The struggle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language
I've been debating philosophy on social media again, despite telling myself, over and again, that philosophizing is endless in the sense of being pointless. That's always my initial attempt to escape philosophical disputation. It never works, only seems to encourage more of it, not least because an anti-philosophical statement concerning the point or pointlessness of philosophy is itself a philosophical question. And Wittgenstein is a most pertinent philosopher in addressing this question. Throw away the books, he said, don't read what others have said.
“A good guide will take you through the more important streets more often than he takes you down side streets; a bad guide will do the opposite. In philosophy I'm a rather bad guide.”
As quoted in Wittgenstein and the Philosophy of Information (2008) edited by Alois Pichler and Herbert Hrachovec, p. 140
Wittgenstein is most associated with the logical positivists for the anti-metaphysics he developed. Logical positivism holds that the only meaningful statements are statements of fact and logic. That’s a programme of intellectual austerity. If we look at someone like Bertrand Russell or A.C. Grayling, then, there is clearly nothing to be said for religion, then, other to reject it for all the pain and suffering it causes. The same with love, sex, and art, really, and all the things that give life meaning. Being, thinking, and experiencing, involving language, law, politics, ethics, culture, art, love, are all clearly trivial and insignificant, then, in a way that accumulating facts and figures (on being, thinking, and experiencing, involving language, law, politics, ethics, culture, art, love) are not. Meaningless and non-sensical.
Intellectual austerity is the easy and boring bit – here’s what little we can say rationally. It's the other non-sensical stuff that interests me, though, the stuff reason can say nothing on. This is all part of the fact-reason dualism that so disables modern living and understanding. Science is the (rational) realm of fact and true knowledge, religion and ethics is the (non-rational) realm of values, mere value judgments. Science has nothing to say when we address questions of value, significance, and meaning. Indeed, logical positivism or atomism will say that these are not questions at all, only non-questions. A question that can’t be answered can’t be a true question. Or may require another ordering of question.
So I am interested in Wittgenstein's "silence." Kant was here earlier, establishing the limits of reason to put an end to metaphysical misadventure. Kant also discovered the scandal of reason, which refers to the fact that the mind raises questions which cannot be settled by reason. In terms of existential meaning, these are the most important questions, but the people who crowded around Wittgenstein on this - the Vienna Circle etc - never quite understood the point. They were baffled when Wittgenstein read the poetry of Tagore back at them. I loved it when Wittgenstein upset Bertrand Russell by telling him that maths is 'made up.' I was once told by a maths professor that maths is based on ‘almost nothing,’ but with that nothing one could build to infinity. Me, I make great leaps with bricks in hand. Wittgenstein describes the truly honest religious person as a "tightrope walker":
"It almost looks as though he were walking on nothing but air. His support is the slenderest imaginable. And yet it really is possible to walk on it."
- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value (1948: 73).
The ‘almost nothing’ is the tiniest of threads upon which we walk; it may be narrow, but it is real and resilient and can take the weight of our hopes and expectations so long as we have faith and courage enough to put our best foot forward. Grammar of life, the common life, everyday life, truth, integrity, that's where I go with Wittgenstein. (Recognising that I am making a leap here, and that the ‘almost nothing’ that maths walks on is not quite the same as Wittgenstein’s tightrope. I need to do some more philosophical heavy lifting to make that nothing the something I want.)
The logical positivism in Wittgenstein’s position is not the interesting bit for me. It’s a philosophical disarmament, which is fine for those who see knowledge as being yielded elsewhere, with philosophy incapable of generating new knowledge. Philosophy is not meant to generate knowledge, of course, but is a form of decluttering, sweeping away rubbish and confusion and making our terms of communication clear. Which is also fine. And that leaves the big questions – as non-questions - for other disciplines, which is not necessarily fine.
I'm lumbering my way out of philosophy, precisely because philosophical reason undercuts itself and would have us in Limbo for all eternity. I’ve never been too keen on analytical philosophy. I’ve studied language and logic, and making sense of things helps in a political world of murk and bias. There is, of course, a need for decluttering and tidying up. And truth does indeed matter. But what is truth? I like what A.N. Whitehead wrote in Science and the Modern World, "man may not live by bread alone, but neither can he live by disinfectants." (I’m going from memory, just check the exact quote). What can be said in terms of fact and logic isn't much, and the important stuff is the stuff we can only remain silent on, as we just focus on living. You'll find that Wittgenstein said little on all the big issues of metaphysics and morals, good and evil. That doesn't mean that he felt them to be unimportant - quite the opposite, in fact. He just felt that when we do try to say something on them, with these great metaphysical systems, we make all manner of errors. That’s not actually an irreligious view but, rather, is consistent with a position which holds that the only logical response to theological proofs for the existence of God is atheism. Edward Feser thinks the proofs for God are philosophically defensible by reason, and he makes the case to avoid a fideism which concedes the realm of reason to atheism. Others say that if we seek to establish God by Reason, the only logical conclusion to draw is atheism.
Wittgenstein is in the line of the great anti-intellectual philosophers whom I like: Rousseau and Marx, also Nietzsche and Heidegger. These were all anti-metaphysical, or said they were. I think they were against a bad metaphysics and against metaphysical speculation (that's how Kant read Rousseau). Rousseau openly repudiated metaphysics, but it is plain to me that he was repudiating a bad metaphysics that makes unwarranted claims. I read him as developing a true metaphysics, one which affirms transcendent standards against conventionalism, but pays attention to practical philosophy, a lived and felt truth. The same with Marx. He objected to a reviewer of Capital who described Marx as offering a labour metaphysics. But I think Marx does offer a clear essentialist metaphysics with respect to the categories he uses (form, necessity, lines of development). I’m not sure about Nietzsche, but his affirmation of life and imperative to become what you are only works, for me, on the basis of the metaphysics of Aristotelian potentiality. I don't think you can have an Aristotelian flourishing without the metaphysical edifice. Heidegger, too, could be portrayed as the last and greatest of the metaphysicians, a realization as an abolition in the Hegelian/Marxist sense (this falling out of being and the house of language) etc etc etc I'm sprinting in my haste to get out of something I never wanted to get into. I don’t really like philosophy. I did it because I had a problem to solve and, having seen that the solution lies outside of philosophy, I’m desperate to get out of it.
Hence my interest in what Wittgenstein has to say about God and silence. I am hugely unimpressed and profoundly unmoved by analytical philosophy and logical atomism/positivism, I must say. It's the other Wittgenstein that interests me, the stuff reason must remain "silent" on. That's anti-metaphysical Wittgenstein is very different from logical positivism.
Wittgenstein is a figure who intrigues me; he is a giant of the awkward squad and therefore something of a kindred spirit.
Short version: quit philosophy for philosophizing, then throw away the ladder as Wittgenstein said! (He later changed his earlier view).
Long version – there is no substitute for long reading and heavy lifting.
Back to short version, then, and an emphasis on the grammar of life, the common life, and the traction of everyday living.
Bertrand Russell 'discovered' Wittgenstein and thought him a genius. He went from the first to the last with Wittgenstein, missed the working-out out, and so came to consider Wittgenstein a tremendous disappointment. Russell didn’t understand him.
"Don’t worry, I know you’ll never understand it,” Wittgenstein told Russell and G.E. Moore at the end of the (perfunctory) defence of the Tractatus for his Ph.D. at Cambridge in 1929.
(I like that story. My oral defence was not so much perfunctory as feeble. I started quite well with a few clever lines I had memorized, but when I had to respond to pointed questioning I was totally lost. Of course, I should have anticipated the key questions and rehearsed answers. Or just maybe I should have known the argument of my thesis so well as to be able to string a sentence or two together. I knew the phrase ‘drying up,’ but never knew that you did actually dry up when nervous. I became conscious of licking my lips at one point. I said little and, despite a formidable memory, can remember little. But I’m not quite sure the examiners understood my argument. They didn’t quite know why Max Weber turned up, as I traced the turning of emancipatory reason into repressive social forms. And the whole chapter on feminist theory, which allowed me to turn ‘rational freedom,’ historically erected in a legal-institutional framework, into a ‘relational freedom,’ embodied in social relations and practices. I thought it was a good argument. But I had submitted 150,000 words instead of 80,000, so plenty of things had to go. Plenty that was crucial to my argument ended up cut. The basics of ‘rational freedom’ remained. As a philosopher, then, I am officially basic. But I did a whole lot more, that wasn’t really understood).
I wouldn’t get too absorbed in philosophy. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, true. But too much of it is an absolute negation of life. You're probably better off in the dark in my view. Or just staying down-to-Earth, with feet on the ground. Dante put the philosophers in Limbo, where they were free to philosophize for all eternity, never drawing a conclusion and never getting anywhere. That’s what philosophy has felt like to me. I openly groan and grimace whenever mentions philosophy to me. That Limbo is Heaven for philosophers, but Hell for everyone else. Limbo is not a punishment exactly, but it's not a reward either. There’s a world beyond philosophy, a world those enclosed in reason are blind to. You have to test reason. But, of course, reality has also to be tested. And then there is the mediation of people. Wittgenstein seems very much to have understood this. He was most impressed with Tolstoy's book on the Gospels, and read and re-read it as he kept it by his side throughout the war. Living the Gospel, as my old school priest calls it
“My inspiration and motivation has always been the priestly task of living the Gospel and enabling the values of the Kingdom to flourish in every situation."
If you want a philosophy for living, that’s as good a place to start from as any. So good, in fact, you can end there too. In fact, it's not too different at all from the place where Wittgenstein ended.
Nihilism seems to be the only logical end of philosophy. Hence it is no surprise that Dante stuck the philosophers in Limbo, repudiating the doctrine he espoused in Il Convivio, where he was under the sway of Lady Philosophy. I tell those interested in philosophy this, but they are not interested in God and religion. Which is fine. I am not out to convert people. But I wish they would listen to me when I say that philosophy can take you so far and no further. And that if you remain within philosophical reason, you are quickly engaged in a process of self-negation.
I argue for the anarchic excess that evades enclosure by philosophical reason. I’ll state that another way. Science deals with the world of fact, religion with the world of meaning, significance, and value, and philosophy is the mediating term between the two. These three disciplines are not opposed but complementary. But all of them together can never truly apprehend the reality they seek to apprehend. They are human disciplines expressing the limits of human intelligence and understanding. Put them all together and they still amount to no more than fingers pointing to the sun, the moon, and the stars and all that they encompass. Worse still, that finger-pointing ambition can soon take shape in the form of grasping hands seeking to appropriate this reality and bend it to human desires.
The subjects that you study at school tend to do you no permanent damage. You leave school and then forget them. Philosophy is different. The problem with philosophy is that you always remember enough of the damn subject for it to ruin the rest of your life! Escape it! Throw away the ladder. I much prefer my first degree, history, to philosophy. I find history far more rounded and grounded, more ‘real’ in being rooted in what human beings are and do, including not only what they think but how they test that thinking in reality. There’s philosophy and more going on. A lot of philosophy is rootless and fruitless (not mine, of course!) Time and again we run into the limits of reason and quit there or retreat or just choose to keep negating others. You think it’s Plato, I think it’s Aristotle, and so it goes on for all eternity in a self-cancellation that cultivates mutual indifference. Neither side can refute the others in these terms. In the end, solipsism wins, since it holds all the trump cards in the philosophical game. Even Kant’s intersubjectivism, the best case for the universality of reason I have ever read, dissolves into subjectivism without the leavening of other elements. You really need to develop Kant’s practical philosophy a lot more than is generally done to get the benefit of Kant. Marx, arguably, did precisely this.
I stress the importance of asking questions that cannot be answered. The mind raises questions which it cannot answer, but which humans may pursue in other areas, through the use of all their faculties. I've been involved in many philosophical debates over the years. I try desperately to avoid them. These debates always depress me since they always end the same way - in ashes and ruins. We keep running into the bars on our conceptual and psychic prisons, then fall back for want of the foundations and certainty we seek in reason. Those things are not there. Reason cannot be its own grounds - there are no such grounds, and a self-legislative reason reduces to a solipsism that holds all the trump cards. One philosophical side cannot 'refute' the other (try refuting Hume), so the question is which viewpoint makes most sense of the richness of human experience and all that that entails. I don't side with Thrasymachus, Hobbes, Hume (although I would read Hume sympathetically as cautioning against axiological extensionism, valuing that part of Hume that could understand and value Rousseau). That question is 'philosophical' in Montaigne's sense, the old sense of how humans are to live well and live well together. That’s not the most brilliantly technical and complex philosophy there has ever been. But it’s pretty much everything people could ask of a philosophy.
Wittgenstein is a most interesting character in these respects:
“We feel that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered the problems of life remain completely untouched. Of course there are then no questions left and this itself is the answer. The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of the problem.”
It’s the notion of Wittgenstein’s “silence” that has always intrigued me.
Wittgenstein’s “silence” is produced by unravelling and discarding the illusions of speculative metaphysics in order to return us to the reality of the everyday life world and to the common life we share together. I’d say that Wittgenstein’s view is very down-to-earth, a religious agnosticism or even mysticism. I hesitate to say mysticism, because a mystical position is hard, disciplined work, and often when people say ‘mysticism’ it merely means they haven’t understood (and rush into the embrace of the ineffable and the inexplicable merely to abandon reason). Wittgenstein says something somewhere about the person who is suspended from heaven rather than standing on earth. It changes the way we think and act in reality. I need to find the references. But I have this image in my mind.
“Religion is, so to speak, the calm ocean floor at its deepest, remaining calm, however high the waves rise on the surface.”
Wittgenstein Culture and Value 1998: 61
Wittgenstein here expresses the unshakeable nature of true faith at its deepest point, a silence and a stillness that is impervious to the roaring, colliding waves of everyday life. However high those waves may rise, they also fall and pass.
Much depends on how you see the sea of faith. If we think of Arnold’s Dover Beach, we can lament the fracturing of the modern moral terrain into subjectivism. The old metaphysical certainties are now going out, leaving us with nothing but a tale of decline and despair. My view can sometimes seem to possess that character. But that’s not quite it. Even the subjectivism of the modern age isn’t quite that since we live in a social world and are forever having to check our likes, wants, and desires against those of others. That interpersonal experience does generate a kind of objectivity. So there is a second view, that of a faith that doesn’t have certainty, and recognizes that we never had that certainty in the first place. That’s why it is called faith. Living is a work of faith and reason. What has happened is that, under sway of natural science and the advances it has made in explaining the physical world, philosophy saw its domain ever narrowing and its ambitions lowering. In the great unnerving, epistemological questions came to predominate at the expense of ontological questions, characterised by a misplaced search for certainty. We have found that such certainty does not exist. Post-modernism was explicit in abandoning the search, leading to panic over an ‘anything goes’ relativism. But post-modernism here is groping its way to a truth about misplaced certainty that the age of faith didn’t quite make, however grand the theological systems of the Schoolmen (which did attract criticism and scorn at the time and after. Read Erasmus on how Jesus and the discipes would none of them understand these systems).
With Wittgenstein, all that we can see clearly is the way that our language works and the games that we play in the grammar of life. And that is where we stop, curtailing the temptations to enter into a speculative metaphysics which invites us into all manner of philosophical and theological errors. Kant had thought he had done precisely this. And I’m not sure that’s the end of metaphysics at all. One of the most interesting moral philosophers of the modern age is Roger Trigg, who demonstrates at length as to why science needs metaphysics. Check his book Beyond Matter on this. Trigg is not a theologian, he is a trained philosopher and works in the field of analytic philosophy.
Much of what he writes is of a piece with my views on ‘rational freedom.’
I’ve tried to uphold the role of reason. I’ve been very opposed to narrowing that conception so that it becomes only scientific reason.
A very negative influence on me was Professor A. J. Ayer, a noted atheist in the middle of the last century. A very, very acute mind, and I admired the way he did philosophy, but I was dead sure that what he said was wrong. He wanted to say that all religious statements were meaningless.
Faith should be rational. I get very concerned when faith is thought to be subjective, irrational, and private. On the contrary, I think that faith should be claiming truth, should take its place in public life.
The question of Wittgenstein’s view of religion is a complicated one, and if I had to sum it up in a line I would say that Wittgenstein is so sharp and nuanced on this that he cannot but trouble both sides of the divide. The view that faith should be rational and claiming truth, something articulated socially and in the public space, is one that I would support and, even, have argued for. I am an ethical cognitivist in the field of 'rational freedom.' And that does indeed involve arguing for such a thing as moral truth and knowledge, not just scientific. And it does mean arguing for a reason which has its ethical component firmly in place.
Wittgenstein takes another tack. He is really talking about ‘religious’ conversion as a conversion in life and in its living. This entails a commitment to truthfulness and an inner integrity (don’t they all say that? Rousseau styled himself a truth-seeker rather than a possessor of truth, he sought authenticity. But who doesn't seek truth?). This is all so … within the reach of all of us. And if that’s all there is to it, then knowing, doing, and being are all as one, and that is all there is to be said. Hence Wittgenstein’s anti-metaphysics, hence his association with logical positivism/atomism. Wittgenstein sought to cure us of the temptations of speculative metaphysics. That’s a caution against a rationalizing conceptual extensionism, a warning against abstraction. I draw a comparison here with Marx. I like Marx’s critique of the abstracting processes of the modern world, which he identified and sought to uproot in philosophy, politics, and society. That’s how I would develop the critique of speculative metaphysics (and have done with Marx). I just find it interesting that some stick to the analytical aspect of Wittgenstein's thought, and miss the importance of his “silence” and his practice. They remain inside philosophy whereas the point, surely, is to come out of that shell. That’s Marx’s point, certainly. It is the “silent” bit that is the most meaningful and the most important dimension of this question. The limits of reason and philosophy are not the limits of life and its living.
Wittgenstein published just the one book in his lifetime, the Logico-Tractatus Philosophicus. It’s an unusual book written in an off-putting style. It’s hard to read for any length of time. There are no paragraphs, only numbered sections, many of which consist of just a single sentence. These are clearly meant to be pondered at length. The only paragraph written in conventional style is the Preface:
“Perhaps this book will be understood only by someone who has himself already had the thoughts that are expressed in it – or at least similar thoughts. So it is not a textbook. Its purpose would be achieved if it gave pleasure to one person who read and understood it. The book deals with the problems of philosophy, and shows, I believe, that the reason why these problems are posed is that the logic of our language is misunderstood. The whole sense of the book might be summed up in the following words: what can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence. Thus the aim of the book is to draw a limit to thought, or rather not to thought, but to the expression of thoughts: for in order to be able to draw a limit to thought, we should have to find both sides of the limit thinkable (i.e. we should have to be able to think what cannot be thought). It will therefore only be in language that the limit can be drawn, and what lies on the other side of the limit will simply be nonsense. I do not wish to judge how far my efforts coincide with those of other philosophers. Indeed, what I have written here makes no claim to novelty in detail, and the reason why I give no sources is that it is a matter of indifference to me whether the thoughts that I have had have been anticipated by someone else.”
In this passage, Wittgenstein expresses his concern to draw a limit to thought. This does not mean that he is seeking to restrict thought, but describe the limits of reality by way of mapping the possibilities and impossibilities of thought. The limits of my language, Wittgenstein argues, mean the limits of my world. For something to exist in our world, the human world, (in either actuality or the imagination), then it must be potentially thinkable by us, otherwise it would not register in our minds. If we cannot think of something in our world, then it cannot be.
It is in this sense that Wittgenstein is an anti-metaphysician. The key questions of traditional philosophy with respect to metaphysics, aesthetics and ethics cannot even be presented correctly using the logical structure of language, let alone be answered. These are thus unanswerable questions and therefore non-questions. Wittgenstein, however, does not draw the same conclusion of the logical positivists who claimed him as their inspiration, for whom such unanswerable questions are merely nonsense. The logical positivists, who made the bits and pieces atomism of the mechanistic age the height of philosophical virtue, nevertheless, claimed Wittgenstein as one of their own. His Tractatus became the textbook of the Vienna Circle. Wittgenstein’s own reaction to them was cool, however. Moritz Schlick, the leader of the Vienna Circle, sought contact with Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein expressed a reluctance to talk philosophy which I so utterly empathize with. If you do have something worth saying, the odds on finding people who understand it are remote. If it’s not worth saying, or can be found in any book, it really isn’t worth the emotional effort involved in facing the public:
‘To persuade Wittgenstein to attend these meetings Schlick had to assure him that the discussion would not have to be philosophical; he could discuss whatever he liked. Sometimes, to the surprise of his audience, Wittgenstein would turn his back on them and read poetry. In particular – as if to emphasize to them, as he had earlier explained to von Ficker, that what he had not said in the Tractatus was more important than what he had – he read them the poems of Rabindranath Tagore … whose poems express a mystical outlook diametrically opposed to that of the members of Schlick’s circle’
Ray Monk 1990: 243
The interest of the logical positivists in Wittgenstein was based on their misunderstanding of his work. Which is not surprising, given the structure of the Tractatus. The bulk of the Tractatus is devoted to the construction of a world-language system. The work, however, is bookended by comments in the Preface and closing remarks in which Wittgenstein makes clear that what he considers to be most important is not actually contained in the book. He also expressed this view in a letter he sent to his publisher, Ludwig von Ficker, before publication. Here, Wittgenstein expresses the impossibility of saying anything meaningful about the most important things in life, including the ‘internal’ parts of the book which he presents as ‘the final solution of the problems [of philosophy].’ Wittgenstein’s ‘silence,’ then, does not denote insignificance and unimportance, quite the contrary. Wittgenstein’s ethical position, then, consists in the importance he assigns to the ineffable:
‘You won't — I really believe — get too much out of reading it. Because you won't understand it; the content will seem strange to you. In reality, it isn't strange to you, for the point is ethical. I once wanted to give a few words in the foreword which now actually are not in it, which, however, I'll write to you now because they might be a key for you: I wanted to write that my work consists of two parts, the one presented here plus all that I have not written. And it is precisely this second part that is the important point. For the ethical gets its limit drawn from the inside, as it were, by my book; … I’ve managed in my book to put everything firmly into place by being silent about it …. For now I would recommend you to read the preface and the conclusion, because they contain the most direct expression of the point.’
Wittgenstein, letter to Ludwig von Ficker (1919), published in C. Grant Luckhard, Wittgenstein : Sources and Perspectives (1979) and also
Wittgenstein, ProtoTractatus, p.16
This leads to a strange position indeed. Wittgenstein is celebrated for what he said about language, and acres of text have been generated debating interpretative complexities with respect to the sayable and the meaningful. But it is clear that the things that get discarded by a positivist reading – aesthetics, ethics, metaphysics, and religion – are, in Wittgenstein’s view, of fundamental significance: it’s just that we can’t say anything meaningful in this, the most important realm of life.
Analysing facts and logical statements, Wittgenstein came to a logical, if surprising, resolution of the problem: The answers to these philosophical questions are not to be found in the facts of the world, but outside of them; the answers are outside of the factual universe and hence outside of the scope of language whose task is to articulate these facts. “I know that this world exists,” Wittgenstein writes in his Notebooks. “This meaning [aim of the world] does not lie in it but outside of it… The meaning of life, i.e. the meaning of the world, we can call God.” (Journal entry, 11 June 1916), p. 72e and 73e). Wittgenstein sharpened these thoughts in the Tractatus:
“The world is all that is the case.” (1)
“The world is the totality of facts, not things.” (1.1)
“Philosophy aims at the logical clarification of thoughts. Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity. A philosophical work consists essentially of elucidations. Philosophy does not result in 'philosophical propositions', but rather in the clarification of propositions. Without philosophy thoughts are, as it were, cloudy and indistinct: its task is to make them clear and to give them sharp boundaries.” (4.112)
“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” (5.6)
“Logic pervades the world: the limits of the world are also its limits. So we cannot say in logic, ‘The world has this in it, and this, but not that.’ For that would appear to presuppose that we were excluding certain possibilities, and this cannot be the case, since it would require that logic should go beyond the limits of the world; for only in that way could it view those limits from the other side as well. We cannot think what we cannot think; so what we cannot think we cannot say either.” (5.61)
Language and logic are appropriate tools for dealing with the universe, and if people consider that universe to be the only reality that there is, then language and logic will do fine. The limits to the one are the limits of the other, there is nothing else.
“The aim of philosophy is to erect a wall at the point where language stops anyway.”
Philosophical Occasions 1912-1952 (1993) Ch. 9 : Philosophy, p. 187
“Philosophers are often like little children, who first scribble random lines on a piece of paper with their pencils, and now ask an adult ‘What is that?’” Philosophical Occasions 1912-1952 (1993) Ch. 9 : Philosophy, p. 193
Wittgenstein openly identified himself as a religious thinker. But his thoughts as to what is truly religious seem incapable of social and public expression:
“Make sure that your religion is a matter between you and God only.”
Comment to Maurice O'Connor Drury, as quoted in Wittgenstein Reads Freud : The Myth of the Unconscious (1996) by Jacques Bouveresse, as translated by Carol Cosman, p. 14
Such a position may guard against the errors of metaphysical speculation, but effectively deny the shared and social aspects of religion, religion as a common bond and shared experience. Such a religion becomes so private as to cease to exist socially. Be wary of a solipsism that holds all the trump cards in a world confined in this:
“This remark provides the key to the problem, how much truth there is in solipsism. For what the solipsist means is quite correct; only it cannot be said, but makes itself manifest. The world is my world: this is manifest in the fact that the limits of language (of that language which alone I understand) mean the limits of my world.” (5.62)
“The world and life are one.” (5.621)
“I am my world.” (The microcosm.) (5.63)
The answers to metaphysical questions cannot be found by means of logic and language, and if we stick to those terms then such questions can be dismissed as unanswerable non-questions. But Wittgenstein pressed further than the logical positivists to see these unanswerable metaphysical questions as being answered by mystical experience.
“Scepticism is not irrefutable, but obviously nonsensical, when it tries to raise doubts where no questions can be asked. For doubt can exist only where a question exists, a question only where an answer exists, and an answer only where something can be said.” (6.51)
Wittgenstein thus brings us to mystical experience:
“The mystical is not how the world is, but that it is.”
(Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 6.44)
Variant translation
“It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists.”
“There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.” (6.522)
“Mystical experience is grasping the world as a wholeness with borders.”
Wittgenstein identifies the borders of the world by describing it as the sum of facts, with a discrete character:
“What is the case, the fact, is the existence of atomic facts.” (Tractatus 2)
Wittgenstein proceeds to analyse the world as this bordered wholeness comprising a structured sum of facts and logical structure. He identifies the borders of this world with the borders of language and proceeds to delineate our human relation to these.
At this point, Wittgenstein takes his leave of the logical positivists. Far from dismissing the search for answers to metaphysical questions, Wittgenstein proceeds to look outside the world, never doubting the meaning, possibility, and existence of these questions and answers even though they can neither be contained by logic nor expressed by language.
The work closes with the sentence from Wittgenstein that most people know:
"Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. (7)
Variant translation: About what one can not speak, one must remain silent. (7)
This sentence establishes the borders that contain the wholeness of the world and the language that describes it, but is less a closure than an invitation into the mystical experience that grasps the world as this wholeness with borders. The most important thing about this statement is not the containment but the opening, as indicated by the “back door” that Wittgenstein left open just a few statements earlier, where Wittgenstein condemns the propositions of his work as meaningless, but as having a value as a ladder, which the reader may ascend and then throw away when reaching true understanding:
“My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.)” (6.54)
Wittgenstein’s propositions may thus be certified meaningless by the strictures of logical meaning presented in the Tractatus, but as the metaphor of the ladder indicates, they remain useful, indeed essential, since without them it would be impossible to ascend to true understanding. Wittgenstein’s philosophical system thus possesses a self-contradictory quality – defining the limits of language whilst at the same time using language in the process of transcending those limits. This is precisely the paradox that one finds in Dante, the man whose poetic genius and invention is employed to convey mystical experience in a world that is beyond words.
The self-contradictory quality of Wittgenstein’s system is bound up with what may be called its fruitful self-abolition. In a manner not unlike Marx’s notion that philosophy is abolished through coming to be realized, this abolition of the philosophical system is its completion in coming to fulfil the purpose for which it was designed. It is here that the question becomes pertinent with respect to my study of Dante’s poetical method as a way of ascending the level of mystical experience beyond the engulfment of language. Since the borders of the world are established by the philosophical system, in venturing outside the limits of the world in search of answers to metaphysical, ethical, and religious questions we necessarily transcend the logico-lingustical limits of our philosophical system. But we can only transcend the borders by first locating and analysing them in the first place, hence Wittgenstein’s metaphor of the ladder.
In fine, the Tractatus delineates the structured facts and logical structure of the universe and the language we use to comprehend and articulate the universe and our place in it. In defining the borders of the world in this way, Wittgenstein opens the way to transcend them so as to enter the realm of mystical experience which is the only way of answering metaphysical questions adequately. Wittgenstein’s anti-metaphysics, then, is less a rejection of metaphysics than a recognition of the necessarily limited nature of metaphysics as rational philosophy. The true answers to metaphysical questions lie outside the limits of philosophical questioning.
I’m with Wittgenstein on this. Ray Monk is also very good on Wittgenstein's cautions against 'scientism.' ‘Wittgenstein’s forgotten lesson’ – Wittgenstein's lesson may have been forgotten by many - in fact it was never learned by many - but not by me.
Wittgenstein's philosophy is at odds with the scientism which dominates our times. I’m at odds with it too. And I have the scars from battles with those who misunderstand the point completely to take it to be a rejection of science (and technology). If you want to know why I avoid philosophical debate, one reason is how often it has involved me struggling to get past first base on some point so simple as not to be worth a minute of my time.
Wittgenstein seemed to have known that he would be misunderstood when not being simply ignored. He knew himself to be swimming against the stream (just as he seems to have been out-of-kilter with people and society). As he put it, his work is opposed to “the spirit which informs the vast stream of European and American civilisation in which all of us stand.” I think I know what Wittgenstein was about. I have felt myself to be swimming against a massive and seemingly irresistible tide. But swim I must. I can do no other. A sense of humour helps keep me afloat. Poor Ludwig lacked a sense of humour.
Richard Feynmann said that “Scientists need philosophers the way birds need ornithologists.” But that doesn’t work at all. Science is an intellectual enterprise guided by frames and values, in a way that ‘birding’ isn’t. The birds don’t need scientists either. If my budgerigars ever did, they never told me. But I jest. The simple lesson is to just shut up, act, and do. It’s just that science, philosophy, and religion are all in their different ways what human beings do, and they must necessarily involve more than silence.
Wittgenstein was far from dismissing ways of knowing lying outside of the strictures of logical positivism as meaningless:
“Frazer's account of the magical and religious views of mankind is unsatisfactory; it makes these views look like errors.”
Philosophical Occasions 1912-1951 (1993), Edited by James Carl Klagge and Alfred Nordmann Ch. 7 : Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough, p. 119
In fact, lacking in spiritual depth and understanding, those armed only with fact and logic may well be much cruder than those they consider primitive:
“Frazer is much more savage than most of his savages, for they are not as far removed from the understanding of spiritual matter as a twentieth-century Englishman. His explanations of primitive practices are much cruder than the meaning of these practices themselves.”
Philosophical Occasions 1912-1951 (1993), Edited by James Carl Klagge and Alfred Nordmann Ch. 7 : Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough, p. 131
If we require a label to describe the tide that threatens to engulf us, then we could call it “scientism.” This is the view that every intelligible question has either a scientific solution or no solution at all. ‘It is against this view that Wittgenstein set his face,’ writes Monk. I have fought it consistently and relentlessly, being concerned to relate it also to specific social relations in historical time and place. “Scientism” has a history and is buttressed by a political economy. People have been slow to understand this aspect of my thought. Very many under the sway of “scientism” are of liberal-leftist persuasion and are inclined to think their criticism and repudiation of religion radical; they think God and religion correlates with conservatism in politics. They therefore are confused by my position which combines a belief in God and a recovery of the spiritual and religious dimension with a conception of socialism as the social restitution of power to the social body. I also consistently challenge “scientism” in my attempts to overcome the fact-value division, and the way that is associated with the exaltation of fact, the true basis of knowledge, over value, mere value judgments or irreducible subjective opinion. From the standpoint I develop, which is entirely in line with Wittgenstein, the “scientism” of the modern world is not emancipatory, liberal, or leftist at all but is a preparation of the intellect and the body for entry into the capitalist Megamachine.
Ray Monk writes:
‘Scientism takes many forms. In the humanities, it takes the form of pretending that philosophy, literature, history, music and art can be studied as if they were sciences, with “researchers” compelled to spell out their “methodologies”—a pretence which has led to huge quantities of bad academic writing, characterised by bogus theorising, spurious specialisation and the development of pseudo-technical vocabularies. Wittgenstein would have looked upon these developments and wept.’
Praise be! I went through that damned factory and I hated every last ounce of ‘protocol.’ I struggled to be an official “researcher” spelling out my “methodology.” I knew fine well what my problem was, I had already read more than enough, and was dying to write. Instead I had to spend so long polishing my lenses I nearly gave up. Yes, I can do methodology, like all dullards. It’s interesting that someone like Marx buries his philosophical and methodological framework and just gets on with his critique. It is implicit in his work. That means we can get a Gerry Cohen who sees a bit of this framework and can blow it up into a vast edifice, presented in Karl Marx’s Theory of History. It is intellectually impressive, certainly. But it isn’t the way Marx presented his work, and isn’t quite ‘what Marx meant’ either. I’m also intrigued by the emphasis on personal moral conversion that Cohen came to adopt in later life, which he admitted was far closer to the Christianity of his youth than the Marxism of his maturity.
Monk makes the point I opened this piece with:
‘There are many questions to which we do not have scientific answers, not because they are deep, impenetrable mysteries, but simply because they are not scientific questions. These include questions about love, art, history, culture, music-all questions, in fact, that relate to the attempt to understand ourselves better.’
And these are not non-questions, they are questions of significance and meaning. Philosophy, Wittgenstein argues, “is not a theory but an activity.” Philosophy seeks to achieve not scientific truth but conceptual clarity. This clarity is achieved through a correct understanding of the logical form of language, which, once achieved, was destined to remain inexpressible. It was in this manner that Wittgenstein compared his own philosophical propositions with a ladder, advising us to throw away the ladder once we climbed high on it. That’s the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus. (I can’t resist jumping in here and drawing attention to my work on Marx. I find clear similarities between Wittgenstein’s resolution of philosophizing into activity and Marx’s emphasis on a critique that is unfolds practically. In my work on Marx I emphasized the extent to Marx did not write theory and was explicitly anti-theoretical; Marx engaged in a critique that was practically focused and socially orientated).
Monk notes that in his later work, Wittgenstein abandoned the idea of logical form and with it the notion of ineffable truths. In this work, Wittgenstein explains the difference between science and philosophy as a difference between two distinct forms of understanding: the theoretical and the non-theoretical. Scientific understanding is given through the construction and testing of hypotheses and theories; philosophical understanding, on the other hand, is resolutely non-theoretical. What we are after in philosophy is “the understanding that consists in seeing connections.”
That’s it. For more detailed analysis, please read the rest of Ray Monk’s article. All I can say here is that the points that Monk is concerned to highlight with respect to the ‘forgotten Wittgenstein’ all concern the dimensions of an integral philosophy I have been concerned to develop in my own work (hence the ranging across areas of ecology, religion and ethics, biology and psychology, art and literature).
One of the most quoted aphorisms of the Philosophical Investigations is this: “An inner process stands in need of outward criteria." Wittgenstein placed great emphasis on the need for the sensitive perception of these “outward criteria” in all their imponderability. Those under the sway of “scientism” would see nothing of any import here, certainly nothing by way of true knowledge. But there is increasing interest in the work of neuroscientists and evolutionary psychologists, who people think can explain consciousness, art, and music (as if cultural creativity reduces to some bio-chemical reaction). You won’t find the acute sensitivity that Wittgenstein sought here. Instead, Wittgenstein looked in the works of the great artists, musicians and novelists. As he writes in Culture and Value, “People nowadays think that scientists exist to instruct them, poets, musicians, etc. to give them pleasure. The idea that these have something to teach them-that does not occur to them.”
Monk concludes that at a time like this, when the humanities are institutionally obliged to pretend to be sciences, ‘we need more than ever the lessons about understanding that Wittgenstein—and the arts—have to teach us.’
Demands for evidence and proof are not as easy as some people seem to think, and logical positivism fell out of fashion a long, long time ago. Think long and hard on Wittgenstein's words on certainty:
94. I did not get my picture of the world by satisfying myself of its correctness; nor do I have it because I am satisfied of its correctness. No: it is the inherited background against which I distinguish between true and false.
105. All testing, all confirmation and disconfirmation of a hypothesis takes place already within a system. And this system is not a more or less arbitrary and doubtful point of departure for all our arguments; no it belongs to the essence of what we call an argument. The system is not so much the point of departure, as the element in which our arguments have their life.
144. The child learns to believe a host of things. I.e. it learns to act according to these beliefs. Bit by bit there forms a system of what is believed, and in that system some things stand unshakeably fast and some are more or less liable to shift. What stands fast does so, not because it is intrinsically obvious or convincing; it is rather held fast by what lies around it.
205. If the true is what is grounded, then the ground is not true, nor yet false.
206. If someone asked us 'but is that true?' we might say "yes" to him; and if he demanded grounds we might say "I can't give you any grounds, but if you learn more you too will think the same."
225. What I hold fast to is not one proposition but a nest of propositions.
253. At the core of all well-founded belief, lies belief that is unfounded.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty (Über Gewissheit), J. & J. Harper Editions, New York, 1969
We may ask of anything 'is it true?' As soon as we trace the question to foundations, we run out of satisfactory answers, whether we seek answers in terms of logic or evidence. All that can be said is that sooner or later you are going to have to take a leap of faith. Indeed, even making a commitment to discover of logic and evidence, in expectation of persuading others to live in accordance with truth, is an act of hope, belief, and faith. The more logic and evidence we have on our side, of course, the less of a leap we are required to make. But leap we must. And to be encouraged to leap requires motivations and meanings beyond scientistic reason.
Perhaps ‘bewitched’ by Wittgenstein’s arguments that traditional metaphysical speculation on such topics as soul and mind, good and evil, is doomed to fail on account of being nonsense, the schools of philosophy that responded most to the Tractatus were those, such as Logical Positivism, who feel that philosophy should limit its investigations to the realm of logic and the natural sciences, and extend its sights no further. All that there is is that which can be dispassionately verified through sense experience or experiment, and nothing more.
That Wittgenstein himself was cold to the attempts of Logical Positivists to embrace him as one of their own was something which puzzled them. But it would be no puzzle at all to anyone who has ever read and understood the closing pages of the Tractatus. True, Wittgenstein does formally outline a world that is circumscribed by that which can be meaningfully represented in language. At the same time, however, he proclaims with some (dare I say religious) fervour that there is nothing cold, lifeless or merely scientific about this circumscribed world—the very opposite in fact:
6.41 The sense of the world must lie outside the world.…
6.52 We feel that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched.…
6.522 There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.
6.43 … The world of the happy man is a different one from that of the unhappy man.
In the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein criticizes the use of symbolic logic and picture theory of meaning in the Tractatus, not on account of being wrong but for being too precise, too pure and too limited for the purpose at hand. Remark 107 not only summarizes Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, but seems to me a personal statement of a man trying desperately to break out of his philosophical obsessions and cravings for certainty and to break through to the rough, uncertain, and ambiguous human world (I’m phrasing it this way for a reason):
“The more narrowly we examine actual language, the sharper becomes the conflict between it and our requirement. (For the crystalline purity of logic was, of course, not a result of investigation: it was a requirement.) The conflict becomes intolerable; the requirement is now in danger of becoming empty.—We have got on to slippery ice where there is no friction and so in a certain sense the conditions are ideal, but also, just because of that, we are unable to walk. We want to walk: so we need friction. Back to the rough ground!”
Poor Wittgenstein was suspended between earth and ice. We need to walk, we need friction: we live always on rough ground. And it's stories all the way down.
‘I’d quite liked to have composed a philosophical work which consisted entirely of jokes.
Sadly I didn’t have a sense of humour.
Let me tell you a little story.
There was once a young man who dreamed of reducing the world to pure logic. Because he was a very clever young man, he actually managed to do it. When he’d finished his work, he stood back and admired it. It was beautiful. A world purged of imperfection and indeterminacy. Countless acres of gleaming ice stretching to the horizon.
So the clever young man looked around the world he’d created and decided to explore it. He took one step forward and fell flat on his back. You see, he’d forgotten about friction. The ice was smooth and level and stainless. But you couldn’t walk there. So the clever young man sat down and wept bitter tears.
But as he grew into a wise old man, he came to understand that roughness and ambiguity aren’t imperfections, they are what make the world turn. He wanted to run and dance. And the words and things scattered upon the ground were all battered and tarnished and ambiguous. The wise old man saw that was the way things were.
But something in him was still homesick for the ice, where everything was radiant and absolute and relentless. Though he had come to like the idea of the rough ground, he couldn’t bring himself to live there. So now he was marooned between earth and ice, at home in neither. And this was the cause of all his grief.
The solution to the riddle of life in space and time lies outside space and time.
But as you know and I know, there are no riddles. If a question can be put at all, it can also be answered.’
So let me suggest a way of remaining on the rough ground without getting bogged down in the self-cancellation of the endless yes/no of politics and ethics. We can have friction and movement in that world, and do not have to put it on ice. Such things are the stuff of politics, drawing human beings out as moral beings capable of taking responsibility for their actions. And we do not have to escape into the icy world of pure abstraction and logic, either (which is itself a world without friction and movement). Rather than disparage the yes/no of politics and ethics, we need to recognize conflict and disagreement as the condition of a healthy and vibrant society, so long as such things can be mediated and resolved. Hence I emphasize Plato's use of the dialectic and dialogue. My work on Kant and his social ethics and practical philosophy also shows how to bridge the divide between transcendent truths and temporal reality.
Throughout the Tractatus, Wittgenstein remains on a level of high abstraction and does little to render his thoughts more comprehensible through concrete examples. He does, however, offer some sparkling musical metaphors that are really pertinent to the argument I develop in Dante’s Sweet Symphony. I’m not saying that Dante and Wittgenstein are at one on this, because Dante’s assumptions are plainly something Wittgenstein would dismiss as a metaphysical overextension. I approach this from another direction, and the way that Dante seeks to justify his position as a leap rather than an overreach, with a reason based on logic and fact narrowing the chasm over which we have to jump, but being incapable of removing it completely, leaving us with the physical and metaphysical planes being connected by the invisible chord of musical connection. I say Dante’s musical model shares similarities with Wittgenstein’s position in the Tractatus in the sense that Wittgenstein’s musical metaphors accent the ubiquitous nature of underlying form and the way that this form brings the seemingly diverse elements of the world together as one:
4.014 A gramophone record, the musical idea, the written notes, and the sound-waves, all stand to one another in the same internal relation of depicting that holds between language and the world. They are all constructed according to a common logical pattern.…
4.0141 There is a general rule by means of which the musician can obtain the symphony from the score, and which makes it possible to derive the symphony from the groove on the gramophone record, and, using the first rule, to derive the score again. That is what constitutes the inner similarity between these things which seem to be constructed in such entirely different ways.…
In Dante’s Sweet Symphony of Paradise, I write of Dante’s musical model and his metaphorical physics. Here we have the musical metaphor employed to emphasize unity and concordance, the underlying form that ties different elements together and has them resounding as one. That’s the idea I explore in Dante’s Comedy and I find it here in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. Here, music is presented as an art form which is the purest demonstration of the power of taking some part of the world’s substance that would be meaningless and cacophonous in chaotic arrangement — its sound — but which becomes meaningful and sweet when joined together in ordered form. Indeed, such sound takes flight. Dante takes the musical model into politics to establish the political significance of the idea of a diversity of voices resounding in one mighty chord. In accordance with this notion all the scanni, or ‘ranks,’ find the place appropriate to their attributes in the harmonious order of the rote, or ‘wheels.’
But part of our delight is measuring
rewards against our merit, and we see
that our rewards are neither less nor more.
Thus does the Living Justice make so sweet
the sentiments in us, that we are free
of any turning toward iniquity.
Differing voices join to sound sweet music;
so do the different orders in our life
render sweet harmony among these spheres.
Dante Par VI: 118-26
The different voices rendering sweet harmony in the celestial spheres are suggestive of polyphonic textures. It is significant that this idea of celestial harmony modulated by God occurs in a political canto. What Wittgenstein describes in terms of underlying form tying different elements together and taking flight very much describes Dante’s journal from infernal cacophony to heavenly polyphony. Benvenuto of Imola expresses the idea this way: the angels sing ‘a threefold song, because every triad makes its own distinct song according to their different offices, and still they all resound and harmonize in magnificent intervals.’ The idea of musical metaphor and celestial harmony as a political allegory is expressed by Hugh of St Victor, a favourite author of Dante’s. In the Allegoriae in Vetus Testamentum, Hugh compares the accordance of different sounds as the solid unity to the diverse but concordant parts of the Church:
The rational and measured harmony of different sounds in a concordant variety signifies the compact unity of the orderly Church, which in various modes resounds every day, and is modulated with mystic sweetness.
PL, vol 175, col 691
I may be stretching the analogy a little – that’s what I do when I test – but we are not at all far here from a musical model in which the different elements of the world are tied together through being properly ordered in accordance with underlying form. That is the sense of the musical metaphors Wittgenstein employs, and the view structures the way that Wittgenstein develops of his theory of logic in the Tractatus. In Autistic Symphony, Alan Griswold writes:
‘The overwhelming need to arrange the world’s randomness into predictable and organized form is the very beginning and the very essence of meaningful life for the autistic mind.’
Griswold 2007
That seems as perfect a description of Dante’s journey from infernal cacophony to heavenly polyphony as any. I think that applies to all of us. When we talk about autism/AS as ill-adjustment to the world, I cannot but help think of St Thomas Aquinas’ prayer that one day we come to rest in our ‘true native land.’ We are not at home on Earth.
Who are we? Where are we? Are we going somewhere? Where is our real homeland? Where will our resting place be?
O saving Victim, open wide
The gate of Heaven to man below;
Our foes press on from every side;
Your aid supply; Your strength bestow.
To your great Name be endless praise;
Immortal Godhead, One in Three;
Grant us, for endless length of days,
In our true native land to be.
St. Thomas Aquinas
God’s glories are eternal and unchanging. His real presence now prepares us for the fullness of vision, the never-ending Communion in Heaven, our true native land.
In The Comedy, Dante writes the beautiful line: ‘In His will is our peace.’ That peace denotes the concordance and harmony achieved through the reconciliation of multiplicities within the oneness of God. That oneness is attained by a unitarian orderly principle which runs through and orients different elements joined together by underlying form. I should make it clear that I am an essentialist in philosophy. When I read Wittgenstein use terms like ‘internal relation’ and the ‘inner similarity’ of things, I immediately think of these as essentialist categories. I know Wittgenstein didn’t care for Aristotle and claimed not to have read Aristotle. He ought to have done. I have. What Wittgenstein is arguing for requires the metaphysics of Aristotle, Aquinas, and Dante. He is seeking the well-tempered harmony of Paradise and the sweet accord of different sounds together. When his logic takes flight, it resounds.
I find Wittgenstein to be a religious thinker.
"To believe in God means to understand the question about the meaning of life.
To believe in God means to see that the facts of the world are not the end of the matter.
To believe in God means to see that life has a meaning."
- Ludwig Wittgenstein
Precisely. I'm reading Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein argued in his 1929 lecture on ethics that "the tendency of all men who ever tried to write or talk Ethics or Religion was to run against the boundaries of language," that is, to talk or write nonsense. Although he never committed himself to any formal religion, Wittgenstein had a lifelong interest in religion, and compared the genuinely religious person to a 'tightrope walker,' walking on seemingly nothing but faith, but walking all the same. Wittgenstein claimed to see every problem from a religious point of view. That's something the logical positivists who claimed Wittgenstein as their inspiration completely missed (from Russell to Ayer, Wittgenstein was classes above them). Many read this statement and suggest that Wittgenstein believed in mystical truths that are incapable of being expressed meaningfully, hence Wittgenstein's 'silence.' But I am in no doubt at all that these are the truths of the utmost importance to Wittgenstein. He didn't believe that these truths could be expressed in language. I am currently finishing my Dante book, to show how the peerless poet-philosopher from Florentine used musical metaphors to express those divine truths overcoming the engulfment of language.
I do have to say that we are revisiting some old truths, forgotten in the modern age, but familiar to those of us not inclined to see the medieval world as ignorant, stupid, and superstitious. For Dante, there is no great distinction to be made between theology, as represented by Scholasticism, and Mysticism: these are the two ways of science and experience along the same road along which the soul travels towards the same goal; two aspects of the same truth, which is God. This is most stark in the example of St. Thomas Aquinas, the highest and most eminently rational of the Schoolmen who ended his days as a sheer mystic. The signs were there long before the end. In his commentary on the De Trinitate of Boethius, Aquinas wrote: "We cannot in this present life attain to a knowledge of God Himself beyond the fact that He exists. And nevertheless, among those who know that He is, the one knows this more perfectly than the other." In the Summa Theologica, answering the question "whether any one in this life can see God in His essence," Aquinas writes of a direct mystical experience of God. God, he argues, cannot be seen in His essence by a man unless he is severed from this mortal life; the soul, while we live in this life, has her being in corporeal matter, and cannot be so lifted up to the supreme of things intelligible which is the Divine Essence. But "even as God sometimes works supernaturally by a miracle in corporeal things, so also has He elevated the minds of some, while living in the flesh, but not making use of the senses of the flesh, supernaturally and beyond the common order, even to the vision of His essence; as Augustine says of Moses, who was the teacher of the Jews, and of Paul, who was the teacher of the Gentiles." Staying at the castle of San Severino, Aquinas experienced a pro-longed ecstasy, in which he seemed entirely alienated from his senses. When he recovered, his words were recorded: "He said with sighs: Son Rainaldo, I will tell thee in secret, forbidding thee to disclose it to any while I live. The end of my writing has come, for such things have been revealed to me that all that I have written and taught seems to me very little ; and from this I hope in my God that, even as my teaching is ended, so my life will soon close."
As I intend to argue in my forthcoming book on Dante, whilst Scholasticism is the head of Dante's religious view of the world, Mysticism is the soul, with the Greater Love the animating spirit that encompasses and moves both. Dante’s Comedy is a mystical journey through time to eternity, leading him through language, reason, and imagination to its supreme goal.
The combination of scholasticism and mysticism runs throughout Dante’s work, predating his mystic journey in the Comedy. Here strikes a very mystical note at the very beginning of the Vita Nuova, with the first appearance of Beatrice before his eyes: —
"From thenceforward I say that Love held lordship over my soul, which was so early wedded to him, and he began to exercise over me such great assurance and such great mastery, through the power that my imagination gave him, that it behoved me to do perfectly all that was his pleasure. He commanded me many times that I should seek to see this youngest of the Angels: wherefore I in my childhood often went seeking her; and I saw her of so noble and praiseworthy bearing, that certainly of her could be said that word of the poet Homer: She seemed not daughter of mortal man, but of God. And albeit her image, which continually abode with me, was an exultation of love to rule over me, nevertheless it was of so noble a virtue, that no time did it suffer that Love should sway me without the faithful counsel of Reason, there where such counsel were useful to hear."
George Tyrrell declares: "All love is mystical, in that it refuses the exact analysis of reason, which, without contradicting, it ineffably transcends."
I would just say that, working within a tradition and concept of ‘rational freedom,’ I’m not quite ready to surrender too much reason to the ineffable and the inexplicable. I certainly appreciate Wittgenstein’s point here. It is a question I am currently wrestling with with respect to Dante, who uses all of his genius as a poet to convey an experience in a realm beyond the engulfment of language, intellect, and even imagination. I do argue for an anarchic excess that evades capture by a totalizing Reason, a spiritual core that can never be colonized, rationalized, and thoroughly humanized. I can certainly appreciate Wittgenstein’s insight into a genuinely religious experience that is beyond any intellectual, linguistic, and theological structure. But I refuse the stark division between statements of fact and logic that say very little and a ‘silence’ that can say nothing at all. There is a value in asking questions that cannot, ultimately, be answered; and half a picture, and even a false picture, may well be better than no picture at all. Human beings are social beings and live a mediated life in relation to others and to their world. I am not averse to living into mystery. At the same time, I don’t abandon reason so quickly as to take refuge in the concepts of the "inexplicable" and the “ineffable.” These things can too easily be evasions of intellectual and moral responsibility. As an ethical cognitivist, I do believe that reason has something to say on ethics. We may not succeed in finding and providing a rational explanation for the issues we raise, but there is real value in striving to understand such issues, not least in the fact we come to discover how much we can explain and make sense of. The faith in the combination of faith and reason, then, is never a blind faith, but places a great responsibility on the critical exercise of human intelligence.
Some quotes from Wittgenstein's Notebooks (1914-1916):
"Certainly it is correct to say: Conscience is the voice of God." p. 75
"What do I know about God and the purpose of life? I know that this world exists. That I am placed in it like my eye in its visual field. That something about it is problematic, which we call its meaning. This meaning does not lie in it but outside of it. That life is the world. That my will penetrates the world. That my will is good or evil. Therefore that good and evil are somehow connected with the meaning of the world. The meaning of life, i.e. the meaning of the world, we can call God. And connect with this the comparison of God to a father. To pray is to think about the meaning of life." Journal entry (11 June 1916), p. 72e and 73e
"To believe in a God means to understand the question about the meaning of life. To believe in a God means to see that the facts of the world are not the end of the matter. To believe in God means to see that life has a meaning." Journal entry (8 July 1916), p. 74e
'The World and Life are one. Physiological life is of course not "Life". And neither is psychological life. Life is the world. Ethics does not treat of the world. Ethics must be a condition of the world, like logic. Ethics and Aesthetics are one.' Journal entry (24 July 1916), p. 77e
“When we have found all the mysteries and lost all the meaning, we will be alone, on an empty shore.” - Tom Stoppard
If the universe is pointless and meaningless, then nothing is more pointless and meaningless than the science and philosophy which says it is so.
"The absence of God, when consistently upheld and thoroughly examined, spells the ruin of man in the sense that it demolishes or robs of meaning everything we have been used to think of as the essence of being human: the quest for truth, the distinction of good and evil, the claim to dignity, the claim to creating something that withstands the indifferent destructiveness of time."
- Leszek Kolakowski
When Jesus Christ said that man does not live by bread alone, he didn’t mean that it lived by disinfectants that prove all too acidic in dissolving meaning and destroying hope to deliver us to ashes and ruins on a destinationless voyage.
Humanism? "This laboriously won self-contempt of man." - Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals
We cannot prove that life has meaning, that God exists, and that the universe has design and purpose. We have no facts to indicate the existence of these things. But these questions are matters of value and significance rather than fact, and the insistence that such things be shown to exist through statements of fact or logic is based upon a monumental confusion between explanation and interpretation and between knowledge and understanding. All manner of confusions – and conflicts – result when we mix our logics. This is not a clash between the scientific and religious views of the world. To the contrary, the scientific explanation of the facts of life may remain the same in both accounts. It is only when religious views start to offer alternative facts and explanations that that sterile clash erupts again. The real issue, though, concerns the meaning, significance, value, and purpose beyond the facts and explanation. Those who choose to remain with the scientific account are entitled to say there is nothing. And in terms of a knowledge restricted to statements of fact and logic they are right. But by the same reasoning we cannot prove that love is better than hate, freedom better than oppression, democracy better than tyranny, cooperation better than aggression, altruism better than egoism, forgiveness better than retribution. There is a practical test in the sense that through experience we can see which of these work the best. But in a way, that is precisely how questions of meaning, value, and significance with respect to the existence of God are resolved. God is not an intellectual proposition to be analysed and debated nor a truth to be stated, but a truth to be lived. I have been recently reading heavily in researching a potential book on Lewis Mumford. I agree with much that Mumford wrote in his long career. But time and again I was confronted by his tragic sense of life. I had to write to the person proposing to act as editor that I could not accept this notion of life of tragedy. For as much as I agree with Mumford in many respects, this tragic sense of life is something I find debilitating. I am currently completing a book on Dante’s Comedy, comedy in the sense of the happy ending of redemption and salvation through God’s grace. I affirm comedy over tragedy. I cannot prove that human life is comedy rather than tragedy, no more than I can prove that any of the great truths which human beings live by are provable. And that’s precisely the point. The only way of ‘proving’ that hope is truer to human experience and the human longing for meaning than the despair which comes with the tragic sense of life is by living the truth.
On the one side are statements of fact and logic, which constitute the boundaries of knowledge for logical positivists. I don’t accept that view and, as an ethical cognitivist, argue that there is such a thing as moral truth and moral knowledge. That’s not Wittgenstein’s view. Wittgenstein I take to be a deeply moral, even religious, thinker, but he writes precious little on good and bad, right and wrong. It’s not that he things these moral questions unimportant but that he thinks reason has nothing to say on them. Science deals in explanation. Once we move into the realm of value, meaning, and significance, then science has nothing to say and much say nothing. (That’s not a view that those working in fields of neuroscience are saying, mind, but reading their views it is clear they are not actually doing ethics, merely engaging in scientific extensionism. But that’s merely a passing critical observation that fails to do justice to the attempts to explore the ethical significance of science, an exploration very much in the tradition of Aristotle, who considered his biological and zoological studies to very much have a significance for his Ethics and Politics). Meaning, significance, and value are matters of understanding and interpretation. Conflate these two territories or seek to subsume one to the other and all manner of misconceived debates and unnecessary controversies follow. Ethics (including religion), aesthetics and metaphysics may be dismissed as meaningless and non-sensical by the intellectual austerity of Logical Positivism. In none of these three disciplines can anything of any consequence be said in terms of fact and logic, but it would be a huge error to dismiss them as insignificant as a result. On the contrary, ethics, aesthetics, and metaphysics exist as the greatest repositories of human meaning, understanding, and wisdom. Without them, and life is indeed meaningless, and human beings without hope. Lose them, and the door is opened to tragedy. Life without meaning is a terrible thing to contemplate, let alone suffer.
For this reason a higher culture must give to a man a double-brain, as it were two brain-ventricles, one for the perceptions of science, the other for those of non-science: lying beside one another, not confused together, separable, capable of being shut off: this is a demand of health.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1986, p. 251.
Poor Wittgenstein wrestled with this question his entire life, and he had no peace. "God have mercy on the man who doubts what he's sure of" (Bruce Springsteen).
THE ANCIENT SAGE By Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Thou canst not prove that thou art body alone,
Nor canst thou prove that thou art spirit alone,
Nor canst thou prove that thou art both in one,
Thou canst not prove thou art immortal, no,
Nor yet that thou art mortal – nay, my son,
Thou canst not prove that I, who speak with thee,
Am not thyself in converse with thyself,
For nothing worthy proving can be proven,
Nor yet disproven.
Wherefore thou be wise,
Cleave ever to the sunnier side of doubt,
And cling to Faith beyond the forms of Faith!
She reels not in the storm of warring words,
She brightens at the clash of ‘Yes’ and ‘No,’
She sees the best that glimmers through the worst,
She feels the sun is hid but for a night,
She spies the summer through the winter bud,
She tastes the fruit before the blossom falls,
The hears the lark within the songless egg,
She finds the fountain where they wailed ‘Mirage!’
Wittgenstein is … intense. I find his sweet spot. It is there. If I may be so bold, the source of Ludwig's grief is that he imposed an intellectual austerity on himself that was incapable of nourishing his spiritual centre. He hankered after the ice, and he plainly realized that no such certainty is possible. He was not at peace. Dante has the truth that Wittgenstein needed openly to embrace: "in His will is our peace." It is not a truth that stands in need of any proof. No proof is possible, none is required. We are happy and fulfilled within the Greater Love that enfolds, nourishes, and moves all.
In The Divine Comedy, St. John acknowledges that Dante's ‘highest love is bent on God’ through human reason and authorities in accordance with it. (Par 26: 46-48). He probes further, however, to ask what other cords draw him to God (Par 26: 49-51). In response, Dante proceeds to enumerate the blessings by which God has manifested His goodness:
Thus I began again: “My charity
results from all those things whose bite can bring
the heart to turn to God; the world’s existence
and mine, the death that He sustained that I
might live, and that which is the hope of all
believers, as it is my hope, together
with living knowledge I have spoken of—
these drew me from the sea of twisted love
and set me on the shore of the right love.
The leaves enleaving all the garden of
the Everlasting Gardener, I love
according to the good He gave to them.”
Par 26: 55-66
I prefer the translation that Reynolds gives of the last verse:
Thus through the garden of the world I rove,
enamoured of its leaves in measure solely
as God the Gardener nurtures them above.
The peace of God in the Everlasting Garden. As soon as Dante was still and silent, ‘a song most sweet resounded’ through the heaven, with Beatrice joining with the heavenly choir to chant the words 'Holy, holy, holy.’ (Par 26: 67-69). Dante's sight is restored to him, only now ‘I saw better than I had before’ (Par 26: 70-81).
I have a sense of humour. Or at least I think I do. I struggle to listen to the jokes people tell. But I like to tell my own. Wittgenstein was an intensely serious person who had a certain disdain for unserious people. ‘You take things far too seriously,’ I was told repeatedly during the miserable time I spent in an office block in Liverpool in 2010. If something is worth doing, then it’s worth doing well, and if it’s not worth doing well, it’s not worth doing at all. So I try to do things well. And I take things very seriously. I doubt Wittgenstein was good company. I doubt that another of my favourite philosophers, Rousseau, was good company. I suspect they took things very seriously. I really don’t mind urbanity and civility at all. As I said above, I hate talking philosophy with a passion. Because it can so soon get bogged down in technical issues and word-games, like chess with words. I like philosophy as a volcanic eruption. I like the writers who give the impression that something is at stake when they open their mouths, that something is on the line with respect to the ideas we live – or die – by. Intense, as I say. I don’t like indifference, I don’t like demonstrations of cleverness, intellectual puzzles whose resolution resolves nothing. I play for enjoyment. I don’t enjoy philosophizing. Because there is something at stake that makes a difference, something important that could be lost. I made reference to philosophy leading to nihilism above. How we respond to nihilism, what we understand by nihilism, determines how serious we are. To explain this requires a little detour into Nietzsche, before bringing this piece to a close. I come to the difference between the Overman or Superman and the Last Man in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and to the notion of walking a tight-rope.
Zarathustra urges people to dispense with the ethical teachings of the church and instead create a new meaning for themselves based on the affirmation of life and earth. The new meaning concerns the individual’s desire for self-actualization, affirming will to power through the assertion of the natural instincts as energies to be channelled to the end of self-overcoming. Throwing off the worship of God, we come to see ourselves as Supermen:
“Once you said ‘God’ when you gazed upon distant seas; but now I have taught you to say ‘Superman’”
Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
The crowd hearing this speech took Zarathustra for the tight-rope walker they had been awaiting, calling out:
“Now we have heard enough of the tight-rope walker; let us see him, too!”
Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
The tight-rope walker takes these calls as a cue, emerges from his tower and begins his performance. He continues talking, using the tight-rope walker’s appearance as a metaphor for the individual’s relationship to the Superman.
“Man is a rope,” Zarathustra cries out to the crowd, “fastened between animal and Superman – a rope over an abyss.”
Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Walking the tight-rope is dangerous, with the walker having to traverse a thin rope suspended over a deep chasm. Wittgenstein compares the truly religious person to a tight-rope walker. For Nietzsche, the individual must walk the tight-rope to dispense with God and become a Superman. And that can only be done by living dangerously, taking great risks for the purpose of self-transformation and self-actualization. Those who make the attempt are the harbingers of the Superman:
“I love all those who are like heavy drops falling singly from the dark cloud that hangs over mankind: they prophesy the coming of the lightning and as prophets they perish.
Behold, I am a prophet of the lightning and a heavy drop from the cloud: but this lightning is called Superman.”
Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
The crowd erupts in laughter as Zarathustra brings his speech to an end. He thus tries to deliver his message by a different approach, warning the crowd that culture is in decline, debilitated by false values. He warns that this decline is breeding “the most contemptible man”, The Last Man, the very antithesis of the Superman.
“It is time for man to fix his goal. It is time for man to plant the seed of his highest hope.
His soil is still rich enough for it. But this soil will one day be poor and weak; no longer will a high tree be able to grow from it…
“I tell you: one must have chaos in one, to give birth to a dancing star. I tell you: you still have chaos in you.
“Alas! The time is coming when man will give birth to no more stars….
Behold! I shall show you the Last Man…”
Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
I don’t care for Nietzsche much, although I praise his honesty - and accuracy - in calling out the emptiness of modern morality. I think the invitation to become Supermen an elitist delusion inviting madness. It isn't a coherent response to the individualism of the modern age but very much an expression, indeed, a mad extension, of it. I see no reason to abandon Aristotle on flourishing here. And I don’t see belief in God as a weakness or as evidence of a false, enfeebling morality. But I do see that Nietzsche saw something going seriously wrong in modern culture (he wasn’t alone, and we should also point out that the elitist, aristocratic contempt for the masses he expressed increased as the people actually started to secure great advances in political participation and material welfare).
Nietzsche profoundly influenced Max Weber, who closed The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism with his version of The Last Man. Weber refers to “the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order. This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which to-day determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt.”
In which case, the age of The Last Man will be the dying days of carboniferous capitalism – and may well be the last days of human civilization:
No one knows who will live in this cage in the future, or whether at the end of this tremendous development entirely new prophets will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals, or, if neither, mechanized petrification, embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance. For of the last stage of this cultural development, it might well be truly said: "Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved."
The Last Man is the individual who is concerned not with creation, but with consumption, not with authenticity, but with self-absorption. Absorbed in satiating base pleasures, The Last Man claims to have “discovered happiness” by virtue of living in the most technologically advanced and materially comfortable era in human history.
I add this here in light of another post detailing yet another anti-social media scrap on my part. Here, I call out the Glastonbury festival for being mediocre, fake, a complacent incorporation (literally). It makes me look a killjoy expressing bitterness at all those hundreds of thousands of people enjoying themselves, bitterness because I am obviously a miserable, pitiful (but not pitiable) loner with no-life and no friends. That’s pretty much the gist of the criticism. But I get what Nietzsche and Weber are getting at with The Last Man. I don’t see a counter-culture emerging here at all, I see the last men and women comfortable in their alienation and celebrating it as a happy inauthenticity. And if that makes me a friendless misery, then so be it. I’ll walk the tight-rope alone. Not to be a Superman. Anything but that. It’s a privilege of a lifetime to become the person you are. And I would prefer to walk a chasm alone than join with a crowd in the flatlands. Intense or what!?
I’m interested in this notion of the tightrope as the ‘almost nothing’ that we may walk upon, with faith and courage, to take us from an inauthentic, unfulfilled state to a condition of flourishing well. I’m interested, too, in relating Wittgenstein’s “silence” here to Osip Mandelstam’s Silentium, particularly the line, “word, return to music.”
In Dante’s Comedy, Dante employs music as a tightrope taking us from the physical plane of mortal finitude to the metaphysical plane of eternal oneness. Heavenly polyphony thus serves as an allegory of harmony on Earth achieved through the proper ordering of human powers. This balance is attained on Earth through the attunement of diverse voices in a heavenly concord. The harmony that is realized ab aeternum in the heavenly Jerusalem is thus learned, internalized, and replicated by human beings in their temporal affairs. On a theological level, the concord that is achieved through the blending of diverse voices in one symbolizes the reconciliation of the multiplicity of the universe within the oneness of God.
At the exalted level of Dante’s itinerarium mentis in Deum, where we enter a realm beyond the limits of human intellect, imagination, and language, music becomes the tightrope by means of which the poet-pilgrim traverses the chasm between the physical plane and the metaphysical plane. Music, as an expressive means of low semanticity, is employed to accompany the more mystical and mysterious steps of the pilgrim’s ascent, as the precise meaning of the songs’ words becomes incomprehensible to him, and he becomes incapable of recollecting the extraordinary spiritual experience and expressing the sweet lingering feeling rationally. Dante describes grace as a divine rain falling on the entire universe, and it is delivered through music. There are no clever metaphysics to map our journey here. And speculation is idle, inviting error, but entertaining and somewhat inspiring. In the end, though, you just have to walk the line, and leap when you have to. 'Word, return to music.'
I have added this excursus on Nietzsche to underline intensity. ‘You take things too seriously’ I was repeatedly told in the office, my complaints and objections repeatedly ignored, before I exploded with a rage that would have sent Zarathustra running for cover. I have no intention of joining in with the 'Last' men and women enjoying the last days of a megamechanical civilisation. Why on Earth people push people into fitting the system when they are plainly ill-at-ease with it I’ll never know. I guess we are just disposable casualties of biological and social evolution. Poor Rousseau and Wittgenstein had unhappy lives, Nietzsche went mad. I still have my sense of humour. And I insist that I am not really a philosopher, just a frustrated poet who can't control the emanation of words. So I may escape after all. So long as I continue to walk the tightrope. It's dangerous: if you abandon the safe ground in the gilded (or not so gilded) cage, you may well fall off long before you get to the other side.
But that life is a serious business is something you can take as a given. Unless you can find joy with the last men and women. Shed authenticity. Join in with the cog-workers droning the clock down to civilization’s end. I don’t seem to have come equipped with the capacity to ‘punch the clock’ and be one of the gang, not even for a short while. I’m even ill-at-ease with the ill-at-ease philosophers who are my soul-mates. I don’t like talking philosophy. But I understand why people see philosophers as intense and serious.
Wittgenstein’s troubled life came to an end in the house of Dr and Mrs Bevan, a house that bore what would seem a propitious name, ‘Storeys Way,’ no. 76. It was to be Story's End for Wittgenstein. Ray Monk tells the following story of Wittgenstein at Storeys Way:
Before Wittgenstein moved into their house, Dr Bevan had invited him for supper to introduce him to his wife. She had been warned that Wittgenstein was not one for small talk and that she should be careful not to say anything thoughtless. Playing it safe, she remained silent throughout the evening. But when Wittgenstein mentioned his visit to Ithaca, she chipped in cheerfully, 'How lucky for you to go to America!' She realized at once that she had said the wrong thing. Wittgenstein fixed her with an intent stare: 'What do you mean, lucky?'
Ray Monk, The Duty of Genius, p. 576.
Now that’s serious and intense. If I have done this – and I have – I now do it as an act, a self-parody. And I tell this story to cover my own somewhat serious nature. Wittgenstein, troubled genius as he was, has been a great companion.
Wittgenstein described ‘seeing the world as a miracle.’
‘The mystical is not how the world is, but that it is.’ (Tractatus 6. 44).
That's how I see Wittgenstein, as issuing an invitation into the miraculous and the mystical. Others will focus on his work on logic and language. I see that work as a prolegomena to his metaphysics as mystical experience. This is how Wittgenstein saw himself and would have liked to have been seen:
“Bach wrote on the title page of his Orgelbüchlein: ‘To the glory of the most high God, and that my neighbour may be benefited thereby.’ That is what I would have liked to say about my work."
Wittgenstein in conversation with Maurice O'Connor Drury, cited in Rush Rhees (eds.) Recollections of Wittgenstein: Hermine Wittgenstein--Fania Pascal--F.R. Leavis--John King--M. O'C. Drury, Oxford University Press, 1984; p. xvi, and p. 168.
I rather like Wittgenstein’s last words, to his doctor's wife on 28 April 1951 (as quoted in Norman Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein : A Memoir (1966), p. 100).
“Tell them I've had a wonderful life.”
Of course, as Wittgenstein's biographer Ray Monk points out, 'wonderful' is not the same thing as 'happy.'
Wittgenstein had spent much of his life philosophizing in the attempt to show others how they may be able to give up philosophy. A lot of the problems of philosophy were not philosophical problems at all, hence their intractable nature when considered philosophically. Wittgenstein struggled long and hard with this. He was a mystic who longed to throw away the ladder. He had led something of a lonely existence. It is now claimed, I have noted, that Wittgenstein suffered from Asperger’s syndrome. Those suffering from Asperger’s have trouble with dealing with everyday human affairs. Even the simple can be incredibly complex for those with the condition and hence those who suffer from it live in a state of constant uncertainty. The condition thus comes with a longing for peace, regularity, routine, order, and predictability.
Did Wittgenstein ever find these things in philosophy? Anywhere?
As he lay dying of throat cancer in Cambridge in 1951, Wittgenstein read Anna Sewell’s novel from 1877 Black Beauty: The Autobiography of a Horse. Sewell wrote the story from the perspective of the horse, in an attempt to educate people as to the suffering which horses experience. The title page announces that the story was ‘translated from the equine.’
We can only speculate as to why Wittgenstein chose Black Beauty as the book to read as he lay dying. His Philosophical Investigations indicate an interest in how non-human animals see the world, containing as it does a duck-rabbit, a goose, a cow, a lion, and a dog. I doubt very much that he was reading for purposes of philosophical investigation, though. I think it is safe to presume that Wittgenstein was seeking peace of mind, some kind of tranquillity to bring his often troubled mind to rest. The novel recounts the details of Beauty’s hard working life and his often cruel owners until the day comes when he is put out to pasture. Here, Beauty finds peace and rest, friendship and enjoyment, and a home he can stay in for the rest of his days. And here, in such congenial surroundings, Beauty recovered his natural equanimity, elan, and grace. Maybe, just maybe, if he managed to reach the end of the book, Wittgenstein found solace in the vision of peace, home, and friendship in Beauty’s place of rest and retirement, his philosophical doubts long behind him, himself finding his resting place:
‘I have now lived in this happy place a whole year. Joe is the best and kindest of grooms. My work is easy and pleasant, and I feel my strength and spirits all coming back again. Mr Thoroughgood said to Joe the other day, “In your place he will last till he is twenty years old – perhaps more.”
Willie always speaks to me when he can, and treats me as his special friend. My ladies have promised that I shall never be sold, and so I have nothing to fear; and here my story ends. My troubles are all over and I am at home; and often before I am quite awake, I fancy I am still in the orchard at Birtwick, standing with my old friends under the apple trees.’
There is more from me on Wittgenstein against “scientism” here: