (aspects of) the meaning of the word ‘God’ – they are part, as the later Wittgenstein would say, of the ‘grammar’ of the concept. But if this is right, then we cannot just assume, pace Swinburne et al., that the correct way of understanding divine predicates is by modelling them on human super-­persons.17 So, let’s turn now to Job’s second point in order to examine its implications. If Job is right that there is no arbiter between God and human beings, as there is no ‘higher standard’ in respect to which both God and human beings can be judged, since God, for believers, constitutes the ‘absolute’ standard, then it is difficult to see how God could nevertheless be a member of the same ‘moral community’ as we are. For this would require either that God and human beings are equal members of the same community (i.e. that they are both subject to the community’s moral principles), or that there is a higher, independent meta-­ standard to which both are subject. Neither option sits easily with God’s ‘absolute’ status: If the anthropomorphic conception is correct, God would have to be conceived of as a moral agent standing on the same footing as ordinary human beings and be judged according to the same standards (or the same higher ‘meta-­

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standard’). This not only raises insuperable moral problems for God (as we shall see in the next section), it also appears to fly in the face of Christian orthodoxy.18 For if God is a moral agent like ourselves, what do we make of Jesus’ remark at Mark 10:18, for example, that ‘No one is good – except God alone’?19 Is Jesus trying to say here that the only good member of the human moral community is God? It seems that Jesus cannot really mean that there is no such thing as human goodness, as otherwise striving to keep the commandments and to love God and one’s neighbour, for instance, would be utterly pointless. Furthermore, given that Jesus makes this comment in respect to himself (‘Why do you call me good?’) – and which human being is supposed to be considered good if not even Jesus is? – he must mean something different. Perhaps that only God can be considered good in an ‘absolute’ sense; that God is the final arbiter of what ‘good’ is. But, if so, we need to distinguish between two senses of ‘good’ – the ordinary, ‘moral’, human kind of good, and the ‘absolute’ sense in which God is uniquely said to be ‘good’. If God is this ‘absolute standard’, however, then, like the standard metre in Paris, which, as Wittgenstein says, cannot be described as either being or not being one metre long since it sets the standard for what is to count as one metre (PI §50), God Himself cannot be thought of as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ in the ordinary human sense either. In other words, whatever ‘God’s absolute goodness’ means, it cannot just be an aggregate of all human goodness, or an extrapolation of human goodness in ‘perfect’ form. For example, God, in Christianity, is said to be able to love and forgive every human being. But, if so, then His love must be qualitatively, not just quantitatively, different from human kinds of love. For even a morally excellent human being would struggle with the idea of genuine love which is also indiscriminate as well as all-­forgiving, since this seems to violate our natural sense of justice: How, we might ask, can God love the good and the bad equally, when the bad – just think of Hitler or Daesh killers – are eminently unloveable? And if God does love the heinous just as much as the virtuous, what’s the point of being good? Presumably, such questions have no force for God, as He is precisely rejecting the natural connexion we tend to make between love and just deserts (or between love and the possessing of virtues), and to show that, inasmuch as we are all sinners, no one deserves God’s love – and yet He offers it freely to all. But if this is so, God’s love must be different in kind to human love – it’s not just a matter of God’s offering more of the same kind of love of which human beings are capable (otherwise it could not be all-­forgiving and ‘natural justice’transcending).

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If this is right, however, then it is a mistake to treat God as if He were a denizen of our moral community. For if we do this, we not only lose sight of how a conception of all-­forgiving love might be seeking to transform our ordinary moral vision – our ordinary ideas of what ‘love’ is – we also risk turning God into a moral agent altogether more callous than any decent human being. But more of this in the next section.

God as moral consequentialist The analytic theist tends to be a moral consequentialist, who reasons in the following way: [I]t is not always a bad act to bring about or to allow to occur a bad state of affairs. For it may be that the only way in which an agent can bring about some good state is by bringing about first (or simultaneously) some bad state, or by allowing such a state to occur.20

Such reasoning is meant to show that God’s ‘perfect goodness’ (conceived on the anthropomorphic model for which we have raised difficulties in the previous section) is compatible with allowing horrendous evils to exist, because it would otherwise be impossible to bring about certain goods. Furthermore, such theodicists contend, all suffering will ‘in the end’ – say in the ‘heavenly afterlife’ – be redeemed or compensated for.21 Swinburne gives the example of a parent allowing her child to go to the dentist where she knows he will experience pain: [T]he only way in which a human parent can get his child’s teeth repaired may be by taking him to the dentist and allowing pain to be inflicted upon him . . . . But the human parent is none the less good for taking the child to the dentist.22

This may well be true in the dentist case, but does this analogy really hold water when we are confronted by the horrors of the Holocaust, for example? Does it make (moral) sense to claim that God allows such evils for the purposes of a greater good (healthy teeth, say23) or that they can, in some sense, be tolerated because they will be ‘compensated for’ in the eschaton? Isn’t the very idea morally abhorrent? D. Z. Phillips certainly thinks that it is. He constructs a dilemma for the theodicist which I will argue is fatal.24 The question that proponents of theodicies need to be able to answer is the following: Does God do what He has to do – e.g.

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allow the Holocaust to occur – with or without a second thought? I.e. do the evils that God allows to happen matter to Him? If not, then, even if one grants that the evil was in some sense ‘unavoidable’, God would be deemed callous and insensitive by the standards of our moral community, as would any member who didn’t care at what price he purchased certain goods. If God does care, however, then He will recognize that He has been involved in evil (even if that evil was an ‘unavoidable’ consequence), and will give this fact its full weight. But, if so, God can no longer be characterized as ‘perfectly good’ (in the anthropomorphic sense) after all. For no ‘perfectly good’ member of our moral community – and it is the assumption of the analytic theist that God is such a member – can recognize the horrendous evils of the Holocaust, allow them to happen because they are the ‘unavoidable consequences’ of bringing about some good (e.g. that of presenting opportunities for character development25), and remain morally unscathed. So, whichever horn of this dilemma the theodicist grasps, God turns out to be either callous and insensitive (if the evils do not matter to Him), or not ‘perfectly good’ (if they do). It is hard to see how one might avoid this dilemma. For having to face difficult (and even unavoidable) moral choices does not necessarily absolve one from moral responsibility. In order to show that God cannot be considered to be ‘perfectly good’ while suffering the consequences of the Holocaust, Phillips gives the example (borrowed from William Styron’s novel, Sophie’s Choice) of Sophie Zawistowska, a Polish survivor of Auschwitz, who was given the terrible ‘freedom’ of choosing which of her two children, Jan or Eva, were not to be sent to the gas chambers. If she refused the choice, both children would die, so Sophie, in the end, chooses Jan. This is a situation where, whatever Sophie chooses (including her not making a choice at all), it is a bad choice. Furthermore, her choices are unavoidable in the sense that they are forced and there are no possible other alternatives within the given parameters. In the light of this (especially if we are moral consequentialists), we might regard Sophie as morally blameless. Nevertheless, Sophie ends up taking her own life after liberation from Auschwitz. Phillips now compares Sophie’s situation with God’s: If God shares a common moral community with Sophie and ourselves, what should we say of his allowing the Holocaust to happen? Is God to be the object of pity? Is creation a moral tragedy in which God is necessarily involved in evil? And what of God’s view of what he has done? Does the Holocaust stay with him? Does he think it can be excused in the light of the greater good that made it necessary, or does he recognize he has something to answer for? It will be

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obvious that within these moral parameters, there is no logical space for talk of God’s perfect goodness.26

Phillips seems to assume that ‘perfect goodness’ is not compatible with being involved in tragic moral dilemmas, which, he appears to think, leave one with ‘dirty hands’ whichever option one chooses. Of course a hard-­core utilitarian, for instance, would not agree: if the better option is choosing the survival of one child rather than none, then this end justifies the means (allowing the other to die). So why should things be any different in the case of God? If it is better for there to be a world that includes the Holocaust than for there not to be a world at all, then, surely God is justified in creating such a world. Since Phillips doesn’t speak directly to this objection, we need to fill in some of the blanks. We might concede that in the case of ordinary moral blamelessness (which may be reinforced by a consequentialist view of the world), we could grant, cautiously, that because her choice is forced and unavoidable, Sophie is morally blameless – for even if we thought that Sophie should have refused the choice altogether and let other people be responsible for the death of her children, one might worry that this would be for her to put her own virtuousness before the survival of even one of her children, which also seems morally objectionable. But we need not agree that moral blamelessness therefore entails ‘perfect goodness’ (or divine omnibenevolence). For even if we allow that Sophie is, to a large extent, not morally culpable, any sensitive human being would still regard her as a tragic figure, and it is hard to see how this can be compatible with the kind of moral perfection standardly attributed to the theistic God. In other words, moral blamelessness alone does not suffice for moral perfection: one can, simultaneously, not be morally culpable and yet fall well short of perfect moral goodness. If this is right in Sophie’s case, then it applies even more strongly to God: a supremely perfect being who offers redemption to others cannot be a tragic figure, Himself in need of redemption. To make matters worse, it seems that God had a choice which Sophie never had. Given that we are operating with the concept of the anthropomorphic ‘creator’ God, even if one grants that God could not have created a world (any possible world) without evil, He could nevertheless have decided not to create a world at all in the light of this fact. So, while, in Sophie’s case, her refusal to choose would still have had bad consequences (i.e. it would have involved the death of two children and, perhaps, her own), God’s refusal to create would not have had any actual bad consequences (as there would then have been nothing, and it seems impossible to determine – because we again have no criteria for

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this – that it would have been better for there to be something rather than nothing).27 Hence, if God is a moral agent like ourselves, and He has decided to create a world full of evil, then – given that He could have not created it – He will have to face up to having ‘dirty hands’.28 If this is right, then theodicies already fall at the first hurdle, and it is not necessary to examine further how ‘soul-­making’ theories trivialize human suffering or rely on an objectionable, self-­centred instrumentalism.29 What we need to do instead is recognize that if we are to make any headway here, we need to drop the assumption that led to the dilemma in the first place, namely, that God is a member of our moral community, and a calculating consequentialist at that.

An alternative conception: Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein So where do we go from here? We have seen not only that theodicies face an insuperable dilemma, but also that they presuppose an incoherent, anthropomorphic conception of God: the God of analytic theism for whom the problem of evil is a theoretical problem that needs to be solved before belief in such a God becomes possible. Theodicies, in other words, seek ‘to show to anyone that belief in God is plausible despite the “natural inference” from the reality of evil to the nonexistence of God’.30 In light of the problems already discussed, however, it is surely better to abandon this enterprise, for it is, in any case, and as I have argued elsewhere,31 impossible to demonstrate God’s existence (or non-­ existence) from premises that anyone would accept. If, for instance, I wanted to demonstrate Napoleon’s existence from Napoleon’s works, to use an example from Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Fragments (PF), I can only do this if I already assume that Napoleon’s works are ‘his’ works, that is, if I already assume that Napoleon exists. For, if I do not do this, all I can demonstrate is that the works in question have been accomplished by a great general, but this in itself is not sufficient to demonstrate Napoleon’s existence (as opposed to someone else’s), as another person could have accomplished the same works (PF 40).32 This is why Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous author (Climacus) says that one can never reason in conclusion to existence, but only in conclusion from existence: For example, I do not demonstrate that a stone exists but that something which exists is a stone. The court of law does not demonstrate that a criminal exists but

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that the accused, who does indeed exist, is a criminal. Whether one wants to call existence an accessorium or the eternal prius, it can never be demonstrated. PF 40

And the same, Climacus believes, applies to demonstrating God’s existence from his ‘works’, that is, from the existence of the universe: I cannot infer the existence of God from the existence of the universe, since God’s works do not exist immediately and directly in the way that tables and chairs do. Hence, even if we assume that nature is the work of God, only nature is directly present, not God. Therefore, just as in Napoleon’s case, I can only demonstrate God’s existence from these works (nature/the universe) if I already regard them ideally as God’s, that is, if I already assume what is to be proved, namely that the universe is ordered according to providential or divine principles:33 God’s works, therefore, only the god can do. Quite correct. But, then, what are the god’s works? The works from which I want to demonstrate his existence do not immediately and directly exist, not at all. Or are the wisdom in nature and the goodness or wisdom in Governance right in front of our noses? Do we not encounter the most terrible spiritual trials here . . .? . . . Therefore, from what works do I demonstrate it [God’s existence]? From the works regarded ideally – that is, as they do not appear directly and immediately. But then I do not demonstrate it from the works, after all, but only develop the ideality I have presupposed . . . . PF 42

That one cannot get beyond a petitio principii here – it is only possible to see divine governance in nature or the universe if one already believes in divine governance (and vice versa) – shows that what is at issue here is not something which could be adjudicated from a neutral, theoretical standpoint. For, as Climacus points out, when we look at nature in order to find ‘divine’ meaning in it, we ‘encounter the most terrible spiritual trials’: the alleged ‘wisdom in nature’ is not right in front of our noses. We can therefore go on examining nature ad infinitum in order to find traces of God in it, but such an ‘investigation’ will never conclusively establish whether nature is the work of God or the product of natural factors,34 just as a historical investigation of the New Testament will never be able to tell us whether Christ was God.35 If this is right, then there is no such thing as demonstrating from the way the world is that there is or there isn’t a God. Consequently, there is also no ‘evidential’ problem of evil which could be solved by the construction of a theodicy that tells us why it is all right for an anthropomorphic God to allow extreme suffering to be inflicted on His creatures. Instead, we need to recognize that the attempt to

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provide a theoretical justification for the existence of evil is itself evil; that the construction of theodicies is part of the problem, and not the solution.36 For what the theodicist does is not just morally objectionable, it also gets things back to front: It makes more sense to regard the Christian religion as an existential response to the problem of human suffering, for example, rather than as a neutrally accessible theoretical explanation for why, from ‘God’s point of view’, such evils exist. The ‘problem of evil’, therefore, isn’t the kind of problem that can be solved intellectually. Rather, it is an existential problem whose solution consists in its dissolution. As Wittgenstein says in the Tractatus: The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of the problem. (Is not this the reason why those who have found after a long period of doubt that the sense of life became clear to them have then been unable to say what constituted that sense?) TLP 6.521

We are all, to speak with Heidegger, thrown into a mercilessly contingent world that is not of our own making and which can, at any moment, reduce all our strivings to nothing. The religious response constitutes a means of making sense of this apparently meaningless struggle that every human being is engaged in. Even though we will later want to reject some aspects of Wittgenstein’s conception (see below), the thought that there is a connexion between belief in God and understanding the ‘meaning of life’ comes out very well in Wittgenstein’s First World War Notebooks: To believe in God is to understand the question of the meaning of life. To believe in God is to see that the facts of the world are not the end of the matter. To believe in God is to see that life has meaning. The world is given me, i.e. my will approaches the world completely from the outside as something finished. . . . That is why we have the feeling that we depend on an alien will . . . and what we are dependent on, we can call God. God would, in this sense, simply be fate or, what is the same: the world independent of our will. I can make myself independent of fate. . . . In order to live happily, I have to be in agreement [Übereinstimmung] with the world. . . . I am then, as it were, in agreement with that alien will on which I seem dependent. This means: ‘I am doing the will of God’. NB 8.7.191637

What Wittgenstein seems to be saying here is that since I did not choose the way the world is constituted, and my ability to change it is limited, all I can do is to try

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and make myself independent of the facts (of the way things are). That is to say, I can choose not to depend on the comforts of the world, which could, as in the Book of Job, at any moment be taken from me. For ‘even if everything we desired happened, this would only be the luck of the draw, as there is no logical connection between will and world . . .’ (NB 5.7.1916). Consequently, for early Wittgenstein, ‘only that life is a happy one which is able to renounce the comforts of the world. For such a life these comforts are just so many mercies of fate’ (NB 13.8.1916). In other words, if we are able to renounce our claim to the ‘comforts of the world’ in favour of treating everything we receive as a gift, then the opposition between will and world will cease, and we will no longer perceive life as a ‘problem’. It is hard not to be reminded of Kierkegaard’s conception of ‘infinite resignation’ here – what his pseudonymous author, Johannes de Silentio, calls the ‘last step’ before faith: ‘In infinite resignation there is peace and repose . . . [It is] that shirt in the old fable. The thread is spun with tears, bleached by tears, the shirt sewn in tears, but then it also gives better protection than iron and steel’ (FT H 74). Why is this shirt a better protection than iron and steel? Because once we have renounced all relative ends (once we have ‘infinitely resigned’ ourselves) and have sublimated our desires into a love of God, we can never be touched in the same way again by the loss of what we have already willingly given up before. In this respect, if one manages to bring about this existential feat, infinite resignation inoculates one against further suffering and loss. Now one might think, perhaps, that the price to pay for this perspective is high, for, as de Silentio himself notes, the ‘knight of infinite resignation’ is a stranger and foreigner in the world. The finite can no longer hold any interest for such a knight, and in this much his perspective is close to a form of nihilism. This raises the question of whether there might not be a better way of responding to human suffering and the ‘problem of existence’. Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous author believes that there is a better response: it is the perspective of the person he calls the ‘knight of faith’. The important difference between the knight of infinite resignation and the knight of faith is that the latter regains the world after having renounced it. That is to say, after having confronted the possibility that all of his heart’s desires may come to nought, he nevertheless manages to believe, through his love of God, that they are still worth pursuing – that finitude, transience and suffering are not, in the end, an ‘objection’ to existence: ‘every moment to see the sword hanging over the loved one’s head and yet to find, not repose in the pain of resignation, but joy . . . – that is wonderful’ (FT H 79).

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Wittgenstein’s account in the Notebooks and Tractatus seems to lack this dimension of a joyful acceptance of existence,38 thus rendering his conception closer to that of the knight of infinite resignation than the knight of faith. And although Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous author would agree that the dying to immediacy that early Wittgenstein proposes – renouncing the comforts of the world – is a necessary condition for faith, it is not the same as faith itself, but rather located on an existential rung below it. For the spirit of faith does not just tolerate the way the world is from the lofty heights of resignation, it has the courage to learn to love the finite in spite of (or because of?) its finitude: To have faith, in the words of de Silentio, is ‘to exist in such a way that my opposition to existence is expressed as the most beautiful and assured harmony with it’ (FT L 41).39 Of course such a perspective may be impossible to achieve. Indeed, de Silentio believes that it is impossible for him. ‘I can swim in existence’, he says, ‘but for this mystical soaring I am too heavy’ (FT L 41). In this respect, faith might constitute the kind of admirable response to the human existential predicament that can only ever be, for most of us, a Kantian regulative ideal.40

Conclusion Let me conclude, as I began, with the Book of Job. Job’s words ‘The Lord has given, the Lord has taken away, blessed be the name of the Lord’ (Job 1:21) are not meant to provide a justification for human suffering, but rather constitute the (personal) response of faith. In this respect, they also mirror the conclusions drawn in this chapter. We have seen that the so-­called ‘problem of evil’ cannot be solved by offering a theoretical explanation of an anthropomorphic God’s reasons, but dissolves once we stop rebelling against the ‘alien will’ on which we seem dependent.41 This does not make the sufferings themselves all right or, indeed, morally justifiable, because nothing could. But whereas infinite resignation is an attempt to return the lottery ticket and to take refuge in ‘eternity’,42 to have faith is joyfully to play in the knowledge that one will lose.43,44

Notes 1 Exceptions include D. Z. Phillips, The Problem of Evil and the Problem of God (London: SCM Press, 2004); Kenneth Surin, Theology and the Problem of Evil (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986); Terrence W. Tilley, The Evils of Theodicy (Washington,

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DC: Georgetown University Press, 1991); Nick Trakakis, ‘Theodicy: The Solution to the Problem of Evil, or Part of the Problem?’, Sophia 47, no. 2 (2008), 161–91; and Rowan Williams, ‘Redeeming Sorrows’, in Religion and Morality, ed. D. Z. Phillips (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), 132–48. 2 Satan, in this story, is not the devil, but rather a ‘son of God’ turned accuser (the literal meaning of ‘Satan’ in Hebrew); see Robert S. Ellwood and Gregory D. Alles, eds, The Encyclopedia of World Religions, rev. edn (New York: Infobase, 2007), 243. 3 I offer the following reading not as a philosophical argument against the anthropomorphic conception (such arguments will be considered shortly), but rather as a biblical challenge posed by a text that is shared by the world’s main monotheistic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam). This should draw the reader’s attention to the fact that an anthropomorphic view isn’t, even from a theological perspective, necessarily the default option when thinking about God (as seems to be assumed in, for example, Richard Swinburne, ‘Philosophical Theism’, in Philosophy of Religion in the 21st Century, ed. D. Z. Phillips and Timothy Tessin [Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001], 3–20). 4 And this point emerges more forcefully precisely because it is made in a context where an anthropomorphic conception of God just seems to be taken for granted. 5 The quotation is from the English Standard Version of the Bible. 6 Tilley, The Evils of Theodicy, 109. 7 Swinburne, ‘Philosophical Theism’, 8. In his The Coherence of Theism, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 103–21, Swinburne defines God as an ‘omnipresent spirit’ (a purely ‘mental’ substance). This is consistent with Swinburne’s earlier definition in ‘Philosophical Theism’, as he believes that a person is also a ‘mental substance’; just not, as in the case of God, a ‘pure’ one. I doubt that we can make sense of the Cartesian notion of a ‘mental substance’, but cannot argue it here. 8 Swinburne, ‘Philosophical Theism’, 9. 9 I cannot, in this chapter, examine all of the different ways in which an anthropomorphic conception might be mistaken; rather, I will focus on two aspects. For more detailed discussion of these issues, see my A Confusion of the Spheres: Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein on Philosophy and Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 10 Swinburne, ‘Philosophical Theism’, 9. 11 Furthermore, and as we shall see below, the whole idea of ‘unlimited power’, seen as freedom from all and any constraint, makes no sense, which puts paid to the notion that one might compare God’s ‘infinite power’ with a particle’s travelling at ‘infinite’ velocity (a comparison that Swinburne also draws). 12 Swinburne, in The Coherence of Theism, for example, has a go, but his account begs many questions. So, for instance, he thinks that God ‘causes’ things to happen merely by ‘intending’ them, or by ‘causing’ the laws of nature to obtain (whatever that might

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mean antecedently to already having laws of nature). It also leaves unanswered the questions of how a ‘pure mental substance’ (assuming this notion makes sense) can intend anything, and how this ‘intention’, by itself, is supposed to bring about an effect. As it stands, this conception not only presupposes the cogency of many contentious metaphysical claims, it also makes God’s ‘causal powers’ sound like the operation of magic. 13 Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening [1849], ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 69. 14 For more on Wittgenstein’s discussion of rule-­following, see my The Illusion of Doubt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 15 Swinburne now seems to concede this and maintains that reason imposes a limit on God’s freedom: God always chooses the rationally better action (Swinburne, The Coherence of Theism, 148–9). This, of course, implies that rational principles are independent of God and exist ‘timelessly’ (in addition to the created universe), like numbers (another contentious metaphysical claim that Swinburne is asking us to swallow). 16 These examples are from Phillips, The Problem of Evil and the Problem of God, 12. 17 This is not to say that there is no room at all for the thought that God is ‘personal’ in the sense that the believer can enter into a relationship with Him. Rather, it is to reject the notion that the idea of a ‘personal’ God is exhausted by a Swinburne-­type anthropomorphic conception of Him. 18 This should at least be a problem for those analytic theists who are Christians (of which there are many). 19 New International Version. 20 Richard Swinburne, Providence and the Problem of Evil (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 10. 21 See, for example, John Hick, ‘Transcendence and Truth’, in Religion without Transcendence?, ed. D. Z. Phillips and Timothy Tessin (London: Macmillan, 1997), 41–59; Swinburne, Providence and the Problem of Evil. 22 Swinburne, Providence and the Problem of Evil, 10. 23 Theodicists tend to invoke free will, ‘soul-­making’ and the eschaton as the ends that are supposed to justify the means; for a comprehensive summary, see Trakakis, ‘Theodicy’. For a critique of the notion that ‘free will’ can even coherently be considered a ‘good’, see Phillips, The Problem of Evil and the Problem of God, Ch. 4. I do not have the space to address this issue here. 24 See Phillips, The Problem of Evil and the Problem of God, 40–1. Compare Trakakis, ‘Theodicy’, 169. 25 See, for example, John Hick, ‘An Irenaean Theodicy’, in Encountering Evil, ed. Stephen T. Davis (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001), 38–52.

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26 Phillips, The Problem of Evil and the Problem of God, 43. 27 This is my argument, not one that Phillips makes. 28 Compare Trakakis, ‘Theodicy’. 29 As Phillips says: ‘To make the development of one’s character an aim [à la Hick and Swinburne, say] is to ensure that the development will not take place. This is because the endeavour so conceived is self-­defeating: it lacks character’ (The Problem of Evil and the Problem of God, 57; Phillips’ italics). For further discussion also see Trakakis, ‘Theodicy’. 30 Tilley, The Evils of Theodicy, 227. 31 See my A Confusion of the Spheres. 32 This parallels the ‘reference problem’ of the name ‘God’ (and according to Swinburne, it is a name, not a ‘job description’): how do we know that the word refers to the God-­conception of analytic theism, and not, say, to the Great Pumpkin, the Abominable Snowman or any other ‘super-­empirical’ object? Swinburne admits that this is a problem for his view, but thinks that appeals to the alleged ‘simplicity’ of the God of analytic theism can again help us to get around it. For further discussion of why this strategy fails, see my A Confusion of the Spheres. 33 Or, as Swinburne claims, that we can assign probability values to supernatural events and thus regard them as a ‘better’ explanation than natural causes. We have already seen above why this doesn’t work. 34 One can only regard Swinburne’s ‘God hypothesis’ as a genuine alternative to natural explanations if one already believes that there might be supernatural causes to which one can assign probability values. 35 For more discussion of these points, see my A Confusion of the Spheres. As this is primarily a chapter about theodicy, I cannot delve any further into these issues here. 36 In the words of Surin: ‘A theodicist who, intentionally or inadvertently, formulates doctrines which occlude the radical and ruthless particularity of human evil is, by implication, mediating a social and political practice which averts its gaze from the cruelties that exist in the world. The theodicist . . . cannot propound views that promote serenity in a heartless world’ (Surin, Theology and the Problem of Evil, 51). Also compare Phillips, The Problem of Evil and the Problem of God, and Tilley, The Evils of Theodicy. 37 This and subsequent translations from the Notebooks are mine. 38 A ‘joyful acceptance of existence’ is not a moral acceptance; it is not to accept existence because it is ‘good’ or because the existence of the world is ‘morally justifiable’ (whatever that might mean). Hence, it makes no sense to ask, in the moral sense, whether one should joyfully accept existence (or whether one should not). Rather, it is merely a question of whether one can – or whether one can become the kind of person who can. A ‘joyful acceptance of existence’ is its own reward, and surely, better, for all sorts of non-­moral reasons, than a ‘rejection’ of existence. But,

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again, none of this implies that ‘joyfully accepting existence’ is any kind of moral imperative or something one should refrain from for moral reasons. 39 Compare Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974), §276: ‘I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth!’ 40 In other words, to achieve such a perspective is an ongoing struggle that lasts as long as life itself. It is not a perspective that one can win once and for all, and it may be impossible to maintain in the face of extreme personal suffering. 41 Of course, we might wish to follow Nietzsche and not speak of an ‘alien will’ at all. It is an advantage of the view offered here that in regard to taking an ‘admirable perspective’ on human existence, both the religious and the non-­religious person are in the same boat. 42 In the sense of ‘immunizing’ oneself against the finite. 43 This is not an ‘ironic’ perspective; this is why, as Johannes de Silentio says, it requires great courage, and the person who manages to achieve it is ‘the only great one’ (FT H 79). 44 I would like to thank Aaron Ridley and audiences at the Southampton Research Seminar and the Eighth British Wittgenstein Society Annual Conference (Leeds, 2016) for comments on earlier versions of this chapter.

6

Wittgenstein, Analogy and Religion in Mulhall’s The Great Riddle Wayne Proudfoot

Based on his 2014 Stanton Lectures at the University of Cambridge, Stephen Mulhall’s The Great Riddle is one of the most innovative contributions in recent years to discussions of the relevance to theology of Wittgensteinian ideas.1 The book takes its departure not, in the first instance, from Wittgenstein’s own remarks about religion, but from the way others have used his work to think about religious language. In particular, it addresses the question of whether religious language constitutes its own language game or games, with grammars and forms of life that differ from other, not distinctively religious, forms of everyday speech and language. In doing so Mulhall is led to rethink the concepts of language game, grammar and form of life in a way that responds to earlier criticisms of Wittgensteinian fideism, to develop a different view of the religious uses of language, and to clarify and even enhance Wittgenstein’s visions of both language and philosophy. To do this and to present his view of the relation of philosophy to theology Mulhall draws on a rich variety of resources, including the work of Cora Diamond, Stanley Cavell, and two Wittgenstein-­influenced commentators on Thomas Aquinas he refers to as Grammatical Thomists, Herbert McCabe and David Burrell.2 Mulhall weaves these strands together persuasively. I don’t want to disrupt that interweaving, but I will call attention to some of the differences between those strands and their implications for how to conceive of the resources Wittgenstein provides for thinking about religious uses of language. While I am not convinced that the Grammatical Thomists can be used to illumine Wittgenstein’s work in the way Mulhall suggests, there is no doubt that Grammatical Thomism is of considerable interest for contemporary theology and that Mulhall has used it well to open up new questions about the relation of Wittgenstein to theology and to the philosophy of religion. As a contribution to

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the discussion the book invites, I’ll focus on its two chief topics, ‘Nonsense and its uses’ and ‘Analogy and projectibility’, and on their bearing on Mulhall’s account of the relation between philosophy and theology.

Nonsense and its uses Mulhall sees a parallel between the fact that the Grammatical Thomists regard as a theological virtue the recognition that language directed toward the transcendent Christian God necessarily outstrips the limits of sense, and Cora Diamond’s resolute reading of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and of some of Wittgenstein’s later work.3 Diamond interprets the Tractatus, along with Wittgenstein’s remark that what he had written there was nonsense, in a way that takes the sentences of that book to be austere or strict nonsense, in contrast to those who read the remark to suggest a kind of substantial nonsense, a use of contradictory or paradoxical terms to point toward some insight that can’t be put into words. Austere nonsense, according to Diamond and Mulhall, results not from using meaningful words in a logically contradictory way, but from the fact that at least one of the words in a sentence is entirely devoid of sense and thus doesn’t admit any interpretation at all. Diamond and Mulhall are interested in what might motivate use of this strictly unintelligible language. Diamond holds that a central point of the Tractatus is to acknowledge, and perhaps to overcome, the temptation to think that metaphysical analysis can show that philosophy is limited by the limits of language. If Wittgenstein is right, what are the implications of this use of nonsense for an analysis of religious language? Mulhall begins the book by considering two influential models of reflecting on the use of Wittgenstein for illumining religious language. Both reject the characterization of that language as nonsense. In the first model, represented by Anthony Kenny and Bede Rundle, nonsense is taken to be incapable of illumining anything and therefore to be of no value in analysing religious language. In the second, exemplified by Norman Malcolm and D. Z. Phillips, according to Wittgenstein all language that is used has a grammar and thus has sense. The task of the analyst is to lay out that grammar and to make explicit the rules that govern it rather than to conclude that it has no sense. In his ‘Lecture on Ethics’, Wittgenstein distinguishes between a judgement of relative value and one of absolute value. What would it mean, he asks, to express an experience of or to make a judgement of absolute value? Absolute value can’t

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be identified by moving along a spectrum of contingent values from something that is relatively to something that is absolutely independent or self-­standing. Wittgenstein writes: ‘I see . . . 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 anyone could possibly suggest, ab initio, on the ground of its significance’ (LE 11). It is not just that a statement or expression of absolute value is nonsensical, but, according to Wittgenstein, a person could be intelligibly motivated to refuse to accept any attempt to give sense to it. The motivation to use such unintelligible propositions might derive from the need to distinguish discourse about ethical and aesthetic value from empirical discourse, or to distinguish between ethical wrongness and the incomprehensibly evil, for instance. In either case the point would be to mark a discontinuity, to refuse to allow the ordinary meaning of a term to apply in cases that are taken to be radically different. Mulhall writes that refusal to give sense to these propositions can be appreciated only by grasping what Friedrich Nietzsche might call their genealogy. By attending to how words have come to be used that way we might come to regard the uttering of such nonsense as ‘an intelligible outworking of the broader forms of human life within which the words uttered have uses whose internal logic and overall significance can be more straightforwardly grasped’ (GR 33). Even though these words have been unmoored from their ordinary uses, they can be seen as an intelligible extension of those uses in other contexts. For a different example of how words can become removed from their contexts in a way that is fruitful for an account of religious language, Mulhall turns to Cora Diamond’s analysis of talk about God in Anselm’s Proslogion.4 Diamond doesn’t regard Anselm’s reflection on the implications of the phrase ‘that than which nothing greater can be conceived’ as a logical argument, but as a riddle. A riddle, she says, can’t be solved by explicating its formal logic, as in a mathematical proof. Rather, it depends for its ‘solution’ on something external to it. It can be given its sense only from outside. The traditional riddle of the Sphinx is of this sort. What has four legs in the morning, two at noon, and three in the evening? This answer can’t be inferred from the grammar or logic of the riddle alone. It depends on knowing something about the course of a human life. Anselm’s phrase, she says, is a riddle phrase. He doesn’t set out a conception and then prove that it exists. The phrase is constructed on the basis of a familiar model (that of the use of the words ‘great’, ‘greater’, and ‘greatest’), but it is removed from any context in which those words make sense, for instance in which something is said to be greater in some respect. Anselm’s phrase, she says, has no

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grammar, but only a ‘grammar’. The phrase operates in such a way that nothing whose non-­existence could be conceived would count as satisfying it. For Diamond, Anselm’s phrase is a promissory note, ‘forging the outer shell of a necessary connection in a language we do not yet know how to speak’ (GR 37). It’s a rule to the effect that whatever one is thinking of cannot be God. Nothing that human beings have themselves thought up can be identified as ‘that than which none greater could be conceived’.5 Diamond doesn’t ‘rule out the possibility of a new language-­game in which that word-­shape has a place’, but that would be outside of established grammar and logic (GR 37). Diamond regards the nonsense of Anselm’s phrase, as well as the propositions of the Tractatus, as having been constructed in order to loosen the hold of an unduly narrow understanding of some of our concepts and to enable us to see more clearly what is before us. In other work, she has emphasized this point about Wittgenstein, what she calls the ‘realistic spirit’ of his practice.6 Sometimes an experience strikes us as real in a way that seems to break through anything we could have conceived to be possible (e.g. the taste of honey, or inconsolable grief); at other times an experience may be exceptionally astonishing or painful in a way that is so difficult it elicits resistance to our thinking it. Diamond follows Karl Barth in holding that the phrase ‘that than which nothing greater can be conceived’ lacks content. It is not a description but a rule for thinking about God. Nothing that we could conceive, nothing that is within our capacity to imagine, could be God.7 Reality may surprise us beyond anything that we could possibly have thought. This is not because we know ahead of time what is possible for thought. It is that Anselm’s phrase, on Diamond’s reading, works in such a way as to rule out in advance anything we could possibly think as language appropriate for God. This ‘rule’ functions in a way that is similar to Wittgenstein’s statement in the ‘Lecture on Ethics’ that he would reject any ascription of significance to the phrase ‘absolute value’ from the outset on the grounds of its significance. The phrase serves, Diamond says, as a promissory note for a new ‘grammar’. She writes that ‘to be a great riddle is to “allude” to a language whose full transparency to us is ruled out’.8 Mulhall applies the idea of a ‘great riddle’ of the sort Diamond finds in Anselm to Thomas’s Five Ways. As with Anselm’s argument, these are not to be read as ways of proving the existence of God, but rather as five ways of refusing to make sense. McCabe and Burrell bring a Wittgensteinian sensibility to Aquinas’s interest not only in God, but in the language we use to talk about God. Mulhall asks if ‘the grammar of the terms through which we reflect upon whether and how we can talk about God [might] be just as mysterious as that to which they

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aspire impossibly to refer’ (GR 49). Our language about God can never be adequate, but we can orient ourselves by Thomas’s comment at the beginning of the Summa Theologiae that theology ‘is chiefly concerned with God, and [with] creatures considered . . . in their relation to him, [with] their origin and end’ (ST 1a.1.3, ad 1). The second of Thomas’s Five Ways begins with familiar language of causation. We know God is not a thing and cannot operate on other things in any of the familiar ways, but McCabe argues that inquiry into natural causes can lead legitimately to the idea of God as Creator. Mulhall glosses this as Thomas’s construction or projection of a ‘grammar’ of a language whose adequacy is guaranteed by its source, but which we cannot actually mean. We need the idea of causation to understand the concepts of beginning and end, he writes, and that sets up a riddle that ‘at once implants a natural projective trajectory for the relevant expressions and excludes the possibility that whatever answers to the resulting linguistic construction . . . could be any such thing’ (GR 53). Talk about God, like language about absolute value or the propositions of the Tractatus, is austere rather than substantial nonsense, but it also seems to be construed by Mulhall as productive nonsense. Words used to express absolute value can be read as an intelligible extension of their uses in broader forms of human life, even though they have become unmoored from the conditions of those ordinary uses. We might have to employ a kind of genealogy to capture the chains of association that allow us to make the relevant connections, but that makes them somewhat available. Anselm has constructed a phrase that is itself rather austere. Its grammar, even in the sense of ordinary language and logic, is quite sophisticated, and it operates recursively over the range of conceptions we might consider. Diamond considers it a riddle that cannot be resolved by any of our own resources, conceptual or otherwise. It requires and invites a solution from without. This is different from genealogical connections that can be made with respect to value terms, but it is a riddle and it inspires a search for a solution, even though it could never be understood. In each of these cases nonsense is productive. It is not the kind of nonsense produced by a string of keyboard strokes recommended for strong passwords. It is also not the nonsense Noam Chomsky meant to exemplify with his grammatically correct sentence ‘Colorless green ideas sleep furiously’.9 It is nonsense that prompts critical reflection and advances inquiry. This is especially true of Mulhall’s claim that in Thomas’s Second Way reflection on God that originates in ideas of beginning and end ‘implants a natural projective trajectory for the relevant expressions’. That provides a direction, even a vector, and some

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guidance for language about God, extending out from familiar patterns of use while acknowledging that it can never be adequate. There is an important difference between Diamond’s characterization of Anselm’s argument as a riddle and Mulhall’s reading of Thomas’s Second Way as a riddle. Diamond argues that Anselm’s carefully constructed nonsense prompts recognition of the difference between a concept of necessary existence and actual real existence. This recognition allows one to see more clearly what is before her. In accord with what she calls Wittgenstein’s realistic spirit, this experience of the real is sharply distinguished from a prior inability to see. A terrible loss or a surprising joy might ‘shoulder out’ our prior categories so that we experience something familiar, or perhaps even everything, as if for the first time (GR 123–5).10 Mulhall’s portrayal of the Second Way as a riddle emphasizes continuity, not discontinuity, with his image of reflection on ordinary causation implanting a natural projective trajectory for language about God. This suggests a more traditional, teleological, reading of Thomas that has no clear counterpart in Wittgenstein. Both Diamond and Mulhall recognize continuity as well as discontinuity, but their different images suggest different emphases.

Analogy and projectibility Thomas writes that words properly used to refer to God are neither equivocal nor univocal, but analogical. The tradition has sometimes ascribed to him a doctrine of analogy that allows for calculating the meaning of analogous terms used for God. The Grammatical Thomists demystify this doctrine. McCabe and Burrell regard Thomas’s use of the term ‘analogy’ as limited and mostly negative, the chief point of which is that words used about God can have meanings that are neither univocal nor equivocal, but are also not simply metaphors. Burrell has written extensively on analogy in a way that is explicitly informed by Wittgenstein.11 Mulhall argues that Burrell’s work on analogy and Stanley Cavell’s account of the ways in which words are projected from one context to another are helpful not only for illuminating religious uses of language, but also for clarifying Wittgenstein’s signature concepts like ‘language game’, ‘grammar’, and ‘form of life’ as well as his visions of language and philosophy. For Burrell, an analogous term is simply one that fails to conform to an account that remains invariant across different contexts. Analogy is a particular example of what Cavell regards as a capacity of words to point beyond themselves and to be used in quite different settings. Religious words, for instance, are not

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sui generis. They don’t necessarily arise from and are not restricted to distinctively religious modes of discourse, and those modes cannot be sharply separated from others. By making this point Mulhall addresses Kai Nielsen’s criticism of Wittgensteinian fideists for distinguishing religious language games and forms of life sharply from non-­religious ones, and he sets the stage for a more accurate way of understanding Wittgenstein’s account of language.12 Wittgenstein’s signature concepts are themselves used analogically and have different meanings in different contexts. They are more flexible than they might appear from earlier debates between Nielsen and Phillips, for instance. A language game is not a discrete set of uses governed by a single grammar that consists of rules determining which meanings are acceptable and which are not. Such a view would yield a picture of insular forms of discourse and of life related to one another only externally. Ordinary words can be and are employed in different contexts with different meanings. Different uses of a term in different contexts don’t require some common feature, but may be related by a chain of overlapping resemblances. We might come to recognize such a chain only by attending to the history of a term and to previous settings in which it has been used. Here, as in his comments about expressing absolute value by extending ordinary words beyond the conditions needed to give them sense, Mulhall writes that something like Nietzsche’s genealogy may be required. In each of these cases he seems to mean retracing intermediate steps by which a word has come to be used in a certain way. But this is quite different from Nietzsche’s idea and practice of genealogy. Nietzsche traces contingent historical connections to show how concepts, practices and institutions have been reinterpreted, redirected, transformed, even hijacked, for purposes other than those they initially served.13 He undertakes this in the interest of a more actual, a more truthful, history that might help to advance self-­knowledge. Mulhall writes at one point that religious uses of language illumine ‘something essential to the everyday words upon which the violently transfigurative religious impulse operates, and so [reveal] something fundamental to language as such’ (GR 63). This echoes Nietzsche’s language of power and mastery in his practice of genealogy, and it would be good to hear more about what Mulhall means by this violently transfigurative religious impulse. To understand it might require an analysis quite different from the historical tracing of a chain of overlapping resemblances. A central feature of Mulhall’s book is the bringing together of Burrell’s reading of Thomas on analogy and Stanley Cavell’s account of the projection of words in

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his ‘Excursus on Wittgenstein’s Vision of Language’.14 If analogy is, as Burrell writes, a propensity to employ a word in diverse contexts in spite of acknowledged differences of meaning, Cavell shows that this practice is not limited to what we call analogies. In Cavell’s example, we learn what it means to feed the cat and the lions, and then come to understand what is meant by feeding the meter or feeding our pride. These are projections of words that are tolerated though they were not part of the initial meaning. Words are projected into different contexts and given meanings that were not known ahead of time. Their meanings are not circumscribed by particular language games. This projectibility of words is essential to language. Language is tolerant, Cavell writes, but ‘not just any projection will be acceptable, . . . it is equally true that what will count as a legitimate projection is deeply controlled’.15 An indefinite number of projections is possible, but they are not arbitrary. Judgements about acceptable meanings require practice and skill and result from interaction between nature and culture. Pre-­linguistic natural reactions may create spontaneous linguistic reactions that in turn have their effect on what is felt to be natural. Attention to which words are projectible under what conditions contributes to our understanding and to the development of our use of language. It is essential to the projection of a word that it can be made to proceed naturally, in contrast to metaphorical uses that depend upon interrupting normal directions of projection. Mulhall makes a good case for the fit between Burrell’s reflection on analogy and Cavell’s focus on projection. Both reject the idea that judgements about the propriety of analogous uses or projections of words could be resolved by appeal to any formula or set of rules. Such judgements can’t be settled in advance, but are developed and perfected over time. Cavell’s reflection on the projectibility of words serves to thicken Burrell’s account of analogy. The fifth chapter of The Great Riddle is entitled ‘Perfections and Transcendentals: Wittgenstein’s Vision of Philosophy’. Mulhall argues that that is appropriate, even though Wittgenstein doesn’t use the terms ‘perfections’ or ‘transcendentals’. In Mulhall’s view, attention to Burrell’s elucidation of these terms in Thomas’s account of language about God can help to illumine language more broadly as well as Wittgenstein’s conceptions of language and of philosophy. Much of the chapter is concerned with a careful interweaving of Burrell’s reading of Thomas on perfections and transcendentals and Cavell’s discussion of the relation between the projectibility of words and their perfectibility and of his Emersonian perfectionist conception of the self. I want to call attention to these separate strands and to take note, as Mulhall himself does, of their differences.

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Following Thomas, Burrell focuses his discussion of analogy on perfection terms. Words such as ‘good’ and ‘wise’ are appropriately and analogically used of God. In fact, they have their primary or literal meaning when used of God, in contrast to ordinary uses of them to refer to creatures. We know that their only adequate use is in language about God, but that primary meaning is beyond our grasp. We can, though, reflect on our use of perfection terms and note that they function appropriately across diverse genera. In Cavell’s language, they are equally projectible across a variety of contexts. They are also achievement terms, referring to standards or paradigms by which we measure ourselves and others. These standards are themselves subject to critical reflection. We don’t have any prior understanding of what it would mean to fulfil these standards, but we can reflect on the projections we find ourselves willing to accept, and this reflection itself will clarify and deepen our understanding. To clarify and perfect my use of these terms is to clarify my desires and interests as well and so to clarify myself. Mulhall regards this as a kind of perfecting of the use of perfection terms. There is an internal relation between projectibility in the use of language and of the self that Cavell calls Emersonian perfectionism and finds in Wittgenstein, and that Mulhall finds also in the Grammatical Thomists. Mulhall remarks that it may seem odd for Thomas to talk about absolute perfection of goodness or wisdom because we know these terms only in their relative uses. But he holds that in projecting them beyond the limits of their intelligible use we can think of them as attaining their fullest possible expression by a kind of extension of self-­critical projectibility. Call it, he writes, ‘perfecting the use of perfection terms, by projecting the idea of a language in which their incessantly self-­critical projectibility might at once fulfil itself and overcome itself, and thereby (like every other created thing) find peace’ (GR 83). Mulhall takes Wittgenstein’s work to suggest a conjunction of projectibility and perfectibility and he argues that attention to Cavell’s analyses of these illumines the philosophical project of that work. He argues, for instance, that Wittgenstein’s signature concepts for analysis of any topic ‘are analogous to perfection terms, in being analogously and appraisively employed’ (GR 86). The concept of a language game, for instance, like that of a grammar and of a form of life, is not strictly defined, but can be and is used differently in different contexts. Wittgenstein developed these concepts to help us remove obstacles to seeing what is before us. He uses them to cut through, and to loosen the hold of, habits of thought and perception that prevent us from seeing what is really there or how language actually works. But if these concepts are reified they can themselves become obstacles rather than aids to looking and to reflection. This can happen

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if a language game is regarded as discrete, isolated, dominated by a monolithic grammar, and correlated with a similarly definite form of life. Burrell and Cavell agree on many points, but their accounts of analogy and projection are developed in different contexts and put to different ends. For Burrell and the Grammatical Thomists, the literal or primary meaning of the word ‘good’ is given by its reference to God. We can reflect on the way in which the term functions, but of its primary meaning, its application to God, we know only that it is always inadequate. We’ve seen that Mulhall reads the Five Ways as posing riddles the answer to which eludes our understanding, but they establish a ‘natural projective trajectory’ that points in the direction of the grammatical object to which we can refer only by the tautologous words, ‘I am who I am’. Cavell doesn’t posit any such primary meaning. He doesn’t identify particular perfection terms. He’s interested in the ways in which language allows, invites, and sometimes rejects projection of words into new contexts with new meanings and in the ethical and aesthetic implications of those projections. Unlike Burrell, Cavell doesn’t posit or imagine some fullness of perfection that is beyond further criticism and perfectibility, in which every perfection term might fulfil itself and find peace. There is no origin and end of all things. The aim of this practice of projecting and perfecting is, in words Cavell draws from Emerson and Wittgenstein, to bring language back from metaphysics to the everyday or the ordinary.16 What is meant by the ordinary? Not what an ethnographer or lexicographer would record about our use of language. He writes of bringing language back to the eventual ordinary, borrowing a term from John Dewey.17 ‘Back’ to an ordinary that is not given, but is the eventual result of an endless practice of critical reflection, revision, and perfecting. Cavell identifies himself with a kind of naturalism defined not by science, but by an eventual conception of the natural that acknowledges both the biological and the social directions of Wittgenstein’s forms of life.18 Both Cavell and Mulhall have written informatively on Wittgenstein’s concept of a criterion. The fact that we have no prior knowledge of what is or is not projectible is not due to the transcendence of the fullness of good, nor is there any natural projective trajectory that will set us in that direction. In this respect Wittgenstein’s approach differs from that of the Grammatical Thomists, even if their accounts of the judgement, skill and practice of analogous usage are similar and complementary. Mulhall introduces the concept of analogy with the Thomists and they are central to his argument, but they are eclipsed in the heart of the book by the care with which Cavell has addressed issues of projectibility and perfectibility and shown

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these issues to be central to Wittgenstein’s work. Burrell’s accounts of language and philosophy are deeply informed by Wittgenstein, but his conception of the primary meaning of perfection terms, and Mulhall’s reading of the Five Ways as a riddle inviting an answer from without, seem quite different from Wittgenstein and Cavell. Neither of the latter two philosophers posits an antecedently existent primary meaning and no natural trajectory is established for projection and perfection.

Theology and philosophy In the final chapter Mulhall offers his own account of the proper relation between philosophy and theology, building on his analyses of the different ways of inheriting Wittgenstein in Diamond, Burrell and Cavell. Burrell, following Thomas, focuses not only on perfection words, but also on transcendental terms such as ‘one’, ‘true’, ‘being’ and ‘good’. As we’ve seen, Mulhall holds that the distinctive nature of these terms is not that they can be projected across categories like other perfection terms, but that they refuse restriction to any range of categorical concepts and are therefore assumed by any discourse. Burrell, Cavell and Wittgenstein all agree that such terms should be construed not as universals, with meanings that remain invariant, but as words that can be legitimately and fruitfully applied analogously across categories. Burrell takes Thomas to be using them chiefly as examples, rather than as a fixed set, but he still follows him in treating them as particularly important for understanding religious language. Mulhall writes that the key idea of his proposal is ‘to see transcendental terms as a kind of transcending or perfecting of cross-­categorical perfection terms, which are themselves a kind of perfecting of the projectibility of terms as such’ (GR 106). For him, as for Cavell, projectibility and perfectibility are internally related so that a comprehension of words and an understanding of self are subject to endless deepening, in a mode of appraisal that is at once ethical and aesthetic and not restricted to some specific linguistic domain. Mulhall takes himself to have shown in his reading of Wittgenstein that perfections and transcendentals are deeply woven into philosophy, and he regards that as an argument against any easy dismissal of attempts to project them into a theological context. He then elaborates that argument in an account of the proper relation between theology and philosophy. Philosophy is distinguished by its attention to trans-­categorical features of language, thought, and reality. This develops from the ways in which we move from judgements of appraisal in specific domains (e.g. chemistry, history or

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psychology) to examining the assumptions of each category in the light of its relation to the others, and then to considering reality as a whole. Each of these steps requires analogous constructions of concepts not strictly determined by those at the prior level. ‘If the step from category-­specific judgement to the crossand trans-­categorical is legitimate’, Mulhall asks, ‘however peculiarly orthogonal or analogous it may be, then what exactly is illegitimate about the equally peculiar analogous step from the trans-­categorical to the theological?’ (GR 109). How we assess that move from philosophy to theology depends on what is meant by the theological. For much of the book Mulhall has emphasized the ways in which religious and theological uses of language differ sharply from ordinary uses of words in other contexts. Diamond on the Tractatus and Anselm and the Grammatical Thomists on the impossibility of our comprehension of words about God make this point. Words may be projected into new contexts and take on meanings that differ greatly from those that they have in their previous settings, but is that sufficient to legitimize the move from philosophy to theology? Mulhall portrays this move as a final step in a series of self-­reflexive steps in which terms and categories are constructed and projected beyond their previous boundaries. It is the fulfilment of this process, the self-­overcoming of philosophy. Theology is the construction of a ‘perspective’ in relation to which any philosophical understanding of this process is acknowledged and transcended as essentially limited or imperfect. It is a perspective from which any idea of further perfecting is ruled out. We might ask, in the spirit of Cavell or Wittgenstein: Why should any step in that series be taken to be final? Why can’t it itself be considered a form of philosophy and, like any other step, subject to critical reflection and liable to and capable of some further self-­overcoming and perfecting in the future? Mulhall’s answer is that the ‘perspective’ constructed by theology is different from earlier steps in the process of analogous concept-­construction. It is not couched in a language we can understand. It is formulated so as to refuse attempts to give it sense, as in Burrell’s reading of Thomas’s doctrine that God’s essence and existence are identical as ‘to be God is to be to-­be’.19 Of course this doesn’t make sense. It is not another step in a recursive series, but a deliberate ‘Stop!’ that is required to express God’s transcendence. But if that is the case, then how can it be considered a step at all in the enterprise of critical reflection? Isn’t it just a refusal to play, a refusal of the spirit of the enterprise? Theology’s sheer existence, Mulhall writes, reveals an ineliminable but unappeasable aspiration of philosophy and testifies to its fulfilment. Humans aspire by their nature to a completeness of understanding that they cannot

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realize. Theology discloses philosophy’s aspiration to a God’s-­eye view as both essential to its nature and beyond its grasp. Such a view could be given only as a gift and grasped only through faith. Anselm’s argument, Thomas’s Five Ways and Johannes de Silentio’s depiction of God’s command to Abraham in Søren Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling20 each pose a riddle the answer to which is not accessible within the conceptual and imaginative resources available to us, but must be given from without. Theology has no knowledge to impart to philosophy, Mulhall says, but it does have something to tell it. It can offer witness or testimony. Drawing on this idea of a great riddle, Mulhall writes that theology must possess ‘phrases and formulations that it is compelled to regard as the perfect fit or ultimate telos for the human impulses for which perfections and transcendentals are the expressive vehicle . . .’ (GR 113). He says that these formulations are fixed points in a logical space beyond anything we could conceivably imagine. They deserve our attention, even though we can’t assign any sense to them. They must have absolute authority for us, the authority of revelation. Kierkegaard’s Johannes Climacus offers an instructive parallel. In the Philosophical Fragments Climacus employs a thought experiment, a poetic tale, and an analysis of what it would mean to think something genuinely other, to argue for a radical difference and even complete discontinuity between theology and philosophy.21 For Climacus theology can provide only witness and scripture should be read as testimony. He writes elsewhere that he wants to show how difficult it is to be a Christian and how difficult it is to be an actually existent self, and that those are not different questions.22 By this he doesn’t mean that to be a self one must become a Christian. But he thinks, with Mulhall, that there is some kind of fit between Christian claims about God and faith and what it means to be an actual human being. For Climacus, this fit is not with the specific words of scripture. Witness, in this instance, whether in scripture or elsewhere, is not dependent on either the truth or the truthfulness of what the testifier has to say. Whether or not he or she had faith, or even was sincere, has no bearing on the matter (PF 99–105).23 How could it have any bearing, given the enormity of the Christian claim? What is important is that it poses a question. It is the paradoxical character of Christian faith and God that is the fit with what it means to be a self for Climacus, not the fit of the phrases and formulations of scripture with the telos of the impulses for which the perfections and transcendentals are expressions. Mulhall’s claim that his account of the moves from category-­specific to crossand trans-­categorical judgements in philosophy, and then on to the theological

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perspective, legitimates the step from the trans-­categorical to the theological is not convincing as it stands. This assessment need not come from some reductive naturalism. Diamond, Mulhall’s reading of the Grammatical Thomists and Kierkegaard all draw a sharp distinction between religious or theological language on the one hand, and that employed in category-­specific and in philosophical inquiries on the other.24 The gulf between them is emphasized in the book and in the insistence that paradigmatic religious language is without sense. Mulhall offers what seem to be two models of this gulf and how it might be crossed. Diamond takes the language of the Tractatus to be austere nonsense requiring a resolute reading that might effect a shift in the reader’s view of the world and in his or her ethical relation to it. Anselm’s riddling phrase is nonsense intended to rule out conceptions of God and to elicit the insight that its meaning can come only from whatever it turns out to apply to. These, and examples in Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, are intended to shoulder out language games that have hindered us from becoming aware of what is before us. This model is of a gestalt switch into some distinct and different view, though it need not happen instantaneously. The other model, from the Grammatical Thomists, is continuous and teleological. The primary meanings of our perfection and transcendental terms when used of God are inaccessible to us, but there are ways to make sense of them. Genealogy can show, if only in retrospect, the way meanings of the same term used analogically have changed in different contexts. Thomas’s Second Way, according to McCabe and Mulhall, can implant a natural projective trajectory toward a meaning that is out of reach. Scriptural formulations such as ‘I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last’ and ‘I am who I am’, are a perfect fit for the impulses expressed by perfections and transcendentals. The kind of reflection Cavell finds in Wittgenstein and exemplifies in his own work, a finding oneself to be lost or confused and an attempt to bring or lead language back to the everyday, raises questions about the aspirations of philosophy, including that to a God’s-­eye view. What gives rise to these aspirations and what does it mean to say that they are essential to human nature? What should we say about claims to satisfy them, either from within human resources or from without, and what would ‘without’ mean in this context? Neither Wittgenstein nor Cavell is dismissive about religion or unattuned to it. But both raise questions that should make us suspicious about the aspiration

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for a perspective from which any idea of further perfecting is ruled out and about any philosophical or theological claims to provide that perspective. The heart of Mulhall’s book seems to lie with Cavell’s account of projecting and perfecting words and self and with Diamond’s reading of Anselm as contributing to the realistic spirit she finds in Wittgenstein. There is a discrepancy between these and the contributions of the Grammatical Thomists to the structure of the book and the argument. Mulhall shows that Burrell and his colleagues are deeply influenced by Wittgenstein and that their work may be used to cast new light on his vision of language and philosophy, but I don’t find support in Wittgenstein’s work for their theological project. Despite these misgivings, it was a pleasure for me to read Mulhall’s book. In The Great Riddle he presents an original and sophisticated way of exploiting resources Wittgenstein offers for an analysis of religious and theological language. Philosophy of religion can take many different forms, but accounts such as this that engage critically with the best thought and practice of a particular religious tradition are among the most important.

Notes 1 Stephen Mulhall, The Great Riddle: Wittgenstein and Nonsense, Theology and Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). Hereafter abbreviated in citations as ‘GR’. 2 Herbert McCabe, ‘Creation’, in God Matters (London: Chapman, 1987), 2–9; David B. Burrell, Analogy and Philosophical Language (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1973) and Aquinas: God and Action (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979). Mulhall also refers to Victor Preller, Divine Science and the Science of God: A Reformulation of Thomas Aquinas (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967). 3 James 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), 42–97; Cora Diamond, ‘Wittgenstein on Religious Belief: The Gulfs between Us’, in Religion and Wittgenstein’s Legacy, ed. D. Z. Phillips and Mario von der Ruhr (London: Ashgate, 2005), 99–137. 4 Cora Diamond, ‘Riddles and Anselm’s Riddle’, in The Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy, and the Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 267–89. 5 Anselm’s carefully constructed phrase does not say that God is greater than anything that can be conceived, but that God is that than which none greater can be conceived. This is not negative theology.

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6 Cora Diamond, ‘Realism and the Realistic Spirit’, in The Realistic Spirit, 39–72. 7 Diamond, ‘Riddles and Anselm’s Riddle’, 278–80. Diamond (ibid., 289) expresses her debt to Karl Barth’s Anselm: Fides Quaerens Intellectum (Cleveland, OH: World Publishing Co., 1962). 8 Diamond, ‘Riddles and Anselm’s Riddle’, 282. 9 See Noam Chomsky, Syntactic Structures (The Hague: Mouton, 1957), 15. 10 For Diamond’s use of the phrase ‘being shouldered out’, see Cora Diamond, ‘The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy’, in Stanley Cavell, Cora Diamond, John McDowell, Ian Hacking and Cary Wolfe, Philosophy and Animal Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 71. 11 Burrell, Analogy and Philosophical Thought. 12 See Kai Nielsen, ‘Wittgensteinian Fideism’, Philosophy 42 (1967), 191–209. 13 Nietzsche writes: ‘the cause of the origin of a thing and its eventual utility, its actual employment and place in a system of purposes, lie worlds apart; whatever exists, having somehow come into being, is again and again reinterpreted to new ends, taken over, transformed, and redirected by some power superior to it . . .’. On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1967), Second Essay, §12. 14 Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 168–90. 15 Ibid., 182–3. 16 Stanley Cavell, ‘Declining Decline’, in This New yet Unapproachable America (Alberquerque, NM: Living Batch Press, 1989), 29–75. 17 See Stanley Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 21. 18 Stanley Cavell, ‘Postscript (2002) to “The Investigations’ Everyday Aesthetics of Itself ” ’, in Naturalism in Question, ed. Mario De Caro and David Macarthur (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 275–9. 19 Burrell, Aquinas: God and Action, 24, 42. Cf. ST 1a.3.4. 20 Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling: Dialectical Lyric by Johannes de silentio [1843] (London: Penguin, 1985). 21 Søren Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments; Johannes Climacus (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985). 22 See esp. Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments [1846] (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992). 23 Mulhall, however, writes that testimony in this instance presses our ordinary use of the term to its analogous limits, placing an absolute burden of responsibility on the one who testifies as well as on the one to whom one testifies (GR 114–15). 24 Not between theological language and ordinary language, because Mulhall understands religious language to be within the realm of the ordinary.

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Riddles, Nonsense and Religious Language Stephen Mulhall

In my recent book, The Great Riddle1 (a revision of my 2014 Stanton Lectures), I sketch a way of understanding talk about God which I claim is faithful both to Thomas Aquinas and to Wittgenstein, in that it draws simultaneously upon, and so amounts to a synthesis of, two Wittgensteinian sources or models: his remarks about judgements of absolute value in the ‘Lecture on Ethics’, and his use of riddles as a lens through which to grasp the status of mathematical conjectures. In its epilogue, I reported an initial sense of consonance between these lectures and Rowan Williams’ 2013 Gifford Lectures (published as The Edge of Words: God and the Habits of Language2), although I suggested that it might take either another book, or a revision of every chapter in my own book, to bring this out. Receiving the invitation to participate in the conference out of which this edited volume has grown, in the knowledge that Professor Williams would also attend, encouraged me to revisit that suspicion; and I now hope that the briefer span of an essay might at least further clarify that sense of consonance. To do so, however, I must first summarize my own argument.

Absolute value, riddles and great riddles Its first source is Wittgenstein’s distinction between a relative and an absolute mode of evaluative judgements. Take someone who claims to feel safe. Ordinarily, this is a relative judgement: it is a claim to feel safe from something – a rabid dog, a threat to one’s reputation, a tsunami; what it means to be safe is thus determined by the specific threat, and we can always envisage what our current safety in fact depends upon, and how those factual conditions might be otherwise. But if I claim to feel absolutely safe, I invoke an idea of safety that is essentially unconditional – that is not a matter of being safe from anything in particular, hence is not keyed to any particular threat, and so is not vulnerable to any change

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of contingent circumstances or conditions, hence could not conceivably be overcome or subverted. In effect, a familiar use of evaluative words has here been recast in such a way as to deprive us of our familiar way of making sense of it. And for Wittgenstein, this lack of coherence is their distinguishing mark: the verbal expressions of experiences of absolute value are essentially lacking in sense (and not because they are incoherently attempting to refer to phenomena in a transcendental realm). But as Cora Diamond has pointed out, accepting this resolute reading of absolute value judgements is entirely consistent with seeing their employment as intelligibly motivated, and so as possessed of significance – a significance they possess for their users (not despite but) by virtue of their nonsensicality.3 For if such a speaker finds satisfaction precisely in refusing any available assignments of meaning to her words, then understanding her means understanding why she might find such assignments essentially unsatisfying. In both the Tractatus and the later lecture, the specific kind of meaning-­ assignment to ethical utterances that is being resisted is that characteristic of fact-­stating, empirical discourse in general, and of empirical psychological discourse in particular. Hence, the unconditional nature of the refusal indicates a sense of absolute discontinuity between this conception of the ethical and the empirical world. Evaluating threats can be understood perfectly well in naturalistic terms; so can the use of language to alter people’s feelings and attitudes, or to express adherence to prescriptive principles, or to guide action. So by refusing to accept any such assignments of sense to his utterances about absolute value, Wittgenstein draws a sharp contrast between two kinds of evil (and hence two kinds of good): in Diamond’s words, ‘evil as something inconsequential or close to home . . . something [not] very bad which one could get accustomed to’ and evil as ‘something terrible, black and wholly alien that you cannot even approach’.4 Recall the Grimm Brothers’ fairy tale about the fisherman who rescues a magic flounder, who then offers to grant his rescuer whatever he wishes; the fisherman’s wife begins by asking for a better home and ends by expressing dissatisfaction at the sun’s and the moon’s rising independently of her will – at which point a cosmically destructive storm arises from the flounder’s ocean and returns her to the pigsty in which they had originally been living. Being dissatisfied at living in a pigsty is not only not evil, it may even seem essential to anyone’s sense of self-­ respect; so the wife’s transition to her climactic dissatisfaction may appear to be seamlessly comprehensible. But to see her final demand as the endpoint of some intelligible process of moral deterioration, one must overlook the fact that wanting

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the world to conform to her will amounts to wanting it not to be a world at all; it requires the unintelligible idea of her occupying God’s perspective on the world. To see in this nothing more than an unwise but understandable over-­extension of an essentially healthy self-­regard would be to obliterate the distinction between genuine human needs and world-­extinguishing hubris. The early Wittgenstein’s removal of thought and talk about the good and evil will from the empirical realm is another way of marking that contrast – one of a number of possible techniques of language through which it might be indicated and maintained. The dissatisfaction of the fisherman’s wife is akin to that of the unhappy man of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (6.43), who is dissatisfied at the world regardless of how things go within it, hence not so much dissatisfied with how that world is as with the bare fact of its existence, with its sheer independent reality – its refusal to meet the conditions he lays down, to submit to his control. The discontinuity is manifest in the unintelligibility of the dissatisfaction (for what would it be like if the world did answer to the conditions either lays down?); and yet, both techniques for marking it simultaneously acknowledge an underlying continuity. The cosmic dissatisfaction of the fisherman’s wife is intuitable even in her initial desire to have a cosy little house rather than a pigsty: the tale explicitly marks this by noting that the sea is already faintly discoloured and mildly turbulent when the fisherman brings his wife’s first wish to the flounder’s attention, quite as if the world-­annihilating storm she eventually unleashes is already gathering its energies. So the wife’s catastrophic hubris is at once something absolutely out of the ordinary, and yet always already lurking beneath the surface of the most innocuous expressions of human will. Her terrible evil is essentially irreducible to everyday moral and psychological understanding, and yet somehow haunts them: that is why, however much violence we must do to their familiar modes of use, it is precisely these words (the ones we employ to talk intelligibly about intra-­worldly objects of desire and dissatisfaction) to which the violence must be done if what we intend by our utterance is to be satisfied. Nothing other than the failure of sense resulting from that violence could convey the simultaneous continuity and discontinuity we mean to capture; it is the unintelligibility of these forms of words that alone can articulate the resistance of such evil to our comprehension. The words that comprise expressions of absolute value thus remain devoid of sense; but we can make sense of their being so employed, and so of those employing them, if we can see their lack of sense in this evaluative context as a denial or deconstruction of the sense they make in other evaluative contexts – as

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a stripping away of those specific patterns of sense-­making. We relate to them not as simply lacking sense but as lacking that particular sense, as deprived of or refusing that familiar meaning (so that each bare mark is marked by the present absence of its symbolic individuality, by that which its user’s refusal necessarily invokes). This is not a matter of grasping the peculiar internal logic of an expression of absolute value (since it has none), but of grasping what Nietzsche might call its genealogy; we appreciate the peculiar significance of uttering such nonsense by seeing it as an intelligible outworking of the broader forms of human life within which the words uttered have uses whose internal logic and overall significance can be more straightforwardly grasped. My second source is Wittgenstein’s comparison of a mathematical conjecture that lacks a proof to a riddle for which we have not found a solution (cf. LFM 84). Suppose I ask: ‘What has four legs in the morning, two at noon, and three in the evening?’ To solve this riddle, you need to know more than what that form of words describes; you need to know how it describes it – to see how a human being might be seen as fitting that description, how those words might be seen as a description of human existence. If so, then until we have the solution to the riddle, together with an understanding of how it counts as a solution to it, to that extent we lack an understanding of the riddle phrase that the question employs, and so lack an understanding of the question. It may seem clear in advance that any solution will have to meet certain conditions – for example, that if something has four legs, it must have more than two legs; but that would (falsely) imply that the solution to our riddle cannot be a human being. In other words, we no more understand the further conditions we might impose on a solution to our riddle than we understand the riddle itself: part of grasping its solution as a solution will be grasping how it can be said to meet these ancillary conditions, and so those conditions can’t be said to control what will count as a solution. However, our imaginative engagement with the riddle is controlled by something – by existing patterns of use in our language, on the basis of which the riddle phrase has been constructed. In this case, there are existing patterns of employing number words, of describing animal anatomy and its supplements, and of measuring time; and familiar ways of extending those patterns – for example, comparing different ways of measuring time (measuring the course of a life in terms of the progress of a day). Finding a solution to the Sphinx’s riddle is a matter of finding an appropriate way to project all those patterns onto it; we are not seeking something of which we have been given a determinate description, but something that it will strike us as right to call by the riddle phrase. The familiarity of the phrase’s construction, and of its grammatical connections with

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other phrases, orients our seeking, and gives the phrase whatever meaning we wish to say that it has at this pre-­solution stage; but we cannot simply read off what we will be prepared to count as its solution, or indeed whether there is one. Wittgenstein sees an analogy here with our relation to a mathematical conjecture that lacks a proof. By fixing its place in the system of mathematical propositions, a proof gives the conjecture a determinate meaning it hitherto lacked, although the task of seeking a proof of it is given such orientation as it has, and so the conjecture has whatever meaning we may wish to say that it has for us prior to the construction of that proof, by virtue of our familiarity with other mathematical concepts and procedures on analogy with which the conjecture has been constructed. And Diamond suggests5 that Anselm’s ontological argument can be illuminatingly regarded as a working out of just such promissory connections in the domain of theology, with respect to the riddle phrase ‘that than which nothing greater can be conceived’ (hereafter TTWNGCBC). That phrase is constructed on the basis of a familiar model (great, greater, greatest, greatest conceivable); and Anselm draws upon existing linguistic connections between lacking something, being limited, being dependent, coming into existence and having a beginning in order to establish that if we were to call anything TTWNGCBC, then it would be something that had no beginning. We understand ‘something that has no beginning’ as much and as little as we understand ‘TTWNGCBC’; the link we establish between them is the outer shell of a necessary connection in a language we do not yet know how to speak. We are entertaining familiar words combined in a familiar pattern, holding open the possibility of a new language-­game in which that word-­shape has a place and in which we might find ourselves at home; but if that possibility were realized, it would be the discovery of a logical space, not a discovery within one. Anselm’s emphasis on the difference between existence in the understanding and existence in reality then appears as a (potentially misleading) way of distinguishing between ideas that we can, and those that we cannot, conceive of being the result of human inventive capacities. He wants to emphasize that our conception of what is possible might itself be shown up by reality – that reality might show us not only that something is the case that we imagined was not, but that something beyond what we had ever taken to be possible, something beyond anything we could imagine as possible, was actual. If there were anything answering to that condition, it must also be such that we could not imagine it never having existed. For if we could, then we could separate the idea of it from its actuality, could make sense of the possibility of its being a mere possibility to which nothing actual happened to correspond; but then we could conceive of

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something greater than it – something whose actuality is a condition for the possibility of conceiving it, something without which it is inconceivable that we could possess a language of any kind for it. Hence, anything we were willing to count as TTWNGCBC would have to be something whose non-­existence could not be conceived, something that is conceivable only on condition of its actuality. In the case of ordinary riddles, and mathematical proofs, Diamond argues that it is only when we discover a solution to the riddle, and how it counts as a solution, that we fully understand the question the riddle poses; before this, the relevant phrases have only promissory meaning. But in the case of TTWNGCBC, Anselm establishes that every statement we can make about it can only have a promissory meaning; the full transparency of that language to us is ruled out, because if we could fully grasp its meaning now, then we could conceive of something greater than whatever those words describe (namely, something whose nature exceeds the grasp of any concepts of which we can even conceive). And of course that form of words (‘something whose nature exceeds the grasp of any concept of which we can even conceive’) is no more fully transparent to us than any other form of words to which it is ‘grammatically’ linked, via the outer shell of a ‘necessary connection’. All are ‘allusions’ to a ‘language’ we cannot even conceive of speaking before actually finding ourselves in a position to speak it – a language given to us by the being to whom it applies, and whose revelation of himself will effect the radical conversion of all our existing concepts of him. The phrase TTWNGCBC thus stands in need of a determination of meaning which must come not from us but from whatever it turns out to apply to. Since ordinary riddle phrases can be given meaning by us, insofar as we can find a way of meaning them, Diamond talks of riddle phrases such as TTWNGCBC as embodying a great riddle (alluding thereby to Wittgenstein’s Tractarian invocation of the ‘question’ of the meaning of life (TLP 6.4312, 6.52), which he tells us will remain even were we to arrive at answers to all our articulable, grammatically coherent questions, and to which he tells us there is no conceivable solution, only a dissolution of the question). My synthesis of the two Wittgensteinian sources discussed above is effected by applying them to Aquinas along lines inspired by Grammatical Thomists such as David Burrell and Herbert McCabe. I argue that the whole project of the Summa can be seen as a creative response to the enigmatic authority of one particular riddling phrase from scripture – one amongst many scriptural and doctrinal shapes of truth that Aquinas treats as divinely authorized or inspired

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acts of speech, hence as aspects of God’s revelation of Himself to us, but which therefore necessarily present themselves to us as inherently mysterious or enigmatic. This anchoring phrase is introduced very early in Aquinas’ treatment of his first question, ‘the nature and scope of sacred doctrine’: having argued that we required instruction from divine revelation not only to supplement the disclosures of human reason, but also to place reason’s deliverances in the right light, in Article 3 he declares that ‘Sacred doctrine . . . is chiefly concerned with God, and it turns to creatures considered as being in relation to him, their origin and end’ (ST 1a.1.3, ad 1).6 The Scriptural basis for such a characterization of God lies in passages such as this, from the Book of Revelation (22:13): ‘I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last’. The opening question which orients the Summa (with its tripartite structure embodying a vision of all reality as flowing from and eventually returning to its divine source) thus takes its bearings from that Biblical phrase – treating it as its own alpha and omega; and the rest of the Summa attempts to make such sense of that riddle phrase as is possible, by working out the promissory connections between this phrase and as many as possible of the other riddling shapes of truth bequeathed to us by scripture and tradition, given the concepts and procedures more generally available to us. He thereby constructs the ‘grammar’ of a ‘language’ whose adequacy to the divine reality is guaranteed by the authority of its source, but which we are not and cannot be in a position simply to speak. We understand that God is the solution to all the riddles out of which this ‘language’ has been woven, but not how He is. The Five Ways are Aquinas’ initial attempt to impose conditions on the kind of solution to that riddle that we might accept. If we are willing to call anything ‘the beginning and end of all things’, would we be willing to call it a thing – an object, a substance, an individual particular? Well: according to Thomas’ best understanding of thinghood, any thing is alterable, capable of causing alteration in other things only insofar as it is capable of being made subject to their causal efficacy, capable of going out of existence, imperfect and capable of being subject to the goal-­directedness of others. In one sense, therefore, the realm of things gives content to the very idea of ‘beginnings’ and ‘ends’ out of which the riddle phrase is constructed: without a grasp of alteration and its causes, contingent as opposed to necessary existence, and the way in which values can function as standards and goals, and so bring things and activities into being for the sake of fulfilling an end, we would have no initial grasp on the riddle phrase. But precisely because that initial grasp is conditioned by its applicability to things amidst other things (that is, as part of a world in which what alters or destroys a

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thing, what shows it to be lacking or puts it to goal-­directed use, is some other thing), appreciating that fact has two consequences. First, it naturally generates the impulse to put together the ideas of beginning and ending in a less conditioned or relative way – to construct the concept of something that is (not the beginning or ending – whether causal or teleological – of some particular thing or things but) the beginning and end of all things. And second, it entails that anything answering to that description could not itself be a thing: for then some other thing could in principle constitute its beginning or end. Accordingly, whilst we couldn’t have constructed the idea of ‘the beginning and end of all things’ except out of our conception of what it is to be a thing amongst other things, that point of origin at once implants a natural projective trajectory for the relevant expressions and excludes the possibility that whatever answers to the resulting linguistic construction (what fulfils the intellectual desire articulated thereby) could be any such thing. If ‘the beginning and end of all things’ cannot be a thing, then it cannot have the ontological profile of a thing. And the Five Ways implicitly spell out what Aquinas takes to be the crucial aspects or dimensions of that ontology: the distinction between matter and form (integral to the First and Second Ways), the distinction between essence and existence (implicit in the Third Way), and the distinction between a thing’s present actualization of the norms and ends internal to its nature and the fullest possible such realization (invoked in the Fourth and Fifth Ways). These elaborate our core conception of what it is for a thing to have a nature, a particular manner or mode of being; and they display that and how any given thing is necessarily open to other things (necessarily capable of variously affecting and being affected by them) in the system of nature. If such divisions or diremptions – such structural multiplicities – are internal to thinghood, then ‘the beginning and end of all things’ must lack them: where things suffer a kind of non-­self-identity, one might say, ‘the beginning and end of all things’ must be genuinely self-­identical – wholly one, absolutely simple. Here, the process of condition-­construction for this Biblical riddle phrase makes contact with another such phrase – one that Aquinas cites immediately before developing his Five Ways: ‘Exodus represents God as saying, “I am who am” [Exodus 3:14]’ (ST 1a.2.3). This great tautology immediately denies that, with respect to the beginning and end of all things, one could make a distinction between essence and existence; but since such a denial entails denying the applicability of the distinctions between form and matter and telos and actuality, it confirms what our imaginative conjecture based on the riddle phrase from

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Revelation independently displays – divine simplicity. And this is the insight from which Aquinas begins in his third Question, which orients the rest of his treatment of our ability to know and name God in the Summa. David Burrell formulates Aquinas’ way of formulating the Exodus tautology as follows: ‘to be God is to be to-­be’; or, slightly more telegraphically: ‘to be God is to be’.7 Wittgensteinians such as Anthony Kenny and Bede Rundle find it hard to imagine anything more radically absurd or lacking in sense;8 but sheer nonsensicality is precisely the point. The Five Ways taken individually or collectively, or the Biblical phrases that orient Aquinas’s treatment from its outset, are exemplary instances of great riddles; and what distinguishes great riddles from mere or simple riddles is that an intelligible answer to them is not just a leap of the imagination away (as it is for the princess who, told to come to the ball neither clothed nor unclothed, attends wearing a fishing net). On the contrary, their significance for us as questions depends on our excluding a priori the possibility that we might construct a satisfactory answer to them out of our own resources. Take the Second Way. If the radical causal question it articulates (not ‘Why this as opposed to not-­this?’ but rather ‘Why this as opposed to there being nothing at all?’) is itself a great riddle, it has such sense as we are inclined to attribute to it by virtue of our familiarity with the concepts and procedures of causal explanation on analogy with which it has been constructed; and one condition we impose on the kind of answer to the question that we are willing to accept is that the creator of everything cannot possess or instantiate a kind of causal power (since our everyday grasp of causal explanation tells us that causation is a process by which one thing is made to be or to be otherwise by the operation of another thing upon it or upon that from which it is made). But it is not just that divine Creation ex nihilo is necessarily not any kind of human creative activity; it is equally essential that the very meaning of the word ‘Creation’ in this context is not the result of human linguistic creativity. For if that phrase forms part of a great riddle, its meaning can only be given to us, and by the very Being to whom it will at last successfully refer (when, and only when, we meet Him face to face); and one way of expressing that conviction is to refuse to accept any proffered specification of a grammar for these words, precisely on the grounds that doing so would confer intelligibility upon them. Faith herewith finds a use for nonsense that is significantly different from the (primarily ethical) one we explored in the Tractatus and the Grimm Brothers’ fairy tales, and yet not unrelated to it.

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Silence speaks: Three glances at the 2013 Gifford Lectures At first glance, Rowan Williams’ Gifford Lectures seemed uncannily close to my own Stanton Lectures. Looking at the first chapter alone, the issues and reference points touched on include: the extraordinariness of ordinary speech, the limitations of a descriptive model for religious discourse, Aquinas, pushing everyday modes of causal explanation to the point at which we are compelled to change linguistic gear, Wittgenstein, analogical uses of words, Cavell, difficulties of reality, conversational exchanges, riddles, revelation, Kenny, objects understood as informed matter dependent on pure activity, excessive or projective speech, the intellect being ordered to what it cannot know, and so apparently endlessly on. A second glance suggested, however, that these shared elements were in fact being organized or ordered towards an end that might be the exact opposite of the one to which my book attempted to direct them. To be sure, Williams begins by rejecting the suggestion that we should portray God and God’s dealings with the world as simply another ‘department’ of description: here is an agent with these properties and habits, to be added to the list of other agents with properties and habits[, as if] God ‘comes in’ as an extra item in our routine description of what is the case. EW 4

For him, speaking of God is characteristically or primitively something quite other than this; indeed, it ‘comes in’ by demanding a linguistic response that disrupts such descriptive routines. But he immediately emphasizes two points. First, there are many moments in our familiar perception and discourse where familiar description fails . . . because something is apparently demanded of us – in order to make an adequate linguistic response to our situation – which is not just another attempt to describe agencies negotiating with each other or combining to effect a specific outcome. It is not only that answers fail to come – we have to think again about the questions. Second, we need to explain why a response to this ‘something demanded of us’ is not properly understood as an arbitrary move, drawing us away from precision, labour or indeed truthfulness. . . . It is more like putting the question, ‘What sort of truth can be told only by abandoning most of our norms of routine description?’ EW 5–6

Williams devotes separate chapters to various exemplary aspects of our ordinary practices as speakers in which those norms are abandoned or otherwise put in

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question in order to respond truthfully to reality’s demands. Beginning with a reminder of our freedom as language users (the fact that our speech is not reducible to patterns of stimulus and response, and so not comprehensible as behaviour determined by the causal impact of given elements or states of affairs), he goes on to stress the temporality of speech (its insights being achievements of successive exchange that are always open to fresh events of speaking and hearing), its embodiedness (its rootedness in equally provisional and open-­ ended physical transactions), its excessiveness (its deployment of creative forms of utterance that enlarge language by making us strangers to ourselves and our world) and its capacity for silence (for suspending itself as a strategy for furthering the goals of truthful response rather than abandoning them). Williams calls these phenomena modes of representation rather than description: where descriptions are a mapping exercise designed to produce a traceable structural parallel between what we say and what we perceive, usually with a view to manipulating it, representations ‘seek to embody, translate, make present or re-­form what is perceived’ (EW 22). So representations retain an orientation to truth, without purely reproducing or imitating discrete elements of the world or our experience of it; they answer to something largely irrelevant to prediction and control, something more like a sheer desire to understand and to enlarge the repertoire of communication. In his first chapter he cites a range of contexts (in Western and Eastern religion, in science, in art) in which this ideal of description-­disrupting responsiveness finds analogical expression; and he suggests that its pervasive enactment in our life as speakers suggests a metaphysical vision of reality as ‘a continuum of “analogical” relations in which we can speak of one thing in terms of another, of [relations of] participation existing between not only object and object in the world but between object and representing subject’ (EW 20). This is because to represent anything presupposes that something of what is perceived can ‘come to be’ in another medium – that it has a characteristic form of action or energy (‘energeia’) that can be activated within another phenomenal shape, and so can in some ways be more clearly apprehended when transplanted from its original embodiment to another context. To illustrate such ‘playing away from home’, Williams invokes the lion-­men statuettes produced in the Ice Age era of Homo sapiens’ evolution: figures with lions’ heads and human bodies partly shaped in leonine form. They are depictions of one thing seen as another thing, thereby at once blurring the boundaries between lions and humans and sharpening our grasp of both; and they indicate the active presence of a mind capable of conforming itself to both things in ways

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that do not simply reproduce them but create a new hybrid conception – a mode of responsiveness to reality that is the opposite of the merely playful, or more precisely that reveals such creative, excessive play to be a way of laboriously and rigorously achieving deeper understanding of reality, and of contributing thereby to the materially and temporally embodied communicative exchanges that make up free linguistic interaction, those characteristic forms of activity of the human being. To sum up, then: although Williams regards talk of God as coming into everyday discourse in a way that unsettles such discourse’s descriptive routines, he emphasizes that it is not only talk about God that has this kind of disruptive effect (and so, that religious discourse is not uniquely out of step with an otherwise resolutely descriptive linguistic drive), and he spends most of his time examining the ways in which so-­called ordinary speech is in fact shot through with a variety of such non-­religious representative registers, consciously excessive or eccentric modes of responsiveness to reality. Together, they imply a relation between knower and object of knowledge in which the latter is active beyond the grasp of the knower, but in a way which provokes us to rethink how we might more truthfully talk about it. If, however, such an indeterminate yet intelligible hinterland belongs to every percept, then our experience suggests that reality consistently gives itself to be known. The activity we meet in objects is congruent with our own, and so represents a feature of activity as such, of being as such, moving into our subjectivity as a presence that enlarges our capacity and serves our welfare. It suggests a prior reality of address, to which we are always subsequent and which we are always seeking to receive appropriately. [T]he indeterminate diversity of representational possibility points us towards an abundance that is always bound up in understanding, always rooted in the intelligible, and also active in bestowing its activity on and in what it is not. The schema that is called up as these considerations are spelled out is, ultimately, that of an unlimited intelligence and love . . . an act of intelligent and beneficent ‘bestowal’. EW 32

If this summary is accurate, Williams’ argumentative strategy and my own appear antithetical: for presenting God-­talk as a mode of representation relates it to truth, knowledge and sense-­making in a way my approach resists. Take his treatment of riddles, and of Aquinas’ Second Way. Williams explicitly cites riddles in his first chapter, when arguing that both descriptive and representative modes of speech presuppose schemata of understanding. A schema is ‘a complex of use

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and association or resonance and recognition patterns or habits’ (EW 23); and for Williams there is an irreducible plurality of them. They are not quickly exhausted, and we cannot say in advance just how diverse their range might be; we can only try them and see. An overwhelming number of cultures deliberately push this as a social and intellectual game: how obscure can you get before recognition disappears? Hence the riddles so popular in pre-­modern cultures, in which elaborate metaphorical strategies are consciously developed to make recognition difficult, and so to extend still further the range of what can become part of a communicative exchange . . . . [W]e couldn’t say in advance how many possible riddling ‘kennings’ there might be for familiar objects. . . . [T]here is an indeterminate – or, perhaps better, underdetermined – element in representation so understood. EW 26–7

Riddles here function as one way in which the creative human imagination might deepen our understanding of reality and of one another. They exemplify exactly what Wittgenstein’s invocation of them in attempting to understand mathematical conjecture exploits: their ability to prompt the discovery of a new logical space rather than a new discovery within an established logical space. In this respect, riddles fit neatly within Williams’ investigation of excessive speech. He begins that chapter with a quotation from Margaret Masterman: ‘Paradox is the most extreme kind of metaphor, just as metaphor is the most extreme kind of simile’;9 since Williams has already implied that riddles are an extreme kind of metaphor, they would presumably be located towards the paradox end of Masterman’s spectrum, and thereby exemplify the ways in which paradox can be a vehicle of enhanced insight. With all of this, I would heartily agree. But Williams’ account does not mark a distinction that is pivotal to my own, and so to my understanding of talk about God – the distinction between riddles and great riddles. His interest in riddles seems exclusively directed to that use of them in which it is in principle possible to construct an answer to them, and thereby maintain the possibility of intelligible, truthful discourse about reality employing the relevant riddle phrases. Whereas I argue that it is internal to the riddle phrases that are central to talk about God that the possibility of assigning a sense to them is excluded a priori, for the purposes they serve require that we maintain a relation to them as having been violently dispossessed of any such sense. A parallel sense of divergent goals likewise appears to surface in Williams’ opening discussion of Aquinas and his Ways, particularly the Second.

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[Aquinas] is . . . inviting us to develop the discourse of causality to the point where we sense the need to change gear: everything we encounter is involved in relations of dependence; if dependence is built in to how we make sense of anything at all, are we bound to find ourselves looking for a language to express some sort of global dependence? . . . [I]f it is part of the definition of every particular intelligible phenomenon we encounter that it is contingent, i.e. the result of a process of some sort, we can reasonably say that it is part of the definition of finite and intelligible being that it is invariably involved in processes of causation, and thus marked by dependence. All energy we encounter is involved in energy exchanges; but are we not then pushed to ask about the character of energy as such (pure act . . .), energy that is simply what or as it is, not as the result of a process of exchange? If we move in that direction . . . we do not seek for another object to explore. It cannot be another instance of anything . . . . Something is required which is expressible only in connection with the language of dependence yet cannot be formulated within the normal frame of reference that we use to deal with causal relations. If dependence is built in to the structure of all possible experience and understanding, we are saying that to be anything intelligible at all is to be caused; we could leave it at that, but this would . . . ignore the question about whether and how we ‘frame’ this comprehensive statement. And the frame proposed is . . . that finite being as such and in sum is marked by dependence: to exist as a discrete subject of predication is to depend. So that which is depended on is evoked or gestured to; but . . . we can’t formulate a sensible question as to what sort of thing it is that doesn’t depend because . . . we have now moved away from asking about sorts of things, and the questions we started with no longer move us forwards. EW 9–10

This is a long passage, but I quote it in full because it seems to me vitally ambiguous (or capable of being taken in the spirit of the Cantabrigian Denys Turner rather than the Oxonian Herbert McCabe, as my book might have it). Take the example of energy: on the one hand, Williams acknowledges that all energy we encounter is involved in energy exchanges, so presumably by definition there is no such thing as energy taken in isolation from such exchanges; but then he appears to suggest that we can ask intelligibly about the character of energy as such. We don’t have to do so: we could simply stop by noting the internal or grammatical relation between energy and exchange, as he says we can simply note the grammatical relation between finite beings and dependence. But he also says that stopping in this way ignores the question about whether and how we ‘frame’ such a comprehensive statement. What exactly this question may be, what it amounts to, is left frustratingly unclear; but Williams’ candidate answer (‘to

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exist as a discrete subject of predication is to depend’) is not treated as a mere restatement of the grammatical relation. It is rather said to evoke or gesture to that which is depended on (by any or all finite beings), even though we can’t formulate a sensible question as to what is thereby evoked or gestured to. But doesn’t our inability to formulate such a question show that we can’t intelligibly think of Williams’ proposal as evoking or gesturing to anything either? Williams seems to think that the relevant question isn’t sensible because it presupposes that we are seeking a sort of thing, when we have left that discursive frame behind; but since not all speech is descriptive in that way, he thinks that leaves open the possibility of moving forward as speakers in another way, in a different linguistic gear – that of evoking or gesturing. In short, such religious evocations of that upon which everything depends, of energy as such, of being, are genuinely truth-­seeking modes of representing reality, hence intelligible ways of responding linguistically to what is given to us as comprehending beings. This sense that Williams wants to see talk about God as basically continuous with the other disruptive but nevertheless intelligible representative modes and strategies he discusses in his book is confirmed by the qualms he expresses about Preller’s claim that the human intellect is ordered to a reality it cannot know. Williams first warns that this flat formulation damagingly ignores the complexities of what knowledge might mean; then he says that the process we are seeking to characterize is one in which we are brought to a point where to go on speaking at all requires a shift of expectation, away from the assumption that there will be a point of descriptive closure . . . . When we acknowledge the impulse to continue when ‘ordinary’ description is done with, we . . . seek a register for speaking in this situation [that] might indeed be described as a ‘yielding to what we know’ . . . looking for a discourse that can be acknowledged between speakers. EW 8–9

But the difficulty encountered with religious talk of ‘energy that is not involved in exchanges’ or of ‘that on which all beings depend’ is not generated merely by the mistaken expectation that they’re meant descriptively, and so can’t be resolved simply by seeing that they’re really functioning representationally. The difficulty is that their significance for us in this context lies in our dismantling (and thereby evoking) their descriptive meaning, and refusing to assign any other kind (representational or otherwise). If the significance of such God-­talk is precisely that it is constructed by removing just the conditions that confer sense on it in everyday contexts, then its significance is not best described as a

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way of going on speaking non-­descriptively; it is a way of not going on speaking (descriptively or otherwise). It is not a mode of discourse, but a mode of ‘discourse’ – discourse deconstructed. In short, Williams seems to present talk about God as one amongst a heterogeneous range of intelligible modes of linguistic representation that disrupt our routine descriptive concerns, however distinctive it may be; whereas I want to suggest that at least core regions of such talk about God are essentially discontinuous with sense-­making, whether descriptive or representative. Otherwise put: if these kinds of talk about God count as modes of representation in Williams’ sense, then either that category elides an important distinction (between eccentric or excessive modes of sense-­making and refusals of sense, between riddles and great riddles), or it misapprehends the distinctive way in which talk about God disrupts speech. Even this second glance at Williams’ argument is not, however, enough to conclude that he and I are fundamentally at odds on these matters. To begin with, my own account of the nonsensicality of talk about God lays much stress on the continuities between more everyday modes of language use and the uses to which religious believers resort. First, there are the internal relations between nonsensical religious discourse and its intelligible kindred, the kind found in ordinary, transparent religious language-­games and practices of the kind on which D. Z. Phillips and others concentrate. It is only in the context provided by the latter – the context of a religious form of life – that the sense-­rejecting practices upon which I concentrate could have the significance I claim to discern. In addition, I devote two lectures to arguing that analogous religious uses of language (to which the nonsensical ones belong) tap into the basic nature of words as projective (always already open to new contexts of use), and so into the inherent relatedness of meaning in our forms of life with language. Given my focus on Wittgenstein, I use such phenomena as family resemblance and secondary sense to exemplify the phenomenon; but many of the phenomena Williams discusses would work equally well for my argument. Such continuity is in fact inherent in my argument that the relevant kinds of talk about God are constructed by stripping familiar forms of word use of their sense-­making conditions. That absence of sense is necessarily the result of violence done to, and so depends for its significance on a continued relation to, everyday ways of making sense. To put it in Williams’ terminology, such religious talk is a mode of achieving silence; and as his concluding lecture on that topic stresses, there is no such thing as an unframed or pure silence: ‘Silence for us is always the gap that occurs here, in this specific place between words or images’ (EW 157). Even if any silence does specifically disrupt and modify an equally

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concrete mode of speech, however, does it follow – as Williams infers – that it ‘thus itself “says” something’ (EW 157)? Well: when I stress that such talk about God is senseless, I don’t mean that employing words in this senseless way is itself unintelligible – for we can make sense of those who do it, in part by seeing what they’re doing as extending a creative use of language to its unintelligible limit, and so can perhaps regard what they are doing as a kind of linguistic responsiveness to reality, as a humanly acknowledgeable or acknowledgeably human employment of language. But calling it a kind of ‘saying’ is itself justifiable only if those inverted commas remain firmly in place. My approach plainly taps into a broader tradition of negative theology, with its extreme sensitivity to the extent to which God’s transcendence constitutively resists any attempts to apply language to it. When Williams addresses this manifestation of silence in theology, he first stresses its dangers, citing Eastern theologians’ anxiety that it risks becoming ‘a conceptual game whose outcome is simply a kind of definitional fastidiousness: as if we were just saying “not quite” about various predications concerning infinite agency’ (EW 174). But he is willing to endorse versions of such negative theology which wholly resign ‘the mind . . . to sheer attentive receptivity’ and abandon ‘all aspiration to definitive “experience” of God’; for then ‘[u]ltimately, what matters is . . . a developing understanding of how our thinking and feeling become . . . dispossessed of controllable material’ (EW 174). That, however, is exactly the understanding of religious discourse that my version of negative theology points towards: for its silences are achieved precisely by an imaginative response to great riddles whose provenance is the revealed authority of scripture, and so are framed by a conception of the authority of revelation that emphasizes its requirement that we absolutely or unconditionally cede control of our speech and forms of living. This Thomist reading demands exactly the sense of dispossession, of transcending registers of order and manipulation, in our life with words that Williams says a serious negative theology must deliver (and that would be anchored in a broader form of religious life in which dispossession is embodied or enacted). And such an account would certainly allow Williams to make good on his early and vital acknowledgement that language about God, whilst being far from unique in having a disruptive effect, does ‘[propose] the most serious disruption of all because it proposes . . . something . . . about all possible subjects of discourse . . . so that what is said about it is going to be linguistically eccentric in a uniquely marked way, and the role of . . . strategic silence becomes central’ (EW 31). At third glance, then, I see a deep continuity underlying the more apparent discontinuities between my approach and that of Williams, and one that might be framed in the most general terms that Williams provides for his lectures. For

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he initially presents himself as trying to recover a defensible form of natural theology in the light of currently influential criticisms of its supposed tendency to discount the role of revelation, and so of God’s capacity actively to interrupt our natural processes of thought, experience and speech. For Williams, this overlooks the extent to which a natural theology that is properly sensitive to the pervasive eccentricities of normal life with language already delineates a space within which that divine disruptive capacity can be manifest and acknowledged. His lectures practise just such a natural theology: they foreground aspects of our encounter with reality which are exactly as we should expect if the world really were what the Christian discourse of revelation claims it to be (cf. EW 180). Then my lectures could be read as an attempt to understand that discourse of revelation as the self-­emptying fulfilment of the discursive frames which make possible the understanding of nature, and so natural theology. Both approaches therefore present natural theology and the theology of revelation as each other’s other, internally related and so mutually constitutive. They show, in other words, not only that revelation and natural theology are essentially complementary, but that the same might be said of these Gifford Lectures and my Stanton Lectures.

Notes 1 Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. 2 London: Bloomsbury, 2014; hereafter ‘EW’. 3 Cora Diamond, ‘Ethics, Imagination and the Method of the Tractatus’, in The New Wittgenstein, ed. Alice Crary and Rupert Read (London: Routledge, 2000), 149–73. 4 Diamond, ‘Ethics, Imagination and the Method of the Tractatus’, 166. 5 In ‘Riddles and Anselm’s Riddle’, in The Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy, and the Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 267–89. 6 All quotations from the Summa are taken from the translation in Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae: Questions on God, ed. Brian Davies and Brian Leftow (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 7 David B. Burrell, Aquinas: God and Action (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), esp. 7–8, 24. 8 See Bede Rundle, Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Anthony Kenny, The Five Ways: St Thomas Aquinas’ Proofs of God’s Existence (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969). 9 Margaret Masterman, ‘Metaphysical and Ideographic Language’, in British Philosophy in the Mid-Century: A Cambridge Symposium, ed. C. A. Mace (London: Allen and Unwin, 1957), 283–357, at 295; quoted in EW 126.

8

Wittgenstein and the Distinctiveness of Religious Language Michael Scott

Religious language as a topic of philosophical research has a lengthy pedigree, extending back to at least the middle of antiquity. The high-­water mark of broader philosophical interest in the field was probably during the ‘linguistic turn’ of the early and mid-­twentieth century, when concern about the meaning (and meaningfulness) of religious utterances rivalled or exceeded the attention given to the existence and knowledge of God. However, there are medieval discussions of the meaning of divine predicates, debates surrounding apophaticism, early modern discussion of the contentfulness of religious utterances and much more recent research on religious metaphor, reference and the use of religious language in both analytic and Continental philosophy. We find in this research a wide range of different accounts of how religious language should be interpreted, ranging from what religious sentences are about and what kinds of speech acts speakers employ when they use them, to the attitudes that speakers express when they engage in religious discourse. The aim of this chapter is to situate Wittgenstein’s remarks and writing on religion in the history of this research, better both to critically assess his contribution to the field and to get an insight into how his work relates to other writers on religious language. Trying to get a broader historical and theoretical perspective on Wittgenstein’s account of religious language should not be taken to imply that it’s time to consign his work to history! Indeed, while there are fewer treatments of Wittgenstein’s writings on religion these days than there were (say) twenty years ago, Wittgenstein is still very widely cited and interest in his work has endured for far longer in the philosophy of religion than in many other areas of philosophy on which his writings were far more extensive. However, it is fair to point out that Wittgensteinian accounts of religious language have not prevailed. Dewi Phillips, perhaps the last very widely recognized exponent of such a position,

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died in 2006. A better understanding of the reasons both for the enduring interest in Wittgenstein’s work on religion and for its limited persuasiveness are also aims of this chapter. Wittgenstein’s work on religion has generated not only a substantial literature but a wide range of different theories about what he was saying. A central point of agreement among these theories is that Wittgenstein thought that there were important points of difference between the ways in which religious utterances should be interpreted and the ways in which utterances in other discourses or language games should be interpreted – specifically scientific or historical utterances. A great deal of his writings and lectures on religion seem to be concerned with articulating these differences. However, beyond this broad characterization of Wittgenstein’s position, there is little in the way of further substantive agreement. In particular, what these points of difference tell us more generally about the differences between religious discourse and other areas of discourse remain contentious issues. Theories range from attributing to Wittgenstein a kind of fideism,1 to seeing him as a kind of non-­cognitivist about religion,2 to portraying him as offering a relatively modest correction to standard ‘realist’ accounts.3 This chapter will begin from the opposite direction. What is the view that Wittgenstein is dissenting from? That is, what is the standard theory of purported areas of similarity between religious discourse and other areas of discourse that Wittgenstein wanted to upset? I will set out the kind of theory this might be – I’ll call it the face value theory – in the first section of the chapter. The subsequent section will consider various ways in which the face value theory has been resisted by a variety of philosophers and theologians. I will then consider some of the differences between religious and other areas of discourse that Wittgenstein posits and, further, draw some critical comparisons between Wittgenstein’s and other accounts of religious language. Any treatment of what Wittgenstein says about religion must be prefaced by qualifications about the prospects of reaching an entirely fair treatment of his views. As with many of Wittgenstein’s writings, his treatment of religion is spread through numerous notebooks written over a number of years and is accompanied by notes taken by lecture attendees. However, in contrast with his compendious output on mathematics, or discourse about sensations, his remarks on religions are few in number. They also lack the intense reworking and refinement of specific remarks that we find in his other philosophy. Finally, many of the remarks are personal, reporting his own feelings, grappling with his personal beliefs and not always clearly making a contribution to what he might have wanted to present in a lecture or in a more formal written form.

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The face value theory of religious language Although there is no general agreement on the details of Wittgenstein’s view about religious language, it seems that he was resisting or offering some sort of correction to the prevailing interpretation of religious discourse in analytic philosophy. It is useful, therefore, to begin by considering what this interpretation is. I will call it the face value theory.4 According to the face value theory the affirmation of an indicative sentence about God, such as

1. God created the universe, has the propositional content that God created the universe and is true just in case God created the universe. It should (in normal contexts) be understood as an assertion that conventionally expresses the speaker’s belief in that propositional content; moreover, the utterance represents the fact that God created the universe in just the same way as indicative sentences in science or history aim to describe scientific or historical states of affairs. In general, according to the face value theory, the principal difference between religious discourse and scientific, historical, ethical and other discourses is in their subject matter. The face value theory about the content, typical usage and descriptiveness of religious language (specifically its indicative sentences) often forms the assumed background in tackling questions in the philosophy of religion. I will return to this presently. To begin with, here are two important qualifications to the face value theory. The first qualification is that the face value theory, as it has been presented so far, is clearly incomplete. Beyond the utterance of indicative sentences, there is a rich variety of religious expressions in the form of religious utterances that are non-­literal and/or non-­assertoric – such as metaphors, questions, fictional stories, expressions of hope, awe or devotion. In addition to saying things like (1), speakers also say:

2. God is my rock. 3. Christ is the way, the truth and the life. 4. Believe in God! Clearly, the face value theory will need to provide an account of these too. However, the strategy here is straightforward. According to face value theory, non-­literal speech acts and expressions of attitude are found outside religious discourse as well as within it and the accounts given of the meanings of these

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non-­literal speech acts and expressions of attitude will follow the treatment given to non-­assertoric communication more generally. For instance, while there is a substantive issue of what metaphors are, once we arrive at a theory of metaphor it should apply across different areas of discourse, whether or not they are religious. There is nothing about religious discourse, according to the face value theory, that demands special treatment. The second qualification – which is as much a clarification – is that the face value theory does not suppose that there is a field of religious language that is either discrete or precisely defined. Sentences can fall into a number of different areas of discourse. For example, (5) can lay claim to being a mathematical utterance and (6) to being an ethical utterance as well as being religious utterances:

5. God is one. 6. God is good. Nor is it critical – at least for the purposes of characterizing the position of the face value theory – that there is a precise account of where the boundaries of the subject matter are situated. If a reductionist variety of divine command theory is true, then sentences that appear to be ethical may be better thought of as religious. Without diminishing the philosophical interest of these issues, we do not need to settle them to reach an account of what the face value theorist is proposing. Why does the face value theory command support? One key point in the theory’s favour is its simplicity. It provides a uniform way of treating a variety of different areas of discourse while recognizing that they describe different subject matters. The differences in subject matter, according to the face value theory, do not show that there should be differences in the manner in which those subjects are represented linguistically. Moreover, the face value theory also allows for complications in the treatment of non-­literal speech and expressions of feeling, but sees these as characteristic of a wide variety of different areas of discourse rather than as indicative of systematic differences between them. We can ask questions, use metaphors, express our feelings, and so on, in historical and scientific language as well as in religious language. However, the principal argument in favour of the face value theory is that it can explain apparent linguistic similarities between different areas of discourse. This is, of course, something that Wittgenstein and Wittgensteinians will want to challenge. However, it is useful to begin by considering why the idea that different discourses are not substantially different should be so attractive.

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Consider the similarities between religious, scientific and historical discourse (I select these because they are ones that are prominent in Wittgenstein’s treatment of religion). Sentences of these discourses can be negated and affirmed. We can call these sentences true or false, and call them factual or descriptive. If one person affirms a sentence of the discourse and another affirms a negation of it, they disagree. Sentences of these discourses can be tensed, placed into conditionals, made the subject of a variety of propositional attitudes such as believing, wishing, hoping, etc. Sentences in each discourse can be regimented into arguments that can be evaluated for their validity. We can even mix sentences from these discourses and organize them into valid arguments (as we find in some versions of the design and cosmological arguments). These characteristic similarities in the ways in which we talk about religious, historical and scientific matters lend support to the view that these areas of discourse are fundamentally similar and can be understood with the same general theory.

Challenging the face value theory Most current philosophy of religion in the analytic tradition that is not specifically about religious language has typically taken the face value theory (or at least the main components of it) for granted. An indication of the prevalence of the theory is that opposition to it is sometimes portrayed as a brief historical aberration of the early and mid-­twentieth century, usually tied in with logical positivism, atheism or confined to a lunatic fringe of Continental philosophy and theology and, in any event, lacking any substantial supporting arguments. For instance, J. L. Mackie says: The main reason why it has been thought that religious language cannot be literally meaningful is that some philosophers – particularly the logical positivists – have embraced a strongly verificationist theory of meaning . . . . But this theory of meaning is itself highly implausible.5

According to Richard Swinburne: Some twentieth-­century writers from R. B. Braithwaite to Wittgenstein and D. Z. Phillips have denied that theological ‘assertions’ ever make statements, claims about how things are. As an account of the actual use of such assertions by religious believers of the past two millennia, this is plainly false. The sentences of creeds do make statements.6

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Peter van Inwagen contends that disagreement with face value theory is really an atheistic position masquerading as a religious one: Not so long ago, as time is measured in the history of thought, anyone who said that it was a mistake to regard x as F would have meant, and have been taken by everyone to mean, that x was not F. . . . Not so long ago, everyone who said that nothing had the properties in the list ‘aseity, holiness, omnipotence, omniscience, providence, love, self-­revelation’ would have proudly described himself as an atheist.7

Similar disparaging comments are offered by Alvin Plantinga.8 Putting aside for the moment whether rejection of the face value theory is rationally defensible, the other objections – that such rejection is a twentieth-­ century phenomenon, tied to atheism, or is an outlier theory in philosophy or theology – are all ill-­founded. For instance, Maimonides (c. 1135–1204) treats much of what we say about God as non-­literal;9 Gregory Palamas, writing a couple of centuries later, questions whether either our thoughts or language should be taken as accurately representing God.10 The early Christian theologian Dionysius (writing c. 600) and the unknown fourteenth century author of The Cloud of Unknowing, propose that a closer relationship with God is achievable through the recognition that no utterance represents the way that God is.11 This was not an uncommon view among apophatic and mystical theologians. According to George Berkeley the affirmations of central Christian ideas and doctrines (including the doctrines of original sin, the action of grace and the afterlife) do not express beliefs in them.12 Kant (at least in his more radical moments) suggests that religious judgements are action-­guiding principles rather than beliefs.13 In fact, most theories of religious language that have been the focus of philosophical discussion have been, in one way or other, in opposition to the face value theory. That is, they have pointed up differences of a systematic sort – other than differences of subject matter (which the face value theory allows) – between religious language and other areas of language. It’s time to consider some of the specific ways in which the face value theory has been rejected. The theory has a number of key elements. It proposes of indicative religious utterances such as

7. God is omnipotent (a) that they have a propositional content (i.e. God is omnipotent), (b) that their utterance conventionally asserts the speaker’s belief in what is said (i.e. the belief that God is omnipotent), and (c) that the utterance represents its subject matter

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just as indicative utterances in other descriptive areas of discourse represent their subject matter (i.e. it represents – truly or falsely – the fact that God is omnipotent). Each (and all) of these different components of the face value theory have, by various writers on religious language, been rejected. The most radical rejection of face value theory is that religious utterances fail to express religious propositions (thereby rejecting (a)).14 The most well-­known example of this position is A. J. Ayer’s version of logical positivism popularized in the 1930s.15 However, there are other more constructive ways of rejecting (a). For example, R. B. Braithwaite proposes that religious utterances express plans.16 For instance, he takes (3) to express the intention to pursue an agapeistic life. Notably George Berkeley, mentioned earlier, proposes that talk of original sin, the afterlife, grace and other ‘Christian mysteries’ is not representational but instead serves a practical function of motivating and guiding the faithful to think and act according to Christian principles. A different way of rejecting (a), suggested by Ronald Hepburn, is to argue that many religious claims are paradoxical and fail to express propositions; they have other, pragmatic and non-­representational benefits.17 Also familiar are reductionist accounts of religious language. These allow that religious utterances have propositional content but not the content that they are usually taken to have. Instead, they are taken to have non-­religious – usually naturalistic – truth conditions. Such an approach is taken by Spinoza,18 some supporters of religious empiricism,19 and more recently (in at least some of his work) by Gordon Kaufman.20 There are two main kinds of resistance to (b). The first focuses on speech acts (or, to use the terminology of J. L. Austin, illocutionary acts21). Speech acts are the various kinds of utterances characteristic of a discourse: assertions, commands, questions, wishes and so on. According to one standard account of speech acts, they are characterized by distinctive norms. For example, it’s been proposed that the practice of asserting obeys a justification norm (where the onus is on the speaker to justify what is asserted if challenged) and a retraction norm (a speaker who asserts p should not continue to assert p if p has been shown to be untrue).22 A norm for the speech act of promising might be that if one says ‘I promise to do x’ then one should x unless certain excusing conditions obtain.23 Non-­literal discourse can also be understood as engaging in varieties of speech act. Fictional utterance, on one account, is pretend assertion. Metaphor is a speech act that involves saying something patently false (‘Juliet is the sun’) or trivially true (‘A revolution is no tea party’) in order to suggest something related but different to what is said. Now, according to the face value theory there is no speech act particularly characteristic of religious utterances: there are religious assertions,

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questions, commands, various kinds of non-­literal speech, but there is no speech act that is characteristic of religious discourse. However, there is a history of attempts to resist this view. The view that predicate expressions used about God are invariably used analogically can be seen as an early example of this (although it is a matter of debate whether analogy contributes to a kind of speech act). A clearer and more recent example is the theory that talk of God is irreducibly metaphorical. Paul Tillich’s suggestion that religious language is symbolic is perhaps an early expression of the view.24 Anthony Kenny and Sallie McFague endorse the idea that all statements about God are metaphorical.25 An initial difficulty with theories of this type is that it looks like speakers assert religious sentences. (1), for instance, does not look like a metaphor. Nor does it seem that speakers (many of them, at least) intend to be taken metaphorically when they say (1). They certainly don’t think that what they are saying is trivially untrue (or trivially true), which is what the metaphor theory seems to require. So a preliminary problem is to show why, despite appearances, religious utterances are metaphorical. Perhaps the most serious difficulty with this first kind of resistance to (b) is in working out the norms of religious discourse. Metaphors are, as noted above, typically trivially false claims used to imply or suggest something other than what is said. For instance,

8. God is my rock might be taken to imply that God is, for the speaker, a source of psychological and spiritual comfort or security. If, however, utterances about God are all metaphorical then these implications will also be metaphorical. We will not be able, even by metaphorical implicature, to get to an utterance about God that is literally true. This is, perhaps, a consequence that supporters of this theory would embrace: talk of God is elusive in that it never settles on a true representation. However, the problem this raises is that of determining what the norms of the discourse are if speakers are not uttering claims that are true. The second kind of resistance to (b) does not rely on an account of speech acts but instead argues that religious language is used with distinctive purposes. An example of this approach is Ian Ramsey’s theory.26 He argues that religious engagement involves two things: a commitment and a discernment. The commitment is ‘total’ and is an attitude that is characterized by its intensity and being directed towards the universe as a whole. The discernment involves a ‘disclosure’, which is a type of recognition of something of enormous importance. This recognition he presents as a bringing together of what is known, comparing

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it to a gestalt-­change. With discernment, one sees the world in a new light; one appreciates something of profound value. Moreover, these two things are connected: it is the discernment that gives rise to the commitment. According to Ramsey, the purpose of religious language is to communicate and promote religious commitment and discernment. The following is a sample of some of the proposals he makes about religious language. He proposes, for example, that ‘religious language talks of the discernment with which is associated, by way of response, a total commitment’27 and that the purpose of religious arguments is ‘to tell such a tale as evokes the “insight”, the “discernment” from which the commitment follows as a response’.28 Religious language, Ramsey maintains, generates ‘a sense of the unseen’ or ‘a sense of mystery’, something ‘which eludes the grasp of causal language’.29 We should ‘map our theological phrases with reference to a characteristically religious situation – one of worship, wonder, awe.’30 He suggests that the ‘logical behaviour’ of such phrases be understood ‘as primarily evocative of what [he calls] the odd discernment, that characteristically religious situation which, if evoked, provokes a total commitment.’31 So Ramsey rejects (b) insofar as he thinks that there is something distinctive about the use of religious language: it is in the business of expressing and communicating commitment and disclosure. However, this is taken to be the general purpose of engagement in religious discourse, which is not tied to any particular type of speech act. Of all the lines of resistance to the face value theory, it is the rejection of (c) that is most commonly associated with Wittgenstein. Two of the most notable proponents of this line of resistance – D. Z. Phillips (in his later work) and Hilary Putnam – trace its origins (rightly or wrongly) to his work. For reasons that will become clear presently, I will call their approach minimalism. Minimalists agree with (a) and (b) – i.e. that religious discourse expresses propositions and that it exhibits the range of speech acts that we find in other areas of discourse – but take issue with the face value understanding of descriptiveness along with associated ideas of fact, representation, reference and truth as properties that are realized in the same way in religious, historical, scientific and other discourses. Call these realism-­relevant properties. The opposition involves two main ideas. First, rather than posit a demanding standard that a field of discourse must meet to count as genuinely descriptive, minimalists propose that a discourse that satisfies very modest conditions – for example, that it possesses a truth predicate and standards of justification for what is affirmed or rejected – is thereby descriptive. Second, realism-­relevant concepts are taken to be at least partly constituted by features of the discourse (or ‘language game’) in which they are

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used. Minimalists thereby reject a uniform account of descriptiveness across different areas of discourse. Here are comments from Putnam and Phillips respectively: The use of religious language is both like and unlike ordinary cases of reference: but to ask whether it is “really” reference or “not really” reference is to be in a muddle. There is no essence of reference. . . . In short, Wittgenstein is telling you what isn’t the way to understand religious language. The way to understand religious language isn’t to try to apply some metaphysical classification of possible forms of discourse.32 [B]y all means say that ‘God’ functions as a referring expression, that ‘God’ refers to a sort of object, that God’s reality is a matter of fact, and so on. But please remember that, as yet, no conceptual or grammatical clarification has taken place. We have all the work still to do since we shall now have to show, in this religious context, what speaking of ‘reference’, ‘object’, ‘existence’, and so on amounts to, how it differs, in obvious ways, from other uses of these terms.33

In general descriptiveness, reference, truth and other realism-­relevant notions are language-­game-internal concepts: they are constituted differently in different areas of discourse. These differences in the uses of the realism-­relevant concepts constitute the philosophically crucial points of contrast between discourses. This completes a (very) brief overview of some of the main ways in which the face value theory has been resisted. Accounts that reject the idea that religious utterances represent their putative subject matter include expressivist, non-­ cognitivist and reductionist theories. Accounts that reject the assumption that the use of religious language is similar to the use of other areas of language include metaphor theories as well as praise and prayer theories developed in Continental philosophy. Accounts that reject a unified account of truth, descriptiveness and other realism-­relevant properties across religious and other areas of discourse include the minimalism of Dewi Phillips and Hilary Putnam.

Wittgenstein on religion Finding some common themes in Wittgenstein’s work on religion is challenging because there are different emphases and questions raised in his written outputs and his lectures on the subject. For example, the idea that religious judgements are like pictures is prominent in his lectures but plays little role in his writings.

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However, here are four ideas that are repeated in his work and that are (I hope) relatively uncontroversial elements of what he wanted to say about the distinctiveness of religious discourse. In general, Wittgenstein finds points of contrast between religious judgements and beliefs and a range of other judgements and beliefs: scientific hypotheses, historical assessments, descriptive beliefs about perceivable features of our environment. For convenience, I will call these empirical judgements.

(i)  Religious and empirical judgements are differently related to evidential considerations We find this idea expressed in a variety of ways: The point is that if there were evidence, this would in fact destroy the whole business. | Anything that I normally call evidence wouldn’t in the slightest influence me. | Suppose, for instance, that we knew people who foresaw the future; made forecasts for years and years ahead; and they described some sort of a Judgement Day. Queerly enough, even if there were such a thing, and even if it were more convincing than I have described, belief in this happening wouldn’t be at all a religious belief. LC 56 Queer as it sounds: the historical accounts of the Gospels might, in the historical sense, be demonstrably false, & yet belief would lose nothing through this: but not because it has to do with ‘universal truths of reason’! rather, because historical proof (the historical proof-­game) is irrelevant to belief. This message (the Gospels) is seized on by a human being believingly (i.e. lovingly): That is the certainty of this “taking-­for-true”, nothing else. CV R 37e–38e Life can educate you to “believing 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, – life can force this concept on us. CV R 97e

He also says that the evidence for the truth of a religious belief may be ‘more than ridiculous’ considered as evidence for an empirical belief (LC 61). These comments are just a small selection. In general, Wittgenstein seems to be proposing that the religious judgement that p is not accepted or rejected on the

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kinds of evidence that would be relevant to the acceptance or rejection of an empirical judgement. It is (at least, to some extent) insensitive to doubts that would be considered compelling reasons to reject an empirical belief; it is supported (at least, to some extent) by considerations that would be completely inadequate to support an empirical belief.

(ii)  Religious judgements have practical consequences for believers that empirical beliefs do not have This idea is particularly pressed in the lectures when discussing the belief that there will be a Last Judgement: 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 things which are by far better established for him. LC 54 It will show, not by reasoning or by appeal to ordinary grounds for belief, but rather by regulating for all in his life. LC 54

(iii)  The religious believer and the atheist do not contradict each other; they ‘mean something different’ and are ‘on an entirely different plane’ (LC 53) This idea, in contrast with (i) and (ii), seems to be explicitly about meaning. [Regarding the judgement ‘I believe in the Last Judgement’:] I can’t treat these words as I [would] normally treat ‘I believe so and so’. LC 62 In a religious discourse we use such expressions as: “I believe that so and so will happen,” and use them differently to the way in which we use them in science. LC 57 It doesn’t rest on an historic basis in the sense that the ordinary belief in historic facts could serve as a foundation. | Here we have a belief in historic facts different from a belief in ordinary historic facts. Even, they are not treated as historical, empirical, propositions. LC 57

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(iv)  Religious judgements are differently connected to our other experiences and commitments than are empirical judgements Whereas (ii) concerned the kinds of risk-­taking and practical consequences that follow from having a religious judgement, Wittgenstein also proposes that religious judgements have deeper connections with the experiences and other judgements of believers than do empirical judgements. It appears to me as though a religious belief could only be (something like) passionately committing oneself to a system of coordinates. Hence although it’s belief, it is really a way of living, a way of judging life. Passionately taking up this interpretation. CV R 73e Election by grace: It is only permissible to write like this out of the most frightful suffering – & then it means something quite different. But for this reason it is not permissible for anyone to cite it as truth, unless he himself says it in torment. – It simply isn’t a theory. – Or as one might also say: if this is the truth, it is not the truth it appears at first glance to express. It’s less a theory than a sigh, or a cry. CV R 34e–35e

Although only the third of the above ideas is clearly about religious language whereas the others are nominally about commitments, behaviour and evidence, we should note that it is not entirely clear what Wittgenstein takes to be included as part of the meaning of an utterance. For instance, construed in a sufficiently broad way, the reasons for adopting a judgement or the practical consequences of having a judgement might be considered part of its meaning. Indeed, Wittgenstein seems to have had this construal of meaning in mind: ‘What is the criterion for meaning something different? Not only what he takes as evidence for it, but also how he reacts, that he is in terror, etc.’ (LC 62). Let us proceed, therefore, with this broad construal of the meaning of religious utterances.

Wittgenstein and the opposition Armed with a characterization of the main points of difference that Wittgenstein sees between religious discourse and other fields of discourse (specifically scientific, historical and related descriptive discourses), how do they fit in with

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the long tradition of differences posited by theologians and philosophers who challenge the face value theory and which we reviewed earlier in this chapter? They fit very well indeed. In fact, the kinds of differences to which Wittgenstein draws our attention are just the kinds of differences that many of those who challenge the face value view would see as supporting their (otherwise conflicting) theories. Take, for example, the non-­cognitivist option. For non-­ cognitivists, religious utterances express plans or motivational attitudes in contrast to the belief states expressed by scientific and historical discourse. The kind of differences that Wittgenstein highlights would be welcomed by expressivists because non-­cognitivism appears able to explain them. If religious utterances express non-­cognitive states rather than beliefs, we would expect religious discourse to be distinctively related to our motivations and commitments (points (ii) and (iv) in my list of key ideas from Wittgenstein above). We would also expect non-­cognitive attitudes to be less susceptible to change by empirical evidence than beliefs (point (i)) – after all, non-­cognitive states aren’t truth-­apt so empirical evidence will not be able to establish whether they are true or false. Moreover, Wittgenstein’s point (iii) also fits neatly with non-­cognitivism. If a religious assertion expresses a non-­cognitive state and a denial of that assertion (by an atheist) expresses the belief that it is untrue, then they will not contradict each other. If Peter’s religious utterance expresses his plans and feelings while Paul’s denials express his belief that, as a matter of empirical fact, that religious utterance is untrue, then they are effectively talking past each other. It is not just non-­cognitivism that is receptive to the differences that Wittgenstein discusses. The theories about religious speech acts, religious purposes and what I called minimalism can also find support in what Wittgenstein says. For example, we can see why (iii) fits with these theories. If a religious utterance p is metaphorical, then the speaker is presumably not trying to communicate what p says but something else. So an atheist denying p misses the point of the utterance (someone who says ‘God is my rock’ could even agree that ‘God is not (really) my rock’). Similarly, someone who thinks that truth is a language-­game-internal concept may conclude that asserting ‘God is omnipotent’ in religious discourse is not true in the same way as asserting ‘God is omnipotent’ in other areas of discourse is true. Aside from the thematic differences between religious discourse and other areas of discourse that Wittgenstein presents, his other comments on religion can similarly be used by supporters of different theories of religious language. Here is a selection of some of his more famous statements:

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(a) Rules of life are dressed up in pictures. And these pictures can only serve to describe what we are supposed to do, but not to justify it. Because to be a justification they would have to hold good in other respects too. CV R 34e (b) Religion says: Do this! – Think like that! but it cannot justify this and it only need try to do so to become repugnant; since for every reason it gives, there is a cogent counter-­reason. CV R 34e (c) Christianity is not based on a historical truth, but presents us with a (historical) narrative & says: now believe! But not believe this report with the belief that is appropriate to a historical report, – but rather: believe, through thick & thin & you can do this only as the outcome of a life. CV R 37e (d) In the way in which asking a question, insisting on an answer, or not asking it, expresses a different attitude, a different way of living, so too, in this sense, an utterance like “It is God’s will” or “We are not masters of our fate”. What this sentence does, or at least something similar, a commandment too could do. Including one that you give to yourself. And conversely a commandment, e.g. “Do not grumble!” can be uttered like the affirmation of a truth. CV R 69e–70e (e) Now why am I so anxious to keep apart these ways of using “declarative sentences”? Is it really necessary? Did people in former times really not properly understand what they wanted to do with a sentence? Is it pedantry? – It is simply an attempt to see that every usage gets its due. Perhaps then a reaction against the over-­estimation of science. The use of the word “science” for “everything that can be said without nonsense” already betrays this over-­estimation. For this amounts in reality to dividing utterances into two classes: good & bad; & the danger is already there. CV R 70e

Statements (b) to (d) fit well with speech act theories, statement (e) with minimalism and all of them comport with non-­cognitivism about religion. Moreover, none of them clearly rules out any of these theories.34 Perhaps the lack of theoretical direction in Wittgenstein’s remarks or clear indication of what we should conclude from the differences might be taken as unproblematic. Indeed, perhaps Wittgenstein should be seen as kicking over the traces of research on religious language – in which case, his lack of clearly stated sympathy with any of the challenges to the face value theory that I have discussed

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is understandable (I will come back to this in my concluding section). However, there is a more serious difficulty at hand. It’s that Wittgenstein’s observations also look as if they can be given innocuous readings that are consistent with the face value theory. There are two components to this objection. First, it seems that the putative differences that Wittgenstein highlights can be understood as emerging from the distinctive subject matter of religious discourse rather than as telling us anything interesting about religious language more generally. Second, the differences in many cases do not seem especially relevant to religious language. Many of them appear neither to distinguish religious language from other areas of language nor to be generally true of religious language. Here are three considerations that the face value theorist might raise in response to Wittgenstein’s observations. First, many religious claims are about matters of enormous importance. Whether there is a god or an afterlife, for instance. One’s beliefs on these matters will have significant implications for one’s practical decisions and life plans. So it’s hardly surprising that some religious judgements would have major effects on the lives of those who accept them (points (ii) and (iv)). This is, however, neither distinctive of religious language generally nor generally true of it. There are many matters of religious doctrine that have (at least for some) little or no practical impact on the lives of those that believe them. For instance, the status of angels or the Nephilim. For many, particularly members of organized religions, there is a ‘package deal’ of religious judgements, some of which one regards as very important but others less so. Moreover, there are clearly many non-­religious judgements that are enormously consequential. Judgements about the morality of abortion or of war, political judgements about the rights and duties of citizens, and so on. There are also judgements outside the ethical and political realm that exhibit the kinds of characteristics in (ii) and (iv): the judgement that one has a year to live, that civil war in one’s community is a realistic, imminent possibility, or coming to the judgement that one has been adopted. The significant practical implications of these judgements, however, do not lead us to consider talk of adoption, war, or end of life as distinct areas of discourse (beyond their subject matter). Why, therefore, should it be different for religion? Second, as is commonly observed, religious commitments are often acquired through upbringing and sometimes through personal religious experiences; it is relatively rare that they are acquired by an assessment of empirical evidence. Also, as Wittgenstein notes in (i), some religious commitments look as if they are resistant to empirical considerations – even to the extent that one can maintain a religious commitment in the face of conclusive contrary evidence, or that

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supporting evidence might undermine one’s religious commitments. Does this make for the distinctiveness of religious language or religious commitments? It’s useful to distinguish the more modest claim here about evidence resistance, i.e. that religious judgements are generally not changed or produced by a consideration of empirical evidence, from evidence repellence, i.e. that religious judgements are compatible with conclusive contrary evidence or are undermined by conclusive supporting evidence. Regarding evidence resistance, there are several points that could be made on behalf of the face value theory. They can grant that religious judgements are not easily susceptible to contrary evidence or empirical enquiry, while pointing out that the same is true for many of our ethical and political judgements and judgements that we have about matters that are of great importance to us. More significantly, we find evidence resistance with judgements about matters that are more straightforwardly empirically evaluable. For example, it’s usual to think well of people that we love and be more inclined to dismiss evidence that presents them unfavourably. What of evidence repellence? It is tricky to assess Wittgenstein’s observations on this because it is difficult to determine how people might react in the highly unusual situations in which definitive evidence for or against a religious judgement became available (or, indeed, what that evidence would look like). The best indication that we have comes from research on end of world prophecies where a date in the near future is specified that its believers subsequently live through. These provide the most plausible instances of religious judgements being conclusively disconfirmed by empirical evidence. The most famous research on this is by Leon Festinger et  al., who studied the community of believers in a UFO religion which predicted the world would end on 21 December 1954.35 This and other research36 indicates a mixed picture among the believers: some double down on the religion, reinterpreting the prophecy or the conditions under which it would obtain, while others splinter off. Evidence repellence does not, therefore, seem to be a characteristic feature of religious judgement. Moreover, according to Festinger, persisting in commitments that have been conclusively disconfirmed is part of a broader phenomenon of cognitive dissonance that is characteristic of a wide range of commitments and not just of religious ones.37 Third, what of the linguistic claim in (iii)? If, we mentioned earlier,Wittgenstein is working with a very broad construal of meaning that includes such things as the sorts of evidence that a speaker takes to be relevant for the truth of what is said, or the sorts of reaction that the speaker has to the truth of what is said, then it follows that a speaker expressing her religious judgements will not mean the

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same thing as what the atheist denies. The face value theorist can simply concede that in this broad sense of meaning, Wittgenstein is right, while also pointing out that there is a narrow sense of meaning that is needed if communication is to be possible. In the broad sense, it won’t just be the believer and the atheist who do not mean the same thing, it will be believers in the same community that have different attitudes towards their commitments or consider different kinds of evidence as relevant to their religious judgements. We need a narrower sense of meaning – one linked to what utterances say – to account for why there also seems to be something in common in their judgements that facilitates communication. So, at least, the face value theorist could argue. The range of observations in (i) to (iv) do not, as they stand, upset the face value theory.

Conclusion The aim of this chapter has been, in part, to put Wittgenstein’s work into the context of research on religious language and also to see why his ideas have endured but not prevailed. We are now in a position to draw some conclusions. I have argued that a central focus of Wittgenstein’s work on religion is to identify points of difference between religious discourse and other areas of discourse. It is for this reason, I think, that his work has been a source of enduring interest for researchers interested in religious language: his lectures and writings are a sourcebook of instances of differences that provide the materials for any aspiring opponent to the face value theory. Equally, I have argued that Wittgenstein gives little direction as to what we should do with the differences that he highlights. Moreover, his examples, while often striking, do not seem to be characteristic of religious discourse more generally nor distinctive of only religious cases. It is for these reasons, I think, that his work is now often used as a source of examples in the development of theories that Wittgenstein would not have endorsed. The lack of theorizing in Wittgenstein’s remarks on religion can, of course, be seen as a virtue or even as part of a process of philosophizing that proceeds by describing use, one that ‘puts everything before us’ without explanation (PI §126). However, this is difficult to square with what Wittgenstein does. To begin with, he seems content with the idea that there is such a thing as religious discourse – apparently unified by its subject matter – and is willing to make very broad generalizations about how religious language is used (as in (b) and (d) and many of the other remarks quoted above). A more descriptive project would presumably look at types of language use from a variety of discourses irrespective

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of their subject matter. This alternative project is orthogonal to the investigation of religious language that Wittgenstein pursues.

Notes 1 Kai Nielsen, ‘Wittgenstein and Wittgensteinians on Religion’, in Wittgenstein and Philosophy of Religion, ed. Robert L. Arrington and Mark Addis (London: Routledge, 2001), 137–66. 2 B. R. Tilghman, Wittgenstein, Ethics and Aesthetics: The View from Eternity (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1991); Richard Swinburne, The Coherence of Theism, rev. edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press [Oxford Scholarship Online], 2003). 3 Brian R. Clack, An Introduction to Wittgenstein’s Philosophy of Religion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999). 4 For more detail on this theory as well as its background, see Michael Scott, Religious Language (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) and ‘Religious Language’, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta (2017). Face value is not intended to indicate that the theory is obviously true (or that it should have unchallenged priority in the range of possible interpretations of religious discourse) but that it provides the simplest account of religious discourse consistent with the way in which it appears to be used. 5 J. L. Mackie, The Miracle of Theism: Arguments for and against the Existence of God (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 2. 6 Swinburne, The Coherence of Theism, ‘Attitude Theories’ chapter summary. 7 Peter van Inwagen, The Problem of Evil: The Gifford Lectures Delivered in the University of St Andrews in 2003 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 156. 8 Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), Ch. 2. 9 Moses Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, Vol. 1 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1963), Ch. 52. 10 Gregory Palamas, The Triads, ed. John Meyendorff (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1983), 32. 11 Pseudo-Dionysius, ‘The Mystical Theology’, in Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1987), 133–41; anonymous, The Cloud of Unknowing, in The Cloud of Unknowing and Other Works (London: Penguin, 2001), 11–101. 12 George Berkeley, Alciphron, or the Minute Philosopher, in The Works of George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne, ed. A. A. Luce and T. E. Jessop, Vol. 3 (London: Nelson, 1950).

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13 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), A671/B699, A686/B714. 14 I am calling it the most radical because theories that reject (a) reject (b) and (c) as well. 15 See esp. A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic (London: Gollancz, 1936). 16 R. B. Braithwaite, An Empiricist’s View of the Nature of Religious Belief (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955). 17 Ronald W. Hepburn, Christianity and Paradox: Critical Studies in Twentieth-Century Theology (London: Watts, 1958). 18 Benedictus de Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise [1670], in Spinoza: Complete Works, ed. Michael L. Morgan (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2002), 383–583. 19 For a review, see Nancy K. Frankenberry, ‘Religious Empiricism and Naturalism’, in A Companion to Pragmatism, ed. John R. Shook and Joseph Margolis (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006), 336–51. 20 Gordon D. Kaufman, In Face of Mystery: A Constructive Theology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); ‘Mystery, God and Constructivism’, in Realism and Religion: Philosophical and Theological Perspectives, ed. Andrew Moore and Michael Scott (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 31–46. 21 J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words: The William James Lectures Delivered at Harvard University in 1955, ed. J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), esp. Chs 8 and 9. 22 See, for example, John MacFarlane, ‘What Is Assertion?’, in Assertion: New Philosophical Essays, ed. Jessica Brown and Herman Cappelen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 79–96. 23 See John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971). 24 Paul Tillich, ‘Religious Language as Symbolic’ [1955], in Philosophy of Religion: Selected Readings, ed. Michael Peterson et al., 4th edn (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 398–403. 25 Anthony Kenny, The Unknown God: Agnostic Essays (London: Continuum, 2004); Sallie McFague, Metaphorical Theology: Models of God in Religious Language (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1982). See also Eberhard Jüngel, ‘Metaphorische Wahrheit’, in Metapher: Zur Hermeneutik religiöser Sprache, ed. Paul Ricoeur and Eberhard Jüngel (Munich: Kaiser, 1974), 71–122. Another notable proposal, due to Jean-Luc Marion and Jacques Derrida, is that religious discourse is a form of praise or prayer; see Jean-Luc Marion, God without Being, 2nd edn (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2012) and Jacques Derrida, ‘How to Avoid Speaking: Denials’, in Derrida and Negative Theology, ed. Harold Coward and Toby Foshay (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1992), 73–142. 26 Ian T. Ramsey, Religious Language: An Empirical Placing of Theological Phrases (London: SCM Press, 1957).

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27 Ibid., 49. 28 Ibid., 37. 29 Ibid., 62. 30 Ibid., 89. 31 Ibid., 50. 32 Hilary Putnam, Renewing Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 168. 33 D. Z. Phillips, ‘Philosophers’ Clothes’, in Relativism and Religion, ed. Charles M. Lewis (London: Macmillan, 1995), 135–53, at 138. 34 What of reductionism, which I associated earlier with Spinoza, Gordon Kaufman and others? In fact, this seems to be a theory that Wittgenstein quite explicitly supported, albeit briefly, in the late 1920s and early 1930s. He posits a number of reductions of religious sentences to sentences about subjective mental states (e.g. LE 10). 35 Leon Festinger, Henry W. Riecken and Stanley Schachter, When Prophecy Fails (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1956). 36 See, e.g., Jon R. Stone, ed., Expecting Armageddon: Essential Readings in Failed Prophecy (New York: Routledge, 2000). 37 Some supporters of Wittgenstein deflect potential counterexamples by drawing a distinction between religious and superstitious belief, notably Phillips. See, e.g., D. Z. Phillips, The Concept of Prayer (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965), Ch. 6; for recent discussion, see Mikel Burley, ‘Approaches to Philosophy of Religion: Contemplating the World or Trying to Find Our Way Home?’, Religious Studies 51, no. 2 (2015), 221–39, at 228–9.

9

Number and Transcendence Wittgenstein and Cantor John Milbank

Number, logic and reality What is the difference between logic and mathematics? Western logic effectively began with Aristotle as a theory about the predication of words in terms of the consistent implications of ascriptions of identity and non-­identity. That gave us the theory of the syllogism, which always belonged to philosophy. Only in the nineteenth century, with the work of the self-­educated Lincolnshire man George Boole, did logic get transferred from words to algebraic signs through his invention of logical symbols, and so from philosophy to mathematics.1 Once this had happened, an ironic consequence ensued: people tried to make logic the foundation of mathematics, and so, in a way, to verbalize number, or at any rate to algebraicize it, in the long-­term wake of François Viète (Vieta) and René Descartes.2 But mathematics is not about the predication of identity and non-­identity: the basic operation of addition is not affirmation, just as the operation of subtraction is not denial. Rather, it is confusingly both a construction of an organized and self-­consistent abstract spatial and temporal reality, and an intuition of this reality as existing, although normally invisible. One makes what one measures and measures what one makes. Thus ‘the true is the made’: the old medieval and Thomist transcendental verum is also the new transcendental factum, as first Nicholas of Cusa and later Giambattista Vico put it, initially for both in the context of philosophy of mathematics, before Vico applied this principle to human history. (The notion that all knowing is creating and all creating is knowing may be ultimately derived from John Scotus Eriugena; for all three thinkers this is grounded in a Trinitarian logic – the Father knows in

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generating the Son/Logos.) These two conjoined characteristics, of measuring and making, invoke a solid and substantial yet in some sense constructed world that is intuitively quite different from the world of logic: it seems, by comparison, to partake both of ‘art’ and of external reality.3 It is for this reason that mathematics, all the way from Pythagoras to Quine, has often presented itself as a more plausible candidate for ontologization than has logic, even though such ontologization, as in the case of Quine, is intimately bound up with the natural pragmatism of mathematical activity.

Numerical Platonism Even in the case of Plato, there was already a certain link between the theoretical certainty and the evident practicability of mathematics – a link later emphasized by the theurgic Neoplatonist Proclus. As with all the ancient Greeks, as Jacob Klein pointed out, number or arithmos is for Plato the measure of a collection of ‘somethings’, and never exists in pure abstraction.4 It therefore follows that Plato himself was not ‘a mathematical Platonist’ in the debased sense in which that term is used today. However, if number is considered reflexively (as opposed to abstractly), then, considering the pragmatic reality of all arithmoi, it followed for Plato that if numbers themselves can be numbered (as seems to be strikingly the case) then they themselves constitute a ‘corporeal’ collection of real ‘thingy’ entities, existing on their own elevated psychic plane – yet not outside this plane of awareness – to which only souls have access. Nevertheless, the air at this height is very thin and rarefied, because it does not reach up to the real glorious heaven of the ‘intellectual’ divinities which is thickly populated with the plenitudinous eidē or ‘forms’ – the super-­numbers – which are the archetypes of real physical entities. But as with the forms, so also with arithmoi, Plato’s belief in their eternal character is not to do with a hypostatization of abstraction or empty universality, but the very opposite: an insistence on the concrete character also of the ideal, and of the eternal reality of the concretely manifest and identifiable content of all appearing entities. Just because of his conjoined realism and pragmatism concerning numbers, yet his sense of their abiding truth as disclosed by their perfect reflexivity, Plato arrived at his own authentic ‘Platonism’, for which number and more particularly geometric shape was the key to entering the philosophical academy, though it did not provide the whole content of the doctrine that one learnt within its portals.

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Number and sign For once inside those portals, one had to consider the shape of the key as a clue rather than a directly effective instrument: it pointed towards the abiding forms, but their fuller disclosure was less apodeictic than mathematical procedure, and involved the endless detours of both negative dialectical refutations of falsity and the positively poetic, rhetorical, mythical and ritual confirmations of truth through the reading of temporal, physical and cultural signs. The richer truth of the forms in balmy celestial climes was nonetheless less evident than the bare but complete truth of number, directly accessible on the alpine heights by a purely alpine climb, since in the mathematical field ontological content and gnoseological method are purely at one. The fact that this is not the case for the higher and completer truth of the eidē, in whose truth even the truth of number merely participates (as the ineliminable mathematical aporiae tend to reveal) constitutes what has well been called ‘the ancient dilemma’, whereby the further off and less accessible is truer, but the more completely at hand is deceptively clearer and more apparent.5 One should not therefore take the immediacy, integrity and entirety of number for the final and complete truth, evading the need for a hermeneutic of obscure signs that always point away from themselves in lack of a completely realized integrity. But on the other hand, it is just because the forms do not, like numbers, offer themselves to an immediate vision and constitution, that this path of conjoined dialectical and grammatical method has to be trodden, and the guiding thread of this path remains that of number, since it leads the self-­ negation of the sign away from itself towards the super-­integrity of the forms. It is just this logic that informed the medieval educational ascent by way of the ‘liberal arts’ from the trivium of the sign-­disciplines through the quadrivium of the number disciplines (including music and astronomy) to the heights of philosophy (metaphysics, ethics and rational theology) and revealed theology concerned with the pure formal-­intellectual existences of God and the angels, besides the hybrid formality of the created material world which participates in and is governed by the celestial realm.6

The strange numerical kinship of Wittgenstein with Plato If Ludwig Wittgenstein had been aware of all this, then surely he would have realized that his own intriguing anxiety concerning the modern ‘forgetting’ of

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simple mathematical processes of counting and so forth was a Platonic anxiety after all. This anxiety is, for example, expressed in his statement, with regard to Georg Cantor’s diagonalization proof, that ‘the concept “real number” ’ [that is, all the numbers on a modern number line, including fractions and irrationals] may have ‘much less real analogy with the concept “cardinal number” than we, being misled by certain analogies, are inclined to believe’ (RFM II §22). I shall eventually revert to his attitude in this respect. For the moment, in relation to Wittgenstein’s remark, it should be noted here that traditional, Pythagorean and Platonic-­influenced mathematics did not allow that fractions, decimal and negative numbers had the full status of arithmos, while zero quantity was not seen as a number at all, but rather as its specific absence. Many, like Jacob Klein himself, have supposed that this rendered ancient mathematics incapable of resolving the aporiae posed by irrationals, and so of approaching the modern ‘solutions’ proposed by calculus and other modes of probability theory, which depend upon the admission to full ontological status of all so-­called ‘real’ numbers.7 But the Warwick University mathematician D. H. Fowler has shown that it is perfectly coherent to argue, after Plato, that any division is more primarily a multiplication, such that, for example, a divided loaf can only be perceived as such because, with phenomenological priority, division has resulted in the new appearance of two pieces of bread.8 With equal coherence, one can add, subtraction is more primarily for Plato an addition: there is only a remainder of three if you take two from five because you are still glimpsing the actuality of the banished two out of the corner of your eye, even if your action pretends otherwise. In this way, on a Platonic view, the cumulative number series – 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 etc. – holds logically and ontologically a pre-­eminence, while the possibility of variant arithmetic operations of subtraction, division, multiplication and so forth has to do with the fact that the number one is not exactly a mere arithmos, but a reality transcendent to the entire arithmetic field, which allows it to exist at all. The tension between any ordinary arithmos and the number one, or the fact that, for example, the number five must be a complete unity in order to be ‘five’ and yet is not a pure single unity after all, is exactly what permits the methodical permutations on addition. Thus the number five, because it both is and is not a unity, can be further multiplied, removed from and divided. By contrast, these processes cannot strictly speaking be applied to the number one at all. When they are applied, for example, to the number five, it does not cease to be a unified five, since this starting point is the required presupposition for the operation of the processes. But when they are applied to the number one, then it has already

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ceased to be the number one and has become many, such that progress can only be here made by belying the reality of the starting point, that is by cancelling its presupposition. Arithmetic is then primarily constructive, yet the possibility of this process rests transcendentally on a deconstructed ultimate foundation in unicity. It is because these basic arithmetical situations and operations are already for Plato aporetic, involving a problematic diminution of thinly unified reality, on a psychic plane already less than the replete noetic reality of the forms, that he does not really have a problem with the aporias posed by the existence of incommensurability and irrational quantities (such as Pi).9 For Plato in The Sophist, and according to the record of his oral teaching, the indeterminate Dyad was co-­primary with the One, if of lower status. Accordingly (in line with the aporetic logic just described), the inherently fluid ‘Two’, problematically in conflict with the very unity that it also expresses, was ingredient in the ultimate reality known to us.10 By comparison, the early modern invention of ‘the number line’, or the acceptance of the full numerical reality of negatives, fractions, decimals, irrationals and zero, can be regarded as an attempt to evade the really non-­ evadable aporiae consequent upon the problematic inter-­involvement of the one with the many and of the indeterminate asymptotic approach to indeterminate quantities – which implies, in modern mathematical thought, a bizarrely measurable excess of a specifically indeterminate point over a specified indeterminate sequence. For now, the primary integral reality of the integers has been denied, along with the overarching transcendental character of numerical unity for the numerical field of pure multiples – abandoned by specifically Greek-­hating Calvinists like Vieta in favour of an ultimately Hindu and Islamic-­ derived transcendentality of a blank zero, which was now elevated beyond convenience (the Arabic numerals including the zero-­sign having been in Latin usage since around 1200) to be regarded not just as a fully-­fledged number, but as the very principle of number, replacing ‘one’ in this respect, but with the very different transcendental implication of ‘flattening’ every other number to univocal equality with itself.11 The new status of zero as a proper number also implied a levelling of affirmation with negation and an insinuation of dubious conventions, such as that the sum of two multiplied negations is supposed to be a positive, as absolute and allegedly provable classroom truths. In consequence of the epochal seventeenth-­century shift, the number line approaches the condition of a continuum, or of a quasi-­geometric indefinitely-­ stretched, thread-­like magnitude. In this way, after Vieta and Descartes, the

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difference between the arithmetic counting of a multitude of discrete items (reflexively the arithmoi themselves) and the geometric drawing of discrete magnitudes – which can, unlike arithmetic entities, be of any size, since their integrity is rather defined by their shape – is algebraically denied. Not only, as the esotericist René Guénon pointed out, does modern thought thereby undergo a quantification, it also loses a qualitative difference within the quantitative sphere itself.12 Only recently has this suppression finally leaked through to ordinary linguistic usage itself: thus the adjectival qualifier ‘less’ now serves to cover also ‘fewer’, to the screaming-­point despair of people of my generation. But a serious metaphysical point lurks here: this suppression collapses both number and shape into, bizarrely, a quasi-­linguistic because algebraic blur; just as inversely and tellingly, Vieta’s Huguenot friend Pierre de la Ramée (Ramus), who shared his hostility to the entire Greek legacy – to the extent of imagining a Biblical affinity to a conjectured truer, near-Eastern ancient science – collapses the linguistic sign into an exact measurable position on a grid of mathesis.13 In this way number and sign fuse with each other and thereby quantity and quality. In a really peculiar way, the quantification which Guénon saw as the crucial mark of modernity involves more deeply an unnatural qualifying of quantity, besides the quantification of quality. It is just this confusion which undergirds the modern claim, as with the calculus, to handle exactly the inexact. For now the continuum can be divided ad libitum, and aporetic leaps can be putatively plastered over in terms of a precisely measurable consistent ratio of degrees of asymptotic approach to a transition that cannot really be made in any finitely specifiable series of steps. But the projected consistency of measure is supposed to be able to convey you safely and rationally over every quantitative abyss. One can note here that Wittgenstein’s disquiet with non-­finite number extended also to a certain unease even about the calculus of infinitesimals, even though he thought that in a simple ‘abacus’ sense, ‘Mathematics is always a machine, a calculus’. Since, nonetheless, ‘The calculus does not describe anything’ (WVC 106), the modern calculus of Newton and Leibniz should not be thought of as an infinitesimal approach to something real, if elusive. One can claim that this modern geometrized and algebraicized arithmetic perspective suppresses aporias, since they would be an embarrassment for its finitized rationalism, whereas the older Platonic approach can readily confess them, within its hierarchy of metaphysical sense, which takes number as a guiding clue to the plenitude of the rational, the logikos, but not as its full actuality. And it is not, as Klein thought, inhibited from grasping ‘solutions’ like those of the differential calculus to the problem of the infinite ‘fluxional’ approach

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of the curve to the straight line because of its inability to see that fractions have the status of fully-­fledged numbers. For as Fowler has shown, the mathematics of the Academy dealt with both fractions and asymptotic approaches in terms of anthyphairesis, which involves repeated subtraction, whereby fractions can be reduced to the endless multiplicatory emergence of new whole numbers: so instead of one half, two from one and so forth.14 This same approach, rather than claiming to isolate ever new ‘real’ numbers, instead supplements strictly ‘arithmetic’ additive processes, whether pursued up or down the scale, with what the Greeks understood to be those of logistikē, or of the ratios between numbers as exposed to a more reflective consideration, such as is already involved for subtraction, multiplication and division. For a logistical perspective, it appears that the unity of three, for example, is really to do not just with the unproblematic counting of digits, but also with the mysteriously problematic proportion between ‘three’ and ‘one’, whereby the unity of three can nevertheless be recursively applied again to its threeness, to give three ‘twice’, and then indefinitely many other times. The other operations of subtraction, division and so forth can similarly be derived from this not exhaustively fathomable and tensional ratio.15 Such a logistical approach to more complex arithmetic operations in terms of a consideration of proportions or ratios also implies a certain geometric dimension to arithmetic, since the repeated application of a ratio implies an indifference to exact multiple content, more characteristic of the geometric concern with integral magnitudes that can be of any size. Thus in logistic the operation of a rule of ratio involves the imagination of a certain quasi-­spatial proportion, rather than a completely specifiable quantity graspable by pure intellect as a series of cumulative temporal moments. For this reason, as Klein showed, logistic tended to migrate, in Neoplatonic thought, somewhat under the influence of the Pythagorean priority of arithmetic over geometry, to the side of mere pragmatic application of mathematical principles. But in the case of Plato there remained a strict logistikē theoretikē, and this fact can be connected with both his privileging of geometry over arithmetic and his exaltation of the metaphysical dyad to near parity with the metaphysical monad. Logistic in this way formed a kind of hinterland between arithmetic and geometry, without ever losing the integral difference of the two processes.16 This loss rather occurred in modern times, with Descartes and others, as we have just seen. In short, Wittgenstein shares with Platonic tradition a sense that the ordinary and primary procedures of arithmetic and geometry are both primary and more real. But he fails to see that certain mathematical mysteries are linked with just

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this primacy, whereas the modern attempt to supress these mysteries is equally linked to a denial of the real primacy of the ordinary number series and the irreducible difference between the arithmetic and the geometric.

Infinity and calculation The invocation in Platonism and Neoplatonism of the principle of repeated application of proportionate operation allows that one might approach an inexpressible quantity in a consistently ordered way without abolishing the aporia of this advance, or invoking a kind of phantom exact quantity after the manner of Leibnizian or Newtonian calculus – a quantity virtually present and entertained as a ghostly (non)possibility that is taken to command our conception of the mathematically actual. Repeatability raises the issue of the infinite, but only with Plotinus and some of the Church Fathers did the unbounded as qualitative and simple, because beyond all quantitative bounds, emphatically become an attribute of the absolute, in a climate influenced by the general late antique exaltation of initiatory darkness and mystery.17 It was this metaphysical development that made transcendently actual infinity respectable,18 and slowly it began to creep into the immanent sphere also. The latter development was therefore plainly not, contra some accounts, at first a secularizing one. Thus several of the scholastics already intimated the reality of transfinites, because they observed, for example, that the infinite series of even numbers is equal in length to the infinite series of prime numbers, although the latter must be simultaneously of a seemingly greater size. Robert Grosseteste, the twelfth-­century statesman and Bishop of Lincoln, even constructed an ontology of light which construed it as mediating in a series of transfinite descents between the infinite God and finite creation.19 Nicholas of Cusa (followed later by Blaise Pascal) finally embraced the infinity of the universe, holding, with Giordano Bruno soon after, that it, too, was ‘an infinite sphere whose centre is everywhere and circumference nowhere’.20 But in the former case there was no blasphemy, because Nicholas effectively saw this infinity as transfinite: it is extended or ‘explicated’ and not ‘simple’ or ‘complicated’, meaning ‘infolded’ in Cusan terminology.21 There are, moreover, for him different degrees of infinity in respectively the intellectual, the psychic and the material spheres. In this way we can see that the positive consideration of the actual infinite in Bruno and Spinoza is a post-Christian development.

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But Bruno and Spinoza still left actual infinity as the presence of an immanent deity; it had not yet consistently invaded the domain of human mathematics as something that might be unproblematically dealt with. That began to happen after Descartes had algebraicized geometry and Leibniz and Newton were then able to algebraicize and numerize in their ‘Calculus’ the ‘fluxions’ of curves as tending to straight lines or perfect circles, even though they do so by infinitesimal degrees. We need, however, to note here that the link between the downgrading of geometric construction and the algebraic invocation of abstract infinity is not so obvious as some historians think. For in the case of Proclus, so influential on Cusa, the Neoplatonic gloss on Euclid held the abyssal mysteries and paradoxes of the metaphysical to be reflected in the imagined arithmetic one and in the drawn point, line and circle, and in this fashion had already intimated the phenomena of continuum and calculus – as many Renaissance thinkers realized – yet still in entirely mystagogic, aporetic terms.22 Even in early Enlightenment Naples, Giambattista Vico and Paolo Mattia Doria continued to be able to give Proclean renderings of the new incorporations of the infinite while defending the primacy of geometry over algebra and the primarily synthetic and physically constructed character of the former.23 The genuine Platonic tradition in mathematics, because it believes, after Plato, that perceived mathematical realities only invoke the forms through dim recollection of a forgotten spiritual realm (not an a priori interior grasp) and therefore require the use of the senses, sustains the role both of intellectual intuition of numerical essence and ratio, or theoremata, and of concrete imaginary or physical construction, or problemata. This approximately accords with the way that there was, as we have seen, originally for Plato, and still more radically than for later Neoplatonism, a ‘theoretical logistic’, or a reflexively operational ‘theoretical application’ to the material of arithmoi themselves. Partly because of the tension between a Cartesian formalist and pragmatic attitude to the calculus, and this more realist, ultimately Platonic metaphysical interpretation, there were heated debates in the eighteenth century about the ‘infinitesimal’ or an infinitely small number that is still more than zero.24 These also correspond to the inevitable modern hesitation between the seeming opposites of mathematical conventionalism on the one hand, and a newly literal physicalization of mathematical truth consequent upon Descartes’ attempted identification of arithmeticized geometric space with physical space itself, on the other. The formalist view was that the infinitesimal was a convenient fiction; the realist view was that the infinitesimals really exist. That view would effectively

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provide us with other examples of transfinites. This same spectre hovered over the new application of infinitesimal calculus to number theory in the nineteenth century by Bernhard Riemann and others.25

Platonizing Cantor, rendering Wittgenstein realist But all this held-­back mathematical hot air was as nothing to the gas clouds released in the same century by Georg Cantor. He broke with the intuitive primacy of ordinal numbering in time by making spatial cardinality central: not the series 1, 2, 3 . . . but, for example, the number ‘three’ standing alone and indicating the ‘set’ of all things that contain three items.26 This new move has proved incredibly ambivalent. Was it about ending or rekindling mystery? It might seem to awaken certain Platonic and realist echoes, re-­invoking the unique integrity of every arithmos.27 But, conversely, the set can be construed, not as a reversion to eidos, but rather as inviting a subordination of mathematics to a nominalistic logic, such that number becomes a sheerly conventional grouping of random singularities, brought together by a spatializing gesture to produce ‘every three’, ‘every four’ and so forth, rather than being conceived of as the unique result in due order of an inexorable process of addition. In that case it is rather ordinality that would stand Platonic sentinel over the integrity of each unique linguistic arrival. By contrast, a nominalist conception of cardinality points to a formalism that encourages us to stop thinking of numbers as either artful construct or strange intuition of psychic essences, or else both at once. Yet, on the other hand, Wittgenstein complained in his notebooks that Cantor had invented sets precisely because he was a mystery-­monger, in love with the pseudo-­religious (as Wittgenstein debatably saw it) consolation of paradox (e.g. RFM II §§18–38). How can this accusation be half-­plausible? How can sets favour mystery as much as series? Or mystery lurk in space as much as in time? How can sets prove to be just as primitive and indefinite as serial ordinals? These strange circumstances arise because Cantor discovered two key contradictions. First, the set of all sets contained within a set, the so-­called ‘power-­set’, is bigger than the original set. All the sets of component parts of three are more than three; all the complexities of a seed exceed its visible oneness. We have already seen how the Platonic primacy of multiplication over division would, however, interpret this circumstance in terms of the aporetic relationship between the real transcendent numerical One and any purely finite unity.

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Secondly, he vastly exacerbated the medieval examples of transfinitude. At least the series of all even and the series of all prime numbers are ‘denumerable’ in the sense that we can draw a series of ‘bijecting’ lines between each step of the two advancing series: 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12 ad infinitum can be made in this way equivalent to 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13 ad infinitum, as we saw was observed by Grosseteste. So in one sense they are the same size after all, for they remain always strictly proportionate to each other. But Cantor now showed that, in the case of infinite sets of real, decimalized numbers, all the endlessly diminishing or advancing horizontal series which we can display in a square diagram and which should be exhaustive, are always ‘exceeded’ by a disproportionately non-­equivalent ‘larger infinite’ since a diagonal series drawn across them will exhibit an alternatively ordered series to that of every instance of the horizontals by the simple device of changing in turn by one position the decimal place of the first number on the first line, then the second on the second line and so forth, a procedure which can go on indefinitely, because decimal fractions are infinitely divisible. Even if the newly emergent diagonal can be re-­inscribed as a new horizontal, and so bijected, the diagonalizing procedure can always resume beyond this bijecting inclusion. And this means that the infinite sum of all real numbers is greater than the infinite sum of all rational numbers, which can be exhaustively specified, even in the instance of their infinity, by the set contained in the square of their exhaustive succession.28 Such a ‘diagonal’ excess can be equally and undecidably seen as the excess of the power-­set over the original one, or else the excess of that set itself over any possible sub-­settings. ‘Diagonalization’ is a geometric metaphor, and perhaps irreducibly so, to the point of real analogy. Such a geometrization of Cantor would be a Platonic, Proclean or Cusan move, as it would imply that his mathematical mystery is ‘logistically’ traversed within the real but contradictory structures of the geometric realm as finitely, physically embodied. By this same token, however, it would contend that his proof can after all also be performed with the infinitized positive multiples of prime numbers, omitting any decimal points, but now arranged in random, not regular advancing series, since regular series could still be denumerated through bijection. Since the series lacks any principle of construction, and since in any infinite series of whole numbers there must be always ‘yet more’ unfilled numerical gaps to come, each number can be arbitrarily shifted a horizontal place forward on the diagonal, instead of shifting the decimal point ‘one more step’ – which though a more regular procedure, is also an arbitrarily adopted one. In either case one is showing that there is a paradoxical ‘more’ within a seemingly exhaustive square container.

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Alternatively, one could no doubt devise (or a computer could no doubt devise) a procedure whereby, even given regular horizontal series of whole numbers, the diagonal operator continuously altered the rule of succession for each line, giving an alternative logic to the succession achieved so far, since, in principle this always remains possible: e.g. 2, 2, 2, 2 might be completed by 4, if the rule has now become, not ‘repeat’ but ‘double at the fifth stage’, while at the tenth it might be ‘double’, or it might be ‘quadruple’ and so on. It is always possible alternatively to complete a series by shifting the rule of composition and yet maintaining consistency. These presentations would be in accordance with the linked Platonic principles of the primacy of the positive and multiple over the negative and divisory, and of the determination of the infinite as equally ‘great’ and ‘small’. But in that case the excess of the real over the rational infinite in the case of decimals is qualified: for it is only after all an instance of an excess pertaining also in the case of infinite primes, but with the additional Cantorian discovery – beyond Grosseteste – that this excess is no longer one of mere quantity, but also of measurable, denumerable ratio. Such an incommensurate and utterly paradoxical excess of infinite primes over the entire set of infinite primes is no longer simply an incommensurate excess of the real over the rational numbers, but rather of infinite natural numbers or integers over themselves. And since all calculations with real numbers can only use conventional permutations of the integers, one can argue that the instance of excess of the infinitesimals over the set of all rational numbers is secondary and parasitic. Looked at in this revised way (which is at least logically possible) Cantor’s discovery much more emphatically points to the actuality of transfinitude and the paradoxicality of the real limits of the world. And indeed, at bottom, Cantor might not have been averse to this development, since as a devout Catholic he wished to read his transfinites as signs of the participation of the finite in the real, absolute simple infinite of God, enfolding all transfinites together in his ideas.29 Neither Wittgenstein nor Cantor would then turn out to be wholly right: the former’s semi-­finitism would have failed to allow for this new incommensurability (or even to admit Grosseteste’s medieval paradox); but the latter would have apparently failed to see the primacy of the instance of the diagonal paradox in the series of mere infinite primes, given the imaginative and so arguably transcendental primacy of the ordinary countable number series, which Wittgenstein, curiously like the Platonic tradition, so much insisted upon. In that case, Cantor’s argument assumes a much more immediately realist complexion.

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In saying that real numbers are only analogous to cardinal numbers, thereby affirming in some sense the latter’s cognitive primacy, Wittgenstein was precisely gesturing towards realism in a Platonic fashion in a way that he did not, of course, suspect. However, he failed to allow that, even given such a primacy, Cantor’s claim can still hold good, since it does not, once ‘Platonically’ revised, really depend upon the equally numerical character of infinitesimal fractions and decimals (along with zero and irrationals) along the modern ‘real’ number line.

Wittgenstein and Aristotle: Infinity and motion But do we really need to take Cantor seriously? Some of the intuitionists and constructivists, who favoured time, series and ordinality, thought not. These included Brouwer, Poincaré and Bergson. But also Wittgenstein, who heard Brouwer lecture, with approval.30 Wittgenstein, however, in order to reject the realism of Cantor and of Kurt Gödel, went to very extreme lengths. There is for him, in the strong ontological sense, no potential infinite for mathematics, never mind any actual one (RFM II §45, V §14; LFM 255). He reduces the potential infinite to the logical or grammatical rule to ‘carry on’, making it ‘the property of a law, not of its extension’ (WLC 13). Mathieu Marion in my view wrongly equates this reduction with Aristotle’s denial that potential infinity could ever be actually realized, in the way that a potential statue can eventually come about.31 But for Aristotle potential infinity still clearly denotes an indefinite power that is extensionally ‘out there’ in the world, something that can be ever further actualized, though never completed in its full actuality, which for him is impossible. Thus time and human generation are both actually without limit, although this lack of limit ‘is not (like the statue-­ potentialities of the bronze) all actualized at once, but is in course of transit as long as it lasts’ (Physics III, 6, 206a22–4). The same applies to division of a magnitude, except that in this case the discarded parts remain to rebuke in their persisting actuality the infinitely destructive ambition of the divider and do not vanish down the abyss of the more successful destroyer, time (III, 6, 206a30– 206b2). Marion equally fails to see that for Aristotle apeiron is a kind of ontological chaos and not just a heuristic instruction. Indeed, since an infinite hovering between act and potency is for Aristotle the condition of motion, which as moving is never ‘over’ (as recent commentators have stressed),32 the apeiron, as

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with the later Plato, is even implicitly shifted beyond chaos in its linkage to the ontologically real condition of motility. For Aristotle is forced to begin to see this condition as almost as real as the condition of substance, if potential belongs to being as much as act does, and the transition between the two which is movement is infinitely continuous, so long as motion remains in the condition of transition.33 Otherwise, one could reduce every motion to a series of initial and final states of actuality and the reality of motion would be denied. It follows that, insofar as motion for Aristotle is real, then there is an as it were ‘actual’ state of infinite potentiality that really exceeds, just as ‘mediating’ motion does, the contrast of potential and act.34 For this reason above all, infinity in Aristotle has an ontological import, since even the mere potentiality of the infinite as motion is for him more than an ordinary potential for act cancelled by the realization of the act (like a municipally proposed statue by the completed edifice); rather, it denotes an ‘actuality’ of this aporetic indefinition. Just as real potential is for Aristotle not a mere logical possibility, but a real ontological latency, so also for him the dynamic potential that is movement is a still more mysterious latency already halfway to act. But Marion, with Wittgenstein, in effect reduces potential to possibility, and with reference to mathematics he thereby yokes it in a still Fregean fashion to logic, rather than maintaining a certain proximity of mathematical things to physical things, which the pertinency of mathematics to physics might surely suggest as natural. If one rather allowed this kinship, then the mysteries of mathematical potency, generative motion and infinitude of process might seem less the results of mystification as Wittgenstein tends to suppose, than as rather resulting from the fact that mathematical entities are, at least in one respect (as for Aristotle and Aquinas), abstractions from physical reality which itself presents to us this triple mystery, to deny which would be to deny moving ‘nature’ as it always presents itself to us.

Cantor versus Wittgenstein’s Fregeanism In the same way that Wittgenstein refuses any ontological reality to the infinite, likewise for him, after a mathematical theorem is constructed, there is nothing ‘lurking’ within the theorem waiting to be discovered. Nor should one think of the theorem itself as ‘lurking’ in the first place, prior to its invention. This ultra anti-Platonism in the conventional modern sense – which rejects even ‘a Platonism of the second phase’ (or the fated logical implication of an arbitrarily

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willed foundation, as with Descartes) demands that 2 plus 1 = 3 in no way follows consistently from 1 plus 1 = 2, except by adopting the same merely conventionally transcendental rule of ‘count one’, which one has to keep reiterating at various stages of the counting process, because every rule admits of some degree of ambiguity. Though we happen to build 2 plus 1 = 3, upon 1 plus 1 = 2, we might build something else incompatible with 2 plus 1 = 3, under another schoolmaster who might even keep changing the rule at every step. Therefore ‘in mathematics it is just as impossible to discover anything as it is in grammar’ (WVC 63); ‘What we find in books on mathematics is not a description of something but the thing itself. We make mathematics’ (WVC 34). Likewise, ‘The proposition: “It is true that this follows from that” means simply: this follows from that’ (RFM I §5). Here the redundancy of the word ‘true’ redounds to the benefit of a convention that must be forever reiterated if it is to remain in force. Therefore Wittgenstein goes to the extremity of arguing that the instruction to ‘add 2’ to 1000 will not necessarily produce 1002, either according to rule-­following or to continuing to follow the rule in the same way (PI §185). In either case there remains a margin of interpretation which only brute imposition of the standard mode of reiteration can prevent. Yet by contrast to this extremity, the real Platonic tradition concerning mathematics, which culminated in Cusa and Vico’s Christian Trinitarian radicalization, was able paradoxically to regard making as also a seeing, also a describing, yet thereby able also to cleave to common sense. Wittgenstein was too conservative to be able to entertain this paradoxical alternative.35 It is in this context especially that we can see why Alain Badiou today regards Wittgenstein as a sophist.36 For surely the integral content of 1 plus 1 = 2 is already itself the patterned rule that leads next to 3, since 1 remains 1 as a transcendental reality in the older medieval sense with every arrival at a new unity? There is no duality of number and function, such as Wittgenstein appears to imply. Otherwise we could not envisage ‘2’ or ‘3’ at all. Simply to make/envisage the number ‘1’ is already to envisage that 1 plus 1 makes 2, 2 plus 1 makes 3 etc. The endless sequences simply require an elaborative ‘unfolding’, and endlessly recursive reiteration, not just of a rule, but of the logic of numerical unity, which is also, and uniquely, an ontologic. It is this same arbitrary transcendentalism (in a Kantian sense, now anarchized) about rules which disqualifies Wittgenstein’s argument against a strong realist understanding of set theory in general, as, for example, espoused by Frank Ramsey, who defended the real instances of contradictory or ‘impredicable’ sets and the actual extension even of their infinite instances, with some

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anticipation of the contemporary dialetheism of Graham Priest.37 Wittgenstein thought that both Cantor and Ramsey, together with Richard Dedekind, had confused the deliberate ‘intension’ or meaning-­input involved in constructing a set (as when one puts only recyclable items in the eco-­green rather than the grey bin), with ad hoc extension (as when 101 random items go in the any-­old grey bin in order to form the set that, without due care, might be our weekly unsorted planetarily-­irresponsible human rubbish). This, he considered, was to confuse a set made by the rule of (‘arithmetic’) intension with a set composed by (‘geometric’) extension which could then contain unknown infinite things which we have not really selected (RFM II §§17–34, V §§34–40).38 The numbers in a set are only there for Wittgenstein because of the ‘rule’ of inclusion: A picture is conjured up which appears to fix the sense unambiguously. The actual use, compared with that suggested by the picture, seems like something muddied. Here again we get the same thing as in set theory . . . . In the actual use of expressions we make detours, we go by side-­roads. We see the straight highway before us, but of course we cannot use it, because it is permanently closed. PI §426

Wittgenstein here wishes to contrast what he takes to be a vicious dualism of set theory between unambiguous meaning and impossibly infinite application with a pragmatist use of ad hoc initial definitions ceaselessly governed, yet ceaselessly qualified by realistic rules that take us down the ‘forking paths’ which we can possibly take, while the ‘dead end’ which we cannot take is oxymoronically construed as sublime absolute openness. Yet one could argue, just to the contrary, that while such pragmatism still has a duality of rules such as ‘go there’ over against the rhetorically anticipated, and then presently pictured content of ‘where you can really, finitely get to’, that set theory – with a greater allegiance to the inherited ontology of number, for which content and rule, essence and method coincide – in its fully realist version implies no such duality. This is partly because the invoked or mentioned ‘picture’ is no less ambiguous and indeterminate than a rule for usage, as the paradoxes resultant from apparently clear definitions of numerical entities always expose. Some of these paradoxes result from recursion and not from infinitude, and so it is not manifestly the case that the problem is always the projection of a delimited sense upon an unlimited referent whose meaningful scope one can therefore never determine. To the contrary, the problem is often that one cannot readily fix the intensional sense, and that this cannot be done at all without (‘geometrically and problematically’) trying at least provisionally to determine its extent of

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referential relevance. A projected construction is inseparable, as for authentic Platonism, from an always obscurely (and so rhetorically or persuasively) envisaged end result. In fact, set theory does not really tolerate the duality of intension and extension that Wittgenstein imposes on it. Despite its initial logicist aspirations, it confirms that a number is more than a sign of a number, given that a sign is always a rule, like a signpost, that points away from itself to another content. For a number is rather itself a content that constitutes a rule: the number one, for example, has cardinal content, but also commands us ordinally to ‘count one’ in subtraction from the numerical pluriverse. Thus it is the very extension of number as a ‘picture’ which exposes – as for Neoplatonic, Cusan and Vichian geometry – the prospect of extension to the infinite, not the illegitimate breaking of the bounds of an arbitrary transcendental rule, as Wittgenstein in a Kantian lineage supposed. If, for example, ‘1’ denotes a single set of all unities, then this can legitimately be a set of an infinite number, while an ordinal series – for example a series comprised by constant doubling – of itself must invoke infinity, and therefore point to the fact that the ‘temporal’ series is also an open-­ended ‘spatial’ set. Otherwise it is not a series – defined for example by doubling, not by any limit of the items to be doubled – and there is no rule, which derives from the setted content of seriality.39 So while not all the paradoxes of number arise from the contagion of the infinite, it is nonetheless true that it is the very nature of numbers, not hubristic overreaching, that incites this contagion. Only quantification leads us to the unquantifiable, and without this approach we would not be able to envisage the unconstrained power to quantify. We take the marked turnings one by one because we forever proceed up the open road. Moreover, the attempt to treat set theory merely intensionally, as with Frege and Russell’s use of logical quantifiers (Boole’s ‘or’, ‘and’ and ‘if ’, plus Frege’s own ‘for every’ and ‘there is a’) lamentably failed to banish paradox, because it turned out that the ambitions of a neo-Leibnizian mathesis universalis (explicitly envisaged by Russell, as equally by Husserl with his ‘phenomenology’) which tries to extend logic into existential adjudication, cannot even deal comprehensively with the most abstract level of objective reality, which is the mathematical. It is for this reason that, after Ernst Zermelo, set theory has been ordered more randomly within the grey bins of extension, according to ad hoc rules of empirical limitation designed to head off paradox. Yet this, as Graham Priest argues, would appear to surrender both logical and mathematical consistency in

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the name of avoiding the inconsistencies that this very consistency tends to generate.40 It is, in fact, most of all mathematics itself that should suggest to us (for reasons that we have already seen) that there is no warrant for any absolute intension/extension duality any more than there is for the almost identical dualities of sense and reference and mention and use, since here what we ‘intend by making’ so exactly coincides with the ontological truth that we ‘see’. In keeping with this mathematical paradigm of verum-­factum (after Hobbes and Vico) one can suggest, indeed after all in concurrence with much of Wittgenstein’s thinking, that we can only refer to what has a locatably different sense for us.41 On the other hand, and also with Wittgenstein for much of the time, one can inversely and additionally suggest that the specific meanings of things out there in the world only disclose themselves to us in endlessly different aspects of real extension. The senses of ‘evening star’ and ‘morning star’ alone locate the referent Venus, but it is Venus herself, along with the entire cosmic order, who shows herself to us as the sense-­referents ‘evening star’ and ‘morning star’ equally, though in diurnal perspectival oscillation.42 However, it would seem that Wittgenstein did not entirely subordinate his account of ‘rule’ to his crucial account of ‘aspects’ (as rightly advertised by Stephen Mulhall), thereby risking an absolute, transcendentalist divide between rule and content. Herein is heard still an echo of the sense/reference divide which sustains the Fregean programme of logicist determination of the existential. The Fregean programme was in turn genealogically derived (as was the Husserlian notion of what is ‘intended’) from the Scotist and neoscholastic isolation of a known ‘object’ (which may equally be possible or actual and eventually, for later Spanish Jesuit thought, as equally a nullity as a reality). This isolation relies on a dichotomy between the cognizing subject and a reality that is independent of the act of judgement, in contrast to the Thomistic view that what we know is the known reality in a transmuted, ontologically ‘intellectual’ guise and that this reality as truth in the full sense is only ontologically present for a judging and living mind.43 The more they invoke knowledge as knowledge of ‘aspects’ of the real, the more both Husserl and Wittgenstein veer towards a kind of more relativistic and perspectival, yet authentic construal of an Aristotelian–Thomist theory of understanding, but the more they qualify ‘aspects’ as tied to controlled, fully-­ surveyable intention (Husserl) or as subordinate to an imposed transcendental rule (Wittgenstein), then the more a neoscholastic perspective – ultimately traceable to the eighteenth-­century Iberian peninsula via Austria and Bolzano, as Jacob Schmutz has now shown – remains to the fore.44

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From number to the divine, from motion to metaphysics: Against Wittgenstein’s transcendentalism It is in terms of this latter perspective that, in his philosophy of mathematics, Wittgenstein exhibits a lingering Fregean and positivist conservatism en dépit de tout. For all his apparently drastic refusal of all mathematical formalization, and so all reduction of maths to logic, the retained intension/extension duality remains allied to such a programme. It is because of this retention, I would argue, that Wittgenstein erroneously tried to contradict Gödel’s (perhaps authentically) Platonizing demonstration of mathematical incompleteness.45 For this retention led him to deny in general (indeed in a disappointingly Anglo-Saxon-Lockean fashion) that there are any real ontological conundra, or openings for unavoidable speculation, as if ordinary language is after all well policed, and we must realize that there is no evading the ineluctable and so transcendental bounds of ‘language games’ and ‘forms of life’. For even if his ‘rules’ for language games other than those of mathematics are by no means so ‘fixed’ in distinction from the content they govern, they still, as Conor Cunningham has argued, close themselves against speculation in a way that suggests an immanently controlling or regulative boundary which, could it be identified, as Wittgenstein explicitly realizes, would thereby have been transgressed.46 Yet since Wittgenstein rightly insists that it cannot be finally or rigorously identified (precisely because ‘knowing how to carry on’ is given by prudential practice, not pre-­given regulation), his nonetheless persisting supposition of a finite boundary to which we might appeal against illegitimately speculative, metaphysical and infinitizing uses of both sign and number remains itself speculative, and implausibly so, given the mathematical paradigm. It then follows that Wittgenstein’s entire tendency to exile matters of ethics and religion to the sublime margins is questionable. The tendency is manifest: ‘It is clear that ethics cannot be expressed. Ethics is transcendental. (Ethics and aesthetics are one.)’ (TLP O 6.421); ‘Ethics, if it is anything is supernatural and our words will only express facts’ (LE 7). Inversely our theoretical knowledge is secure in its own transcendental circumscription which has (as for Kant) no bearing on things in themselves and so not really upon truth or knowledge at all: [I]f I say . . . “I know that I am now sitting in a chair” . . . In its language-­game it is not presumptuous. . . . But as soon as I say this sentence outside its context, it

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appears in a false light. For then it is as if I wanted to insist that there are things that I know. God himself can’t say anything to me about them. OC §§553–4

Theoretical language games then have a bounded, pragmatic context, however multifarious. The error of metaphysical language for Wittgenstein is to ignore this context and to stretch words beyond their natural usage. But its equal error in consequence is to regard religious and ethical language as such stretched natural usage, whereas in reality such language serves to underwrite both ethical imperatives and a certain stance upon reality, which may indeed involve commitments to the transcendent and the miraculous (since there is nothing in Wittgenstein’s approach to justify a reductively ‘anti-­realist’ approach to religion). ‘Rules of life are dressed up in pictures. And these pictures can only serve to describe what we are to do, not justify it’. (CV 29e) Similarly, ‘A religious symbol does not rest on any opinion. And error belongs only with opinion’ (GB M 3e). Thus religious affirmation is for Wittgenstein originally and properly removed from the modes of speculation and argumentation that are proper only to our pragmatic experience of the things we daily move amongst. Though even in that case, conjecture and debate are silenced at the transcendental boundary of the rules of a language game and the modes of a form of life, however elusive it may prove to state them outright. In this way then, the immanently moving and infinite character of thought in the Platonic and Aristotelian traditions is squeezed out of legitimacy by the imposition of an absolute boundary between finitude and a sublime exterior no longer necessarily accorded even the attribute of a qualitative infinitude which would retain some analogical link with an actual infinitude of mathematics and physics. But, in criticism of Wittgenstein, one might say that there is nothing inherent to human language, which is itself in endless indeterminately open motion, to justify an absolute divorce between the theoretical and the ethical-­aesthetic, which would amount to another version of an absolute cleavage between fact and value. Nor to justify the assumption that our ordinary language is really free of collective speculation. Nor that physical things can be practically handled without some working metaphysical hypotheses as to their nature being always already enshrined within grammar itself. And Wittgenstein’s position assumes without warrant both that the ‘beyond’ is non-­mediable by our discourse concerning things and that the aporetic involvement of the finite in the infinite can be evaded, whereas, as we have seen,

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the mathematical conclusions which Wittgenstein tries to circumvent, suggest that it cannot. This involvement rather suggests that in fact there is no non-­ speculative human discourse, no ‘set’ of verbal usages safely corralled against indefinite and sometimes paradoxical extensions, by virtue of the inherently open and dynamic character of this setting. Such a more rigorous ‘metacritical’ outlook thereby renders metaphysics a natural extension of ordinary language which has always been taking festive holiday time-­off in order to do its job at all. By the same token, one should contend against Wittgenstein that there is no religious ritual that is not always already mythical or theological conjecture: the practitioners are thinking just as much about the meaning of the sacrificed king as are the ethnographers, whose theories need not, of course, be as reductive as those of James Frazer. And to a degree they also may hold such conjectures to be subject to a necessary debate. Thus it is not that religious speculation is an aberrant swerve away from the primacy of practice (as tends to be implied in work by Karen Armstrong, for example), but that, as in theurgic Neoplatonism, ritual always has to be returned to as a further carrying through of theoretical reflection which always comes up against not just the ineffable but also the practical unavoidability of taking a Pascalian partial wager as to its character. The paradoxical mysteries of mathematics are not then the preserve of pseudo-­religion. Instead, Wittgenstein’s failure to conjure them away at the very beginning and core of all his reflection on number, whose apparent surety he, as much as Plato, sees as the gateway to philosophy, reveals the spuriousness of trying to divide the existential mysteries of human life from the mysteries of reason, and human practice (both artisanal and ethical) from the speculative work of thought which fundamentally insists that, in order to engage with the real, we perforce have to try approximately to grasp its nature. Much better than Wittgenstein, Søren Kierkegaard, whom he professed to admire, as ultimately and unlike Wittgenstein an avowedly Platonic thinker, had already with much greater clarity seen that in the case of religious faith, trust in the infinite and conjectural mediation of its nature stay naturally in step with each other.

Notes 1 George Boole, The Mathematical Analysis of Logic: Being an Essay Towards a Calculus of Deductive Reasoning (Cambridge: Macmillan, Barclay and Macmillan, 1847).

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2 François Viète (Vieta), ‘Introduction to the Analytic Art’ [1591], in Jacob Klein, Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968), 313–53, esp. 315–35; Klein, Greek Mathematical Thought, 150–224; René Descartes, The Geometry (Chicago, IL: Open Court, 1925); David Rapport Lachterman, The Ethics of Geometry: A Genealogy of Modernity (New York: Routledge, 1989), 124–205. 3 Giambattista Vico, On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians: Drawn Out from the Origins of the Latin Language (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), Cap. I [14–28], pp. 16–29. 4 Klein, Greek Mathematical Thought, 46–99. 5 See Wesley Trimpi, Ben Jonson’s Poems: A Study of the Plain Style (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1962), 87–129. 6 See Marshall McLuhan, The Classical Trivium: The Place of Thomas Nashe in the Learning of His Time (Corte Madera, CA: Gingko Press, 2005); Claude Lafleur, ‘Scientia et ars dans les introductions à la philosophie des maîtres ès arts de l’Université de Paris au XIIIe siècle’, in Scientia und ars im Hoch- und Spätmittelalter, ed. Ingrid Craemer-Ruegenberg and Andreas Speer (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1994), 45–65; John Milbank, ‘Writing and the Order of Learning’, Philosophy, Theology and the Sciences 4, no. 1 (2017), 46–73. 7 Klein, Greek Mathematical Thought, 117–224. 8 D. H. Fowler, The Mathematics of Plato’s Academy: A New Reconstruction (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 108–17. 9 In disagreement here with Daniel Heller-Roazen, The Fifth Hammer: Pythagoras and the Disharmony of the World (New York: Zone, 2011). 10 See Hans Joachim Krämer, Plato and the Foundations of Metaphysics (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1990). 11 Klein, Greek Mathematical Thought, 150–85. 12 René Guénon, The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 2000), 7–69. 13 See Catherine Pickstock, After Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 49–57. 14 Fowler, The Mathematics of Plato’s Academy, 25–7, 31–66, 191–2, 364–71. Anthyphairesis, a procedure also found in Euclid, literally means ‘reciprocal subtraction’ because the resultant remainder was then further reduced ad infinitum – again through multiplying fragmentation of a unity – by measure of the proportionate difference between the first remainder and the initially given unit. (Repeated application of this process is also carried out by modern mathematics but in terms of pure division and divisors.) See Aristotle, Physics III, 6, 206a14–b35 for a slightly differently inflected account of the reciprocal analogy between division and addition. He argues here that whereas repeated removal of the same definite

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proportion of a quantity reaches a null terminus, repeated removal of the same proportion of a quantity, first from that quantity and then from the remainder and so forth, can never be concluded and so points to an infinite. For technical reasons of his own physics concerning a single bounded universe, Aristotle denies even a potential infinite of addition, but he does admit a potential infinite of division. And this infinite is even to be considered ‘actual’ in the sense that ‘the games’ and ‘the day’ (of the games – which could be any day of any length) can be considered actual even though they are of indefinite potential duration. Plato is here somewhat problematically invoked, but on the arguably essential affinity between Aristotle and Plato’s thinking about indeterminacy and the infinite, see further in the main text. 15 Klein, Greek Mathematical Thought, 17–25. The primacy of the actual and the positive in premodern western mathematics shows us how naturally Christian theological theses such as the privative theory of evil could be grafted onto what the student would have learned in the quadrivium. 16 See Lachterman, The Ethics of Geometry, 124–205; Dimitri Nikulin, Matter, Imagination and Geometry: Ontology, Natural Philosophy and Mathematics in Plotinus, Proclus and Descartes (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 63–8, 210–60. 17 Plotinus, Enneads V.5.10: ‘[The Good’s] being is not limited; what is there to set bounds to it? . . . All its infinitude resides in its power: it does not change and will not fail; and in it all that is unfailing finds duration’; V.5.11: ‘It is infinite also by right of being a pure unity with nothing towards which to direct any partial content’; VI.9.6: ‘We must . . . take the Unity as infinite not in measureless extension or numerable quantity but in fathomless depths of power’ (Stephen Mackenna’s translation). Note here the implied equality of potency with act. 18 Though it is arguable that this transcendent infinity lies in Neoplatonism ‘actually’ beyond the contrast of the actual and the possible. See further in the main text. 19 Robert Grosseteste, De Luce, in Iain M. Mackenzie, The ‘Obscurism’ of Light: A Theological Study into the Nature of Light (Norwich: Canterbury Press, 1996), 25–33. 20 See Jorge Luis Borges, ‘The Fearful Sphere of Pascal’, in Labyrinths (London: Penguin, 1971), 189–92. But for a corrective of Borges see Karsten Harries, ‘The Infinite Sphere: Comments on the History of a Metaphor’, Journal of the History of Philosophy 13, no. 1 (1975), 5–15. Harries rightly says that Cusa preceded Bruno; that early modern cosmology altered in the wake of this transference of metaphorical application rather than the reverse; and that the shift itself is not a secularizing cosmic appropriation of a divine attribute, but rather a following through of the full cosmological implications of this attribute of an infinite creative God. As with Grosseteste, if God is infinite, then his productions, though finite, cannot themselves be finitely bounded. The closed universe was specifically pagan, not uninflectedly religious. 21 Nicholas of Cusa, De Docta Ignorantia, I.12.33; 23; De Visione Dei, 13–15. See Jasper Hopkins, Nicholas of Cusa on Learned Ignorance: A Translation and Appraisal of De

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docta ignorantia (Minneapolis, MN: Banning Press, 1981); Nicholas of Cusa’s Dialectical Mysticism: Text, Translation, and Interpretation of De visione dei, 2nd edn (Minneapolis, MN: Banning Press, 1988). 22 Proclus, A Commentary on the First Book of Euclid’s Elements (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992). For the ontological role of problema in Proclus, see Part One, §§201, 243–4. His insistence on the essential initial role of problematic in producing the geometric field can be seen as consonant with his overall ‘theurgic’ perspective which, in contrast to Plotinus, stressed the full descent of the human soul into the human body and consequently the need for sensory and material mediation and the merciful descent of the gods to our realm, drawn down through and as myriad modes of ritual attraction. 23 Vico, On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians, Cap. IV, 1, pp. 57–71. And see David R. Lachterman, ‘Mathematics and Nominalism in Vico’s Liber Metaphysicus’, in Sachkommentar zu Giambattisa Vico’s ‘Liber Metaphysicus’, ed. Stephan Otto and Helmut Viechtbauer (Munich: Fink, 1985), 47–85; Robert Miner, Truth in the Making: Creative Knowledge in Theology and Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 2004), 96–125. 24 See Amir Alexander, Infinitesimal: How a Dangerous Mathematical Theory Shaped the Modern World (London: Oneworld, 2014). 25 See Robert Kaplan, The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero (London: Penguin, 1999), 144–74; Charles Seife, Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea (London: Souvenir, 2000), 131–56; Florian Cajori, A History of Mathematics, 2nd edn (New York: Macmillan, 1919), 367–447. 26 Georg Cantor, Contributions to the Founding of the Theory of Transfinite Numbers [1895–7] (New York: Dover, 1955). 27 See Fowler, The Mathematics of Plato’s Academy, 14: ‘a much more faithful impression of the very concrete sense of the Greek arithmoi is given by the sequence: duet, trio, quartet, quintet’. 28 For a clear and simple summary of Cantor’s diagonalization proof and its immediate intellectual aftermath, see Seife, Zero, 147–53. 29 See Joseph Warren Dauben, Georg Cantor: His Mathematics and Philosophy of the Infinite (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979); Walter Purkert and Hans Joachim Ilgauds, Georg Cantor 1845–1918 (Basel: Birkhäuser, 1987); Anne Newstead, ‘Cantor on Infinity in Nature, Number, and the Divine Mind’, American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 83, no. 4 (2009), 533–55. 30 Mathieu Marion, Wittgenstein, Finitism, and the Foundations of Mathematics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 18–19, 38–40, 84–5, 162–8, 202–5. 31 Aristotle, Physics III, 6, 206a10–207a30; Marion, Wittgenstein, Finitism, and the Foundations of Mathematics, 26–7, 181–8, 200–1. And see note 14 above. 32 See, for example, Joe Sachs, ‘Introduction’ to Aristotle’s Physics: A Guided Study (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995).

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33 This was the nineteenth-­century insight of Félix Ravaisson, in his Essai sur la Métaphysique d’Aristote [1837] (Paris: Cerf, 2007). 34 It is partly along this trajectory that Plotinus will eventually see ‘the One’ as infinite, since it exceeds the ontological contrast of act and potential, rest and motion. 35 See Marion, Wittgenstein, Finitism, and the Foundations of Mathematics, 1–20, esp. 14: ‘[Wittgenstein] insists that we never discover facts about structures that we have already set up: any new theorem is in fact a new extension of mathematics.’ See also V. H. Klenk, Wittgenstein’s Philosophy of Mathematics (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1976), 8–17. 36 Alain Badiou, Wittgenstein’s Antiphilosophy (London: Verso, 2011), 75 and passim. The sophistic label is not meant to be entirely negative. 37 See Wittgenstein, RFM II §§21–2; Marion, Wittgenstein, Finitism, and the Foundations of Mathematics, 6, 187, 200–1. Cf. Graham Priest, Beyond the Limits of Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 38 See also Marion, Wittgenstein, Finitism, and the Foundations of Mathematics, 12–13, 63–4, 181–9, 200–1. 39 As Jacques Lacan showed, even the sign-­operation, in order to avoid anarchy, has to occur within certain loosely ‘setted’ parameters. In this way number interferes with the field of sign, ensuring that it concerns always ‘numbers of things’ just as, in the case of number, sign and reality coincide, though in ontologically thin air. See John Milbank, ‘The Double Glory, or Paradox versus Dialectics: On Not Quite Agreeing with Slavoj Žižek’, in Slavoj Žižek and John Milbank, The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic? (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 110–233, at 118–20. 40 Priest, Beyond the Limits of Thought. I am grateful to discussions with my son, Sebastian Milbank on Priest and the ontological reality of paradox. 41 See Miner, Truth in the Making, 78–125. 42 On the phenomenon of aspect-­seeing more generally, see Stephen Mulhall, On Being in the World: Wittgenstein and Heidegger on Seeing Aspects (Abingdon: Routledge, 1990). 43 See John Milbank, Beyond Secular Order: The Representation of Being and the Representation of the People (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 31–4. 44 Jacob Schmutz, ‘Der Einfluss der böhomischen Jesuitphilosophie auf Bernard Bolzanos Wissenshaftslehre’, in Bohemia Jesuitica, 1556–2006, ed. Petronilla Cemus and Richard Cemus, Vol. 1 (Würzburg: Echter, 2010), 603–15; ‘Réalistes, Nihilistes et Incompatibilistes: Le débat sur les negative truthmakers dans la scolastique jésuite espagnole’, Cahiers de philosophie de l’Université de Caen, no. 43 (2007), 131–78. 45 The fact that Gödel did not see his demonstration of the undecidability of the continuum hypothesis as problematic for his Platonism might suggest its genuine character. 46 Conor Cunningham, ‘Wittgenstein after Theology’, in Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology, ed. John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock and Graham Ward (London: Routledge, 1999), 64–90.

10

What Have I Done? Sophie Grace Chappell

What is the natural expression of an intention? – Watch a cat when it is stalking a bird; or a deer, when it wants to escape. PI §647; my trans.1

Double effect and the limits of negative responsibility My project in this chapter is to use Wittgenstein to illuminate a familiar Thomist thesis. I argue that there is a thesis in philosophical psychology which is true, which has real application in ethics, and which deserves to bear the name ‘the doctrine of double effect’ (DDE), duplex effectus as Aquinas calls it in ST 2a2ae.64.7. Here is DDE in Joseph Mangan’s classic statement: A person may licitly perform an action that he foresees will produce a good and a bad effect provided that four conditions are [satisfied]: 1) that the action in itself from its very object be good or at least indifferent; 2) that the good effect and not the evil effect be intended; 3) that the good effect be not produced by means of the evil effect; 4) that there be a proportionately grave reason for permitting the evil effect.2

DDE does an important part of the work of showing us something ethically fundamental, namely the limits of our negative responsibility. We want to know, for instance, what makes the moral difference that we intuitively see there must be between the terrorist who kills the hostages because no ransom is paid, and the authorities that refuse to pay this ransom. Or we want to know why, when Sir Thomas More resisted the government of Henry VIII over the divorcing of Catherine of Aragon, in the full knowledge that his so doing would

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very probably deprive his wife of a husband, his children of a father, and his estate of an inheritance, it was not thereby correct for his wife Alice to protest (as she does in Robert Bolt’s play) that Sir Thomas More was so depriving them, rather than Henry VIII and his minions. If the true structure of our intentional action was simply what pure consequentialists say it is – that we should make all and only those bodily movements that will bring about the best overall consequences – then Alice More’s accusation would be right, and so would the terrorist who says that the authorities ‘left him with no alternative’. Quite generally: if pure consequentialism were true, our negative responsibility would be unlimited; even if – as consequentialists find it comforting to add – we would not then do best to believe that our negative responsibility is unlimited. DDE wards off this prospect, by dealing with the question of philosophical psychology that lies at the heart of the issue, namely the question ‘What have I done?’ I say pure consequentialists, meaning to imply that impure ones, indirect ones for instance, might find a use for DDE. Joseph Boyle apparently thinks that uses of DDE by any non-­absolutists at all are not only gratuitous but illicit: ‘Outside the absolutist context of the Catholic tradition, DDE is not needed; and those who reject this context are not entitled to use it’.3 But so far as I can see, DDE makes a point about the nature of intention that has no intrinsic connection at all with the idea of a moral absolute (i.e. an exceptionless or virtually exceptionless moral prohibition). So anyone who is not a pure consequentialist at least can deploy DDE, perhaps should, in any case surely may. (Conversations with them suggest that Brad Hooker, Tim Mulgan, John Skorupski, and Michael Ridge all accept that there is some kind of moral distinction between the intended and the merely foreseen: indirect consequen­ tialists to a man.) Is my intentional action always really just another instance of the only fundamental action-­type that the (pure) consequentialist recognizes, namely a better or worse pursuit of overall good?4 Or are there other, more limited and less profoundly counter-­intuitive, answers that we can offer to the question what I, or anyone, has done? The answers to these two questions are, respectively, No and Yes, and I shall show how DDE is part of what we need to spell out these answers. First, however, I shall also argue that, for a reason made clear by Wittgenstein in my epigraph, DDE cannot do anywhere near all the casuistical work that it has often been recruited for by Thomists – though not, so far as I can see, by Thomas.

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The publicity of the mental The reason is that intentions are, like meanings and emotions and suspicions and thoughts and sensations and other mental phenomena, basically and essentially public. Anything about them that was not so public would not and could not be what we were talking about when we talked about intentions, meanings, sensations, etc. Like the unseen beetle in the box (PI §293), the hidden part of the mental phenomenon would simply drop out of consideration. The point of that famous analogy is not, as some interpreters seem to think, that the box is empty, i.e. that we have no inner processes. The point is rather that we do have inner processes, but they are not hidden. So to speak, we see each other’s beetles all the time: cp. PI §313. Here is one simple example of the publicity of the mental. When my daughter Róisín was four, I once saw her leave her finger – unintentionally – in a slamming door. I did not infer her agony. I saw it (and heard it). Her pain was as directly perceptible to me as the slamming door was. And how directly perceptible is that? Completely directly, I would say. It is certainly a whole lot more natural to call this directly perceptible than any ‘sense-­data’, ‘qualia’, or ‘phenomenal seemings’ that we might like to talk about.5 A second example of the publicity of the mental. Suppose Anna, who is married to K, is watching Alexei compete in a horse race. Her fervour in urging Alexei on has something excessive about it, something that tells everyone around her, including K, that she is in love with Alexei. Anna then realizes what those around her have realized. Yet it is only now, and by ‘reflection’ from their reactions, that she realizes it herself; as if she were to find out that she is blushing only by looking in a mirror. What is manifest in Anna’s behaviour is more manifest to others than it is to her.6 Because intentions too are normally public in this way, the right answer to the question ‘How do we know what someone’s intention is?’ is normally ‘Nothing simpler’. A cat stalks a bird. A deer runs toward a fence and then, seeing it, shies away. A man, as in the jokes, walks into a bar. Nothing is more natural for us, and few things are easier, than seeing simply from its public behaviour that some creature means to get something: the cat means to get the bird, the deer means to get out (and then discovers it can’t), the man means to get a beer. In cases like these, involving humans,7 talk about intentions is at home, and (philosophy notwithstanding) uncontroversially available to us. I said above that my daughter’s pain was directly perceptible. When the aforementioned man walks into a bar, normally his intention to get a beer is

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directly perceptible too. (Imagine him wiping the back of his hand across his mouth as he crosses the street, licking his lips, feeling in his pocket for his wallet as he pushes at the bar-­room door.) It is not, as the behaviourists used to claim, that his intention is his walking-­into-a-­bar behaviour, any more than Róisín’s screaming and clutching of her finger in her other hand is her pain. The behaviour expresses the intention, as perfectly as a clock face shows the time. It’s not that the time is reducible to or identical with the state of the clock face; that would be a category mistake. Yet we can normally look at the clock face and, from it, simply recognize the time. Just likewise, we can normally simply recognize what other agents intend, what sensations they have, and the rest of it, just by observing them. ‘If someone sees the behaviour of a living being, he sees his soul’ (PI §357; my trans.). ‘But Róisín might not have been in pain at all – she might have been tricking you with a grisly rubber finger she’d just bought in a joke shop. And the man walking into the bar might not intend to get a beer at all – he might be an actor, or an undercover detective. What are you directly seeing then?’ Apparent pain, of course, or an apparent intention. The fact that these can be seen is no evidence that real pain and real intentions cannot also be seen, any more than the fact that there are forged fivers is evidence that there are no real fivers, or the fact that we seem to be able to see the right time from wrongly-­set clocks is evidence that we cannot actually see the right time from rightly-­set clocks. Normally with a clock, we just look and see the time. The possibility of a mistake arises afterwards. Likewise with sensations and intentions, the cases where we simply and directly observe them are the primary ones. Just as the very idea of a forged fiver depends upon the prior idea of a genuine fiver, so the idea and the possibility of a mistake about a sensation or an intention happening sometimes is built upon the prior fact that normally there isn’t a mistake. ‘But surely the man himself knows better than anyone else what he really intends!’ If you genuinely think that, think again about my example of Anna. Or try saying it to the man’s wife; she’ll soon put you right. Of course there is a sense in which each person is, when things go well, peculiarly intimately related to his own intentions: as Anscombe argues in Intention, the normal way for us to know our own intentions is directly and non-­observationally, just like the normal way in which we know our other mental states, or know what we are doing with our own limbs and muscles. The directness and non-­observationality of such self-­ knowledge doesn’t imply its incorrigibility from other, more indirect sources. There is a kind of pragmatic absurdity about a question like ‘Are you sure you have hands?’; there is no such absurdity about ‘Are you sure this is what you

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mean to do?’ I cannot, except in very special circumstances (a phantom limb case, say), be unsure whether I have hands; though if I was, I would check by way of an observation. But I can be unsure about what I really intend and about what I am doing, even though checking that is not a matter of observation.8 Again, the point is not only about intentions; it generalizes across the realm of the mental. In my quasi-Karenina example, it would be futile for Anna to deny what everybody else can see about her emotional state – even if it is only because they see it that she comes to see it for herself. We can even imagine people being corrected about their own pain-­sensations: the St John’s Ambulance men might rush a fired-­up rugby-­player off the pitch, saying to her ‘Come on, you’re in a lot of pain’ – and they might be right even though she sincerely denies it, and even though here, too, she cannot check whether she is in pain via any observation. So with intentions, it is similarly futile for the man walking into the bar to deny his beer-­purchasing intention, even to himself. He might say to himself ‘I’ll just pop my head round the door and ask “Jeff been in?” ’ That is what he says, but then that is what he has said every evening for the last twenty-­five years – and on every such occasion he has ended up staying in said bar till chucking-­out time. ‘Thus even the most explicit expression of an intention, on its own, is not sufficient evidence of an intention’ (PI §641; my trans.). In a host of ordinary-­life cases the question arises ‘What have I done?’; and as the posing of the question often contextually implies, the person who asks it is not always the one best-­placed to answer it. One person says to another: ‘You intended X (adultery, to set the building on fire, to plagiarize another student’s work, to get drunk . . .). You obviously intended X, so don’t bother denying it’ – and is absolutely right to say so. Absolutely right, no matter what the accused claims to the contrary. Absolutely right, too, even if the accused quite sincerely tells himself that adultery or arson or plagiarism etc. was not his intention. He can make little speeches in his head if he likes: ‘I am comforting Jean after John’s demise’,‘I am maximizing our insurance return’, or whatever. These little speeches, if others get to hear them, are not irrelevant to determining the agent’s exact set of mind; but as is obvious from the practice of law courts the world over, they are not the sole or even the main evidence of anyone’s intentions. ‘But there are cases and cases. Of course sometimes we can tell someone what his intention is, even if he self-­deceivingly denies it. That’s quite different from the case where something is a necessary concomitant of what he actually intends. He might simply fail to see it. Or like Anscombe’s man pumping poisoned water,9 he might see it and not care about it.’ I quite agree. My point is absolutely not to deny this, but rather to build on it. What I am showing here is just that the

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in-­advance question from others ‘Don’t you see what you’re doing?’, and/or the ex-­post-facto question to myself ‘What have I done?’, give us the means of unpicking and unpacking the detail of such cases, and the different ways in which our actions may relate to or embody our intentions. ‘But sometimes the only way you can tell what someone’s intention is is by asking him – if even that is possible. Imagine someone, John, whose intention is to rescue a woman, Emma, from the rapist, George, whom he sees charging towards her from her left. John charges towards Emma himself, from her right, to pull her physically out of harm’s way; she looks right and so sees John coming, but not George; Emma takes John for a rapist, and shoots him dead. Meanwhile George sees this happening and makes himself scarce. Such cases show that two people can make exactly the same external movements – rushing towards Emma from one side or the other – with completely different intentions. They therefore show that intentions are internal, not external.’ Again, I quite agree that sometimes quite different intentions dictate identical external movements, and that there could in principle be cases where no one can tell what someone’s intention was because many different intentions were compatible with his external movements, and he is no longer around to ask. (Think for instance of the controversies about Mallory and Irvine’s last known movements on Mount Everest.) To think that such cases show that intentions are never discernible from external movements is simply a crude overgeneralization. Usually, in fact, they are so discernible. Think here about the other evidence that might be relevant to settling what were the intentions in the John and George case. John’s relatives might protest ‘You’ve got the wrong man – John was no rapist’, and cite all sorts of evidence from his former life to prove that this was not the sort of thing that John would ever have intended. Or suppose George was apprehended after the fact, and he protested his innocent intentions; it would be quite possible for others to defeat his protests by showing e.g. how habitual rape was for him, or that he was both violent and obsessed by Emma. A court would call such evidence presumptive, because George does not actually perform his rape and John does not actually perform his rescue. But is it merely secondary? No; it is just the kind of evidence that we are always amassing about intentions. And after all, as our disbelief of George’s protestation shows, a report of an intention is only presumptive evidence too. Suppose then that I point a gun at your head and pull the trigger. Unless I don’t understand guns, or have bizarre causal beliefs, or think this is only a replica, or (. . .), this means that I intend to kill you. And no speech, inner or outer, on my part professing that something else is my action or my intention can make any difference to that.

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It is true that if I don’t aim at your head, but (say) at your knee, then my intention is to shoot you but – probably: unless I e.g. want you to die slowly – not to kill you. (Sometimes in films, you see a gunman first level a gun at someone’s head, and then pause and move its muzzle downwards to a different target: a nice example of the publicity not only of intentions, but of changes in intention.) None of that even begins to justify Germain Grisez in writing this: ‘The rapist’s death is not what is chosen as a means or sought as an end when the woman shoots him in the head to stop his attack (the shooting is not direct killing). Her end is to avoid being raped’.10 If shooting a man in the head isn’t direct killing, what on earth is? How could it be more obvious that she intends to kill the rapist, and that if she does kill him, she does it intentionally? Of course it may also be true (in real-­life cases it very often will be) that she acts in the heat of the moment, that she would not shoot him if she could see any alternative, that she will help get him to hospital if he is still breathing after she has shot him, that she will feel terrible about it afterwards, that if guns were not so readily available then neither the rapist nor she would have been in their awful predicament in the first place, and so on. All of this is relevant to the moral character of what she does. None of it affects the description of her intention as to kill, and her action as intentional killing – and, I should say, entirely ­justified intentional killing too. Or suppose that I crush and cut off an unborn baby’s head. Unless I am bizarrely ignorant of human physiology, or derangedly think it is a plastic model not a real baby, or think that God will intervene miraculously to keep the baby alive, (. . .), this means that I intend to kill the baby, and that what I have done is killed it. Here too I may profess to do and/or intend not killing but something else, but it makes no difference. Any competent observer can see that my action and intention are killing ones – even if I cannot see it myself.11 In an insufficiently discussed paper on double effect, Elizabeth Anscombe says this: At this point the Doctrine of Double Effect helps itself to an absurd device, of choosing a description under which the action is intentional, and giving the action under that intention as the intentional act. ‘I am moving what blocks that egress’ . . . . The suggestion is that that is all I am doing as a means to my end. . . . [But] an act does not merely have many descriptions, under some of which it is indeed not intentional: it has several under which it is intentional[12] . . . . Nor can you simply bring it about that you intend this and not that by an inner act of ‘directing your attention’. Circumstances, and the immediate facts about the means you are choosing to your ends, dictate what descriptions of your intention you must admit.13

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Circumstances dictate what descriptions of your intention you must admit: notice the cogency and externality of these correct descriptions. Whatever else DDE may involve, it cannot include a permission or an exhortation to redescribe our intentions ‘from the inside’ in whatever way we like. For the correct descriptions of our ‘inner processes’ quite generally, including our intentions, are made externally, not ‘from the inside’, and objectively, not at our whim. As John Finnis, to cite one distinguished authority on these matters, apparently agrees: [H]owever ‘certainly foreseeable’ [the very good consequences] may be, they cannot be used to characterize the act itself as, in and of itself, anything other than an intentional act of, say, man-­killing. This is especially obvious when a blackmailer’s price for sparing his hostages is ‘killing that man’; the person who complies with the demand, in order to save the lives of the many, cannot deny that he is choosing an act which of itself does nothing but kill.14

Bad philosophical psychology leads to bad ethics; bad ethics has further, familiar, bad consequences. Internalism about intention, the thesis that our intentions are whatever we choose to say they are, or set ourselves to make them by way of little speeches inside our own heads, is false. This false idea in philosophical psychology leads us straight into a false idea in ethics: that we can excuse ourselves in, say, the craniotomy case by adopting an intention only to rearrange some physical stuff and not to cut off a baby’s head, even though the rearranging is the decapitating (as we perfectly well know). Or that we can excuse ourselves in a self-­defence case by adopting an intention only to shoot a bullet through an attacker’s brainstem and not to kill him, even though the shooting is the killing (as we also know). The irony is that those who most frequently appeal to an internal view of intention have a decisive tactical reason not to. They usually do so while defending absolutist views about killing against one or other sort of consequentialist attack. But the move leads them straight into checkmate, because of course the consequentialist can help himself to exactly the same sort of double-­effect reasoning – and generalize it in a way that is fatal to absolutism. If we may say, with Grisez,15 that the craniotomy is not an act of killing but only an act of making certain physical alterations in certain material, and stress the good intentions with which (or the good plan as part of which) this neutral physical procedure is performed, then pari passu the abortionist may say that she is clearing an obstacle from the mother’s womb, not killing the foetus, and stress her good intentions. Also pari passu, the nuclear bomber may say that he intends to end the war by pressing a button, not by annihilating Nagasaki. Even the concentration camp

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guard may say that his intention is to keep his job by mixing one chemical with another, not by releasing poison into a gas chamber. (A fortiori, then, there need be no moral difficulty at all about unplugging oneself from Judith Jarvis Thomson’s violinist, and the reason why, as John Finnis immediately suspected, is indeed to do with DDE.)16 In each case there is no doubt some possible description of what the agent does under which – in supposed compliance with DDE – what is done is not bad in itself but either good or indifferent, and under which no bad effect is allowed to be a means rather than a mere side-­effect. In fact the only part of DDE, so understood, that puts any substantive limits at all on what is permitted is the proportionality clause. Which of course is grist to the consequentialist’s mill, since his starting point was the claim that the absolutist went wrong precisely in trying to attach moral significance to actions just as such, and not to the proportion between good and evil in their consequences. To put it another way – Anscombe’s17 – DDE, so understood, does not stretch a point on the circumference of ethics; it destroys the centre.

What intention isn’t ‘But if our intentions are not determined by what we set ourselves to make them inside our own heads, then how are they determined?’ I speculate that at least part of the reason why the literature on DDE keeps coming back to the internalist picture is because its defenders have not seen clearly enough how to give any other answer to this question. They think the internal view of intention is the only way to avoid saying what they know they don’t want to say – namely, what Sidgwick says: [I]t is best to include under the term ‘intention’ all the consequences of an act that are foreseen as certain or probable; since it will be admitted that we cannot evade responsibility for any foreseen consequence of our acts by the plea that we felt no desire for them, either for their own sake or as means to ulterior ends: such undesired accompaniments of the desired results of our volitions are clearly chosen or willed by us.18

If we don’t say that the intention of the action is the inner speech I make to myself before doing it, then isn’t Sidgwick’s position the only coherent alternative – that what I intend in doing it is every consequence of doing it that I ‘foresee as certain or probable’? Far from it. There are usually intermediate points available

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between any two extremes! And that common sense takes an intermediate point between these extremes is something that homely examples will quickly teach us. Here is one: earlier this afternoon I went for a bike ride. When I did this it was, for a start, primarily the bike ride itself that I intended, not its consequences. The consequentialist’s picture of action always seems to be an instrumental, button-­ pushing one, in which what we do is no more than a means of securing a state of the world. Indeed some non-­consequentialists seem to use the same picture. Joseph Shaw defines intention like this: ‘Of the upshots which agent A believes he makes more likely by acting or omitting to act, A intends those the anticipation of which provide motivating reasons for his action or omission’.19 This seems to be, at best, a definition of what it is to intend an upshot, not of what it is to intend. It faces other difficulties too: why, for example, can I only intend upshots that I think what I do will make more likely? When I ask my counter-­suggestible pupils to stop teasing their classmate, I may well think that asking them will be likelier to make the problem worse than better (since they are counter-­suggestible). Nonetheless, my intention in asking them to stop is indeed that they should stop. What I do may be objectionable on the grounds that it is not very phronimos of me, but it surely isn’t objectionable on the grounds that by definition, trying to get them to stop can’t be what I’m doing. There are of course some kinds of action that fit the consequentialist’s button-­ pushing picture; button-­pushing, for instance. But not all do. My bike ride today didn’t. I didn’t do it mainly because of how things would be once it was over. There is exercise like that, of course, as when what you want is not to do 100 press-­ups, but to have done 100 press-­ups. But not this bike ride of mine. I did it for its own sake, as an activity, not as a means to any state of affairs. (Not even the state of affairs that I should be engaged in the activity.) Secondly, when I went for my bike ride I foresaw, indeed foresaw as certain, all sorts of consequences which were no part of my intention. For example, I foresaw (let us say) that my going for a bike ride would create a slight alteration in Tayside NHS’s health and exercise statistics. Nonetheless, pace Sidgwick, that certain and foreseen consequence of my choice was not something I intended by going for a bike ride. So far from intending this certain consequence, I wasn’t remotely interested in it. In possible worlds where no such consequence held, that wouldn’t have made the slightest difference to any of my choices. Anyone who says to me ‘Since going for a bike ride is affecting regional health statistics, you must have intended such an effect’ is simply wrong. And anyone who says to me ‘Since you knew that this consequence had a probability of (more or less) 1, you must have intended it’ is wrong as well.

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I also foresaw that going for a bike ride would certainly make it true that if anyone rang me while I was out, I wouldn’t get the call. Nonetheless, I wasn’t intending to avoid phone calls when I went out for my ride. You can intend that when you go for a bike ride. On occasion I have intended it. But not today. So this is a certain foreseen consequence of my action of going for a ride which, again pace Sidgwick, is only sometimes part of what I intend by actions of that type. Anyone who says to me ‘Since going for a bike ride is avoiding phone calls, you must have been avoiding calls today’ is wrong today – even though another day he would have been right. I foresaw these consequences as certain, yet I did not intend them. Conversely, I foresaw some other consequences as far less than certain, and yet I did intend them. For instance, I was trying to go as fast as I could. Now I foresaw that it was actually pretty unlikely that I would break my personal best for this cycling route today, since today was windy and I was tired and unfit, and I set my personal best on a still day when I was feeling really strong. Nonetheless, anyone who says to me – should I need cajoling on this point – something like ‘Come on, riding as fast as you can is trying to break your personal best, so if you broke it, you broke it intentionally’ is quite correct. Compare entering lotteries: I’d say that if you win a lottery, you win it intentionally iff you entered it intentionally, even though the chances of your winning were miniscule. More evidence here that the line between the intentional and the unintentional is not a line between any two levels of probability. (‘Don’t you mean “the line between the intended and the unintended,” not “the line between the intentional and the unintentional”?’ My point is, precisely, that – at least where the attempted action is completed – these are the same line. One way of putting my thesis in this chapter is that I think ‘What was x’s intention?’ can be a misleading question; to redress its misleadingness, we are often better off with the question ‘What did x do intentionally?’, or indeed just ‘What has x done?’ Compare a pair of questions that are conceptually very close to these questions about intention, namely ‘What was x’s trying?’ and ‘What did x do by trying?’ The idea of a conceptual divorce between a trying and an action which is done by that trying is not a happy one. Yet some such divorce is precisely the upshot of trying to keep our talk about intentions strictly separate from our talk about our intentional actions.) Notice here that my act fell under a number of intentional descriptions, not just one. (As Sidgwick perhaps accepts, and as Anscombe repeatedly insists.) If you ask me ‘What was your intention in going for a bike ride?’ I might just respond ‘To go for a bike ride. Nothing else’ – especially if you are a police officer.

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But further questioning will swiftly dispel any impression that there was really just one intention on which it is uniquely correct to see me as acting. If you ask me ‘Did you intend to get some fresh air?’ I will say Yes. If you ask me ‘Were you intending to test out your new bike?’ I will also say Yes. ‘Were you out for the exercise?’ will get a Yes too, as will ‘Were you trying to set a new personal best?’ So too will ‘Did you intend to have another passing glimpse of that fine church hall in Fowlis village?’ (Not all cyclists are afflicted just by Boardmania or just by Betjemania; some of us have both conditions.) Indeed, if you ask me ‘Did you leave the house intending to think through double effect from a quite different perspective, viz. that of the saddle?’, I’ll say Yes to that too. Or if you question me in a Kammian manner,20 to see if there is a third sort of effects alongside the intended ones and the side-­effects, namely effects of my choice without which I would not intend it, even though they are neither (directly) intended nor side-­ effects, I’m sure there will be. I would not, for instance, form the intention to go for a bike ride unless I knew that, if I do, motorists will do their best not to kill me. But I do not go for a bike ride in order that motorists may do their best not to kill me. Here, as surprisingly often elsewhere in philosophy, we suffer from the curse of the definite article. The question ‘What is the intention of your action?’ seems so natural; but it imports into our thinking, and right under our noses too, the contraband assumption that there must be just one intention.21 (Compare ‘What is the explanation of why killing is wrong?’ – a question I have complained about before.22) Quite generally, the contrary is true; to take Anscombe’s own example,23 if someone is intentionally moving his arm up and down with his hand round a pump handle, it is bound to be the case that he is also intentionally doing something else (operating the pump, replenishing the house water supply, poisoning the household, or the intentions in some other list). That is why it should cut no ice with us for a theorist of double effect to say, as too many of them do,24 things like ‘His intention is to injure the miner whose body he uses to block the trolley, and therefore not to kill him’. For this simply doesn’t follow. Of course there are some intentions which, barring gross confusion, exclude each other: if I intend to go sailing on Loch Katrine for the next hour, then I cannot intend to go sailing on Coniston Water for the next hour. But in general, to show that someone has one intention is by no means to show that he is innocent of another. So, in sum: I deny (on Wittgensteinian grounds) the internalized view of intention, as a speech I make to myself inside my own head before acting. One way to put this is to deny that there is a significant distinction between two

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questions about x’s completed action (where there is a completed action): ‘What was x’s intention?’ and ‘What did x do intentionally?’ And I deny (by appeal to examples) the claim that often goes with the internalized view, explicitly or implicitly, that there must be some one intention in any action which is uniquely the intention of that action. I deny too (also by appeal to examples) the Sidgwickian claim that what I intend is all the consequences of my intentional action that I foresee as certain or probable: as my examples have illustrated, one can both fail to intend what one takes to be a certain consequence of one’s intentional action, and also intend what one takes to be a far from certain, even a far from probable, consequence. So if I am right, intention is not a matter of speeches in the head; and not a matter of foreseen consequences, certain, or probable above some given level, or otherwise.

Against closeness Another familiar suggestion in the literature at this point is closeness: what I intend is the action under the intensional description under which I actually do it, and also that action under whatever other intensional descriptions are close enough to that first description. But what is ‘close’ here, and what is ‘enough’? A cottage industry in metaphysics has grown up to answer these questions. I myself have contributed to that cottage industry the suggestion that nothing is close enough, except intensional identity: the intensional description under which I do the action is, strictly speaking, the only description under which it is intentional.25 I recant. For one thing: as argued earlier, in normal circumstances it is entirely wrong to say that if I knowingly and intentionally pull the trigger on a loaded gun pointed at your head, then I don’t intentionally kill you. For another: as argued just now, there isn’t in general any such thing as the unique ‘intensional description under which I actually do it’. A further problem for closeness is that an action can be intentional under both of two descriptions, one very ‘close’ and one very ‘distant’ indeed – while not intentional under some third description which (so to speak) lies in between as to ‘closeness’. Example: we plant a time capsule in the ground. It’s packed with interesting goodies from our time, and on the outside it says ‘Not to be opened till 2350 AD’. Our action is intentional under the known description ‘Digging a hole in the ground and sticking a tin in it’, which presumably is a ‘close’ description on most if not all intuitive accounts of closeness. And it is intentional under the known description ‘Telling the people of 2350 about life in 2017’, which

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presumably is a very ‘distant’ description. But it is not intentional under the known description ‘Providing twenty-­second-century looters with some possible spoil’ – even though we are clearly doing that as well, and even though that description may well be intermediate in closeness between the first and the second. (This remains possible pretty much whatever we take closeness to be – temporal closeness, spatial co-­location, coincidence across possible worlds, the entailment of one description by another, the probability of one description being true if the other is, normal causal separability,26 some mix of these factors, or whatever.) If you think this is an isolated example, consider what happens every time you write a letter or an email, or make a phone call. Or consider a tyrant who signs a death warrant and hands it to a runner, who takes it to the hangman, who waits till the joiner has finished building the gallows, and then hangs the tyrant’s victim. On most accounts of closeness that I can think of, both the runner and joiner perform actions that are closer to the death of the victim than anything the tyrant does. Nonetheless, intuitively, the hangman and the tyrant both kill the victim (in different senses), while the runner and the joiner do not. (They might of course do things that make them culpably compliant in killing the victim, but that is another matter.) To understand what counts as an intention or27 an intentional action and what does not, we do not need the bad philosophical psychology of internalism about intention; nor Sidgwick’s clearly mistaken claims about the intentionalness of whatever is foreseen as certain or probable; nor do we need the fanciful pseudo-­metaphysics of closeness. The contours of our category of intentional action are not the same as the contours of any of these other categories. What then do we need?

Intention and convention In one word, convention. (Recall, again, Anscombe as quoted above: ‘Circumstances, and the immediate facts about the means you are choosing to your ends, dictate what descriptions of your intention you must admit.’) Or to use Wittgenstein’s phrase, what grounds our judgements about agents’ intentions is ‘[t]he common behaviour of mankind’ (PI §206; cp. §415). There are ways in which it is fruitful to think of actions as analogous to linguistic utterances. (There are also disanalogies, most obviously (a) that utterances are actions of one sort, and (b) that utterances typically have just one meaning (at any rate one semantic meaning), whereas actions, as I’ve already

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stressed, typically fit more than one intentional description. These differences do no harm provided we keep them in mind.) To understand another person’s actions – indeed to understand them as actions, and her as a person – is to categorize them within a repertoire of possibilities which – like the vocabulary of a language – is both set and familiar, but also extensible and flexible in indefinitely many new ways. He is arguing, sewing, voting; she is listening, ploughing, deciding; they are computing the nth place of Pi, hauling on the main brace, dancing Swan Lake . . . and so on indefinitely. The frame of reference for our understanding of each other as agents – if you like, the lexicon of action – is this repertoire of possible things that other people could be doing. The same repertoire is also the constitutive backdrop to all our own choices; just as the same vocabulary guides both my interpretation of others’ utterances, and my composition of my own utterances. When I act, as much as when I speak, I almost always choose to come out with something intelligible. And what it is for an action to be intelligible is for it to be relatable in some way or other, as novel in some respects and formulaic in others, to the complex network of circumstance and presupposition that constitutes the background repertoire, the lexicon of action – just as utterances are intelligible in virtue of their partly novel, partly formulaic relation to a literal lexicon, namely the language’s vocabulary (PI §337). Quite generally, what counts as a given action is settled by convention: by how that performance fits into the known pragmatic lexicon. Since to intend is simply to set oneself to do an action, the fact that the nature of actions is conventionally determined entails that the nature of intentions is conventionally determined too. Why, when I go for a bike ride, do I intend the bike ride, and the exercise, and the breath of fresh air, and the attempt on my personal best, and the sightseeing round Angus villages, but not (ever) the change in the NHS Tayside exercise statistics, and not (on this occasion) the avoiding of lunchtime phone calls? The answer is: because that is how our common frame of reference categorizes and interprets my behaviour. This is how any competent user of that framework will interpret me. It is also, insofar as I am a competent user of the framework, how I myself will understand what I intend and what I do. Just the same applies when we say ‘Come off it – if you intend to fire a bullet through someone’s head then you intend to kill him’, or ‘Come off it – if you intend a craniotomy then you intend the baby’s death’, or make the various other come off it remarks that I (at any rate) find myself longing to make so much of the time in so many of the most typical debates about double-­effect reasoning. (Come off it is not, formally speaking, a logical refutation. I increasingly suspect

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that, most of the time, in most interesting philosophy, even non-­trivial logic, come off it is about as close to refutation as we can hope to get.) The force of these remarks is of the come off it kind: it lies in their appeal to our shared framework for understanding actions. It is part of that frame of reference that e.g. cutting off a baby’s head is inseparable from killing it. And that – not anything about foreseen consequences, or ‘closeness’, or little speeches inside the head – is why the two intentions are inseparable.

Intention, convention and some familiar old chestnuts The same convention-­based approach does good explanatory work elsewhere. For example, I think it gives the right answer to the old Tramp vs. Trolley chestnut. What is the moral difference between diverting the famous trolley so that five lives are saved and one isn’t, and dissecting the familiar tramp for transplant organs that will save five lives at the cost of his life? The difference can’t be centrally to do with action and omission; if the doing/allowing distinction is morally relevant to Tramp, then it is hard to see why it isn’t equally relevant to Trolley. Nor can the difference be centrally about where you direct your ‘inner acts of intending’; if you can give your inner acts some suitably harmless target in Trolley, it is hard to see, for reasons explained above, why you can’t do the same in Tramp. Nor again, to knock away another of my own earlier attempts,28 is the key difference really a point about whether we are confronted by an already-­existing problem, or as it were create the problem for ourselves – though that is the closest of these failed attempts. The real moral difference between Tramp and Trolley, I suggest, is simply that in Tramp I kill, in Trolley I don’t. I don’t kill in Trolley, because I don’t have a killing intention there; I don’t have that sort of intention in Trolley, because in that case no interpreter of my action who had a decent competence with the relevant conventions would interpret my action as having a killing intention. But I do have a killing intention in Tramp, because no competent interpreter of my action there would or indeed could interpret my action as having anything but a killing intention. That my action in Trolley is a reaction to something confronting me, and a deflection of causal processes already under way, whereas my action in Tramp is an initiation of a causal process, is also relevant: it helps us see why any competent interpreter of my actions will so interpret them. But the central point is the point about how we determine, in line with our shared human conventions, what counts as an act of intentional killing, and what doesn’t.

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‘But conventions are society-­relative (they vary from place to place) and history-­relative (they vary from time to time). So conventions can’t objectively determine the facts about what you intend!’ One might as well say that ‘orange’ can’t objectively be the modern English word for orange. There is an interesting and important mistake in this inference, one which is entirely characteristic of contemporary analytic ethics. The mistake is the background assumption that ‘what things really are’ – actions, for example – can’t be historically conditioned. Nothing is a bigger obstacle to real progress in the theory of action than this ahistorical assumption about the nature of action. Rejecting it, we should take seriously the possibility that there are action-­kinds which are not accessible to us purely for historical reasons. No one now, for example, can sacrifice his daughter to Hera to placate her and get a following wind to sail to Troy; and no European has ever been able to commit hara-­kiri. (Perhaps even the Japanese cannot commit hara-­kiri anymore.) If the categories which demarcate our ethical concepts are, as the jargon has it, ‘thick’, it follows logically that the categories that demarcate our actions must be thick as well. So if we are asked ‘Why couldn’t it be that intentions which were inseparable within one social framework were separable within another?’ the answer is: It not only could be, it is. Deliberately belching at the end of a meal is, inescapably, an insult to your host in Reigate, and a complimentary act in Riyadh – or so I’m told. None of this implies that the action-­lexicon of one culture cannot be translated, at least roughly, into the action-­lexicon of another; no more than we should think that, because different cultures have different languages, there can be no shared reference ­point by which to translate one language into another. This is the ‘common behaviour of mankind’ of which Wittgenstein speaks as a necessary condition of understanding humans from other cultures. (It is also why, pace C. S. Lewis, we could not understand talking lions: PPF §327.) ‘But conventions are partial and incompletely determinate. So they can’t fix what it is that we intend in every case.’ I have two replies to this: (a) maybe it is also incompletely determinate what we do and do not intend, so that our standard accurately matches the vaguenesses that are actually there in what it is measuring. And (b) to echo what Austin said about ordinary language – my claim is not that the pragmatic conventions that together constitute the lexicon of action are the last word. It is only that they are the first word. Besides its use in analysing the Tramp vs. Trolley chestnut, the convention-­ based approach helps us with some other chestnuts too; Loop and Fat Man, for instance. In Fat Man, it is not a question of diverting the trolley away from the

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five miners by pressing a button; it is a question of stopping the trolley by throwing a fat man onto the track in front of it. No sane or normal person, following the ordinary conventions about how we use action-­descriptions, would unqualifiedly describe what I do in the straight Trolley case as an action of killing (and so of intentional killing), even though the one miner’s death is a certain and foreseen consequence of my action. By contrast, every such person would call throwing the fat man onto the track an act of killing, or attempted killing. (And as above, if it is objected that the intention is only to injure him, the best response seems to be ‘Yes, you intend to injure him too.’) Likewise in Loop, diverting the trolley away from the five miners and towards the one only saves the five miners provided that the trolley hits the one; if it doesn’t hit him, the trolley will carry on round the Loop and mow down the other five miners from behind. So if you intentionally divert the trolley in Loop, you must be intending it to hit the one miner. In the original Trolley case, if you found out that the trolley had not in fact hit the one miner, you would be delighted and relieved; in the Loop variant, you would think ‘My plan has misfired’. That shows that hitting the miner – which, at least as the story is usually told, means killing him – is part of your plan in Loop; killing him is a means to the end of saving the others, not a side-­effect of pursuing that end. So here it looks to me, on the whole, as if you do have a killing intention. Loop is not straightforward, because it is an even more unusual case than most of the others in the modern casuist’s panoply; but under the conventional approach, it comes out, on reflection, as pretty clearly a case of intending to kill. Does that mean that diverting the trolley in Loop is wrong? It does if you think that the content of the relevant absolute prohibition is that ‘It is always wrong to intend to kill an innocent’. But that, it seems to me, is the wrong way for an absolutist like Aquinas, or Anscombe, or Boyle, or Grisez, or Finnis, or Shaw or myself to understand the prohibition on murder – a prohibition which, it is agreed on all sides, is exceptionless only once we have made certain important exceptions, perhaps just war or capital punishment for instance. This is partly because so understanding it can very quickly lead us to want a sense in which we don’t intend to kill an innocent in Loop, and this is almost certain to be the internalized-­intention sense once more. There are possible cases where whatever I intentionally do – in the conventional sense of ‘intentionally do’ that I have been developing – I will intentionally kill an innocent. The Crashing Aeroplane case, where my only serious options are to crash the aeroplane of which I am the pilot into more innocent civilians or fewer innocent civilians, is like that. Craniotomy is like that too – or at least those

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particular types of craniotomy case where the child’s death is certain in any case, and the mother’s death is certain without craniotomy, and I am the attendant doctor (so that, given my special responsibility to my patients, intentional abstention on my part here also counts as intentional action). So are most of the cases involving uterine cancer in a pregnant woman that get described in the literature. In such cases, where it simply isn’t open to me to kill no innocents, the reasonable thing to do is not determined by DDE at all. The reasonable thing there is to kill as few innocents as possible; which suggests in turn that the wording that we should have in the relevant absolute prohibition is something like ‘It is always wrong to intend to kill an innocent where it is open to you not to’. In any case, where I do have to kill, and in so killing am not flouting the absolute prohibition against murder, however exactly that should be defined – in such cases it is also reasonable, of course, for me to do this killing with deep repugnance and horror, and utterly unreasonable for me to do it with delight, or as part of a plan to get rid of the baby, or ‘to kill someone to see what it feels like’. So such cases do show that there can be some place in ethics for making speeches to myself inside my head about what I am doing, and the aspects of it that I find morally repulsive; after all, from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics onwards it is a familiar enough thought that character is revealed by our attitudes, ranging from regret to delight, to the things we in one sense or another ‘have to’ do. Even then, however, such speeches are not intentions; nor, on their own, are the plans that such speeches might express. They may capture my motives, or morally important aspects of the intentional choices, aspects that can make the difference between permissibility and impermissibility. But as I have argued, the test of ‘the common way of behaviour of humanity’ shows that these speeches do not typically capture intentions. What comes out in that last paragraph, I think, is how overworked DDE has been. Cases like Craniotomy and the Crashing Aeroplane – and, I would say, Loop – have been analysed using DDE; as if the fact that DDE is sometimes the appropriate casuistical tool implied that it is always appropriate. But it is the usual philosopher’s disease, the disease of overgeneralization, to think that a principle that works perfectly well in some cases must be stretched and contorted so that it covers all, or as many as possible. What I am proposing here – in different respects following Wittgenstein, Anscombe and Aquinas29 – is simply that we not overreach ourselves. Like any other moral principle, the DDE cannot do everything. Trying to make it do too much will only lead to trouble. Indeed it already has.30

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Notes 1 Sed contra: ‘[A] cat’s movements in stalking a bird are hardly to be called an expression of intention. . . . Wittgenstein seems to me to have gone wrong in speaking of the “natural expression of an intention” ’ (G. E. M. Anscombe, Intention, 2nd edn [Oxford: Blackwell, 1963], §2; thanks to Roger Teichmann for reminding me of the passage). Anscombe seems to me to be reading Wittgenstein rather uncharitably here. We can say both that my involuntary and non-­convention-­governed sigh is an expression of relief, and also that my voluntary and convention-governed remark ‘I’m relieved’ is an expression of relief. The sigh betrays my relief, just as the cat’s movements betray its design on the bird. We might want a word to capture the distinctive way in which this sort of behaviour counts as expression. If we do, why not ‘natural’? 2 Joseph T. Mangan, SJ, ‘An Historical Analysis of the Principle of Double Effect’, Theological Studies 10, no. 1 (1949), 41–61, at 43. Virtually identical statements of the doctrine are given by, among others, Germain Grisez, The Way of the Lord Jesus, Volume 1: Christian Moral Principles (Chicago, IL: Franciscan Herald Press, 1983), 239–41, and Joseph M. Boyle, Jr, ‘Toward Understanding the Principle of Double Effect’, Ethics 90, no. 4 (1980), 527–38, at 528–30. I don’t know whether any statement of it is in any sense authoritative for Catholics. 3 Joseph Boyle, ‘Who Is Entitled to Double Effect?’, Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 16, no. 5 (1991), 475–94, at 477. 4 For a clear instance of this limitation, see Jonathan Bennett, The Act Itself (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). 5 On this see further my ‘Moral Perception’, Philosophy 83, no. 4 (2008), 421–37. 6 I got this example long ago, from a class that David Pugmire gave in Southampton in 1989. The story is almost but not quite in Anna Karenina, Part 2, Ch. 28 – hence my names. (There Karenin and other spectators at a horse race do realize Anna’s passion for Vronsky from her behaviour. But Anna herself knows already.) 7 PI §647 is not, of course, about whether non-­human animals have intentions too, though it is about animal-­kingdom-wide continuities. From evidence elsewhere it is clear that Wittgenstein thought not, as did Aquinas (ST 1a2ae.12.5), but that is not the issue here. 8 On non-­observational knowledge of one’s own actions, and how it might be a species of Anscombean practical knowledge, see Adrian Haddock, ‘ “The Knowledge that a Man has of His Intentional Actions” ’, in Essays on Anscombe’s ‘Intention’, ed. Anton Ford, Jennifer Hornsby and Frederick Stoutland (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 147–69. 9 See esp. Anscombe, Intention §§23–7. 10 Germain Grisez, The Way of the Lord Jesus, Volume 2: Living a Christian Life (Chicago, IL: Franciscan Herald Press, 1993), 473.

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11 Perhaps this is the thought that lies behind the Vatican’s condemnation of craniotomy. 12 Cp. G. E. M. Anscombe, ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’, Philosophy 33 (1958), 1–19, at 5: ‘pretty well any action can be so described as to make it fall under a variety of principles . . . if it falls under any.’ Cp. ST 1a2ae.12.3. 13 G. E. M. Anscombe, ‘Action, Intention and “Double Effect” ’, in Human Life, Action and Ethics: Essays, ed. Mary Geach and Luke Gormally (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2005), 207–26, at 223. 14 John Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 123. 15 ‘[T]he baby’s death need not be included in the proposal adopted in choosing to do a craniotomy. The proposal can be simply to alter the child’s physical dimensions . . .’ (Grisez, Living a Christian Life, 502). Cp. Boyle, ‘Who Is Entitled to Double Effect?’, 480: ‘the death of the one who is killed by the craniotomy in Hart’s famous example is not intended in the [present] sense of intention’. 16 See Judith Jarvis Thomson, ‘A Defense of Abortion’, Philosophy and Public Affairs 1, no. 1 (1971), 47–66; John Finnis, ‘The Rights and Wrongs of Abortion: A Reply to Judith Thomson’, Philosophy and Public Affairs 2, no. 2 (1973), 117–45. 17 ‘[T]here are always borderline cases in ethics. Now if you are either an Aristotelian, or a believer in divine law, you will deal with a borderline case by considering whether doing such-­and-such in such-­and-such circumstances is, say, murder, or is an act of injustice; and according as you decide it is or it isn’t, you judge it to be a thing to do or not. This would be the method of casuistry; and while it may lead you to stretch a point on the circumference, it will not permit you to destroy the centre’ (Anscombe, ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’, 12). 18 Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics [1874], 7th edn (London: Macmillan, 1907), 202. 19 Joseph Shaw, ‘Intention in Ethics’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy 36, no. 2 (2006), 187–223, at 206; emphasis added. 20 See Frances M. Kamm, ‘The Doctrine of Triple Effect and Why a Rational Agent Need Not Intend the Means to His End’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes 74 (2000), 21–39. 21 We should be similarly suspicious of talk of ‘the action’, which crops up in all sorts of unexpected places, e.g. in Gerard Hughes, who even while being much more negative about DDE than I would want to be, is to be found talking of ‘the (perhaps complex) action-­type which that individual piece of behaviour instantiates’ (italics mine), and of ‘which action [singular] it is that the agent can properly be said to have performed’ (‘ “Double Effect” or Practical Wisdom?’, in Human Values: New Essays on Ethics and Natural Law, ed. David S. Oderberg and Timothy Chappell [Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004], 217–35, at 220, 232). As if there must (really, after due analysis) always be just one.

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22 See my ‘Ethics Beyond Moral Theory’, Philosophical Investigations 32, no. 3 (2009), 206–43. 23 Anscombe, Intention §23, p. 40. 24 One recent example is Lawrence Masek, ‘Intentions, Motives and the Doctrine of Double Effect’, Philosophical Quarterly 60 (2010), 567–85, at 570: ‘Removing Otto’s organs saves five people by providing organs, not by killing him. According to the strict definition of intention, therefore, Lily does not intend Otto’s death. I would find the strict definition mad or absurd if it permitted Lily’s action, but it does no such thing. She does not act immorally by intending Otto’s death, but she does act immorally . . . by stealing . . . . I would also reject the strict definition if it entailed that Lily could be legally punished only for stealing and not for murder. Fortunately, nothing about the strict definition denies the possibility, or the prudence, of classifying actions somewhat differently in legal and moral contexts.’ Masek does not explain what is supposed to justify these different classifications; on the face of it, jurists have typically gone in for rather a lot of very moral-­looking reasoning in reaching their legal conclusions. Again, why can’t Lily avoid moral blame for stealing too? Another recent example is Joseph Shaw, ‘Intentions and Trolleys’, Philosophical Quarterly 56 (2006), 63–83, at 67, commenting on Glanville Williams’ case of a surgeon who ‘takes a fancy to [a] patient’s heart’, and ‘removes it, not with the intention of killing the patient, but just to be able to . . . examine it. . . . Williams then points out that a constraint against killing formulated in terms of intention would not forbid this action. | This, of course, is perfectly true’ (italics mine). No it isn’t. As any court would find, the surgeon who does what Williams describes is either of unsound mind, or does intend to kill his patient. 25 In my ‘Two Distinctions that Do Make a Difference: The Action/Omission Distinction and the Principle of Double Effect’, Philosophy 77, no. 2 (2002), 211–34. 26 I tried out this suggestion in ‘The Polymorphy of Practical Reason’, in Human Values, 102–26. I now think it’s hopeless. 27 Some remarks made by some writers on DDE, e.g. Joseph Shaw, suggest that they think that intentions and intentional actions are separate categories which should not be confused. In some senses no doubt this is true. In particular, and obviously enough, because something can always stop you acting, there can be an intention without an intentional action, but there can’t be an intentional action without an intention. Still, the intention’s telos is always the intentional action; an intention is in potentia what an intentional action is in actu. 28 I did try this idea out, in various drafts. I am not sure any of them ever made it into print. I got the idea partly from Bernard Williams’ talk of ‘confrontation’ in Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (London: Fontana, 1985), Ch. 2, and partly from Philippa Foot’s talk of the difference between ‘initiating’ and ‘deflecting’ in ‘The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of Double Effect’, in Virtues and Vices and

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Other Essays in Moral Philosophy (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1978), Ch. 2. 29 In this chapter I have not been able to cite Aquinas as much as I would have liked to, as a source for the externalism about intention that I develop. I think he is such a source, and that this can be shown by a careful reading of (in particular) Questions 12–20 of the Prima Secundae. (It is striking how often modern debates about double effect cite ST 2a2ae.64.7c and not 1a2ae.12. It is the latter which is the set-­piece disquisition on intention; the former is barely more than an obiter dictum.) However, to develop such a reading properly would take a long time, especially because a lot of what Aquinas says at least looks patient of either an externalist or an internalist reading. In the present context I remark only that the starting points for the externalist reading are a close look at Aquinas’ notion of the obiectum of an action, which so far as I can see is best translated as the objective description of that action, its genus and its species, and the intrinsic and essential relationship that Aquinas sees between obiectum and voluntas – a relationship which the intention mediates. 30 This chapter had its origin in a contribution to an Anscombe Centre for Bioethics day conference in Blackfriars, Oxford, in 2011; an earlier version was published in the online journal Diametros in 2013. My thanks for discussion, commentary, and help to Vivienne Brown, Adrian Haddock, John Haldane, Sir Anthony Kenny (my commentator at the Blackfriars conference), Erasmus Mayr, Eleonore Stump, Tom Pink, Anthony Price, Roger Teichmann, Ralph Wedgwood and especially Joseph Shaw, who has generously shown me extensive drafts of his book-­in-progress on DDE. None of these discussants is in any way culpable for the present chapter, unless it is culpable of them to allow me to write it while foreseeing, but not intending, what would be in it.

11

Wittgenstein and the Value of Clarity Duncan Richter

Two potentially competing values in communication are clarity or understanding, on the one hand, and achieving (other) particular goals, on the other. In this chapter I address Wittgenstein’s concern with clarity, and consider some examples of unclarity, especially deliberate unclarity. I also discuss George Orwell’s well-­known attack on thoughtless and imprecise language, before turning to Rowan Williams’ recent updating of Orwell’s argument. My conclusion is not that clarity is more important than anything else, but that it makes sense to value it (rather than simply caring about the more practical results of language use) and that in some cases we might have to choose between achieving our desired results and being clear. The goodness of clarity does not guarantee that clear communication will always have the best effects.

Wittgenstein against reduction In 1930, Wittgenstein wrote that: 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. And even clarity is only a means to this end & not an end in itself. For me on the contrary clarity, transparency, is an end in itself. I am not interested in erecting a building but in having the foundations of possible buildings transparently before me. CV R 9e; Wittgenstein’s emphasis

He does not say why he regards transparency as an end in itself, what is so good about it, but he does say something about what he means by clarity. It means, at least here, having a transparent, unobscured, view of possibilities, or at least the

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foundations of possibilities. If the clarity Wittgenstein describes is an end in itself then it will not simply be a means to some other end, but it might also serve as such a means and have value for this reason too. It might, for instance, help to end unnecessary problems arising from false ideas about what must or cannot be the case. In 1931, with reference to Friedrich Waismann’s work, Wittgenstein writes: As long as there is a possibility of having different opinions and disputing about a question, this indicates that things have not yet been expressed clearly enough. Once perfectly clear formulation – ultimate clarity – has been reached, there can be no second thoughts or reluctance any more, for these always arise from the feeling that something has now been asserted, and I do not yet know whether I should admit it or not. If, however, you make the grammar clear to yourself, if you proceed by very short steps in such a way that every single step becomes perfectly obvious and natural, no dispute whatsoever can arise. WVC 183

It is striking that Wittgenstein says that no dispute can arise once things have been expressed clearly enough. Surely two people might know all the relevant facts of some matter and yet have different ideas regarding, say, ethical or aesthetic judgements or about what should be done. But Wittgenstein is not talking about this kind of dispute here. He is talking about philosophy, which he did not take to include the making of value judgements or practical decision making. Grammatical clarification should disentangle alternative positions or claims, and show what does and does not follow from what else. Philosophy then involves differentiation, and Wittgenstein thought of using the line ‘I’ll teach you differences’ as a motto for the Philosophical Investigations.1 In line with the desire to differentiate, he also rejected attempts to boil one thing down to another. In the notes taken by students at his lectures on aesthetics we find this, for instance: “If we boil Redpath at 200° C. all that is left when the water vapour is gone is some ashes, etc. This is all Redpath really is.” Saying this might have a certain charm, but would be misleading to say the least. LC 24

Reduction of this kind can be misleading and is hence unclear. Clear expression, on the other hand, prevents disputes but also (allegedly) has value simply in itself. If it does, then there is value in the transparent presentation and recognition of all possibilities. Wittgenstein seems to want to respect differences,2 unlike

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misguided, misleading reductionism, which shrinks, or pretends to shrink, the world (cf. TLP 6.43).3 He implies also that he wants to do justice to concepts.4 So there is an ethical aspect to his method or approach to philosophical problems. Clarity for him has intrinsic value and aiming for it is a matter of something like respect or justice. For this reason Wittgenstein’s clarificatory method, if I can call it that, should not be judged, or at least is not supported, solely by reference to its efficacy.5 If we use his method(s) we are concerned with grammar, but not mere surface grammar. What matters is the kind of grammar that makes a difference. The kind that allows us to distinguish religion from science, say. In the 1929 ‘Lecture on Ethics’, Wittgenstein says that if someone suddenly grows the head of a lion and I seek to find out why, perhaps by means of surgery, then I am responding scientifically, in a way that leaves no room for the possibility of a miracle. At most a miracle in this case would be an unlikely hypothesis, but that is not (what Wittgenstein takes to be) the religious view of what a miracle is. If instead I fall to my knees and pray then I am responding religiously and not scientifically. It is not that I rule out various hypotheses as highly unlikely. They simply do not arise for me in this example. So the scientific response and the religious response are not (best thought of as) rival versions of the same thing. They are different kinds of response, involving different concepts and behaviour. Observing this multiplicity, part of the richness that the world contains, is a way of respecting it. Pointing out deep grammatical differences can be regarded as a kind of duty, while actively trying to deny or blur such differences would, on one view, be impious or philistine. This is a strike against such denial or blurring, but not in itself reason to believe that nothing could possibly justify it. Who commits such blurring or denial? One group might consist of people who deny Wittgenstein’s distinction between religious and scientific approaches to natural phenomena. Richard Dawkins is a possible example of someone with whom Wittgenstein might seriously disagree. Some Christian fundamentalists might be another, or perhaps Father C. W. O’Hara, SJ, whom Wittgenstein criticizes in his lectures on religious belief for treating a religious question as a question of science (see LC 57).6 And another possible group would include those who engage in what are often called politically correct uses of language, but that might be better called forms of semantic blinkering. In each case there is a rejection or denial of differences involving concepts. In order to avoid vague or misleading generalizations myself, I will turn now to some specific examples of unclear, sometimes deliberately unclear, language.

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Examples of blurring distinctions When I mention political correctness, what I have in mind is any attempt to promote a debatable political cause, good or bad, left or right, simply by insisting that certain terms be used in place of others. I take it that insistence on the use or non-­use of certain terms is all right in some cases. There are words we should not use, for instance because of their offensiveness. One important reason for preferring a term such as ‘African-American’ to ‘black’, or more obviously insulting terms, though, is clarity. The word ‘black’ need not always be avoided when speaking about people, but it has connotations that might, especially in conjunction with human history, mislead someone into thinking of ‘black people’ as worse than other people.7 A person so misled lacks clarity in their thinking. A more neutral term, such as ‘African-American’, on the other hand, does not have the same connotations, and has similarities with such terms as ‘Irish-American’ that might help people see the equal humanity of African-Americans and other Americans. Not all attempts at semantic persuasion are like this, however. For instance, in a column in The New York Times, Paul Krugman claimed that ‘right-­ wing political correctness’ insists that wealthy people should instead be referred to as ‘job creators’.8 Could an insistence such as this be all right? A consequentialist will care only about the effects, or the probable effects, of word choice. Others will care about clarity and accuracy. Most of us, I suspect, will care about both accurate conceptualization and the consequences of such conceptualization. For example, Sally Haslanger offers analyses of gender and race with, she says, ‘both the goal of understanding racial and sexual oppression, and of achieving sexual and racial equality’ (my emphasis).9 One point I want to make is that these kinds of goals (i.e. understanding and achieving practical goals) are not the same and can conflict. The very idea of accurate conceptualization might be questioned though. Can any concepts be wrong or worse than others except in terms of their effects? I think they can be, because of the question of seeing, or obscuring, possibilities. A term such as ‘killer whale’ tends to hide the possibility of a sympathetic member of this species. The word ‘orca’, on the other hand, is more neutral, tending to rule nothing out about what an orca might be like. Similarly, it is harder (though not impossible) to think of a bad job-­creator, but fairly easy to imagine a wealthy person being either good or bad. So far as we care about transparency of possibilities, then, we will tend to prefer terms such as ‘orca’ and ‘wealthy person’. Which is not to say, however, that other concerns will never push against this tendency.

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I have mentioned reduction, but the blurring of distinctions can also come from expansion. Indeed, these might be seen as two sides of the same coin. Expanding what counts as a physical object, for instance, might also be regarded as reducing some things to physical objects. Another example is expanding the concept of violence to cover more than it usually does. Johan Galtung draws a threefold distinction between what he calls direct, structural and cultural violence. ‘Direct violence’ is what we might call actual or literal violence (or simply violence); ‘structural violence’ is, roughly speaking, systematic injustice; and ‘cultural violence’ is a matter of norms that support such injustice.10 In these cases, we have an extension of a concept from the universally abhorred evils that it clearly includes to other bad things that are less obviously included. This is done quite consciously by Galtung, who writes that: [I]t will soon be clear why we are rejecting the narrow concept of violence – according to which violence is somatic incapacitation, or deprivation of health, alone (with killing as the extreme form), at the hands of an actor who intends this to be the consequence. If this were all violence is about, and peace is seen as its negation, then too little is rejected when peace is held up as an ideal. Highly unacceptable social orders would still be compatible with peace. Hence, an extended concept of violence is indispensable but that concept should be a logical extension, not merely a list of undesirables.11

Speaking of the task of defining ‘violence’, Galtung writes that ‘it is not so important to arrive at anything like the definition, or the typology – for there are obviously many types of violence’. His immediate concern ‘is to indicate theoretically significant dimensions of violence that can lead thinking, research and, potentially, action, towards the most important problems.’12 In other words, his concern is much more with practical consequences than with providing an accurate analysis of the concept of violence. Others who extend concepts in a similar way may do so either unwittingly or else with good intentions (or perhaps a bit of each), the aim being to encourage action against these other bad things. An example might be using the expression ‘white supremacy’ to refer not only to a relatively rare openly racist ideology but also to a much more common kind of racial inequality. Sometimes people use the term ‘white supremacy’ in a somewhat technical sense, but it is at least possible that its suggestion of violent hate-­groups gives the term a borrowed rhetorical power that appeals to some of its users. If words are chosen because they have this kind of power, then the means chosen to promote the relevant cause, belonging to the mode of presentation, are indirect and therefore

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somewhat manipulative, the idea apparently being to change people’s thinking without their noticing or consenting to it. This may be manipulative towards a good end, but it is manipulative all the same. And the justification of such linguistic manipulation is likely to be slightly odd, appealing both to the good intentions of the manipulators and to the consequentialist idea that intentions do not matter. Direct violence is intentional, while structural violence need not be. In talking of ‘structural violence’ the concept of violence is extended on the ground that intention matters far less than effects, and the effects of structural or cultural violence might be just as bad as those of direct violence. But then the persuasive force of the word ‘violence’, rather than, say ‘injustice’, seems to depend on a sense that intentions do matter. Violence is more active than injustice, and agency implies intention. Galtung talks about violence because he is concerned with peace, which he wants to identify as the absence of violence. But why talk about peace rather than goodness or justice or perhaps some combination of terms? As we have seen, he gives essentially consequentialist reasons for doing so. The word ‘peace’ is widely and deeply accepted as the name for something of great value. Galtung writes of: the generally widespread use of the term ‘peace’ – so widespread and so generally acknowledged that it possibly presents some kind of substitute in this secular age for feelings of devotion and community that in former ages were invoked by reference to religious concepts.13

Despite what he acknowledges as ‘the many possibilities for semantic confusion’,14 Galtung wants to use the word ‘peace’ because of its broad and deep emotional appeal. He and other similarly motivated linguistic innovators can seem to want both the inherited meanings of the words they use and the new meanings that they want to associate with them. This, as he recognizes, can lead to confusion, but this is a price he is willing to pay for the sake of the benefits he anticipates. Whether the actual effects will be good is unknown, however. What we know is that taking a word such as ‘violence’ and applying it to a phenomenon to which it has previously not applied stretches the meaning of the word, making it cover more than it did before. It might be in some sense (and in some cases of this phenomenon) what Galtung calls a logical extension of the concept in question, but it is an extension all the same. This might have highly beneficial consequences, but we cannot know in advance that it will do so, and using language to imply similarities both obscures differences that were previously more evident and

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works by implication rather than by rational or clear explication. For example, if we call people ‘differently abled’ then, whatever advantages this might have (and both reducing prejudice and calling people what they prefer to be called are significant advantages), this also has the disadvantages of making disabled people sound as though they have unusual talents (which may or may not be true in any given case) and of reducing prejudice, if at all, by means other than rational persuasion or, at least arguably, reference to reality. (Some people would insist that the so-­called disabled are in fact merely differently abled.) These terminological disadvantages certainly might be outweighed by the advantages, but they are worth noting all the same, and might not be so outweighed in other cases (such as substituting the term ‘job creators’ for ‘wealthy people’). And if we value clarity in a non-­consequentialist way then this weighing of advantages and disadvantages will not be the only consideration we care about. It might be asked whether extensions of concepts such as that of violence necessarily dilute meaning or blur distinctions. If I extend a concept that formerly covered only A and B so that it now covers C as well, then of course I have done something to reduce the distinction between A and C. But I might also have brought out the similarity between A and C that was formerly obscured. The value of this revelation might outweigh the badness of any hiding in what I have done. So extending concepts is not necessarily something that proponents of clarity should oppose. It will depend on the particular case. My point is simply that it can reduce clarity. Expanding the concept of violence, for instance, as Galtung does appears to reduce clarity even on his own admission. Expanding the concept of marriage to include same-­sex relationships, on the other hand, might improve understanding of these relationships.15

Orwell versus vagueness Speaking of blurring distinctions brings to mind George Orwell’s famous attack on vague and stale language in his essay ‘Politics and the English Language’.16 Orwell argues in favour of simplicity and clarity, saying that: one ought to recognise that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end. If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself.17

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This is close to something Elizabeth Anscombe says in ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’. There she writes that: It would be a great improvement if, instead of “morally wrong,” one always named a genus such as “untruthful,” “unchaste,” “unjust.” We should no longer ask whether doing something was “wrong,” passing directly from some description of an action to this notion; we should ask whether, e.g., it was unjust; and the answer would sometimes be clear at once.18

One problem with talk about what is ‘morally wrong’, as Anscombe sees it, is that its meaning is not clear, and therefore it is hard to see whether a given act is right or wrong. If we use more precise language, words that are both more specific and more clearly meaningful, we will be in a better position to see what we should do. This is very close to Orwell’s idea that if we use simpler language, by which he means, at least in part, more specific language, the stupidity of certain remarks will be more obvious. Orwell emphasizes the political consequences of decayed language, but he sees a human cost too. Watching a political speech full of the usual expressions thoughtlessly mouthed, one can, he says, feel as though it is a dummy or machine, not a human being, that is speaking. And there is some basis in fact for this, according to Orwell, because: A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself.19

But worst of all, Orwell seems to think, is the political cost. Political uses of euphemism and vagueness act as a kind of intellectual smokescreen for gross injustice. In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. . . . Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-­begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-­gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. . . . Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.20

It is easy to sympathize with Orwell, but harder to follow his recommendations in practice. One problem is that Orwell recommends focusing on concrete

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objects and examples as much as possible, but not everything is concrete. He never defines what he counts as meaningless language, but he comes close when he says that: Words like romantic, plastic, values, human, dead, sentimental, natural, vitality, as used in art criticism, are strictly meaningless, in the sense that they not only do not point to any discoverable object, but are hardly ever expected to do so by the reader.21

As Wittgenstein points out in the ‘Lecture on Ethics’, and as might be obvious anyway, ethics and religion are full of words that do not point to any discoverable object and should not be expected to do so by their audience. Moral rights and obligations are not discoverable objects. Perhaps on Wittgensteinian or Anscombean grounds we might reject talk of these things, but what about justice or God? Are they discoverable objects? Perhaps in some sense they are, but they are not concrete objects in the sense that Orwell seems to have in mind. So there is a problem here, or at least a challenge, for anyone who does not want to reject Orwell’s view. How can we talk about ethical, religious, aesthetic and related political issues without resorting to the kind of language that Orwell apparently regards as meaningless and that brings with it the problems he identifies? I think the answer is: very carefully. Orwell especially rejects imprecision and lack of imagination. It is not necessarily more difficult to speak and write imaginatively about ethics than it is to speak and write imaginatively about anything else. There is a problem, though, concerning precision, and specifically with what precision means, or can mean, in these cases. It cannot mean what it means in specifying what materials are needed for constructing a building. But it is perfectly possible to try to say exactly what one means, and to avoid both clichés and misleading generalizations. It might be objected that while the language Orwell rejects is vague, referring to nothing in particular and thereby obscuring our view of reality, it does not necessarily obscure the specific kind of distinctions that Wittgenstein was concerned with. We might obscure our view of particular facts without obscuring our view of possibilities. If we want to see our options clearly, though, and see what each involves, then we will want to avoid obscurity of both kinds. And I think that in spirit if not in letter this is a Wittgensteinian ideal. Attaining Orwell’s ideal of concreteness and specificity is not always possible, though, it seems to me. Which is not to say, of course, that we should not be as concrete as is possible. And it is not to say, either, that obscurity or lack of clear meaning is just all right.

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Williams on power In his 2015 Orwell Lecture, Rowan Williams compares Orwell’s position on these matters with that of Thomas Merton: The trouble with what Merton characterises as ‘double-­talk, tautology, ambiguous cliché, self-­righteous and doctrinaire pomposity and pseudoscientific jargon’ is not just an aesthetic problem. It renders dialogue impossible; and rendering dialogue impossible is the ultimately desirable goal for those who want to exercise absolute power.22

According to Merton: ‘on top of the obligation to write “disciplined prose”, a writer has “the duty of first writing nonsense . . . to let loose what is hidden in our depths, to expand rather than to condense prematurely.” ’ This is also very Wittgensteinian, and it is hard to imagine Orwell seriously disagreeing.23 He was not in favour of premature or distorting condensation. Less obviously true is this idea of Williams’ though: If we talk and write badly, dishonestly, unanswerably, what we are actually doing is getting ready for war. The habits of mind that make war inevitable are the habits of bad language – that is to say, the habits that grow from uncritical attitudes to power and privilege: contempt towards the powerless, towards minorities, towards the stranger, the longing for an end to human complexity and difference.24

The kind of bad criticism that Orwell quotes need not involve these largely right-­wing vices. Bad language is not always bad because it grows from contempt or uncritical attitudes to privilege. It might just be stale and unimaginative, or thoughtless, or perhaps (Orwell is not very clear on this) carefully constructed to conceal the costs of a political agenda (of any persuasion). The most interesting item on Williams’ list, to my mind, is the last one: the longing for an end to human complexity. This is not the same thing as dishonesty or getting ready for war, but there is a connection. The longing for an end to human complexity can express itself in denial of such complexity, refusal to acknowledge it, and attempts to conceal it. It pushes towards simplification and obscuring. And this kind of non-­rational manipulation is a step in the direction of violence, as Williams brings out and as I will try to explain below. Drawing on Orwell and Merton, Williams says that in a certain kind of bad writing: everything is so organised that you are persuaded not to notice what it is you are talking about. And when that happens, you cannot intelligently

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converse or argue: all there is is the definitive language imposed by those who have power.25

The essence of ‘really bad and poisonous writing’, he says, is ‘trying to make the reader see less.’ In contrast, good writing is open to possible challenge by reference to an independent, uncontrolled reality; it ‘insists that the world is larger than the reader thought’, and it ‘comes from a sense of conversation already begun.’ One key point is that it is bad to speak or write in ways that cannot be checked against any recognizable reality. On the face of it this is problematic, seeming to leave little or no room for ethical, religious or aesthetic judgements, as I have noted. But what it leaves room for depends on what we count as checking language against reality. ‘How can you possibly not like this? Taste it again’ could be (considered, accepted as) a way to check a claim against reality. That is, when we think about checking a claim against reality we are likely to think in terms of the discoverable objects that Orwell mentions, so that where no such object is involved there can be no reality check. But it does not have to be this way. Reality does not need to be understood only as a set of concrete objects. It could also include experiences, and perhaps other things needed to make sense of this experience (such as numbers, atoms, love or God).26 Bad writing and speech, Williams says, silence, shrink or blind. They evade response, make the world seem smaller, and encourage us to ignore at least some features of reality. Good uses of language do the opposite: they not only invite but presuppose response (they belong to a conversation that has already begun), they increase awareness, and insist that the world is larger than we had thought. Proposed ways to check statements against reality that are good in this way, that invite response and increase awareness, will also be good on Williams’ view. Politically motivated innovations in language can do this, but they can also do the opposite. Silence imposed by choice of terms is what Steven Poole calls ‘unspeak’.27 To describe an anti-­abortion position as ‘pro-­life’, he says, is to imply an argument (roughly, that the life of a fetus has the same value as that of a human being and that therefore abortion is wrong) without stating it explicitly and therefore without having to defend it. At the same time, he says, it tries to silence any opposing position by suggesting that there is only one way to think about abortion, as an issue that turns on the question of the value of human life. One can be either pro-­life or else, the implication is, pro-­death or anti-­life, which no one is, apart from the odd philosopher.

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As Williams brings out, this kind of ‘unspeaking’ does not depend only on the choice of words and phrases used. It can also be done by talking (or thinking) as if only certain issues or questions, whatever words we use to pose them, are relevant. In the case of the military examples that he gives, the key issue is victory. ‘Saving the village’ means saving it from falling into the hands of the enemy. The concern is all with the results of action, not with what the action itself is. This is why it is possible to be ‘persuaded not to notice what it is you are talking about.’ Not necessarily because anyone is out to trick you, but perhaps because it is simply taken for granted that what you are talking about (e.g. killing civilians) does not matter. Only the implications for the mission are assumed to matter. Of course, both consequentialists and soldiers do usually care very much about whether civilians are killed. But the commander who said that it was necessary to destroy the village in order to save it cannot have cared very much about the people who lived there, at least while he was saying those words. And his way of thinking comes from focusing exclusively on the accomplishment of a given mission, without (sufficient) regard for how it is accomplished. A complicating fact here is that there are arguably things about which we should be silent, unthinkable ‘options’ that should not be discussed or considered. Torture comes to mind, but ‘mass killing in a nuclear war’ could be another example.28 Careful and reasonable calculation of such things treats them as serious options and thereby makes difficult any insistence that no reasonable person would even consider them. This suggests a doubt about Williams’ idea that bad uses of language shrink what we see or know, because the bad use here actually seems to be more open-­minded than the good alternative. But the appearance is deceptive. The ‘fearless’ or ‘open-­minded’ position is not a realistic one for anyone whose imagination and conscience are both fully functioning. So although it may appear brave or open-­minded, it actually involves a flight from reality and a closing of key parts of the mind. It is not easy to torture or kill someone, especially if you are seeing and thinking clearly about what you are doing. So treating torture as an option encourages blindness or squinting or unclear thinking, not more or better perception. Returning to the problem of focusing excessively on accomplishing a mission brings up what Williams calls the ‘particular kind of bureaucratic redescription of reality, language that is designed to be no-­one’s in particular, the language of countless contemporary manifestos, mission statements and regulatory policies, the language that dominates so much of our public life, from health service to higher education.’29 This too is focused on accomplishing a mission. That might seem obvious in the case of mission statements, but actually it might be least

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obvious in that case. Because mission statements are not about missions. They do not only exist in order to give sincere or accurate expression to the goals of an organization.30 They exist, at least partly, to make that organization look good. This is why they involve a redescription of reality. And because they aim at giving a particular kind of impression, they aim at having a certain effect, at producing a consequence, not at telling the truth or describing reality. So they neither invite questions or challenges nor treat their audience as rational beings, welcome to ask questions or perceive reality for themselves. They thereby disrespect their audience and the truth, treating both as tools to be either ignored (if the truth is inconvenient) or used for making a profit, or else achieving whatever other goal the organization in question happens to have. This is all part of the shrinking and blinding that Williams identifies as essential to bad writing. If we focus too much (or in the wrong way) on the idea that words are deeds31 and care only about their effect and not their meaning – or if we focus too much on what we can achieve by means of words and not enough on the reality that corresponds with them, on what they are about – then we may find ourselves ignoring reality and truth. This approach to communication, we might say, is like a low-­grade kind of violence, using words to move without much understanding, thought or imagination. As such it could be said to invite a violent response, partly because that would be a response in kind and partly because those who communicate in this way treat their audience as an object and not a subject, as something to be exploited rather than reasoned with, and so to respond with reason is likely to be a waste of one’s time. It is also insulting to treat people this way, so violence might be closer to being justified than it usually is. This is why there is some truth in Williams’ assertion that, ‘If we talk and write badly, dishonestly, unanswerably, what we are actually doing is getting ready for war.’ Alternative, better ways of talking and writing would, in contrast, be good, honest and answerable. But what does such communication require? For one thing, concern with truth or fidelity to reality. For another, respect for one’s audience as rational, as capable of understanding and questioning rather than simply being moved. And not minimal respect, as if there were some amount that is sufficient for decent or acceptable communication. Rather, the greater the respect for (or concern with) truth and one’s audience, the better the communication will be. In short, good communication means communication that is not corrupted by excess egoism (instead showing concern for its audience), that respects language as having meaning, as something more than a mere tool, that respects reality or truth, and that respects other people as rational

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agents, not passive objects.32 In order to avoid excessive egoism I think it might be necessary to write with personality, oddly enough, so as to avoid giving the impression (if only to oneself) that one’s writing is coming, unanswerably, from nowhere. Respect for reality and truth, though, requires that I do not overdo the extent to which my writing is personal. It should be about reality, not ‘my reality’. So writing, and certainly writing philosophy, is an ethical task. If, that is, people such as Williams are right. What does all this have to do with Wittgenstein? Perhaps not very much. I believe that he would have been sympathetic to what I have said here, but it is too prescriptive and too unrelated to problems of specifically philosophical confusion to qualify as what he would likely count as philosophy. This does not make it any the less true, however. And noting the ethical difference between someone like Galtung and Orwell is, it seems to me, Wittgensteinian in spirit. Wittgenstein wrote in his diary (in 1931) that Kierkegaard teases and tricks his readers into doing what Kierkegaard wants them to do. So far as this is something important it is good that people are made to do it. But even so, it is ‘unpleasant’ to trick people in this way, Wittgenstein writes. Using such a trick is a bold move, he suggests, but ‘would also take a lack of love of one’s fellow human being’ (PPO 131). It is this love that seems to be missing from the manipulative (though possibly beneficial) consequentialist ethic of communication that I have described. Galtung is not unconcerned with people or with truth. What he is not concerned about is conceptual accuracy – perhaps because he would question the very idea of such a thing – or conceptual clarity – because he regards other things as more important. He does, or at least might, care about what we say and whether it is true or not. But he does not care very much about whether the way we say it results in what he calls semantic confusion. Orwell, and quite possibly Wittgenstein, would care about this.

Conclusion In conclusion, I am suggesting a contrast between two views of the ethics of communication. One is consequentialist, judging uses of language solely by their actual or expected consequences. People on the left arguably employ such tactics by branding themselves as pro-­choice or as Friends of the Earth, and by rebranding injustice as violence. This need not be dishonest. Presenting a pro-­legal-abortion position as pro-­choice is more a case of accentuating the

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positive than out-­and-out dishonesty. There is, nevertheless, a downside to this kind of use of language. I take it as uncontroversial that blurring conceptual or verbal distinctions in some ways reduces the distinctness of our thought and language about the relevant phenomena. What is controversial, however, is exactly what the relevant phenomena are, and hence what is a blurring and what is a refocusing. Concepts involve distinctions, and changing a concept changes the distinctions made, in ways which could be entirely good, entirely bad, or a mix of both. The non-­consequentialist view I am describing wants to get the focus right, which need not mean being linguistically conservative. New, politically progressive terminology, such as ‘white privilege’, for instance, is often introduced partly in order to increase just the kind of clarity I am talking about. Nor need concern with clarity involve positivism, as if seeing things as they are could not include seeing such things as the moral equality of all people. Nor is it absolutist. As Thomas Carroll, who compares Wittgensteinian clarification with Confucian rectification of names, puts it: ‘clarity is not one thing, to be described in one (ideal) language, but rather something that is local, based on the context of the people in question who are deliberating.’33 Non-­consequentialists can care about consequences, but they might also care about both clarity and distinctness in our thinking. This, it can be thought, is a matter of doing justice to our concepts and to the varied and complex phenomena to which they refer. The victim of a hate crime and the victim of a badly designed housing policy are both victims, but not of the very same thing. Arguably they deserve to have the particular quality of the wrong done to them recognized. This particularity, as limited as it is bound to be, requires (or seems to require) that we not simply lump both cases together into the category of violence or of racism. Doing justice to concepts is part of doing justice to people. Another aspect of this concern with justice is a concern with being human. Orwell compares the person who speaks in politically convenient clichés to a machine. The less we make distinctions the poorer our world becomes. And to care only about the consequences of linguistic acts is to ignore their meaning, which is to ignore precisely what makes them linguistic. To ignore the meanings of one’s words is to become, or to try to become, machinelike. And this in itself can be regarded as unethical, as showing insufficient respect for the value of both our own humanity and the world that we are capable of perceiving and appreciating, and for the value of the language we have inherited for talking about this world.34

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Notes 1 The phrase is spoken by the Earl of Kent in King Lear, Act 1, Scene 4. See M. O’C. Drury, ‘Conversations with Wittgenstein’, in Recollections of Wittgenstein, ed. Rush Rhees (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 157. 2 An example of such respect, which might help to bring out its importance, can be found in a remark of Karl Kraus’ in the December 1913 issue of Die Fackel: ‘Adolf Loos and I – he literally and I grammatically – have done nothing more than show that there is a distinction between an urn and a chamber pot and that it is this distinction above all that provides culture with elbow room. The others, those who fail to make this distinction, are divided into those who use the urn as a chamber pot and those who use the chamber pot as an urn’ (quoted in Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin, Wittgenstein’s Vienna [Chicago, IL: Dee, 1996], 89). 3 In my translation, this reads: ‘If good or evil willing alters the world, then it can only alter the limits of the world, not the facts; not that which can be expressed through language. | In short, the world must then thereby become an altogether different one. It must, so to speak, wane or wax as a whole. | The world of the happy is a different one than that of the unhappy.’ 4 A chapter of the section headed ‘Philosophy’ in TS 213 is titled: ‘The Method of Philosophy: the Clearly Surveyable Representation of Grammatical Facts. The Goal: the Transparency of Arguments. Justice’ (BT 306e). 5 On whether Wittgenstein has a method, see PI §133. 6 However, on Father O’Hara’s identity and whether he thought what Wittgenstein seems to have believed he thought, see Brian Davies, OP, ‘Scarlet O’Hara: A Portrait Restored’, Philosophy 57 (1982), 402–7. 7 For an example of when ‘black’ might be the better term to use, see Sally Haslanger, ‘Gender and Race: (What) Are They? (What) Do We Want Them To Be?’, Noûs 34, no. 1 (2000), 31–55, at 47. 8 Paul Krugman, ‘The New Political Correctness’, New York Times, 26 May 2012. 9 Haslanger, ‘Gender and Race’, 47. 10 Galtung himself accepts ‘social injustice’ as a synonym for what he calls structural violence in his ‘Violence, Peace, and Peace Research’, Journal of Peace Research 6, no. 3 (1969), 167–91, at 171. He defines cultural violence as ‘those aspects of culture, the symbolic sphere of our existence – exemplified by religion and ideology, language and art, empirical science and formal science (logic, mathematics) – that can be used to justify or legitimize direct or structural violence’ in ‘Cultural Violence’, Journal of Peace Research 27, no. 3 (1990), 291–305, at 291. 11 Galtung, ‘Violence, Peace, and Peace Research’, 168; his italics. He also says that ‘the present definition of violence is entirely located on the consequence side’ (171–2); i.e. it ignores intention. It is worth noting that in the later paper, ‘Cultural Violence’,

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Galtung approvingly quotes Gandhi saying: ‘take care of the means and the ends will take care of themselves’ (see 302). However, even here Galtung does not reject consequentialism but rather the idea of doing harm now for the sake of very long-­term benefits. He aims to ‘unify’ means and ends by bringing them closer together, rejecting ‘distant goals’ and ‘long causal chains’ (‘Cultural Violence’, 302). 12 Galtung, ‘Violence, Peace, and Peace Research’, 168. 13 Ibid., 185. 14 Ibid. 15 For discussion of this example, see Thomas D. Carroll, ‘Wittgenstein and the Analects on the Ethics of Clarification’, Philosophy East and West 66, no. 4 (2016), 1148–67, at 1161, and Reshef Agam-Segal, ‘Aspect-Perception as a Philosophical Method’, Nordic Wittgenstein Review 4, no. 1 (2015), 93–121, at 102–3. 16 George Orwell, ‘Politics and the English Language’, in The Orwell Reader: Fiction, Essays, and Reportage (San Diego, CA: Harcourt, 1984), 355–66. 17 Ibid., 366. 18 G. E. M. Anscombe, ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’, Philosophy 33, no. 124 (1958), 1–19, at 8–9. 19 Orwell, ‘Politics and the English Language’, 362–3. 20 Ibid., 363. 21 Ibid., 359. 22 Rowan Williams, ‘War, Words and Reason: Orwell and Thomas Merton on the Crises of Language’, The Orwell Lecture 2015, https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-­ orwell-prize/projects/the-­orwell-lecture/2015-dr-­rowan-williams/ (accessed 1 June 2017). 23 Cf. Wittgenstein: ‘Don’t for heaven’s sake, be afraid of talking nonsense! But you must pay attention to your nonsense’ (CV 56e, from 1947). 24 Williams, ‘War, Words and Reason’. 25 Ibid. 26 Charles Taylor suggests that reality might include everything we find we need to refer to in order to make sense of experience, and this (it seems to me) might include such non-­concrete items as numbers, atoms, and God; see Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 59. Stanley Cavell, in his writings on Shakespeare, talks about our reaction to a play or other work of literature as a guide to, or test of, its meaning. This is a kind of testing against reality, but it is a subjective kind of test, and not the kind that immediately comes to mind when we speak of the empirical method or pointing to a discoverable object. See Stanley Cavell, Disowning Knowledge: In Seven Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 65. 27 See Steven Poole, Unspeak: Words are Weapons (London: Abacus, 2007), 1–2. The subtitle of Poole’s book is problematic. The non-­consequentialist, broadly

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Wittgensteinian view that I want to describe insists that words not be used as weapons. 28 Williams, ‘War, Words and Reason’. 29 Ibid. 30 Just as some organizational codes of ethics exist as defensive measures against possible law suits rather than as actual, or even sincerely intended, guides to behaviour. 31 Cf. CV R 53e and PI §546. 32 The Philosophical Investigations might be seen as an example of such writing. It is not a ladder or any other kind of tool so much as an invitation to think in dialogue with its author. 33 Carroll, ‘Wittgenstein and the Analects on the Ethics of Clarification’, 1162. Compare Oskari Kuusela, ‘Wittgenstein’s Comparison between Philosophy, Aesthetics and Ethics’, in Aesthetics Today: Contemporary Approaches to the Aesthetics of Nature and of Arts: Proceedings of the 39th International Wittgenstein Symposium, ed. Stefan Majetschak and Anja Weiberg (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017), 333–48, at 339: ‘Wittgensteinian philosophical orderings of the knowledge of language use are problem relative’. Kuusela is especially talking about clarification by means of placing objects, including thoughts, side by side in order to see similarities and differences. 34 I am grateful to Mikel Burley and audiences at the Eighth British Wittgenstein Society Annual Conference in Leeds, the Regional Wittgenstein Workshop at West Virginia University, and at Virginia Tech for helpful comments and questions on earlier versions of this chapter.

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Index aesthetics and ethics/religion 22, 25, 77–8, 80, 81, 82, 84, 89, 115, 122, 123, 187, 188, 220, 229 and politics/power 227–8 afterlife 5, 61, 100, 152, 153, 162 analogy, analogies 43, 52, 55–6, 60, 63, 96, 100, 113–28, 133, 137, 138, 139, 154, 197, 208 in mathematics 172, 179, 181, 188, 190 n.14 and projectibility 118–23, 144 animals 26, 55, 62, 63, 64 anatomy 132 and intention 214 n.7 and language 59 man as an animal 6 Anscombe, G. E. M. 198, 199, 201, 203, 205, 206, 208, 212, 213, 214 n.1, 215 nn.12 and 17, 226, 227 Anselm 52, 115–18, 124, 125, 126, 127, 127 n.5, 133–4 see also ontological argument anthropocentrism 50, 58, 63 anthropology, anthropologists 1, 5, 49, 65 anti-­realism (about religion) 188 see also realism anxiety, angst, anguish 34–41, 44–6, 83, 84, 171–2 grammatical anxiety 86 apophaticism 147, 152 Aquinas, Thomas; Thomism 116, 129, 134–8, 140, 141–2, 145, 169, 182, 186, 195, 196, 212, 213, 214 n.7, 217 n.29 Grammatical Thomism 113–14, 118, 121–7, 134 Aristotle, Aristotelian 169, 181–2, 186, 188, 190–1 n.14, 213, 215 n.17 aspect-­seeing 186 atheism 50, 58, 59, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 151, 152, 158, 160, 164

Austin, J. L. 153, 211 Ayer, A. J. 153 Badiou, Alain 183 Barth, Karl 116 beetle in the box 197 belief, beliefs and assertion 160 contingency/groundlessness of 50, 65–6 empirical 157–8 and experience 15 grammar of 83 and judgements 152, 157 as mental facts 26 and moral reactions 6 and motivational attitudes 160 and practical decisions 162 as a propositional attitude 151 religious see faith; religious belief and ritual behaviour 60 in transcendence 50, 65 Bergson, Henri 181 Berkeley, George 152, 153 Bible, The 54, 69 n.34 Biblical phrases 135, 136, 137 Exodus 136, 137 Gospels 80–3, 84, 85, 86, 89, 157 Job 69 n.34, 93, 94, 98, 106, 107 Leviticus 55 Mark 99 Nahum 46 n.5 New Testament 104 Revelation 135, 137 Romans 83 biological inheritance 66 and social life 122 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich 88, 91 n.12 Boole, George 169, 185 Boyle, Joseph 196, 212, 215 n.15 Braithwaite, R. B. 151, 153 Brouwer, L. E. J. 181

256 Bruno, Giordano 176–7, 191 n.20 Burrell, David 113, 116, 118, 119–21, 122, 123, 124, 127, 134, 137 Calvinists 173 Canfield, John 74 n.75 Cantor, Georg 178–81 diagonalization proof 172, 179 and Wittgenstein 184 Carroll, Thomas 233 Cavell, Stanley 66, 113, 118, 119–23, 124, 126–7, 138, 235 n.26 Chalcedonian Definition 86–7, 89 Chomsky, Noam 117 Christ, Jesus 69 n.36, 81, 86–9, 99, 104, 149 Crucifixion 55 Resurrection 81, 82, 83, 86, 90 n.4 Christianity, Christians 55, 80–9, 99, 105, 108 n.3, 114, 125, 146, 152, 153, 161 Atonement 55 becoming a Christian 125 fundamentalists 221 mysteries 153 theologians see theologians; theology Trinitarian 183 Church Fathers 176 Churchill, John 71–2 n.56 Cioffi, Frank 5 Clack, Brian 55, 58, 61, 63, 65 clarity and accuracy 222, 232 and distinctness 233 as an end in itself 219–20 and showing 20 and simplicity 225 ultimate 220 value of 219–33 and wonder 26 Cloud of Unknowing, The 152 concepts doing justice to 54, 221, 233 clarifying/elucidating 65, 156 expanding/extending 223–5 family resemblance see family resemblances ‘thick’ 211 Copleston, Frederick 68 n.20 Cunningham, Conor 187

Index Dawkins, Richard 221 Dedekind, Richard 184 depression see anxiety Derrida, Jacques 166 n.25 Descartes, René; Cartesianism 14, 108 n.7, 169, 173, 175, 177, 183 desire abandonment of 13, 14, 17–20, 25, 27 and choice 27, 29 n.3 clarifying 121 as a mental fact 18, 26, 27–8 sublimation of 106 Dewey, John 122 Diamond, Cora 31 n.25, 113, 114–18, 123, 124, 126, 127, 130, 133, 134 Diamond, Malcolm 65 dignity 37 dispositions, dispositional attitudes 6, 13, 21, 22–6, 77 Doria, Paolo Mattia 177 double effect, doctrine of (DDE) 195–6, 201–3, 206, 209, 213, 215 n.21, 216 n.27, 217 n.29 drugs 38–9 Drury, M. O’C. (‘Con’) 83, 85 Emerson, Ralph W. 122 Emersonian perfectionism 120, 121 emotion, emotive attitude 14, 17, 26 and wonder 26 emotivism see expressivism Engelmann, Paul 15–16, 22, 25, 27 Eriugena, John Scotus 169 ethical approach to philosophical problems 221, 232 concepts 211 demands/imperatives 28, 188 discourse/utterances 3, 77–8, 130, 149, 150, 188 education/improvement 28, 80 judgement(s) 77–8, 80, 81, 84, 88, 89, 163, 220, 229 propositions 25 relation to the world 126 religiousness 13, 22, 26 -religious transformation 23, 28 value 26, 115 see also ethics; moral

Index ethics and aesthetics 25, 77–82, 84, 89, 115, 122, 123, 187, 188, 220, 227, 229 borderline cases 215 n.17 choice-­less 27 of communication 232 consequentialist 100–3, 196, 202–3, 204, 222, 224, 230, 232, 235 n.11 and facts 26, 77, 80, 130, 187 non-­consequentialist 225, 233, 235 n.27 and nonsense 77 and philosophical psychology 202 and politics 163, 227 propositions of 2 and religion see and ethics/morality under religion and similes 78 as supernatural 187 and theology 171 as transcendental 2, 187 utilitarian 102 see also ethical; moral evil abhorred 223 and double effect 195, 203 horrendous/terrible 95, 100–1, 130, 131 incomprehensible 115, 131 privative theory of 191 n.15 problem of 93–111 see also theodicy will(ing) 131, 234 n.3 experience of absolute safety 2–3 of absolute value 114, 130 and belief 15 of discontent 78 of God 145 of guilt 3 of human life 52 as mental representation 15 of non-­being 46 pragmatic 188 of the real 118 and reality 229, 235 n.26 religious 162 of remorse 55 and thought 15 senseless 42 of supernatural events 96 of terror/torment 38, 43 see also anxiety

257

of wonder/astonishment 26, 42, 77, 116 see also wonder expressivism 60–1, 73 n.65, 156, 160 face value theory (of religious language) 148–56, 160–4, 165 n.4 fact/value distinction 86, 188 faith 81–2, 84–6, 88–9, 93–4 defending/immunizing 49–50, 57–8, 64 grammar of 61 Kierkegaard on 84–5, 93, 106–7, 125, 189 knight of 106–7 lack of 15, 22, 82 moral 51 and nonsense 137 paradoxical character of 125 subverting/undermining 59, 65 see also religious belief family resemblances 4, 11 n.5, 49, 144 fate 45, 105, 106, 161 amor fati 111 n.39 Festinger, Leon 163 Ficker, Ludwig 22 Finnis, John 202, 203, 212 Floyd, Juliet 29 n.11 Foot, Philippa 216 n.28 form(s) of life 3, 4–5, 37, 49–52, 54, 65, 66, 113, 118, 119, 121–2, 144, 187, 188 religious 52, 57, 58, 61, 65, 144 Fowler, D. H. 172, 175, 192 n.27 Frazer, James 5, 58, 59–60, 63, 72 n.56, 189 Frege, Gottlob; Fregeanism 22, 182, 185, 186, 187 Frei, Hans 90 n.5 Galtung, Johan 223–5, 232, 234 n.10, 234–5 n.11 Gandhi, M. K. 235 n.11 God anthropomorphic conception of 93–104, 107, 108 nn.3, 4 and 9, 109 n.17 Aquinas on 135–7 belief in 61, 83, 103, 105, 157 call/command of 5, 125 as consequentialist 100–3 as Creator 3, 42, 96, 102, 117, 149, 191 n.20

258

Index

denial of 61 existence/reality of 51, 61, 73 n.70, 103–4, 116, 124, 147, 156, 171 and experience 145, 229, 235 n.26 ‘the god’ (in Kierkegaard) 84–5, 87, 104 grammar of 86–9, 98 hands of 3 as infinite 176, 180, 191 n.20 language/thought about 83–4, 89, 115–18, 120–2, 124, 126, 129, 138, 140–1, 143–6, 149–56, 160, 227 love of 99, 106 and nonsense 114 simplicity of 95–7 understanding of 52, 65 ways/purposes of 83, 86, 93 will of 105, 161 God’s-­eye view, God’s perspective 85–6, 125, 126, 131 gods 63, 64, 65, 192 n.22 Greek 83 Gödel, Kurt 181, 187, 193 n.45 Goethe, J. W. von 59 grammar clarification/description of 73 n.68, 86, 88, 89, 114, 156, 220 and conflation/confusion 5, 56 depth vs. surface 59, 61, 221 of ‘God’ 86–9, 98 grammatical connections/relations 132, 134, 142–3 grammatical inquiry/method 3, 56, 64–5, 171, 221 grammatical rule 181 and language-­games 113, 118, 119, 121–2 see also language-­games and mathematics 183 and physical objects 188 of religious language 113 and riddles 115–17, 132–7 surveyability of 1 theology as 83 Grammatical Thomism see under Aquinas Grisez, Germain 201, 202, 212 Grosseteste, Robert 176, 179, 180, 191  n.20 Guénon, René 174 guilt 3, 60

happiness (and unhappiness) 34–5, 36, 106, 131, 234 n.3 Harries, Karsten 191 n.20 Harris, Sam 38–9 Haslanger, Sally 222 heaven 54, 82, 100, 170 Heidegger, Martin 105 hell 38, 43, 54 Hepburn, Ronald 153 Heretics, the 2 Hick, John 68 n.20, 110 n.29 Hindus 90 n.7, 173 Hobbes, Thomas 186 Hodges, Michael 74 n.77 Holocaust, the 93, 100–2 Hoyt, Christopher 55–6, 71 n.52 Hughes, Gerard 215 n.21 human activity/behaviour 50, 58, 59, 66, 72 n.56, 74 n.80, 137, 189, 208, 211, 213 beings 5, 6, 37, 43, 55, 59, 66, 86, 87, 93, 95, 98, 99–100, 102, 105, 116, 125, 132, 140, 157, 226, 229, 232, 233 culture(s) 51, 211 existence/predicament 107, 132 history 169, 222 life 1, 3, 5, 37, 50, 52, 53, 54, 58, 59, 66, 87, 88, 115, 117, 132, 189, 229 nature/natural history 61, 63, 66, 124, 126 suffering 103, 105, 106, 107 Hume, David 58 Husserl, Edmund 185, 186 imagination lack of 227 leap of 137 and understanding 141 ineffability 14, 25, 189 infinity actual 176, 177, 188, 191 n.14 of the Good 191 n.17 infinite agency 88, 145 infinite distress/torment 43–4 infinite God 176, 180, 191 n.20 infinite power 95, 98, 108 n.11 infinite resignation 106–7 in mathematics 174–89, 191 n.14

Index and motion 182 of the One 193 n.34 potential 181–2, 191 n.14 of the universe 176 insanity 39 instinct 4, 5–6, 50, 58–60, 61, 63, 64–5, 72 n.60, 73 n.63 see also primitive reactions intention 60, 109 n.12, 153, 186, 196–213, 214 nn.1 and 7, 215 n.15, 216 nn.24 and 27, 224, 234 n.11 Aquinas on 217 n.29 and convention 208–13 internalism about 202–3, 206–7 natural expression of 195, 214 n.1 ‘private’ 97 publicity of 197–203 Islam 108 n.3, 173 James, William 11 n.5, 38 Judaism 108 n.3 Kamm, Frances 206 Kant, Immanuel; Kantianism 14, 51, 68 n.13, 107, 152, 183, 185, 187 Kaufman, Gordon 153, 167 n.34 Kenny, Anthony 52, 114, 137, 138, 154 Kierkegaard, Søren 84–9, 91 n.12, 93, 97, 103, 106–7, 125–6, 189, 232 Anti-Climacus 97–8 Johannes Climacus 103–4, 125 Johannes de Silentio 106–7, 111 n.43, 125 Klein, Jacob 170, 172, 174, 175 know-­how 21, 23, 24, 25 knowing how to carry on 187 Kraus, Karl 234 n.2 Krugman, Paul 222 Kuusela, Oskari 236 n.33 Lacan, Jacques 193 n.39 language and action 209 and culture 211 describing 56 everyday/ordinary 122, 124, 126, 128 n.24, 187, 188–9, 211 good vs. bad uses 228–31

259

and human life/practice/behaviour 1, 3, 5, 58–9, 63, 73 n.63, 74 n.80 see also language-­games imprecise/unclear/vague 219, 221, 225, 227 see also vagueness limits of 2, 78, 114, 145 meaningless 227 see also nonsense metaphysical 188 modes/patterns of 3, 132, 144 nonsensical/unintelligible see nonsense and philosophy 1, 113, 118, 120, 123, 127, 236 n.33 and politics 221, 225–30 and projection 120–2 religious see religious language/ vocabulary senseful 17, 20, 25 and thought 21, 23, 25, 123 see also grammar; language-­games language-­games 4–5, 49, 52, 68, 72 n.60, 84, 113, 116, 118, 119, 120, 121–2, 126, 133, 144, 148, 155–6, 160, 187–8 Leibniz, G. W. 174, 177 Leibnizian calculus 176 neo-Leibnizian 185 Lerner, Berel Dov 55 life form of see form(s) of life fragility/insecurity of 39–46 meaning of 105, 134 problem of 34, 36, 39–46, 93, 105–6 rules of 161, 188 logic 18–24, 77, 81, 115–16, 117, 132, 169–70, 171, 173, 180–3, 185, 210 logical clarification 24 logical contradiction 98, 114 logical extension 223–4 logical form 80 logical necessity/possibility 41, 78, 180, 182 logical positivism see under positivism logical refutation 209 logical space/room 37, 63, 89, 102, 125, 133, 141 and mathematics/number 169–70, 178, 183, 185, 187, 234 n.10 logicism 186

260

Index

love and belief 81 and experience 229 and faith 84 of fate 111 n.39 of the finite 107 and forgiveness 99–100 of God 99, 106 and intelligence 140 lack of 232 and obedience 89 Lovibond, Sabina 90 n.1 Luther, Martin 54 Lyas, Colin 68 n.19 Mackie, J. L. 151 Maimonides, Moses 152 Malcolm, Norman 11 n.6, 52, 59, 72–3 n.63, 114 Mangan, Joseph 195 Marion, Jean-Luc 166 n.25 Marion, Mathieu 181–2 Masek, Lawrence 216 n.24 Masterman, Margaret 141 mathematics 115, 129, 132–4, 141, 148, 150, 169–93, 234 n.10 algebra 169, 174, 177 arithmetic 170, 172–6, 177, 178, 184, 192 n.27 calculus 172, 174, 176–8 geometry 170, 173–7, 179, 184–5, 192 n.22 set theory 183–5 see also number McCabe, Herbert 113, 116–17, 118, 126, 134, 142 McDowell, John 71 n.55 McFague, Sallie 154 McGinn, Marie 71 nn.52 and 55 meaning (in language) 61, 158, 231, 233 absence of 24, 35 broad vs. narrow construal 163–4 and context 119–20, 124, 126 descriptive 143 dilution of 225 inherited 224 -input/intension 184 literal/primary 121–3, 126, 151

in literature 235 n.26 obscure 227 ordinary/familiar 115, 132 promissory 134 reductive approach to 71 n.55 of religious concepts/utterances 52, 147, 149–50, 159 semantic 208 of a text 90 n.5 theories of 151 ‘to mean’ 61 meaning (in life) 42, 105, 134 loss of 38 meaning (in mathematics) 133 Ménégoz, Eugène 51 mental facts 18, 26, 27–8 health/constitution 38–9 pictures 226 publicity of the 197–9 representations/signs 15, 23–4, 26 states 167 n.34, 198 see also mind, state of substance 108 n.7, 109 n.12 Merton, Thomas 228 metaphor 22, 79, 80, 118, 120, 141, 147, 149–50, 153–4, 156, 160, 179, 191 n.20 metaphysics 13–16, 24, 25, 41, 42, 56, 68 n.20, 109 nn.12 and 15, 114, 139, 171, 174, 175, 176, 177, 187–9, 207 metaphysical subject 13–16 metaphysical vs. everyday use 122 pseudo- 208 suspicion of 85 mind, state of 26, 33, 35 miracles, the miraculous 42, 61, 78, 80, 84–5, 88, 188, 201, 221 moral absolute 196 acceptance 110 n.38 actions/practice 84, 201, 203 agency/responsibility 93, 98–103 attitudes/reaction 6, 213 certainties 6 community/universe 93, 98–103 consequentialism 100–2, 196, 202–4, 222–4, 230, 232

Index deterioration 130 difference/distinction 195–6, 210 equality 233 faith 51 imperative/obligation/summons 78, 94, 111 n.38, 227 perfection 102 principle 213 understanding 131 see also ethical; ethics Mulhall, Stephen 5, 113–28, 186, 193 n.42 music 79, 171 mysticism, the mystical 11 n.3, 22, 88, 107, 152 myth 171, 189 mythologizing 89 Nagel, Thomas 75 n.81 naturalism 49–50, 58, 62–3, 66, 71 nn.52 and 55, 122, 126, 130, 153 Newton, Isaac 174, 177 Newtonian calculus 176 New Wittgenstein debate 21, 30 n.14 Nicholas of Cusa 169, 176, 177, 179, 183, 185, 191 n.20 Nielsen, Kai 49, 51–3, 119 Nietzsche, Friedrich 111 n.41, 115, 119, 128 n.13, 132 nonsense 3, 14, 16, 17, 20–1, 23, 24–5, 77–8, 114–18, 126, 130, 132, 137, 144, 161, 228, 235 n.23 number, numbers 169–89, 229, 235 n.26 cardinal 172, 178, 181, 185 natural 180 prime 176, 179, 180 rational 179, 180 real 172, 175, 179, 180, 181 super- 170 as timeless 109 n.15 transfinite 176, 178, 179, 180 words 132 zero 172, 173, 177, 181 see also mathematics Ogden, C. K. 11 n.1 O’Hara, Father 221, 234 n.6 Ollé-Laprune, Léon 51, 68 n.13 ontological argument 52, 133 Orwell, George 219, 225–9, 232, 233

261

pain 26, 35, 38, 63, 100, 106, 116, 197–8, 199 the word 59 Palamas, Gregory 152 paradox 114, 125, 153, 177, 178, 179, 183, 189, 193 n.40 absolute (Kierkegaard) 84 in mathematics 180, 184, 185, 189 and metaphor 141 Pascal, Blaise 43, 176 Pascal’s wager 43, 189 Paul, St 82–3 Pears, David 58 perfections 120–3, 125–6 phenomenology 185 Phillips, D. Z. xi–xii, 5–6, 49–50, 52–5, 57, 64, 66 n.1, 100–2, 107 n.1, 109 n.16, 110 nn.27 and 29, 114, 119, 144, 147–8, 151, 155–6, 167 n.37 philosophers 1, 6, 16, 23, 34, 49, 51, 55, 57, 85, 86, 88, 89, 123, 151, 229 and nonsense 21, 24 and overgeneralization 213 of religion 4, 93 and theologians 1, 4, 148, 160 Wittgensteinian 52–3 philosophy as an activity 23–4 analytic 93, 94, 147, 149, 151 as clarification/elucidation 3, 23, 24, 25, 64–5, 70 n.46, 221, 233 contemplative 54, 57–8 Continental 147, 151, 156 as descriptive 3, 56–8, 164 history of 14 philosophical theory 3, 24, 148, 164 philosophical understanding 16, 124 of religion 49, 52–3, 56–7, 64, 93, 94, 113, 127, 147, 149, 151 self-­overcoming of 124 as self-­therapy 69 n.33 and theology 1–2, 113–14, 123–5, 148, 151–2 Plantinga, Alvin 152 Plato, Platonism 170, 171–3, 174–83, 185, 187, 188, 189, 191 n.14, 193 n.45 Neoplatonism 170, 175, 176, 177, 185, 189, 191 n.18 see also Plotinus

262

Index

Plotinus 176, 191 n.17, 192 n.22, 193 n.34 see also Neoplatonism under Plato Poincaré, Henri 181 politics 110 n.36, 162, 163, 222, 225–9, 233 political correctness 221–2 Poole, Steven 229 positivism 187, 233 logical 78, 151, 153 prayer 73 n.70, 156, 166 n.25, 221 Preller, Victor 143 Priest, Graham 184, 185 primitive reactions 50, 59–60, 61, 63, 64 see also instinct Pritchard, Duncan 74 n.80 privately following a rule 97 see also rule-­following Proclus, Proclean 170, 177, 179, 192 n.22 see also Neoplatonism under Plato prophecy 163 propositions 2, 3, 18–20, 23–5, 28, 153, 155, 158, 183 instruction- 31 n.24 mathematical 133 nonsensical/unintelligible 14, 16, 20–1, 23, 25, 115–17 see also nonsense propositional attitudes 151 propositional content 61, 149, 152, 153 (Pseudo-)Dionysius 152 psychological comfort 154 discourse/expressions/terms 56, 130 explanation 79 naturalism 58 projection 64 understanding 131 psychology 124 philosophical 195, 196, 202, 208 Putnam, Hilary xii, 71 n.52, 155–6 puzzles 24–5, 31 n.25 see also riddles Pythagoras, Pythagorean 170, 172, 175 Quine, W. V. O. 170 Ramée (Ramus), Pierre de la 174 Ramsey, Frank 22, 25, 31 n.26, 183–4 Ramsey, Ian 154–5 ratiocination 6, 59

rationality and faith 50 finitized rationalism 174 and God’s choice 109 n.15 and intelligibility 51 rational agents/beings 231–2 rational explication/persuasion 225 universal 54 realism about mathematical entities 170, 177, 178, 180–4 about religious language 148, 155–6 realistic spirit 116, 118, 127 see also Diamond, Cora reality 116, 123–4, 133, 146 acceptance of 17, 27–8 of affliction 46 of the Church 89 contingency of 27–8 difficulties/demands of 138, 139 divine/God’s 61, 156 of evil 103 and experience 235 n.26 flight from 230 of forms (Plato) 173 God’s-­eye view of 85–6 and mathematics 169, 173, 176, 177, 182, 183, 185, 186, 193 n.39 norms of 51 of paradox 193 n.40 physical 182 redescription of 230–1 reference to 225, 229 responsiveness to/stance upon 140, 145, 188 transcendent(al)/ultimate 61, 63, 64, 172, 173, 183 and truth 141, 143, 186, 231–2 understanding of 140, 141, 229 vision of 135, 139 wonder at 85 of the world 131 reason downfall of 84 and God’s freedom 109 n.15 and the gospels 81 mysteries of 189 and religious language 86

Index and revelation 135 universal truths of 157 relativism 66, 186 religion, religions 50–9, 61–5, 68 n.19, 70 n.46, 81–2, 105, 113, 127, 143, 156, 160–4, 187–9, 221, 234 n.10 et passim concept of 4, 11 n.5 and ethics/morality 1–2, 4–7, 11 n.2, 13, 20, 22–3, 26–8, 78, 81, 89, 187, 188, 227, 229 et passim monotheistic 108 n.3 philosophy of see under philosophy pseudo- 178, 189 religious attitude/impulse 17, 26–7, 52, 119 religious behaviour/practice 52, 55–6, 58, 62, 65, 72 n.56 religious concepts 52, 62, 65, 224 religious confusion 54 religious insights 20 religious life 30 n.18, 50, 51, 54, 55, 145 religious point of view 58, 72 n.57 and science 4, 51, 139, 149, 150, 151, 155, 157, 158, 159–60, 221 Western and Eastern 139 religious belief/commitment/judgement 6, 49–50, 57–8, 61–6, 70 n.46, 81–2, 88–9, 144, 157–64, 189, 221 Christian 80–5, 90 nn.4 and 5, 158, 161 see also Christianity and superstition 167 n.37 see also faith religious language/vocabulary 2–3, 5, 53, 56, 61–3, 65, 68 n.20, 70 n.46, 74 n.77, 78, 86, 89, 113–27, 128 n.24, 129–67, 188 emotivist/expressivist theories 60–1, 73 n.65, 156, 160 face value theory 148–56, 160–4, 165 n.4 and historical language 81, 148, 149, 150, 151, 155, 157–61 and metaphor 118, 147, 149, 150, 153–4, 156, 160 non-­cognitivist theories 148, 156, 160–1 realist accounts 148 reductionist theories 150, 153, 156, 167 n.34, 188, 189

263

and scientific language 149, 150, 151, 155, 158, 159–60 as symbolic 154 religiousness, religiosity 4, 13–15, 17, 21, 27, 28 n.1 religious studies, study of religion xi, 1, 11 n.5, 49, 51, 57, 64, 65, 66 Rhees, Rush 33, 55, 73 n.63 Richter, Duncan 53, 56, 57, 70 n.46 riddles 85, 115–18, 122, 123, 125, 126, 129, 132–8, 140–1, 144–5 see also puzzles Riemann, Bernhard 178 ritual 5, 58, 59–63, 72 n.56, 171, 189, 192 n.22 scapegoat 55–6 rule-­following 79, 97–8, 181, 183 Rundle, Bede 114, 137 Russell, Bertrand 14, 21, 22, 185 Satan 94, 108 n.2 saying/showing distinction 20–1 scepticism 51, 61, 68 n.13, 82, 90 n.5 Schmutz, Jacob 186 Schönbaumsfeld, Genia 85, 88 Schopenhauer, Arthur 13, 14–18, 27, 29 n.9 science, scientists 4, 95–6, 139, 148, 149, 150, 151, 155, 159–60, 161 ancient 174 empirical and formal 234 n.10 natural 24, 31 n.24 and naturalism 58, 122 pseudo- 228 and religion see under religion scientific hypotheses 157 scientism 65 self -awareness/knowledge 5, 85, 86, 119, 123, 198 being a 125 -centredness 103 -deceit 84, 199 -defence 202 -deprecation 28 -disgust 82 -dispossession 86 perfecting 120, 121, 127 -respect 37, 130–1 -revelation 152

264

Index

-therapy 69 n.33 thinking 14 -torture 38 as totality of possible thoughts 16 see also subject Shaw, Joseph 204, 212, 216 nn.24 and 27 Sidgwick, Henry; Sidgwickian 203–5, 207, 208 Smart, Ninian 52 social theory, sociology 1, 49 Sophie’s Choice (Styron) 101–2 Sorel, Georges 33, 46 Spengler, Oswald 58, 72 n.58 Spinoza, Benedictus de 153, 167 n.34, 176–7 Steuer, Daniel 73 n.68 Stokhof, Martin 29 n.3 subject cognizing 186 human 84 metaphysical 13, 14, 16 thinking/representing 14, 16, 85, 139 transcendental 14–20, 27 willing 14–17, 20, 25 see also self supernatural agents 90 n.7 causes/events/working 46, 95, 96, 110 nn.33 and 34 ethics as 187 supernaturalism 71 n.55 Surin, Kenneth 110 n.36 Swinburne, Richard 94–6, 98, 100, 108 nn.7, 11 and 12, 109 nn.15 and 17, 110 nn.29 and 32–4, 151 Szabados, Béla 68–9 n.28 Taylor, Charles 235 n.26 Tejedor, Chon 11 n.2 theism 95–6, 100–3, 109 n.18, 110 n.32 see also God; theology theodicy 93–5, 100–1, 103–5, 109 n.23, 110 n.36 theologians 4, 51, 87–8, 90 n.5, 145, 148, 152, 160 theology 1, 80, 89, 93, 108 n.3, 113–14, 117, 123–7, 128 n.24, 133, 145–6, 151–2, 155, 189, 191 n.15 as grammar 83

natural 146 negative 127 n.5, 145 see also apophaticism and philosophy 1–2, 113–14, 123–5, 151–2 rational 171 revealed 146, 171 Thomson, Judith J. 203 Tilley, Terrence 94 Tillich, Paul 154 transcendence 50, 61, 65, 188 God’s 114, 124, 145 transcendent infinity 176, 191 n.18 transcendent numerical unity 173, 178 transcendent(al) reality/realities 61, 63, 64, 172, 183 see also transcendentalism transcendentalism 13–20, 25, 173, 183, 187 about ethics 2, 11 n.2, 187 about rules 183, 185, 186, 188 transcendental necessity 28 transcendental subject see under subject ‘transcendental twaddle’ 15–16 transcendental verum 169 transcendentals 120, 123, 125–6 trolley problems 206, 210–12 truth 155–6, 157, 159, 160, 161, 163 and affliction 46 and description 138 disrespecting 231 encountering 85, 89 of the gospels 81 historical 161 mathematical 177 of numbers 170–1 and obedience 82 ontological 186 and reality 141, 143, 186, 231–2 and representation 139, 140, 143 and revelation/scripture 134–5 unconditional 84 and witness 125 truth-­functional structures 18, 19–20 Turner, Denys 142 vagueness 211, 221, 225–7 value absolute (vs. relative) 2, 78, 114–15, 116, 117, 119, 129–32

Index deprivation of 38 discourse of 86 ethical 2, 26 grammar of 86 van Inwagen, Peter 152 verificationism 151 Vico, Giambattista; Vichian 169, 177, 183, 185, 186 Viète (Vieta), François 169, 173, 174 violence 223–5, 228, 231, 232, 233, 234 n.10 von Wright, G. H. 33 Waismann, Friedrich 220 Weil, Simone 45–6 will, freedom of 17–18, 109 n.23 Williams, Bernard 216 n.28 Williams, Rowan 129, 138–46, 219, 228–32 Winch, Peter 5–6, 50, 62–6 Wittgenstein, Ludwig and Cantor 178, 180, 184 and clarification 23, 221, 233, 236 early 13–31, 106, 131 and Engelmann 15–16, 22, 25, 29 n.6 influence of 1, 4, 6, 49, 52, 54, 57, 68 n.20, 90 n.5, 113, 127 and Kierkegaard 84–9, 93, 103–7, 189 later 33–47, 56, 58–9, 98, 114, 126 life of 34 methods of 1, 4, 16, 21, 53, 57–8, 65, 234 n.5 see also Wittgensteinian ideas/methods and metaphysics 42, 188 and naturalism 49–50, 58–62, 71 nn.52 and 55 ‘not a religious man’ 72 n.57 and Plato 175, 180–1, 189 and quietism 54, 69 n.33 return to philosophy 2 and Russell 22 and Schopenhauer 27, 29 n.9 as a sophist 183, 193 n.36 and the study of religion 49–75 et passim works cited: The Blue and Brown Books 11 n.5, 70 n.41 The Big Typescript 37, 55, 234 n.4 ‘Cause and Effect: Intuitive Awareness’ 59

265 Culture and Value 3, 33, 34, 39, 43, 59, 72 n.58, 79, 80, 81–3, 85, 90 n.4, 157, 159, 161, 188, 219, 235 n.23, 236 n.31 Koder Diaries 35, 42 see also: Public and Private Occasions (below) Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology 11 n.4 ‘A Lecture on Ethics’ 2–3, 13, 26, 28 n.1, 42, 77, 80, 90 n.2, 114–15, 116, 129, 187, 221, 227 Lectures, Cambridge, 1930–1932 181 Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief 5, 78–9, 98, 157, 158, 159, 220, 221 Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics 132, 181 Notebooks 1914–1916 13, 14–16, 105–7 On Certainty 6, 11 n.12, 50, 59, 66, 187–8 Philosophical Grammar 70 n.41 Philosophical Investigations 1, 3, 5, 11 n.5, 37, 47 n.10, 56–7, 59, 61, 66, 71 nn.48 and 55, 74 n.80, 79, 80, 83, 97, 99, 164, 183, 184, 195, 197, 198, 199, 208, 209, 214 n.7, 220, 234 n.5, 236 nn.31 and 32 ‘Philosophy of Psychology – A Fragment’ 11 n.4, 211 Prototractatus 13, 14, 16, 22 Public and Private Occasions 34–8, 39, 42, 43, 45, 232 Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics 172, 178, 181, 183, 184, 193 n.37 Remarks on Frazer’s ‘Golden Bough’ 5, 58, 59–60, 63, 74 n.79, 188 Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology 11 n.4, 59 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 2, 3, 11 nn.1 and 3, 13, 14, 16, 17–25, 28, 29 nn.3 and 11, 30 n.17, 31 n.24, 34, 47 n.10, 78, 80, 93, 105, 107, 114, 116, 117, 124, 126, 130, 131, 134, 137, 187, 221

266 Wittgenstein’s Nachlass 69 n.37 Wittgenstein’s Whewell’s Court Lectures 90 n.3 Zettel 11 n.4, 59, 72 n.60 Wittgensteinian fideism 49–57, 64–6, 113, 119, 148 Wittgensteinian ideas/methods 5, 49–57, 64–6, 69 n.33, 70 n.46, 90 n.1, 113, 116, 129, 134, 147, 206, 227, 228, 232, 233, 236 nn.27 and 33 et passim Wittgensteinians 50, 51–5, 64–5, 137, 150 et passim wonder, wondering 50, 66, 155 and emotions 26

Index at the existence of the world 2–3, 26, 42, 77 of faith 85 world, the as given 105 limits of 14–15, 180, 234 n.3 miraculousness of 42, 80, 85 see also at the existence of the world under wonder state of 93, 204 taking the world seriously 54 as totality of facts 27 transcendental condition of 16 and one’s will 105–6, 130–1, 234 n.3 Zermelo, Ernst 185