The Early Wittgenstein on Religion (Continuum Studies In British Philosophy)

THE EARLY WITTGENSTEIN ON RELIGION

Continuum Studies in British Philosophy: Series Editor: James Fieser, University of Tennessee at Martin Berkeley and Irish Philosophy - David Berman Bertrand RusseWs Ethics - Michael K. Potter Boyle on Fire - William Eaton Doing Austin Justice — Wilfrid Rumble F. P. Ramsey - Maria Frapolli Hume's Theory of Causation - Angela M . Coventry Idealist Political Philosophy - Colin Tyler Matthew Tindal, Free Thinker - Stephen Lalor Radical Philosophy - Colin Tyler Rethinking Mill's Ethics - Colin Heydt Russell's Theory of Perception - Sajahan Miah Thomas Hobbes and the Politics of Natural Philosophy - Stephen J . Finn Thomas Reid's Ethics - William C. Davis Wittgenstein and the Theory of Perception — Justin Good Wittgenstein at His Word - Duncan Richter Wittgenstein's Religious Point of View - Tim Labron

THE EARLY WITTGENSTEIN ON RELIGION

J. Mark Lazenby

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Continuum International Publishing Group The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX 80 Maiden Lane, Suite 704, New York, NY 10038 © James Mark Lazenby, 2006 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. James Mark Lazenby has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the Author of this Work. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. EISBN

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Abbreviations

Standard abbreviations for Wittgenstein's works in the text are as follows: GV GT LE LRB NB PI TLP Z

Culture and Value Geheime Tagebiicher 1914-1916 'A Lecture on Ethics' Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief Notebooks 1914-1916 Philosophical Investigations Tractatus Logico -Philosophicus Zettel

To Jodi

Contents

Preface

ix

1

1 2

Introduction Biographical and intellectual influences on the early work Background on the interpretation of these works My interpretation

5 8

2 The Force of Words Ethics: A human, not a scientific, inquiry Verificationism and religious expressions The sense of religious expressions Conclusion

14 15 21 28 34

3 A Common Language Wittgenstein the mystic, or the mystical Wittgenstein? Facta, non verba: Factual discourse in the Tractatus 6 The limits of my language mean the limits of my world': Tractatus 5.6 and the truth there is in solipsism

36 37

4

Reconstructing Meanings Non-sense or nonsense? A case of important nonsense Reconstructing the meanings of words

60 65 75 80

5

Slipping into a Way of Life

83

6

Conclusion

91

Notes

43 46

97

Selected Sources Consulted

112

Index

120

Preface

This book began as a dissertation on the relevance of Wittgenstein's Tractatus to the philosophy of religion and theology. The dissertation grew out of my awareness of the few contemporary philosophers of religion and theologians influenced by Wittgenstein's philosophy who take seriously his early work; most disregard it. For example, in a 1999 article on the relevance of Wittgenstein's philosophy to religion and theology, Gordon Kaufman devotes only one short paragraph to the early work. In that paragraph, Kaufman implies that, in his later work, Wittgenstein refutes the Tractatus, and so it has nothing to offer philosophy of religion and theology today.1 This, however, misunderstands not only the relation of the Tractatus to the later work, but also the Tractatus itself and what it has to offer these disciplines. A powerful, new approach to the Tractatus sheds light on how Wittgenstein's early work can (and as I argue in this book, should) inform the practice of philosophy of religion and theology. This new approach owes much to the profound legacy of the late Burton Dreben, a former professor of mine. Nary a lecture would go by without Dreben invoking the Tractatus, and the issue of how to read it as a philosophical work - even if the lecture was about Austin or Frege or Russell. Others, for sure, have contributed much to this new way of reading the Tractatus: Cora Diamond, prime among them, and James Conant, and for me, particularly, Eli Friedlander, whose work Signs of Sense appeared after I defended my dissertation. Their work and Dreben's thought have influenced my thinking. They, however, have not applied this new reading to philosophy of religion and theology. This was my task in the dissertation. My task in this book, however, has broadened. I realize that, while my dissertation needed to demonstrate exegetical acumen and philosophical skill, it did not have running through it what a good work of philosophy ought to have. Yes, it had a thesis; and so does this book. It did not have, though, a compelling reason for writing. I wrote the dissertation, as many a graduate student does, to get out of

x

Preface

university; but I write this book because I have to, just as Wittgenstein had to write the Tractatus. Something compelled him, as something compels me now. The compelling reason for Wittgenstein, I believe, was to save his life; more about that later. For me, the reason to write this book is nearly the same. It is, as I shall argue, to give the circumstances of my life meaning. It is to use the writing of the book to reveal to myself the ultimate point of reference. This is what the writing of the Tractatus was for Wittgenstein: to see God, not in the world, nor in the logical structure of the world, but in the very act of giving the whole of the world, the whole of life, meaning. As for Wittgenstein, for me: I write to give the circumstances of life meaning, and in that meaning, God. My debts are many. Without the sharp-eyed editing of Nick Fawcett at the Continuum International Publishing Group the text would have been much less readable; and without the persistence of Sarah Douglas, Haaris Naqvi, and Slav Todorov, also at Continuum, this book would have never seen the plates of the presses. The late Burton Dreben, of course, influenced my thinking, particularly about deep nonsense. Robert Cummings Neville opened my mind and heart to philosophy as a spiritual discipline, and though Neville himself would not claim to be a Wittgenstein scholar, he more than anyone helped me to look at the Tractatus as a deeply spiritual work. My defence of my position in face of strong questioning from Gordon Kaufman — whom I mentioned above and with whom I had a threeyear-long conversation on the early Wittgenstein and theology proved my mettle and strengthened my argument; I owe him much, though he in the end will doubtless have many more questions. Jaakko Hintikka, a reader for the dissertation, provided important insight, particularly on the status of objects in the Tractatus. Nancey C. Murphy has been a sounding board, a mentor, a teacher, but above all, a good friend. I own as mine whatever errors course through this book; this goes without saying. It does not go without saying, however, that whatever I lack as a scholar and a lover of wisdom persists despite the best efforts of these fine scholars.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Many have commented on how Wittgenstein's later work illuminates the philosophy of religion and theology, but rarely, if ever, have they commented on the early work.1 Much of this neglect, I aver, has to do with the bifurcation of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: what do its cryptic preface, its creation-myth opening, and some obscure remarks in the last three pages, all of which concern ethics and religion, have to do with the rest of the book, which is focused on philosophical logic, as the title that G. E. Moore gave suggests. Who can blame commentators for this neglect? The bifurcation between these two discussions (ethics and religion on the one hand, and logic on the other) appears large, and the gulf between them seems unbridgeable. However, if one is at all interested in the interpretive question of what ethics and religion have to do with logic in the Tractatus, one must seek to bridge this gulf. Indeed, the key to understanding the importance of Wittgenstein's early work, the Tractatus and 'A Lecture on Ethics', to the philosophy of religion and theology lies in the interpretive question of what is the bridge between these two discussions. Until a 1991 essay by Cora Diamond and Eli Friedlander's 2001 book, both on how to read the Tractatus? a satisfactory link between these two discussions remained elusive. To his credit, Peter Geach offered a link; a link, however, that, for reasons I shall articulate in the next chapter, could not withstand the heavy pressure of argument.3 The truth remains, though, that the majority of scholars who worked on the Tractatus did not straightforwardly address the question of how ethics and religion and logic are connected in the book. That the question of how these two Tractarian discussions are related had not been straightforwardly addressed in the main of Wittgenstein scholarship until recently is astonishing. Wittgenstein himself claimed that the point of the book is ethical. 4 Indeed, a well-known

2

The Early Wittgenstein on Religion

interpreter of Wittgenstein, P. M. S. Hacker, dismisses this claim as 'either self-deluding, or disingenuous'.5 Hacker's dismissal is understandable, for the relation of the logical to the ethical - indeed how the book has an ethical point at all - is unclear in the text itself. This lack of clarity notwithstanding, a careful investigation reveals the relation. A careful investigation, however, is no facile task. The Tractatus is notoriously difficult to read. Part of the difficulty is that in it Wittgenstein discusses complex philosophical issues, issues such as linguistic meaning, the nature of logic, and the purpose of philosophy, in a technical way and'm a literary way. This is intentional: Wittgenstein wrote to his friend, Ludwig von Ficker, that 'The work is strictly philosophical and at the same time literary, but there is no babbling in it'. 6 It may be hard to believe that the book is literature, because its remarks are so condensed that they often appear to be sibylline pronouncements; this is another part of the difficulty. Indeed, Brian McGuinness, in Wittgenstein, a Life, refers to the biblical-like tone of the Tractatus and its creation-myth opening. However, as Friedlander notes, McGuinness does not consider the significance of this.7 Friedlander himself draws out this analogy a bit more. The Tractatus is divided into seven parts, he notes; and they are analogous to the seven days of creation. In the first part, like the first day, the world appears out of nothing [creatio ex nihilo, he suggests). And the last part, like the last day, ends with silence, the sabbatical of the Creator. This analogy is insightful, and I think convincing. However, while Friedlander goes on to propose a new way of reading the Tractatus that takes the ethical into account, he does not draw on this analogy enough. And so the force of the Tractatus as a spiritual work, a work both about ethics and religion is, I fear, lost. The way forward is to consider what the ethical and religious comments have to do with the logical in the Tractatus.

Biographical and intellectual influences on the early work The Tractatus is the culmination of work that began much earlier in Wittgenstein's life. Born in Vienna on 26 April 1889, Ludwig was the

Introduction

3

youngest of eight children of a wealthy industrialist family that had wide cultural, particularly musical, interests. His older brother trained as a classical pianist,8 but young Ludwig trained as an engineer at the Technische Hochschule in Berlin. In 1908, he went to England to study at the College of Technology in Manchester. While working on the design of a jet propeller, he became increasingly interested in the mathematical problems it raised, and subsequently, in the philosophy of mathematics. He became familiar with Bertrand Russell's The Principles of Mathematics and with Gottlob Frege's Die Grundgesetze der Arithmetik. Wittgenstein studied both books, and, by 1911, had devised a plan for a book on philosophy that dealt with problems raised in Russell's and Frege's work. In the summer of 1911, he travelled to Jena to present to Frege the book plan. Frege was not impressed with it, but he was sufficiently impressed with Wittgenstein that he convinced him to go to Cambridge to study with Russell. Wittgenstein went to Cambridge for the fall term, 1911, and attended Russell's mathematical logic lectures. By February 1912, Russell was so persuaded of Wittgenstein's aptitude in philosophy that he had him admitted first as an undergraduate at Trinity College, and then later as an advanced student. In 1912 and 1913, while in Cambridge, Wittgenstein worked on logic. This we know from correspondence between Russell and Wittgenstein in 1912, and from the extant 1913'Notes on Logic'.9 In 1913, he left Cambridge for the solitude of Norway in order to work on logic. This work is recorded in notes taken by the Cambridge philosopher G. E. Moore in April 1914, and in Wittgenstein's published preTractatus philosophical journals, which begin in August 1914, with the entry: 'Logic must take care of itself'.10 In addition to his thoughts on the nature of logic, Wittgenstein's philosophical journal of 1914 contains the beginning of his thoughts on symbolism, the so-called picture theory of language. Wittgenstein remained in Norway until the outbreak of the First World War, when he enlisted in the Austrian Army. He continued to keep philosophical journals during the war. The journals of 1915 still speak of symbolism, but increasingly of mathematics and science. In the 1916 journals he intersperses his discussion of logic and symbolism with discussion of God and fate, of the immortality of the soul and

4

The Early Wittgenstein on Religion

eternal life, of good and evil, of the nature of the self, of art and aesthetics, and of the mystical. It may seem a useful way to start ferreting out the connection between Wittgenstein's logical discussions and religious discussion in the Tractatus is to place the young Wittgenstein within a philosophical or religious context. Indeed, he was baptized in the Roman Catholic Church, and he received religious instruction from a priest who later became a bishop; thus, he would have been well acquainted with neo-scholastic natural theology.11 His grammar school grades were lacklustre, except for religious studies, in which he received top marks.12 During these grammar school years, he had philosophical and religious discussions with his sister Gretl, discussions that relieved him, he said, of his faith and that directed him to the work of Schopenhauer.13 As a youngster, he read Karl Kraus, a cultural critic of the late Hapsburg Empire, Fritz Mauthner, whose idea of philosophy as a critique of language is contrasted with Wittgenstein's own at proposition 4.0031 in the Tractatus, and Otto Weininger. Additionally, he was interested in the philosopher-scientists Ludwig Boltzmann and Heinrich Hertz, the latter of whom receives mention at propositions 4.04 and 6.351. In Cambridge, he read William James' 1901 Gifford Lectures, the Varieties of Religious Experience, and told Russell that it was ameliorating his worry. While he was serving in the war he bought and read Tolstoy's The Gospel in Brief, a. book that had so great an impact on him that he recommended it to his fellow servicemen. During the war, he prayed.15 After the war, he taught at a grammar school in Lower Austria for six years, until a crisis forced him to resign. At the height of the crisis, he approached a father superior to inquire about joining his monastery, but the father superior sent him on his way. After this attempt to become a monk, he worked as a gardener for a summer at another monastery, and afterwards, as an architect on his sister Gretl's house in Vienna. Through Gretl's mediation, Wittgenstein met with the professor of philosophy of inductive sciences at the University of Vienna, Moritz Schlick, and other members of Schlick's discussion group known as the Vienna Circle, among whom were Frederich Waismann, Rudolf Carnap, and, for a time, A. J. Ayer. The Vienna Circle's aim was to

Introduction

5

give philosophy a scientific outlook; to this end, it rejected metaphysical and transcendental statements as meaningless. By the time Wittgenstein met with the Circle (February 1927), the Tractatus had been in print for some five years and had become recognized as a philosophical tour deforce. The Circle was interested in the Tractatus because of its proscription of metaphysics; according to the Tractatus (6.53), metaphysical utterances can only be put in the form of a necessarily true proposition, and thus not in the form of what can be said. However, to the surprise and consternation of the members of the Vienna Circle, at one of their meetings, Wittgenstein turned his back on those present and read aloud the metaphysical poetry of the Indian philosopher-poet Rabindranath Tagore. 16 In January 1929, Frank Ramsey, a colleague from Trinity College, persuaded Wittgenstein to return to Cambridge. By June, he successfully defended the Tractatus as a PhD thesis, with Russell and Moore as examiners. In November, C. K. Ogden, who first translated the Tractatus into English, invited Wittgenstein to deliver a lecture to the Heretics Society in Cambridge. He accepted and gave to them the lecture titled 'A Lecture on Ethics'. These two works, the Tractatus and 'A Lecture on Ethics', are generally accepted as Wittgenstein's early work.

Background on the interpretation of these works Some have chosen to interpret the religious issues in the Tractatus and the ethics lecture within the context of these biographical and intellectual influences. Norman Malcolm's memoir does so from personal reflection. William W. Bartley Ill's biography speculates about the significance of Wittgenstein's private life. And Brian McGuinness added more substantively to our understanding of how Wittgenstein's 'consciousness of sin' permeated his early years.1 In one of the most comprehensive and penetrating biographies of Wittgenstein, Ray Monk argues that the early Wittgenstein's manner of philosophizing was the result of his imposing personality and his desire to cultivate the role of'creative genius'. Monk argues convincingly that Wittgenstein cultivated and embraced the responsibilities of this role of'creative genius', taking to heart some of the

6

The Early Wittgenstein on Religion

central ideas of Weininger. Monk mentions two Weiningerian ideas that seemed to remain with Wittgenstein life-long: an 'uncompromising view of the worthlessness of everything save the products of genius', and a 'conviction that sexuality is incompatible with the honesty that genius demands'. 18 Monk's interpretation accounts for many of Wittgenstein's eccentricities. It accounts for his tendency to obscure his privileged roots, to consider scholarly documentation of his sources as unnecessary, to become outraged when expected to abide by the dress code at the College High Table, to reject association with any school of thought, and to discourage followers. The genius creates purely out of himself. He cannot be understood or appreciated. With regard to accounting for Wittgenstein's intellectual influences, however, Monk's claim is self-defeating. For if indeed he is right that Wittgenstein answered thtfin desiecle call to the duty of genius, Wittgenstein would not have cited his influences, but instead would have made, as he did make, oracular-like statements, thereby making it difficult to tell definitively which of Wittgenstein's thoughts are influenced by which thinker. Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin consider the young Wittgenstein's intellectual heritage against the backdrop of Vienna. In Wittgenstein's Vienna, they argue that his Tractarian project was to reconcile 'the physics of Hertz and Boltzmann with the ethics of Kierkegaard and Tolstoy, within a single consistent exposition'.19 They draw the connection that the natural world as envisaged by Hertz and Boltzmann offers a picture of the natural world, while ethics as envisaged by Kierkegaard and Tolstoy deals with the meaning or the value of that picture. This project of reconciling the view of physics and the view of ethics that influenced Wittgenstein also involved the aestheticism of fin de siecle Vienna. For Wittgenstein's generation, Janik and Toulmin write, 'aestheticism became the only alternative to immersion in business affairs. So art, which had earlier been the decoration adorning middle-class success in business, became for the younger generation an avenue of escape'.20 The aesthetic was an escape from the world of reason and fact. If, as Wittgenstein says in the Tractatus, the world of reason and fact is just the world,21 there is no place in the world for the aesthetic, and language will be inadequate to express it. In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein proclaims 'ethics

Introduction

7

and aesthetics' to be 'the same'. 22 This remark, as situated in the aesthetic understanding of Vienna that Janik and Toulmin depict, indicates that the ethical is absorbed into an aesthetic appreciation. The Tractatus, they write, 'assigns a central importance in human life to art, on the ground that art alone can express the meaning of life'.23 Insightful though it is, Janik and Toulmin's account has three lacunae. First, if the Tractatus puts great weight on art in human life, as they claim, they fail to work out the details of such a view in the context of the Tractatus itself. Second, their much-needed attention on the cultural and intellectual background of the young Wittgenstein focuses too much on the ethical at the cost of the logical; does Vienna have anything to do with Cambridge (and Jena)? Third, they assume that, for Wittgenstein, the problem of the meaning of life was exclusively a moral, not a religious, problem. It would be difficult to argue with these biographers and intellectual historians that they are wrong in the attributions of influence on Wittgenstein. In most cases, the evidence lies with them, but the problems with their approach serve to highlight the difficulty in situating Wittgenstein within a particular religious and intellectual context.24 Insofar as Monk is correct that Wittgenstein participated in the cult of genius and thus failed to cite sources, an intellectual biography of Wittgenstein, no matter how illuminating, is speculative. The useful approach is to focus on Wittgenstein's texts.25 Some have tried to understand Wittgenstein's religious concerns in his early work with more of an eye to the role of the metaphysical in the text of the Tractatus. Frederick Sontag compares what he considers Wittgenstein's philosophical method in the Tractatus to the mystical practice of Zen. James C. Edwards argues that the Tractatus is an attempt to become godlike; that through discussion of traditional philosophical (that is, metaphysical) concerns, Wittgenstein was trying to ascend above a normal human to a God's-eye perspective. Michael Hodges claims that, in the Tractatus, Wittgenstein was infected with a philosophical (that is, metaphysical) disease that he later repudiated - the disease of thinking from a 'transcendental point of view', the viewpoint of the metaphysical subject. Phillip R. Shields suggests that in the Tractatus Wittgenstein argues for the limits of human language in order to show absolute human limitation,

8

The Early Wittgenstein on Religion

in which lurks the spectre of a fearful God. However, these commentators do not pay heed to Wittgenstein, when, in the concluding propositions of the Tractatus, he proscribes the metaphysical, from speech and from philosophy.26 This proscription sets up a seemingly intractable predicament that is baffling to some.27 The predicament is this. If only that which can be said to be true or false has sense, then all the propositions of the Tractatus, including those about religion and ethics, are nonsense, as Wittgenstein proclaims in the penultimate proposition of the book, even though he says in the Preface that the truth of these propositions is 'unassailable and definitive'.28 He says elsewhere in the book that what these propositions, and other nonsensical propositions, try to say cannot be said but is shown. The question is, how are they shown? The answer to this question unlocks the relation of the logical discussion to the religious discussion in the Tractatus; moreover, this answer yields an insight important for philosophy of religion.

My interpretation There is no simple way into the answer of the relation of the logical to the religious in the Tractatus. Wittgenstein is too terse in the Tractatus for a clean interpretive strategy. My interpretive strategy is, then, to start with 'A Lecture on Ethics', for in it he speaks more about the propositions of religion and ethics. Then I move on to the Tractatus. My strategy is to read the Tractatus around two questions that relate directly to the relation of logic to religion; the first is: what is the mysticism of the Tractatus? and the second: what is nonsense in the Tractatus?

With the aim of illuminating what, according to the early Wittgenstein, the meaningfulness of religious and ethical statements consists in, I read Wittgenstein's 'A Lecture on Ethics' in Chapter 2. I read it against three opposing viewpoints. The first viewpoint is G. E. Moore's Principia Etkica, in which Moore makes ethics out to be a scientific inquiry. By contrasting the nature of Moore's inquiry with what Wittgenstein says ethical inquiry is, we can see that Wittgenstein

Introduction

9

argues in this lecture that Moore fundamentally misunderstands what religion and ethics are about. They are about the human predicament, to which the scientific method cannot be applied. It may be countered, as the logical positivists countered, that the propositions of ethics and religion, though strictly speaking nonsensical, reveal speakers' states of mind; this is the second viewpoint. However, speakers' states of mind are facts, and if the propositions of religion and ethics were exhausted in these facts, then such propositions would be either true or false and would thus not be nonsensical. To exhaust the propositions of religion and ethics in speakers' states of mind is also to misunderstand them. The third viewpoint against which I read the lecture is word-verificationism, which theorizes that, although the words used in religious and ethical propositions are not directly verifiable, they can be verified by their use in verifiable propositions. This assumes that a word carries its meaning with it from one context to another, which, as I show, cannot be assumed. After reading the lecture against these three viewpoints, the propositions of religion and ethics remain nonsensical. Indeed, according to Wittgenstein, they are nonsensical, but he states in the lecture that they make sense to those who use them. From examples Wittgenstein gives about how they make sense, I deduce this principle regarding their meaningfulness: their words used in propositions of religion and ethics showforth in their contribution to the acts or the performances effected by them. This contribution I call the force of words. It is key to unlocking the relation of the logical to the religious and ethical in the Tractatus. My aim in Chapter 3 is to continue to unlock the relation of the logical to the religious through a consideration of the role of logic in Wittgenstein's mysticism in the Tractatus. Running throughout this consideration is a subsidiary argument that in the Tractatus Wittgenstein is some sort of theistic mystic, not a nature mystic, as B. F. McGuinness argues. My reading of Wittgenstein's mysticism follows these lines. In the Tractatus, the role of logic is to elucidate the nature of the world. Logic, in other words, gives the mystic the ability to ascertain all the facts, the sum of which is the world. The mystic wishes to achieve the ability to ascertain all the facts in order to limit the world, so he

10

The Early Wittgenstein on Religion

can transcend it to have mystical union with God. Wittgenstein, to be sure, sets up here a sharp distinction between fact and value. Facts do not have value. God, who lies outside the world, has value. Consequently, God is not a fact. There are, moreover, no religious or ethical facts. It follows then that there is no religious or ethical vocabulary, only the vocabulary of factual discourse. The mystic, if he wants to transcend the world, must keep all speech factual, or say nothing at all. The result is that the mystic remains squarely fixed in the same language the non-mystic (and the non-religious) use - the common language. If Wittgenstein is going to say anything, he has to say it in the common language of factual discourse, or be silent. This, again, is the baffling predicament, which I take up in Chapter 4. What Wittgenstein writes in the Tractatus is not factual; it is nonsense, but what kind of nonsense is it? In the literature, there is debate on this question. Elizabeth Anscombe, Peter Geach, and David Pears, one side of the debate represented in the literature, argue that there are two categories of nonsense, non-sense that conveys ineffable insights, and nonsense that is confused or incoherent speech. The Tractatus, they argue, is non-sense, in that it conveys insights that cannot be said in straightforward prose. Cora Diamond and James Conant, the other side of the debate represented in the literature, argue that there is only garden-variety nonsense, plain nonsense. The propositions of the Tractatus are plain nonsense, and through the therapeutic activity Diamond advocates, we must come to recognize them as plain nonsense and give up using them. I propose a reading that strikes between the two sides. Consistent with Anscombe, Geach and Pears, I argue that some nonsense is nonsense in that it conveys insights, even though in the end, we must come to recognize it as nonsense and give it up, a point consistent with Diamond. For example, the propositions of the Tractatus are non-sense in that they convey the insights necessary for the mystic to transcend the world. However, if the mystic is to transcend the world, all speech must be factual, and so non-sense, no matter how illuminating, must be given up. One way to keep speech factual is to reconstruct the meanings of words that cannot be used meaningfully in factual discourse. For example, 'eternity' traditionally means something like 'infinite

Introduction

11

temporal duration'. This, however, cannot be said in factual discourse. To make the proposition meaningful, Wittgenstein reconstructs the meaning of 'eternity' to 'timelessness'. Then, on the Tractatus account of sense, the reconstructed 'eternity' has meaning in the proposition 'Eternal life belongs to those who live in the present': if'one lives in the present, then it is true that one has eternal life; j/^not, then it is false.29 In the use of the reconstructed meaning, the meaning of the word is seen in the agreement between behaviour and use.30 This, then, is the relation of the logical to the religious discussions in the Tractatus. The logical discussions limn the boundaries of factual discourse, the common language. Religious and ethical statements fall outside those boundaries. Consistent with Anscombe, Geech and Pears, I argue that some nonsense is non-sense. It is non-sense in that it conveys insight. However, in the end, we must come to recognize non-sense as plain old nonsense and give it up, a point consistent with Diamond. We give it up by reconstructing words that cannot be used meaningfully in factual discourse. The effect of this reconstruction is that there is agreement in behaviour and use; this agreement is the word's force. Of course, Wittgenstein also exercises another option available to the mystic: he invokes silence in the last sentence of the book and in his long hiatus from philosophy. The behaviours that accompany either the proposition that 'Eternal life belongs to those who live in the present' or 'Whereof we cannot speak thereof we must be silent' show the meanings of the words used in them. In this way, these propositions show their meaning. At the end of Chapter 4,1 offer this answer to the interpretive question as the answer to the question in the philosophy of religion of what we are to do with words in religious uses of language that no longer have meaning in face of modern understandings and sensibilities. Consider, for example, the word 'God'. On the one hand, in the Western tradition, having inherited the view that all reality was believed to derive from, and to be grounded upon, the one eternal Source of all that is, we find ourselves in need of a concept adequate to orient and ground our lives. On the other hand, this inherited understanding of God has become unacceptable, and even intolerable, to many. For some, the modern scientifically described world has no place for such

12

The Early Wittgenstein on Religion

a being. For others, the evidential argument from evil simply makes it impossible for them to believe in a Father-Creator. Others protest that this very notion of God fosters and legitimates the destructive domination of much of the world by a ruling class elite. To attempt to understand human existence in relationship to a God by which we mean an all-powerful sovereign, creator, king of the universe, may thus seem to require a fundamental compromise of our moral and intellectual integrity.31 The way round this difficulty is to reconstruct the meanings of words like 'God' so that they have force - that is, so that, in a modern context, there is agreement in behaviour and use. I offer Kaufman's notion of God as 'serendipitous creativity' as an example of such reconstruction. In Chapter 5, I apply more fully the notion of force to theology. This notion causes us to think of theology not just as being about words but also about uses or acts - that is, about activity in a large sense. By looking at this larger sense, through exposition of Wittgenstein's lectures on religious belief, and by considering what this exposition has to say about theological method, I come to a guiding principle for theological method. Namely, in the reconstruction of the meanings of words used in religious ways of life, theologians ought to keep in the fore the question of what effects the usage of the reconstructed meanings will have on everyday life, with the aim of effecting a more humane force in the activities of life, which by their very nature, are public. For only in the public square, where the common language is used, will theology have the power to transform the activities of everyday life. The notion offeree, with its emphasis on the ongoing nature of practice and the activities of life, allows me to go beyond Kaufman's emphasis on logo-centric analysis; theology is concerned, I argue, about all of life. My solution to the conceptual problem in the philosophy of religion and my proposed theological method in Chapter 5 place me among those who are indebted, directly or indirectly, to (what many consider to be the later) Wittgenstein's notion that meaning is use. John Searle and William Alston, following J. L. Austin, take the view that the meaning of a sentence is its potential as an illocutionary act. Paul Grice holds that linguistic meaning supervenes on complex communicative intentions to elicit reactions of certain kinds from addresses.

Introduction

13

Michael Dummett holds that an important part of the notion of 'use' is how we determine whether a given assertion is true, justifiable, or acceptable. However one interprets Wittgenstein's important notion, it implies that what we do with a string of words, grunts, gestures, and so on, is the key to correct understanding of that string.32 This agreement is, I argue in the next chapter, the notion of force.

Chapter 2

The force of words

My quest for the relation of the logical to the religious in the Tractatus begins with Wittgenstein's 1929 'A Lecture on Ethics', because in it, Wittgenstein speaks more openly about religion and ethics than he does in the Tractatus, while retaining his Tractarian view of language. It is, therefore, a better place to begin to answer the interpretive question of whether, according to Wittgenstein, religious and ethical statements are meaningful, and if so, what he considers to be the source of their meaningfulness. The short answers are: (1) he considers them meaningful, and (2) he finds their meaning in their contribution to the performances of which they are a part; this is the notion of force, which I uncover through a close reading of this lecture. For the purposes of this close reading, I will have to take seriously Wittgenstein's 1929 views of what is scientific (that is, factual) language - namely, free of value. Today, however, this view is untenable; we have come to recognize that so-called scientific 'facts' rely on value-laden theories.1 In addition, Wittgenstein's examples of religious experience reveal a primitive view of religious thought. In the end, though, these inadequacies do not detract from the notion of force I take with me from 'A Lecture on Ethics'. In 6A Lecture on Ethics', Wittgenstein indeed speaks more openly about religious and ethical statements, but he does so in a terse style, like the Tractatus, and, like the later work, in a dialogue with unknown interlocutors. The only known interlocutor is G. E. Moore, though it is not at all clear from the text what role Moore plays. Given this lack of clarity, I supply three interlocutors whose views differ from Wittgenstein's views of the meaningfulness of religious and ethical expressions. The first interlocutor is Moore. In Principia Ethica, Moore claims that ethics is a scientific inquiry into the nature of the good. Contra Moore, Wittgenstein argues that ethics is not a scientific inquiry, but

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an inquiry into the human predicament; namely, an inquiry into what is the right way of living. This does not imply, however, that ethics is an inquiry into the state of mind of those who make ethical and religious statements, as A. J. Ayer, the second interlocutor, claims in Language, Truth and Logic, According to Ayer, religious and ethical expressions inform us only of speakers' states of mind, as these expressions cannot be verified. The third interlocutor, Richard Swinburne, tries to get around the implications of Ayer's verificationism by proposing that words, not propositions as a whole, are verifiable, thus the meaning of words used in unverifiable propositions can be ascertained by their use in verifiable propositions. Swinburne's word-verificationism, however, fails to consider the role of context. By placing what Wittgenstein says about the use of words in a religious context against the backdrop of the failure of Swinburne's theory, I offer the notion of the force of words as the meaning of ethical and religious expressions.

Ethics: A human, not a scientific, inquiry Wittgenstein opened his talk to the Heretics Society by alerting them that he would not follow the traditional manner by lecturing them on a scientific topic.2 More than just a warning to his audience, however, this remark was philosophically significant. Wittgenstein aimed it at the tendency to treat philosophical subjects, including ethics, scientifically. G. E. Moore, the major proponent of the scientific treatment of ethics, published Principia Ethica in October 1903.3 Soon thereafter, Lytton Strachey, in adulation, wrote that between the lines of Principia Ethica shone 'the scientific method, deliberately applied for the first time, to Reasoning... I date from Oct. 1903 the beginning of the Age of Reason'.4 The influence of Principia Ethica was at first narrow, confined to The Apostles, Cambridge's conversazione group, which included Maynard Keynes and Russell, and many of the Bloomsbury group, of which Strachey was a member. By the time of its reprinting in 1922, however, it had a much wider influence, so that when the Heretics heard that Wittgenstein was lecturing on ethics, they would

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The Early Wittgenstein on Religion

have expected a scientific treatment of it, especially from one so closely associated with Moore. This expectation, though, was wrong. Indeed, at the beginning of the lecture, Wittgenstein says that many of his auditors have 'come up to this lecture of mine with slightly wrong expectations'.5 A review of Moore's Principia Ethica will serve to explicate upon why this expectation was wrong; that is, it will serve as the background for Wittgenstein's differentiation of religious and ethical uses of language from scientific uses of language. Moore introduces Principia Ethica by claiming that he is writing a 'Prolegomena to any future Ethics that can possibly pretend to be scientific', punning, to be sure, on Immanuel Kant's famous title. 6 His stress on the scientific nature of ethics is accompanied by the thesis that ethical theory concerns more than moral judgements concerning conduct and character. If ethics is to be scientific, judgements of this kind can only constitute knowledge when grounded in a general theory of value. This value, what Moore calls 'intrinsic value', is goodness. All moral concepts derive, by analysis, from goodness. Ethics is, then, 'the general enquiry into what is good'.7 ' "Good" is indefinable', writes Moore. The thesis of the indefinability of the concept of goodness is a thesis about the nature of the evaluation of possible states of affairs, an evaluation that is necessary in order to determine what one's actions ought to be. Moore distinguishes between the judgement that a state of affairs is 'good in itself and the judgements that a state of affairs is 'good as means' and 'good as a part'. The latter, however, are reducible to the former. Whatever analysis x is offered (for example, something is good because it fulfils one's wishes), we still question whether a state of affairs - a state of affairs, for example, in which y satisfies x - possesses intrinsic value (that is, isy ipsofacto good?) . 8 Moore is concerned with 'a state of things... t h a t . . . is good in itself in a high degree', so that he can settle the question 'What is the Absolute Good?' For the Absolute Good contains 'all the things which have intrinsic value in any degree'. The way for deciding what is ideal is 'a comparative valuation' of'things known to us', things that 'if they existed by themselves . . . we should judge their existence to be good'. This comparative valuation is important 'in order to decide correctly at what state of things we ought to aim', as well as what state of things

The Force of Words

17

'will have the greatest value5; indeed, this comparative valuation is an 'investigation of the Absolute Good'.9 Those who have tried to analyse the Absolute Good (that is, rather than investigate it through comparative valuation) inevitably commit, according to Moore, the naturalistic fallacy. Moore introduces the term 'naturalistic fallacy' in an analogy between yellowness and goodness. He argues that, as it is a mistake to suppose that yellowness can be defined in terms of those physical properties that cause us to perceive things as yellow, it is a mistake to think that goodness can be defined in terms of those properties of a thing which make it good.10 In the 'Preface to the Second Edition', Moore admits that there are three versions of the naturalistic fallacy coursing through the veins of Principia Ethica: one commits the fallacy by 'identifying G [the Absolute Good] with some predicate other than G\ by 'identifying G with some analyzable predicate', or by 'identifying G with some natural or metaphysical predicate'. 11 Though these three theses are independent, they are, Moore observes, combined in the thesis that goodness 'is not completely analysable in terms of natural or metaphysical properties', the denial of which is to commit the naturalistic fallacy.12 If goodness is defined by reference to some putative metaphysical entity (for example, God) or by reference to a natural object, it is, then, an abstract universal. There is now, however, a disanalogy between yellowness and goodness. Goodness, unlike yellowness, is not a natural property; but the property yellowness is just as nonempirical (or non-natural) as goodness. Like yellowness, however, goodness has natural instances. So then how is goodness non-natural? Whereas an object's natural properties are independent parts of it, which 'give to the object all the substance it has', its goodness, Moore claims, is not in this way an independent part of it, thereby constituting goodness' non-naturalness, and thereby the investigation of good states of things is the investigation of goodness.13 According to Moore's theory, 'good' is a predicative adjective. However, this is a misuse of the word 'good'. Let me explain. 'Big', in the expression 'a big car', is an attributive adjective, while in the expression 'this car is yellow', 'yellow' is a predicative adjective. In the first instance, 'big' is an adjective and 'car' is a noun; likewise in the second instance, 'yellow' is an adjective and 'car' is a noun. Unlike

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The Early Wittgenstein on Religion

the first instance, however, 'this car is yellow' splits, logically though not necessarily grammatically, into 'this car' and 'is yellow'. This splitting, Peter T. Geach argues in 'Good and Evil', indicates that logically 'yellow' is predicative.14 If an adjectival phrase is attributive, it will not split. The word 'good' is always attributive, for it cannot split from what it modifies. Consider, for example, the contrast between 'blue computer' and 'good computer'. Though colour-blind, I can tell that there is a computer on the professor's desk, and a friend who does not share my affliction can tell that it is blue (in fact, a blue iMac). There is no way, however, of telling whether a thing is a good computer by combining independent information that it is good and that it is a computer. Indeed, that blue (iMac) computer may not be good, as it crashes all the time; but I cannot tell from merely looking at it (that is, from information not gained by use of it). 'Good', then, is logically attributive. Even when 'good' appears alone as a grammatical (though not logical) predicative adjective, something substantive has to be supplied by the context. The problem with Moore's theory is that there is nothing substantive enough supplied by context in order for 'good' to be predicative in the phrase 'a good state of things'. 15 After his caveat that his lecture is not about a scientific topic, but about ethics, Wittgenstein 'adopts the explanation of that term [ethics] which Professor Moore has given in his book Principia Ethica\ to the consternation, to be sure, of his auditors who had read the book, namely: 'the general enquiry into what is good'. Wittgenstein goes on to say that he will use 'the term Ethics in slightly a wider sense'. This wider sense is evident in what Wittgenstein calls 'synonymous expressions', substitutable for Moore's definition. These are: 'the inquiry into what is valuable', the inquiry into 'what is really important', into the 'meaning of life', into 'what makes life worth living', and into 'the right way of living'.16 It seems as though Wittgenstein was actually being tongue-incheek when he said that he was adopting Moore's definition. For in his so-called synonymous expressions he does not use the word 'good' at all, but rather, in the last entry, uses 'right' attributively, which by the nature of the attributive adjective, has a context. Life - the living of it - is the context for Wittgenstein's definition of ethics. If we read the list with this in mind, we see that Wittgenstein's inquiry is into that

The Force of Words

19

which is 'the meaning of life', into that which 'makes life worth living', namely 'the right way of living'. Once one has reached 'the right way of living' in the digression of Wittgenstein's list, one cannot go back to the first without it in mind. The expressions are, thus, easily seen to be synonymous: that which makes life valuable, important, meaningful, and worth living, is the right way of living. Ethics is not, according to Wittgenstein's list, a scientific inquiry into the non-natural concept of goodness, but a human inquiry into the living of life. What strikes Wittgenstein about these synonymous expressions is that each can be used in two different senses, the relative and the absolute sense.17 The relative sense is the sense in which words like 'good' and 'right' are attributive adjectives. 'Good' and 'right' are relative to some standard. That the noun the adjective modifies comes up to that standard, to one degree or another, is what is attributed. For example, we speak of 'a good chair' because the chair serves a predetermined purpose, and apart from that purpose (this standard of goodness), 'good' would have no meaning. However, 'right' in 'the right road' is right relative to a certain goal. When using the relative sense, expressions of value can be reduced to statements of fact in which all references to value disappear. Wittgenstein explains: 'Instead of saying "This is the right way to Granchester," I could equally well have said, "This is the right way you have to go if you want to get to Granchester in the shortest time"; "The man is a good runner" simply means that he runs a certain number of miles in a certain number of minutes'. 18 Expressions that use the absolute sense, however, are not relative to a predetermined purpose or goal. Wittgenstein's example of an expression of absolute judgement of value is of someone who tries to shrug off an obvious prevarication by saying, 'I know I behave badly, but then I don't want to behave any better'. An absolute judgement of value - for example, the reply to the prevaricator that 'Well, you ought to want to behave better' - cannot be expressed in a statement of fact.19 A difference, then, between relative and absolute senses is that a relative judgement of value can be shown to be a statement of fact. No statement of fact (a statement about a state of affairs), however, 'can ever be, or imply, a judgment of absolute value'. 20 Wittgenstein

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The Early Wittgenstein on Religion

is not ruling out tout court expressions of absolute judgements. Consider his example of an absolute judgement: 'You ought to want to behave better'. Wittgenstein's point is that statements of fact can only be relative judgements. Statements of fact cannot express absolute values. Phillip Shields misreads Wittgenstein on this point. Shields reads Wittgenstein in the ethics lecture as propounding the incompatibility of absolute values with language, because expressions of absolute values 'presume to transcend the arbitrary predetermined conditions that make language possible'.21 To substantiate his reading, Shields quotes from 'A Lecture on Ethics': The right road is the road which leads to an arbitrarily predetermined end and it is quite clear to us that there is no sense in talking about the right road apart from such a predetermined goal. Now let us see what we could possibly mean by the expression, 'the absolutely right road'. I think it would be the road which everybody on seeing it would, with logical necessity, have to go, or be ashamed for not going. And similarly the absolute good, if a describable state of affairs would be one which everybody, independent of his tastes and inclinations, would necessarily bring about or feel guilty for not bringing about. And I want to say that such a state of affairs is a chimera. No state of affairs has, in itself, what I would like to call the coercive power of an absolute judge. 22 Wittgenstein says directly preceding this passage that: 'so far as facts and propositions are concerned there is only relative value and relative good, right, etc. And let me . . . illustrate this by a rather obvious example'. The example is the above quotation selected by Shields. Wittgenstein's problem in this example is not, as Shields supposes, that ordinary ethical expressions transcend some supposed predetermined conditions for the possibility of language. The problem is in supposing that facts, describable states of affairs, can be good in themselves. Indeed, in the lecture, Wittgenstein argues that statements of absolute value do not express facts. In 'the right road', 'right' is used attributively. The standard of lightness is whatever we have predetermined. By 'right', we can mean an absolute, but then, what would we mean by 'the absolutely right road'? In 'the absolutely right

The Force of Words

21

road', 'right5 expresses necessity; it attempts to make an absolute of a fact. The same is true with the phrase 'a state of things good in itself, if by 'state of things' we mean a describable state of affairs and if by 'good' we mean 'absolute value'. No describable state of affairs, Wittgenstein declares in the lecture, no fact, has the power of an absolute. If we were to suppose it did, such state of affairs would be an idle fancy, and anything said about it would be confused. That any general inquiry into what is good - that a so-called scientific evaluation of describable states of affairs - can disclose the absolute is the chimera that the scientific method is omniscient: Suppose one of you were an omniscient person and therefore knew all the movements of all the bodies in the world dead or alive and that he also knew all the states of mind of all human beings that ever lived, and suppose this man wrote all he knew in a big book, then this book would contain the whole description of the world . . . It would of course contain all relative judgments of value and all scientific propositions and in fact all true propositions that can be made. 'The book', however, 'would contain nothing that we would call an ethical judgement or anything that would logically imply such a judgement'. 24 If, per impossibile, the Principia Ethiccfs method could be applied to life, the world-book that would result would be a description of states of affairs - nothing more. It would contain, for instance, the description of murders, all their physical and psychological details, but, Wittgenstein reiterates, 'the mere description of these facts will contain nothing which we could call an ethical proposition'.25 It might be that Wittgenstein implies that attributive adjectives speak only of our states of mind. However, he denies this, and thereby differentiates himself from the Vienna Circle, a member of whom was A.J. Ayer. Verificationism and religious expressions G. H. von Wright says that, along with Ernst Mach and Bertrand Russell, Wittgenstein is 'the spiritual father of the powerful movement

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The Early Wittgenstein on Religion

of thought, known as logical positivism'.26 This influence on logical positivism, the name given in 1931 by A. E. Blumberg and Herbert Feigl to the philosophical ideas put forward by the Vienna Circle, has come from the Tractatus or, rather, as von Wright disclaims, 'from interpretations put on that work by others'.27 After exposition of the doctrine of verificationism, in Ayer's Language, Truth and Logic,28 I show how Wittgenstein differentiated himself from logical positivism in 'A Lecture on Ethics'.29 Language, Truth and Logic's central thesis is that a genuine proposition must be either a tautology (that is, analytic) or empirically verifiable. A tautology, depending 'solely on the symbols it contains' for its validity, says nothing but shows 'the way in which we use certain symbols'.30 An empirically verifiable proposition, on the other hand, says something; it is factual. A proposition is factual if it can be accepted 'as being true' or rejected 'as being false'.31 Thus, more than is suggested by the name of the theory, empirical verifiability and empirical falsifiability count as tests of a factual . .

30

proposition. Not so much to identify genuine (that is, factual) propositions, these tests expose nonsense, which comes in two varieties. The nonsense that is just plain gibberish does not need rooting out by tests of verifiability or falsifiability; it is obvious. However, a proposition that at first glance seems to pass as factual in that it is not gibberish and appears to be assertoric, but cannot be said to be either true or false, is the type of nonsense these tests are meant to expose. The nonsense that looks like it says something, but, when put to the test, says nothing true or false is well formed. Exposing well-formed nonsense (that is, testing for verifiability or falsifiability) requires philosophical analysis, which in turn requires admitting tautologies as a class of genuine propositions. Tautologies, a priori genuine propositions that say nothing but show the way symbols are used, are necessary for philosophical analysis because they provide definitions of a certain sort, the sort Ayer calls 'definitions in use'. Saying explicitly what a symbol means, 'explicit definition', is the sort one would find in the dictionary; Ayer's example is 'occulist means eye-doctor'. The sort necessary for philosophical analysis, however, (that is, 'definitions in use') shows, rather than says, the meaning

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of a certain symbol by translating the proposition in which the symbol is used into an equivalent proposition in which is not contained the 'definiendum itself, nor any of its synonyms'.33 This 'definition in use' is a tautology not of Wittgenstein's sort in the Tractatus, the sort that is thrown up in the mirror of language when one utters a proposition that has sense - not the sort of'It is or is not raining'. Ayer's tautology is a translation of propositions that mean the same: analytic propositions. Through Russell's theory of definite descriptions, we can adduce an example of analytic propositions: 'The Author of Waverly was Scott' is translated, without using the definiendum or any of its synonyms, into 'For some x, x wrote Waverly and for ally,y wrote Waverly only ify = x and x was Scott'. Ayer needs this 'definition in use' tautology (as I am calling it) in order to account for the class of genuine propositions about something not observable. He must show that this class of genuine propositions can be translated into some observable and thus verifiable or falsifiable propositions. Consider, for instance, the problem of other minds. Some philosophers have justified belief in other minds by arguing that, although one cannot observe the existence of others, one can infer others' existence through an analogy from one's own experiences. However, this argument is, according to Ayer, refutable; for 'no argument can render probable a completely unverifiable hypothesis'. He continues: 'I can legitimately use an argument from analogy to establish the probable existence of an object which has never in fact manifested itself in my experience, provided that the object is such that it could conceivably be manifested in my experience'.34 Otherwise, Ayer would have to regard other people as metaphysical, and thus unverifiable objects. By contrast, if the existence of God were probable, the proposition 'God exists' would be an empirical hypothesis, and it would be possible to deduce from it 'and other empirical hypotheses certain experiential propositions which were not deducible from those other hypotheses alone. But in fact this is not possible'.35 The religious person may agree with Ayer. Even if one assumes, as Ayer seems to, that God-talk is talk about a transcendent being, and even if this being is known through empirical manifestations, God cannot be defined in empirical terms. In that case, however,

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The Early Wittgenstein on Religion

'god' is a metaphysical term. And if 'god' is a metaphysical term, then it cannot be even probable that a god exists. For to say that 'God exists' is to make a metaphysical utterance which cannot be either true or false. And by the same criterion, no sentence which purports to describe the nature of a transcendent god can possess any literal significance. The theist's assertions cannot be valid on Ayer's account. How about invalid, though? There is no need for worry, for: They cannot be invalid either. As [the theist] says nothing at all about the world he cannot justly be accused of saying anything false, or anything for which he has insufficient grounds. It is only when the theist claims that in asserting the existence of a transcendent god he is expressing a genuine proposition that we are entitled to disagree with him.38 Again, this should be agreeable to the religious person, since 'We are told that God is not an object of reason but an object of faith'. The existence of God, then, can be taken on trust. Even if the existence of God were taken on trust as gained through mystical intuition, this intuition cannot be put in intelligible terms. But if one allows that it is impossible to define God in intelligible terms, then one is allowing that it is impossible for a sentence both to be significant and to be about God. If a mystic admits that the object of his vision is something which cannot be described, then he must also admit that he is bound to talk nonsense when he describes it.39 In that the mystic talks nonsense - that is, in that the mystic cannot produce propositions that are verifiable or falsifiable - his talk reveals nothing about the external world. What is given is merely 'indirect information about the condition of [the mystic's] own mind'. 40 Clear from Ayer's resolution of the problem of other minds and his classification of religious utterances as nonsense is that he requires factually significant assertions to be observational. The differences between the entities which are the subject matter of physical discourse

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but which are not purely observational (for example, other minds), and the realm of sense-experience which is purely observational and into the discourse of which the former must be translated in order to be considered factual, is the reason for Avers non-synonymous 'definition in use' sort of tautology.41 In the 1936 (first) edition of Language, Truth and Logic, these 'definitions in use' tautologies themselves were linguistic rules. In the 1946 Preface (to the second edition), however, to avoid the charge that tautologies were not analytic but empirical propositions, in that they were said to describe the empirical fact of the uses of symbols, Ayer realized that tautologies cannot be equated with rules for the use of symbols, which are arbitrary. Tautologies, however, are necessary and true 'only because the relevant linguistic rules are presupposed'. Thus: It is a contingent, empirical fact that the word 'earlier' is used in English to mean earlier, and it is an arbitrary, though convenient, rule of language that words that stand for temporal relations are to be used transitively; but, given this rule the presuppositions that, if A is earlier than B and B is earlier than C, A is earlier than C becomes a necessary truth. 42 This is confused. Necessary truths, tautologies (ipso facto) do not become or cease to be. Rather, signs are, or cease to be, used in certain ways.43 This confusion shows that, however indebted to Wittgenstein for inspiration, verificationism is a bird of a different feather. To show the difference between verificationism and Wittgenstein, for a moment I will have to rely on the Tractatus, and on knowledge of certain Tractarian notions, but I will return to 'A Lecture on Ethics' shortly. In the Tractatus the 'determination of circumstances in which I call a proposition true' must be a statement of its truth-conditions. This is an entirely different notion from Ayer's ostensive rules for the use of symbols, especially in that rules for the use of symbols are really rules for the use of entire propositions - (tautologies for Ayer, you will recall, are translations of entire propositions). In the Tractatus, there cannot be a statement of the truth-conditions of elementary

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The Early Wittgenstein on Religion

propositions, just restatements of them; there can always be statements of truth-conditions for all non-elementary propositions. If verificationism follows the Tractatus, the notion of'definition in use' can only be germane to elementary propositions. Ayer's presupposition that entire propositions are complex names of states of affairs is the opposite of Wittgenstein's thought. 45 Ayer's insistence that rules for the use of symbols are arbitrary is, also, far from the Tractatus. In the Tractatus, the assignment of names is capable of representing a state of affairs; the arrangement of names can represent a state of affairs only by reproducing in itself the same structure as the arrangement of objects in the state of affairs. We cannot by our will make the arrangement of names mirror the arrangement of objects. Hence, a proposition cannot be criticized because we have failed to give reference to some of the names in it. The point is that on the Tractatus view, one cannot ask which observations establish the truth of a proposition unless the structure of possible observation statements stands in certain internal relations to the structure of the proposition. Thus, given the internal relations, the question of meaningfulness does not arise, only the question of reference. That is, if no reference is given to a sign, the proposition cannot be given any sense, even by stipulating that its truth would be established if and only if such-and-such observation statements were verified. A supposed proposition that was 'given a sense' would not be a proposition strictly speaking, but the simple sign of a complex; the sentences in which the complex occurred would have to stand in internal relations to the so-called observation statements. The internal relations then supply the description of the complex, and the observation statements would give truth-conditions of propositions in which the sign occurred.46 Ayer's confusion, though, is deeper than confusing signs. As we have seen, Ayer holds that because religious (and ethical) statements cannot be put into the form of a proposition that is true or false, they are nonsensical, and that if it informs of anything, it informs of the speaker's state of mind. In the ethics lecture, however, Wittgenstein argues that ethical and religious statements cannot be verified or falsified by something that has happened or been discovered, as in science. What would it be to say that the statement 'You ought to want

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to behave better' is true or false? Or, if we put in a book the description of a happening - for example, the description of murder - which we agree would occasion utterances in which the attributive adjective 'bad' would occur, the description itself would not contain the utterances in which the attributive 'bad' would occur, but only factual statements. This description would not contain that 'which we could call an ethical proposition'.47 Reading the description would evoke emotions, or the description might include the states of mind of people affected by the murder; but these would only be facts. It remains, however, that there are utterances in which attributives like 'good', 'bad', and 'right' occur, and these utterances are not factual. Ayer imposes on ethical and religious uses of language the same uses for signs as for scientific uses of language. However, 'Our words as we use them in science', Wittgenstein lectures, 'are vessels capable only of containing and conveying meaning and sense, natural meaning and sense. Ethics, if it is anything, is supernatural .. \ 4 8 The uses of signs in statements about the supernatural are completely different from the uses of signs in statements about the natural. Ayer's imposition of the standards of meaningfulness of scientific expressions on religious and ethical expressions obscures the point Wittgenstein makes in calling ethical and religious expressions nonsensical. Ayer holds that nonsense, if it is not gibberish, is the result of an expression not conforming to the form of a scientific proposition. In the ethics lecture, however, Wittgenstein uses the term 'nonsense' differently when it comes to religious and ethical expressions. According to Wittgenstein in the ethics lecture, expressions of ethical and religious values make sense to those who use them, though, strictly speaking, they are nonsensical. Working between this dialectic of having sense yet being nonsensical, the intricacy in Wittgenstein's use of the term 'nonsense' in his ethics lecture can be unravelled. In the following discussion, it is important to remember that Wittgenstein's examples of religious experience and thought are unsophisticated. He does not consider the history of theology, which supplies a context for cognitively impressive religious symbols. Again, this inadequacy does not detract from my exegetical claim that Wittgenstein distinguishes himself from the positivists' and verificationists' view of ethical and religious expressions.

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The sense of religious expressions In an attempt to answer the questions, 'What have we in mind?' and 'What do we try to express?' when we use words in religious and ethical expressions, Wittgenstein considers two examples. They are T wonder at the existence of the world' and 'I am safe, nothing can injure me whatever happens'. 49 These expressions accompany religious experiences, which often are described theologically. The experience of wonder at the existence of the world, Wittgenstein explains, often has been described by 'God . . . created the world'; and the experience of absolute safety by 'we feel safe in the hands of God'.D° Religious expressions, however, are distinguished from factual descriptions of experiences and states of mind. For example, the description of the experience one would have when inclined to use the first expression is, 'when I have [the experience] I wonder at the existence of the world'. The description of the experience when inclined to use the latter expression is, 'the experience of feeling absolutely safe. I mean the state of mind in which one is inclined to say "I am safe, nothing can injure me whatever happens" '.51 These descriptions are factual; they may be either true or false. They also inform us of the state of mind of the speaker; information that also may be either true or false. However, the expressions we give to those experiences differ from factual descriptions. The words 'wonder' and 'existence', for example, have common uses, the uses that fit the form of a factual proposition. Wittgenstein holds the common use to the tests of sense for a factual proposition: 'To say "I wonder at such and such being the case" has sense only if I can imagine it not to be the case'. In the common use, the word 'safe' means 'it is physically impossible that certain things should happen to me', and thus, used in the form of a factual proposition, we can test whether the statement has sense; it is either true or false that 'I am safe in my room, when I cannot be run over by an omnibus'.52 As they are being used in religious expressions, the common use of the words is not being employed. The words 'wonder', 'existence', and 'safe', when used in expressions of religious experiences, do not allow for testing the truth or falsity of the propositions in which they are used. Thus, in religious expressions, these

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words are, strictly speaking, misused; for the meanings they have in absolute expressions rely on the meanings they have in their common uses. For example, 'I feel absolutely safe5 cannot make sense to the utterer of it if'safe' did not mean what it means in its common usage, and so absolute expressions, though nonsensical with regard to the tests of sense, make sense to the speaker. However, to the objection that the experience of wonderment at what there is - had, for example, while looking at the sky - is just an expression of wonderment that the sky is blue and not cloudy (a wonder in Cambridge, to be sure), Wittgenstein rejoins, 'that's not what I mean'. He means: 'I am wondering at the sky being whatever it is'. 53 This expression, like the others, cannot be held to the tests of sense, though it makes sense to Wittgenstein, the speaker. If, however, words like 'wonder', 'existence' and 'safe' do not necessarily mean in absolute expressions something other than what they mean in their common use, how can Wittgenstein claim that they have any meaning at all? It can be argued that this seemingly intractable problem can be undone by understanding a proposition's truth-conditions - the conditions, that is, which make a proposition true or false - and by insisting that this understanding be manifested, for understanding, ipso facto must be publicly manifested. An account of meaning is thus an account of understanding. As we have seen with Ayer, this presents a problem. For Ayer, manifesting understanding by means of an explanation of the meaning of a proposition regresses to knowledge of the meaning of the propositions used in the explanation. In principle, one can use the capacity one possesses of getting to know that the proposition is true, if true, and false, if false. That is, if the proposition in question is effectively decidable, knowledge of its truth-conditions is manifested by applying a decision method, like mathematical calculations, thereby arriving at demonstrable understanding of its truth-value. This, however, is not practicable. Propositions about the past are examples of not effectively decidable propositions. Consider, for example, 'On the first day of spring in the year that was two-hundred years before the founding of Boston University, a bittern landed in the garden of St John's College,

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Oxford'. However, as Michael Dummett points out, this proposition, of which one has no capacity to get to know its truth-value, is meaningful and understandable. Since one must manifest knowledge of meaning, and since one cannot manifest knowledge of truthconditions in propositions about the past, knowledge of meaning cannot be knowledge of truth-conditions.54 Dummett concludes that meaning, in general, does not consist of truth-conditions.55 For empirical propositions, Dummett's conclusion occasions the view that one must distinguish between direct and indirect verifications of a proposition. The meaning of a declarative sentence is given by what counts as direct verification of it. Understanding a proposition would be manifested by exercising an ability to decide for every proposed piece of evidence whether it verifies the proposition. One can be accredited an ability to decide, even in cases in which one does not know how to find verification. It is enough for Dummett that one can recognize verification if found, thereby fulfilling the requirement of 'manifestability'. This recognition, however, must be conclusive. Dummett's requirement of conclusiveness is too strong for Richard Swinburne, whose word-verification theory attempts to avoid the intractable question of what conclusiveness might be. It is: A sentence S has a truth-value if and only if it is a grammatically well-formed sentence, in which the referring expressions have a reference and the property-words (including relation-words) have a sense. A sentence is grammatically well-formed if it has the same structure as some verifiable sentence ... A referring expression has a reference if there is a procedure for determining what we are talking about, and that procedure does pick out an individual . . . A property-word has a sense if it occurs in verifiable sentences and makes a difference to their verification conditions.57 According to Swinburne's theory, the meaning of words in wellformed propositions, impossible to verify or falsify as a whole, can be verified by their use in other understandable, grammatically alike propositions. It might be said that Swinburne has a decision procedure for determining the meaning of words.

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However, one can demand too much of Swinburne's theory. Must every speaker confirm the meaning of the word? How many other understandable propositions must the word be used in to confirm its meaning conclusively? Swinburne settles for confirmation by more than one person in order to establish that the meaning of the word has been verified in other understandable propositions. Confirmation by more than one person, however, does not settle the issue of the meaning of words in unverifiable propositions. Attempting to verify the meaning of the word 'objects' in the sentence 'There are objects', I polled five native English speakers whether they understood the sentence 'There are objects on my desk' - a sentence of the same form as the former, in which the referring expression can be verified (they all counted the number of objects on my desk, and there were over twenty) in which the referring expression in the question is in the same grammatical role as the former, and in which the relationword is the same as the former, and possesses sense. They all, upon seeing my desk, said they understood the sentence. However, this does not confirm the meaning of 'objects' in the former sentence. This small and inconclusive sociological enterprise aside, that a word carries its meaning with it from one sentence to another cannot be ensured by Swinburne's procedure. Context is what Swinburne's theory neglects.58 This point can be made by a rudimentary and brief look at Frege. Three principles guide Frege's investigation into number theory in his Grundlagen der Arithmetik: 1) to separate the psychological from the logical; 2) never to ask for the meaning of a word in isolation but only in the context of a proposition; and 3) to keep in mind the distinction between concept and object. According to the first principle, the mental images a word may arouse in the mind of the speaker (or hearer) are, Frege argues, irrelevant to its meaning. Meaning consists in the part played by the word in determining the truth-conditions of sentences in which it occurs. With regard to this principle, Swinburne is Fregean. According to Swinburne's theory, the meaning of a word connects with its actual use in everyday language. The second principle is where Swinburne's theory runs into problems. This principle is: only in the context of a sentence does a word

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have meaning.59 To sin against this principle is to ask for the meaning of a word in isolation. This isolation - this concentration on the meaning of a word without consideration of the kind of sentence that contains it - causes one to fix on a mental image as the meaning of the word. To be faithful to the principle, we ought to characterize the general form of a sentence in which the word occurs.60 Such a characterization relates to complete sentences, for in the way words are used in sentences are the meanings of words given. If this were all there was to the context principle, then Swinburne's theory would be tenable; indeed, it would be Fregean. If the first and second principles are considered together, however, Frege's emphasis on context takes on wider proportions. If the meaning of a word is connected with our actual practice in the employment of language, and if it is only in the context of a sentence that a word has meaning, then only by uttering a sentence do we perform a linguistic act. The meaning of a word thus consists in its contribution to determining what particular linguistic act is effected by the utterance of the sentence in which the word occurs. What linguistic act is effected, or could be effected, by 'There are objects'? The expression 'There are objects' demands more context for 'objects' to have meaning. Swinburne's theory, if accepted, leads us to say that 'objects' in 'There are objects' means the same as when it occurs in 'There are objects on my desk'. If so, then according to modus ponens, the following is valid: 'If there are objects on my desk, then there are objects. There are objects on my desk; therefore, there are objects'. Moreover, on Swinburne's theory, it could be said that 'There are objects' and 'There are objects on my desk' are the same expression, the latter only containing a prepositional clause that does not philosophically change the meaning of the sentences. Then the following would have to be said to be meaningful: 'If both there are objects on my desk and if there are objects on my desk, then there are objects, then there are objects'.61 As the Tortoise belaboured the point in Lewis Carroll's 'What the Tortoise said to Achilles', if they are the same expression, then we can keep adding hypothetical propositions adinfinitum and not reach a valid conclusion.62 This confusion arises because it appears that 'There are objects' is meaningful. It is not. If, as based on the two principles of Frege, we

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must look to linguistic practice to give an account of the meaning of a word, then we must be able to give an account of the effect of the utterance of the sentence in which the word is used. What type of linguistic act is it to utter 'There are objects'? It, at first glance, seems to be an assertion. An assertion, however, is either true or false. To understand an assertoric sentence, we must know under what conditions it is true and under what conditions it is false. These conditions give the sentence a descriptive context. For instance, for 'There are objects on my desk' to be true, there must be a desk (it must be mine), and there must be some possible objects that can be put on it - say, a keyboard, a mouse, a clock, a computer monitor, a lamp, a phone, a calendar, a vase of flowers, pictures in frames, and so on. However, there may not be a desk that I may call mine. Even if there were, the desk may be bare. 'There are objects' does not admit of these conditions. What conditions could it admit? It is not, therefore, assertoric. What linguistic act could be performed with 'There are objects'? This lack of being able to conduct any commerce with 'There are objects' disqualifies it from admission as a meaningful sentence. For, following Frege, sentences, to be meaningful, need to have force, that quality of a sentence that determines of what linguistic act it is a part. Wittgenstein has this notion of force in mind when in the ethics lecture he uses expressions that are nonsensical, as the tests of sense cannot be applied to them. For example, 'I am safe, no matter what happens' has force in that it is part of a way of life. When one utters it, one engages in an activity. For instance, when one wonders at the existence of the world, one sees the world, Wittgenstein explains, as a miracle. The word 'miracle', in its common, scientific use, means 'an event the like of which we have never yet seen'. In its common use, a scientist, looking at an event the likes of which he has never seen (for instance, a man growing a lion's head), would dissect the event (or vivisect the man) to explain it bit by bit. This dissection would not be an activity of the person who looks at the event with a sense of wonder. Looking at the world with a sense of wonder, even though one can scientifically explain what one sees, is a way of life different from looking at it scientifically. Different ways of life entail

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different ways of behaving: the scientist would vivisect the man, and the religious person would not. It is, then, to these different ways of life that we must look to see what kind of linguistic activity an expression of absolute value is. 65 The agreement in the way of life, as seen in the behaviour of the speaker, and the use of absolute expressions is the force of the words used in absolute expressions.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have read Wittgenstein's ethics lecture against Moore, Ayer, and Swinburne. Moving against Moore, Wittgenstein shows that attributive, not predicative, adjectives are used in ethical and religious expressions. Ayer has argued, however, that the attributes spoken about in these expressions inform only of speakers5 states of mind. Thus, the expressions are nonsensical, in that they are unverifiable. Swinburne tried to get round Ayer's argument that ethical and religious expressions are unverifiable by suggesting that words, not propositions as a whole, are verifiable; according to Swinburne's theory, the meaning of words in unverifiable propositions can be ascertained by their use in verifiable propositions. This, however, assumes that the use of a word is the same regardless of context, which I have demonstrated is not always the case. The use to which a word is put depends on context, and it is from this contextual use that the meaning of a word in religious and ethical statements can be seen. The meaning of a word in religious and ethical statements consists in its contribution to the act effected by the statement in which that word occurs. This contribution I have called the force of words. In 'A Lecture on Ethics', Wittgenstein encourages us to look at the force of words in ethical and religious expressions. Not information about an abstract universal and more than just information about speakers' states of mind or about how a word is used in verifiable statements, this agreement between use and behaviour is the meaningfulness of ethical and religious language. For Wittgenstein, the meaningfulness of religious expressions — expressions like 'I am safe, no matter what happens to me' - is the behaviour these expressions force on him.

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Drury suggests that 'A Lecture on Ethics' might be seen as a commentary on the last few sentences of St Augustine's Confessions: c Tu autem bonum nullo indigens bono semper quietus es . . . Et hoc intellegere quis hominum dabit homini? Quis angelus angelo? Quis angelus homini? A te petatur, in te quaeratur, ad te pulsetur: sic, sic accipietur, sic invenietur, sic aperietur'. 66 To be sure, Wittgenstein knew the Confessions well. He quoted it to the members of the Vienna Circle, and he opened the Philosophical Investigations with an extended paragraph from it. It seems possible that the ethics lecture could have been a commentary on a passage from the Confessions; this passage is a fitting one. For, in the lecture, Wittgenstein does not cast about for verification of Goodness, which might stand behind, and thus give meaning to, religious expressions. It takes hubris to hold that any creature, human or angel, can explain Goodness. Such explanation is not Wittgenstein's task in the ethics lecture. His task is to inquire into the activity of expressing absolute values. This is a profound inquiry: it knocks at Goodness' door. With this declaration, Wittgenstein ends the lecture: Ethics so far as it springs from the desire to say something about the ultimate meaning of life, the absolute good, the absolute valuable, can be no science. What it says does not add to our knowledge in any sense. But it is a document of a tendency in the human mind which I personally cannot help respecting deeply and I would not for my life ridicule it. 67 The central notion of Wittgenstein's lecture is that for the meaning of religious and ethical expressions we are to look at the force of words in the lives of those who use them. This notion is crucial to understanding the relation of the logical to the religious in Wittgenstein's Tractatus. In the next two chapters, I interpret the Tractatus - first on Wittgenstein's mysticism, and the role of logic in that mysticism, and then on the question of what is nonsense in the Tractatus.

Chapter 3

A common language

The profound inquiry into the activity of expressing absolute values was the task Wittgenstein set before himself in his 1929 'A Lecture on Ethics'. From my reading of the lecture in the last chapter, I argued for the notion that for the meaning of words used in religious and ethical statements, we are to look at the force they have in the everyday lives of those who use them. This force, though mundane, is something at which to be awestruck, as was Wittgenstein at the end of the lecture. His sense of wonder, however, began much earlier in his philosophy. It is apparent in the mysticism of his early years, to which we now turn. In this chapter, I begin with the question of whether Wittgenstein was a mystic or just a person with an air of mysticism about him; I argue that, indeed, he was some sort of theistic mystic, not a nature mystic, as B. F. McGuinness has argued. I nonetheless agree with McGuinness that, in the Tractatus, logic is the mystic's tool. Logic gives the mystic the ability to ascertain all the facts, the sum of which is the world. This ascertainment is necessary in order to limit the world, so the mystic can transcend it to have mystical union with God. This separation between the world and God is the separation between fact and value; thus, God, ultimate value, is not a fact. Consequently, nothing that has value is a fact. Since, however, ascertaining and limiting oneself to the facts is the means by which the mystic unites with God, the mystic must then limit himself to factual discourse. For the mystic, there is no religious or ethical language, no special religious or ethical vocabulary, only the vocabulary of factual discourse. Thus if Wittgenstein the mystic is going to say anything, he has to keep it factual, or be silent. Wittgenstein is famous for the silence he invoked at the end of the Tractatus. By understanding this silence as the silence of a mystic who

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not only attempted to have mystical union with God by keeping his language factual, but who also wanted the words in the Tractatus to carry force, we see that he had to be silent. Even though the logical propositions of the Tractatus are the means by which he is able to have mystical union, they are not factual, and so if what he writes in the book is to have any force - if what he says is to agree with his behaviour - he must be silent.

Wittgenstein the mystic, or the mystical Wittgenstein? On 20 December 1919, Bertrand Russell wrote to his lover, Lady Ottoline Morrell, from The Hague where he had been meeting with Wittgenstein: I have much to tell you that is of interest. I leave here today, after a fortnight's stay, during a week of which Wittgenstein was here, and we discussed his book [the Tractatus] every day. I came to think even better of it than I had done; I feel sure it is really a great book, though I do not feel sure it is right... I had felt in his book a flavour of mysticism, but was astonished when I found that he has become a complete mystic. He reads people like Kierkegaard and Angelus Silesius, and he seriously contemplates becoming a monk. It all started from William James's Varieties of Religious Experience, and grew (not unnaturally) during

the winter he spent alone in Norway before the war, when he was nearly mad. Then during the war a curious thing happened. He went on duty to the town of Tarnov in Galicia, and happened to come upon a bookshop, which, however, seemed to contain nothing but picture postcards. However, he went inside and found that it contained just one book: Tolstoy on the Gospels. He bought it merely because there was no other. He read it and re-read it, and thenceforth had it always with him, under fire and at all times. But on the whole he likes Tolstoy less then Dostoevski (especially Karamozov). He has penetrated deep into mystical ways of thought and feeling, but I think (though he wouldn't agree) that what he likes best in mysticism is its power to make him stop thinking.

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I don't much think he will really become a monk - it is an idea, not an intention. His intention is to be a teacher. He gave all his money to his brothers and sisters, because he found earthly possessions a burden. I wish you had seen him.1 Russell's impression contrasts with Wittgenstein's philosophical influence on Rudolf Garnap. In The Logical Structure of the World (Der logische Aufbau der Welt), written between 1922 and 1925, Carnap declares 'love', 'poetry', 'art', even 'mystic enrapture' and 'faith based on religious revelation', as spheres of life that, though outside science, are important and worthwhile.2 In his 1927 Pseudo-Problems in Philosophy {Scheinprobleme in der Philosophie), however, he introduced

his 'meaning criterion', namely that a meaning of a statement is given by the conditions of its verification and that a statement is meaningful if and only if it is in principle verifiable.3 All utterances that do not fit this criterion, which include religious utterances, are meaningless. The change between the Aufbau and the Scheinprobleme was due to the influence of Wittgenstein's Tractatus, as Garnap explains in the Preface to the second edition of the Aufbau: The article 'Pseudoproblems in Philosophy'... appeared in 1928 at roughly the same time as the Aufbau. However, I did not write it until the end of 1927, the end of my first year in Vienna. Hence it shows a stronger influence of the Vienna discussions and Wittgenstein's book. [The] condemnation [in the Scheinprobleme] of all theses about metaphysical reality (which is clearly distinguished from empirical reality) is more radical than that in the Aufbau, where such theses were merely excluded from the domain of science. My more radical orientation was due, in part, to Wittgenstein's conception that metaphysical sentences were meaningless since they are in principle unverifiable. This position was held by the majority of the members of the Vienna Circle and other empiricists.4 In his 'Intellectual Autobiography', Carnap stresses the influence of the Tractatus. At a young age, Carnap had been influenced by 'anti-metaphysical scientists and philosophers', but his rejection of

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metaphysics became 'strengthened . . . and more definite and more radical' due to Wittgenstein. He credits Wittgenstein for the 'insight that many philosophical sentences, especially in traditional metaphysics, are . . . devoid of cognitive content'. He acclaims Wittgenstein as 'the philosopher who, besides Russell and Frege, had the greatest impact on my life'.5 Through the efforts of Moritz Schlick, Carnap and other members of the Vienna Circle met Wittgenstein for the first time at a meeting of the Vienna Circle in the summer of 1927. Carnap was impressed: When I met Wittgenstein, I saw that Schlick's warnings [not to engage Wittgenstein in heated questioning] were fully justified. But his behavior was not caused by any arrogance. In general, he was of a sympathetic temperament and very kind, but he was hypersensitive and easily irritated. Whatever he said was always interesting and stimulating, and the way in which he expressed it was often fascinating. His point of view and his attitude toward people and problems, even theoretical problems, were much more similar to those of a creative artist than to those of a scientist, one might also say, similar to those of a religious prophet or seer. When he started to formulate his view of some specific philosophical problem, we often felt the internal struggle by which he tried to penetrate from darkness to light under an intense and painful strain, which was even visible on his most expressive face. When finally, sometimes after a prolonged arduous effort, the answer came forth, his statement stood before us like a newly created piece of art or a divine revelation.6 CarnapJs impression of Wittgenstein - the person - seems discontinuous with the philosopher who had influenced Carnap's disdain 'for metaphysics and for metaphysical theology', but according to Carnap, it was not: Once when Wittgenstein talked about religion, the contrast between his and Schlick's position became strikingly apparent. Both agreed, of course, in the view that the doctrines of religion, in their various forms had no theoretical content. But Wittgenstein

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rejected Schlick's view that religion belonged to the childhood phase of humanity and would slowly disappear in the course of cultural development. When Schlick, on another occasion, made a critical remark about a metaphysical statement by a classical philosopher (I think it was Schopenhauer), Wittgenstein surprisingly turned against Schlick and defended the philosopher and his work.7 Wittgenstein met on and off with the Vienna Circle until early 1929, when he told Schlick that he did not want to meet with Carnap and the other members, ostensibly because of a difference in personalities. Carnap had 'the impression that the deliberately rational and unemotional attitude of the scientist and likewise any idea which had the flavor of "enlightenment" were repugnant to Wittgenstein'.8 This impression is understandable. At times during the meetings, Wittgenstein read aloud the mystical poetry of Rabindranath Tagore, rather than discuss logic and mathematics. This induced Carnap to reconsider the passages in the Tractatus he had read too lightly: Earlier, when we were reading Wittgenstein's book in the Circle, I had erroneously believed that his attitude toward metaphysics was similar to ours. I had not paid sufficient attention to the statements in his book about the mystical because his feelings and thoughts in this area were too divergent from mine. Only personal contact with him helped me to see more clearly his attitude at this point. 10 Was Wittgenstein, as Carnap implies, a mystic? G. E. M. Anscombe remembers him as 'an extraordinary individual - the very man to have some mysticism about him', but his air of mysticism, she avers, had nothing to do with his philosophy.11 In his obituary of Wittgenstein, however, Bertrand Russell remembers him as 'more or less of a mystic, which shows itself here and there in the Tractatus'.12 However, in the Tractatus, Wittgenstein uses the term 'mystical' only three times. From these uses alone, it is impossible to tell if he was a mystic and, if so, in what sense. Anscombe suggests that it is a technical term he took over from Russell, but she does not develop this suggestion.13

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In 'Mysticism and Logic', Russell holds that philosophical greatness is the attempt to harmonize mysticism with science. However, he rejects what he considers the chief claims of the mystic, which are four. First, the mystic claims a special intuitive source of knowledge available through mystical experiences. Second, the mystic claims that reality is one; in reality there is no plurality. Third, time is unreal for the mystic. Fourth, because the mystic views good and evil as illusory, ethics involves an overreaching valuation of the world as a whole. Metaphysics, the attempt to put these claims into the form of a creed, Russell also rejects. He nevertheless extols mysticism as 'an attitude toward life', an attitude that may inspire the artist and scientist alike.14 B. F. McGuinness, in 'The Mysticism of the Tractatus\ convincingly argues for a kinship between Russell's mysticism and Wittgenstein's mystical sayings that appear at the end of the Tractatus. At 6.53, Wittgenstein rejects metaphysics, but he holds at 6.522 to a special feeling, which he calls the mystical (das Mystiche), which, like Russell's first characteristic, is the source of inexpressible knowledge. This knowledge Wittgenstein identifies at 6.521 as the solution to the problem of life. At 6.45, Wittgenstein also identifies the mystical with viewing or feeling 'the world as a limited whole', which is akin to Russell's second characteristic: that the mystic claims all reality as one. Russell's third characteristic of mysticism is timelessness; at 6.4311 Wittgenstein declares that 'eternal life belongs to those who live in the present', to those, that is, who 'take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness'. McGuinness parallels Wittgenstein's account of good and evil in the 6.4s to Russell's fourth mark of mysticism: Wittgenstein's happy person accepts the world as good, while the unhappy person finds the world inharmonious. According to McGuinness, these claims constitute a single 'mystical' Weltanschauung, which, unlike Russell, Wittgenstein finds as the inspiration even of the scientist.15 McGuinness forcibly argues that Wittgenstein's mysticism, unlike Russell's, is rooted in experience, though not religious experience. It is, McGuinness argues, a nature mysticism, in which the experiential zenith is union with the world, evidenced by Wittgenstein's statements at 5.621 and 5.63: 'The world and life are one' and 'I am my

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world', respectively. McGuinness finds it similar to the mysticism of the Muslim Abu'l Qusim al-Qushayri, according to whom the soul, in mystical rapture, feels at once expansion and contraction, which, McGuinness surmises, is like Wittgenstein's notion at 6.43 that the world waxes and wanes as a whole.16 McGuinness' description of Wittgenstein's mysticism as nature mysticism is odd, for he finds its origin in 'a kind of religious awakening thanks to a performance of Anzengruber's Die Kreuzelschreiber\ and parallels it with a theistic mystic.17 However, McGuinness writes: 'I do not . . . mean a genuine theistic mystical experience'. He goes on: 'True, there are references to God in the Notebooks and even in the Tractatus but clearly to a God who is identical with Nature: Deus sive Natura. At best Wittgenstein allows a form of pantheism: in the spirit of Whitehead's remark about Unitarianism, he might be said to hold that if there is any God, then the world is God'. 18 I argue, pace McGuinness, that Wittgenstein's mysticism is some sort of theistic mysticism. As I argue below, the equation of the world with God is not a fair reading of the Tractatus, However, Wittgenstein does not use any special language to talk about his mysticism - just ordinary, everyday factual language. Indeed, I read Wittgenstein as arguing that philosophy has no special discourse, no special vocabulary, at its disposal. Rather, it has the discourse of everyday life. My reading follows these lines. I begin with an explication of the Tractatus' view of factual language, studying the limits of which is part of Wittgenstein's aims in the Tractatus. This study involves an inquiry into the logic of factual discourse, an inquiry that unlocks not just the nature of logic but also the very foundation of the world that the mystic looks back on after she has transcended the world. I also read Wittgenstein's remarks on solipsism, since McGuinness bases his view that Wittgenstein's is a nature mysticism on his reading of these remarks. At Tractatus 5.63, Wittgenstein remarks: 'I am my world', and at 5.621: 'The world and life are one'. According to McGuinness, these two remarks indicate that mystical union is with the world, and that if Wittgenstein has any God, the world is God, thus nature mysticism.19 I read these two remarks differently. If the mystic takes seriously the nature of logic, the mystic will realize that what she does - how she apprehends the world - constitutes the

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world. Thus the life one leads determines one's world. One may lead a life that engenders awareness of the existence of the world, which is the good life the mystic leads, or one may not. The mystic leads the good life in order to unite with God, who, according to the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus, is not part of the factual world. To make my case, my reading necessarily ranges over several Tractarian notions: the view of the world from eternity's perspective, contemplation, the will, and the separation between fact and value.

Faddy non verba: Factual discourse in the Tractatus The opening sentences of the Tractatus are not the philosopher's typical prolegomena of definitions of key terms. Indeed, they are not really prolegomena at all; rather, they plunge straight into a description of the world: The world is all that is the case. The world is the totality of the facts, not things. The world is determined by the facts and by their being all the facts. For the totality of facts determines what is the case, and also whatever is not the case. The facts in logical space are the world. The world divides into facts. Each item can be the case or not the case while everything else remains the same. What is the case - a fact - is the existence of states of affairs. A state of affairs (a state of things) is a combination of objects (things).20 From these opening sentences, we know that there is nothing in the world except facts, and that facts are combinations of objects (or things).21 Objects, Wittgenstein goes on to explain, are simple (TLP 2.02). If they were not simple, they could not combine to form facts; but they do combine, and so they are necessarily simple (2.03; 2.0272). Which objects combine and which do not is accidental (2.012-2.0121). However, it is not accidental that they combine; the possibility that an object can combine with another to form a fact is part of its nature (2.0121). This possibility is the form of an object (2.0141); in other words, the form of an object is the possibility of facts (2.014). In that objects combine to form facts, the sum of which is the world, they are the substance of the world (2.021). As the

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substance of the world, they exist independently of facts (2.024). They are unalterable and subsistent (2.0271). In their uncombined rawness, they are the form of the world (2.026). Objects are named. Their names are signs in elementary propositions (4.21); for example, the propositional sign 'A9 signifies the object named A (3.203; 4.126). Elementary propositions, the simplest kind of proposition, assert the existence of facts (4.21), which they do by placing signs in the same configuration as they are in the fact they represent (3.144; 3.21; 4.22). They have sense in that they point, like arrows, to the facts they describe (3.144). The fact a proposition describes may be non-existent, but the proposition still has sense, for 'The sense of a proposition is in its agreement or dis-agreement with possibilities of existence and non-existence' of facts (4.2; cf. 4.25). The general form of a proposition is 'This is how things stand' (4.5). That is, a proposition gains sense by exhibiting in its own structure the structure of the fact it represents, that fact which is the sense. Embedded in this idea is that names and objects possess determinate ranges of possibilities for combinations into propositions and facts, respectively. For each, that range of possibilities constitutes its logical form. A proposition or a fact is, thus, a determinate structure composed of elements collocated in ways limited by the logical forms of their constituents. A proposition, whose structure mirrors the logical form of a certain fact, depicts that fact. This depiction is, for the mystic, the very limitation of language: 'Objects can only be named. Signs are their representatives. I can only speak about them: I cannot put them into words. Propositions can only say how things are, not what they are' (3.221, original emphasis). The mystic is not concerned with how things are, but with what things are - with, that is, the existence of the world (6.44, original emphasis). The problem for the mystic is that language is limited to the facts of the world (6.4321). Logic overcomes this limitation. The 'experience' that we need in order to understand logic is not that something or other is the state of things, but that something is: that, however, is not an experience. Logic is prior to every experience - that something is so.

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It is prior to the question 'How?', not prior to the question 'What?5 (5.552). It is not clear from 5.552 that the experience necessary to understand logic is the same as mystical experience; however, there are similarities. Both are the unusual experience that something is, not the common experience of how it is (6.44). Both cannot be put into words; they are not bodies of doctrine. Both are transcendental (6.14; 6.421), or, in the earlier language of the Notebooks, they are 'conditions of the world'.22 The guide for those wishing to have mystical experience, then, may well lie in explicating the experience necessary to understand logic. Tractatus 6.142 is a clue to what the experience necessary to understand logic is: 'The propositions of logic describe the scaffolding of the world, or rather they represent it. They have no "subject-matter". They presuppose that names have meaning and elementary propositions sense; and that is their connexion with the world'. As we have seen, names have meaning if they name an object, and elementary propositions have sense if they point to a fact, which is a combination of objects. Thus, since logical propositions presuppose that names have meaning and elementary propositions have sense, logical propositions ultimately presuppose objects, the substance of the world. The presupposition that there are objects means that there are possibilities. That there are possibilities means that there is a world. That there is a world means that some possibilities of combinations of objects are realized. Anyone who speaks everyday language, in essence, presupposes that there are objects, since everyday language is in perfect logical order (5.5563). Not just anyone, however, is aware of this presupposition. The Tractarian logician, however, is aware of it, because logic deals with all possibilities (2.0121). The propositions of logic show the formal 'properties of language and the world' (6.12); they represent the scaffolding of the world (6.142); they show the logic of the world (6.22). Logic is the mirror image of the world (6.13). Rather than presuppose the existence of objects, the Tractarian logician reflects and describes the fact that there are objects, the substance of the world.

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There are parallels between the Tractarian logician, who reflects on and describes the substance of the world, and the mystic. Through this reflection and description, the logician views the world as a limited whole, a view the mystic also has (6.45). Through this reflection and description, the logician becomes content with factual language, and is intellectually satisfied with how things are, though she cannot explain why. Likewise, the mystic cannot put her vision into words, and so, must be content with factual language. What she sees, however, is the answer to the problem of life, an answer that accepts the world as it is (6.52-6.522). More than just parallels, however, the Tractatus gives the mystic no other path to view the world as a limited whole, to be content with factual language, and to be satisfied with the world as it is, but to be a Tractarian logician. The link between logic and mysticism is the say/show distinction.23 The distinction has already made its appearance in Tractatus 3.221: We cannot speak about objects - they cannot be put into words - yet, what we say shows how they are combined into facts. The Franciscan in the last line of Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose illustrates the distinction: 'We grasp the name alone; the rose remains untouched by our naming'. 24 What shows in this saying is that language is limited. Part and parcel of the say/show distinction, then, is the limit of language, a limit Wittgenstein discusses in the passages on solipsism.

' The limits ofmy language mean the limits of my world5: Tractatus 5.6 and the truth there is in solipsism The basic aim of the written part of the Tractatus is to demarcate the limits of language (TLP, p. 3). At 5.6, 5.61 and 5.62, Wittgenstein applies this demarcation to the world, and asserts that it is the key to the truth of solipsism. In his discussion of solipsism, Wittgenstein holds that the self, which he calls the metaphysical subject, is the limit of the world. The connection between solipsism, the self, and the limit of the world is this: to view the world as a limited whole is to understand its limits. To understand its limits is to understand that logical form structures the world, and that the subject stands outside

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the world as its limit, not within it as a fact. The individual tied to a body in the world, then, vanishes from consideration. What remains is the metaphysical subject, for whom the particular facts of the world are valueless and whose interests, now purified of particulars, lie with the existence of the world. (To this separation of the facts of the world and value, I will turn shortly.) Wittgenstein first mentions the word 'solipsism' at 5.62, but he begins implicitly discussing the notion at 5.6, where he writes, 'The limits of my language mean the limits of my world' (original emphasis). Just before 5.6, at 5.561, we find that 'Empirical reality is limited by the totality of objects'. Although empirical reality, that is, the world, is the totality of facts, not objects, its limit is all possible combinations of objects. Wittgenstein continues to say at 5.561 that the limit of the world is also 'manifest in the totality of elementary propositions'. Elementary propositions are either true or false, so no elementary proposition can contradict another (see 4.21-4.22). For example, the possible combinations for elementary propositions in which occur 'p', which names an object, and 'q', which names another object depend on whether p and q are the case. It may be that both p and q are the case; then 'p and q' is true, and 'p or q' is true. If p is the case and q is not; then 'p and q' is false and 'p or q' is true. If p is not the case and q is; then 'p and q' is false and 'p or q' is true. If neither p nor q is the case, then 'p and q' and 'p or q' are both false. The possible combinations of p and q in the world are expressible in the truth-functions of the elementary propositions, in which their names occur. The world is limited to possible combinations of objects, and thus language is limited to truth-functions of elementary propositions.25 The remark at 5.6, however, introduces a new limit: the limit language puts on the speaker. Wittgenstein explains this limit in the first two paragraphs of 5.61, which is, according to Wittgenstein's numbering system, a commentary on 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'.'' Language's limit is not like a white line drawn down the middle of a border crossing to distinguish one realm from another. When it comes to the limit of language, there is no other side. The limit of language is the limit of logic - the limit of thought. Since we cannot think what lies on the

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other side of the world, we cannot say it. If we could say it, Wittgenstein explains in the last two paragraphs of 5.61, we would apparently presuppose that we exclude certain possibilities, and this cannot be the case, for logic would then have to go beyond the boundaries of the world; it would, in other words, have to view those boundaries from the other side as well. What we cannot think, we cannot think; and we cannot say what we cannot think. Wittgenstein mentions solipsism for the first time in the next remark, 5.62, which is another commentary on 5.6: The remark [5.6] 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. Russell characterizes 5.62 as a 'somewhat curious discussion5.26 David Pears expresses every interpreter's frustration about it: 'This is one of the most difficult texts in the Tractatus and there is very little agreement between commentators about its meaning'.27 The interpretive difficulty notwithstanding, it is obvious that Wittgenstein criticizes the solipsist for trying to say something that cannot be said. It is also obvious that Wittgenstein thinks something is right about what the solipsist tries to say. Relying on Pears' interpretation in The False Prison, I will first discuss what Wittgenstein thinks is wrong with the solipsist's claim and then what he thinks is right about it. Wittgenstein's criticism is that the solipsist cannot make his claim in language. If the solipsist could state the claim, it would have to be factual. To be factual, the T , or the ego, would have to be an identifiable object. The only way to make the ego identifiable is to attach it to a human body. The human body, however, lies partly outside the field of consciousness. Thus, the claim that the ego attaches to the body is for the solipsist self-refuting. If on the other hand the solipsist does not attach the ego to the body, he can claim that it is the focal point behind the field of consciousness. This claim, however, makes

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solipsism empty, because, as Pears says, 'An ego postulated to account for his [the solipsist's] awareness of a range of objects cannot possibly be used to impose a real limit on his language. The . . . ego [as the focal point behind consciousness] is not discoverable by introspection or in any other way and it cannot serve as an identifiable referencepoint'. 28 The claims of solipsism in language are, then, either selfrefuting or empty. The interpretive difficulty with 5.62 is the remark 'The world is my world', which seems to be what Wittgenstein thinks is right in what the solipsist says. McGuinness' interpretation is that this means union with the world.29 At first glance, it seems a good interpretation, for at 5.621 Wittgenstein writes: 'The world and life are one'. This interpretation, however, cannot be correct, as I argue in what follows. Thinking, a constitutive act It is important to remember that 5.621, 'The world and life are one', is a commentary on 5.62: 'The world is my world . . ' . According to Pears, 5.621 is an explanation of how Wittgenstein uses the word 'world' in 5.62, and that this 'world' is the world of the 5.5s, the world of all possible combinations of objects. Some of these possibilities are realized as facts and others are n o t . . . but I can always explore them in imagination. So 'the world' [in 5.621] is 'the world as I find it' and as I construct it in imagination . . . If it seems strange that Wittgenstein should identify this world with life, it is worth remembering that perceiving and imagining are things that we do . . . He means that [these things] constitute the world.30 Thinking of possible combinations of objects constitutes the world. The substance of the world includes all the objects we experience, which include, Wittgenstein writes in the Notebooks, 'the human body . . . my body in particular . . . [and] beasts, plants, stones, etc., etc.'.31 We cannot think these things into existence, but we can think of them as on one terrestrial ball. In thinking of them as on one terrestrial ball, it is not that one thinks about how they have combined, but rather, that they are in this world at all. It is to think of the existence of the

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world. This type of thinking is viewing the world of one's experience as complete, as a limited whole. 'To view the world sub specie aeterni is to view it as a whole - a limited whole (6.45)'. The view sub specie aeternitatis The notion of viewing something from the perspective of eternity is a difficult notion. The only place it receives mention in the Tractatus is at 6.45, there set in the passages on the mystical. In the Notebooks, however, Wittgenstein discusses it at greater length. On 19 September 1916, the entry in the Notebooks just before he contemplates the view sub specie aeternitatis, Wittgenstein muses that it is impossible to say, and so to think, that the world is disorderly. The world is orderly; by that very fact, every possible world we can think of is orderly, no matter how disorderly it appears. After these musings, the very next two sentences in the same journal entry are: 'Art is a kind of expression. Good art is complete expression5. He connects the complete expression of good art to the notion of the world as orderly in the next journal entry, dated 7 October 1916: The work of art is the object seen sub specie aeternitatis', and the good life is the world seen sub specie aeternitatis. This is the connexion between art and ethics. The usual way of looking at things sees objects as it were from the midst of them, the view sub specie aeternitatis from outside. In such a way that they have the whole world as background.32 The perspective of the good artist on its object is from the outside, that is, from a God's-eye point of view, not in the middle of it. This perspective allows the artist to see the object as a whole, so he may capture it completely. Likewise, the good life sees the world from outside, not from within it. How does one have the good life? That is, how does one transcend the world to have the view sub specie aeternitatis? Contemplation One transcends the seeming chaos of the world by contemplation. However, one cannot contemplate a plurality. It is not just

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that there is too much to focus on - the plurality is distracting but it is that plurality is insignificant. Contemplation is to view a singular thing as a whole isolated from plurality; it is to view that singular thing as a world. 'As a thing among things', writes Wittgenstein in his journal one day after he muses about eternity's point of view, 'each thing is equally insignificant'. However, 'as a world', he continues, 'each one [is] equally significant'. By isolating the object, thereby making it a world, it takes on a significance - becomes a sign - that it otherwise could not. The isolation of the object of contemplation causes all other objects to pale; they become, as it were, formless. Although they may have two of the three elements of form (that is, space and time), they lack colour (the third element of form), and are only shadows. Wittgenstein illustrates this with a mundane example: If I have been contemplating the stove, and then am told: but now all you know is the stove, my result does indeed seem trivial. For this represents the matter as if I had studied the stove as one among the many things in the world. But if I was contemplating the stove it was my world, and everything else colourless by contrast with it. For it is equally possible to take the bare present image as the worthless momentary picture in the whole temporal world, and as the true world among shadows. The object of contemplation takes on significance in a way that other objects do not. Other objects become colourless; they lack that element of form. Although it has colour and although it obviously has some relation to space and time, the object of contemplation is not in space and time. If it were in time, it would be fleeting, moving by in time's rapid forward movement. Wittgenstein recognizes this four days later: 'Having only one direction is a logical property of time', he notes. What would it be if time did not have one direction? 'Time would not be confined to one direction if an event could be repeated'. This, however, is impossible. An event cannot be repeated, just as a body cannot be in two places at the same time, for a logical property of space is that an object can only be in one place at once.34 Things that are not the object of contemplation are in space and time, and

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limited by their logical properties. The limitations of the logical properties of space and time, however, do not apply to the object of contemplation. The mystic views the object of contemplation with space and time, and not in them. To view an object with space and time is to view it from eternity's perspective: 'in this view the object is seen together with space and time instead of in space and time'. 35 The object in this top-down view has the whole world as its background, which is not so much to say that all other objects stand behind the object of contemplation, but that space and time go with the object in a subsidiary, not a primary, way. The act of contemplation - the act of isolating an object from the many, the act of viewing an object from eternity's perspective - 'conditions [bedingt, which Anscombe translates as "modifies" but I think "qualifies" or "conditions" captures the idea better] the whole logical world .. \ 3 6 by putting the object on a par with, and not subject to, the conditions necessary for its perception while not contemplating it. All other objects stay in, and are subject to, these conditions of perception. Isolating the object puts it on the same level as space and time, and thereby makes it a world. The will Making an object a world brings in the notion of the will, for 'Things acquire "significance"5, Wittgenstein writes on 15 October 1916, 'only through their relation to my will'.37 The notion of the will in the Tractatus is difficult to comprehend, for it is illegitimate to speak about acts of the will. Since 'there is no logical connexion between the will and the world', the will, Wittgenstein insists, is independent of the world. In other words, there is no logical connection between my will and what happens to be the case. A volitional act as a phenomenon 'is of interest only to psychology'.39 The will as the bearer of good and evil, however, is part of the mystical,40 and it is integral to achieving mystical union. For the mystic, the facts of the world, Wittgenstein writes at Tractatus 6.4321, 'contribute to setting the problem [Aufgabe], not to its solution'. The problem is what is important. Anscombe, in An Introduction to Wittgenstein's Tractatus, translates Aufgabe as 'task set'. The reason

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she gives is that it is the German word 'for a child's school exercise, or piece of homework. Life is like a boy doing sums'. She goes on to say in a parenthetical remark that 'at the end of his life [Wittgenstein] used the analogy still'.41 If we use Anscombe's translation we come up with this: The task set is that there is a world.42 The facts cannot contribute to the solution because they are accidental. The solution, however, is concerned with good and evil, which are not accidental. In that the will is concerned with good and evil, it is not accidental. The problem, the task set - the world one is given - is the connection between the world and the will. If one has reached a solution, the world remains the same. A change in the world would only be 'a favour granted by fate'.43 'I cannot bend the happenings of the world to my will', Wittgenstein writes on 11 June 1916; 'I am completely powerless'.44 How, then, is the solution reached, if one is completely powerless? Wittgenstein answers: 'I can only make myself independent of the world and so in a certain sense master it - by renouncing any influence on happenings'.45 This renunciation is, however, an exercise of the will. Although a good or bad exercise of the will does not affect the facts, it affects the limits of the world by giving it a different meaning. 46 A change in limits brought on by good or bad willing, in fact, produces a different world altogether. A world limited by a good exercise of the will has a different meaning from a world limited by a bad exercise of the will. The world of a good person is different from the world of a bad person,4 because their worlds, as wholes, take on or lose meaning by their exercise of will.48 The meaning one gives to the world by the exercise of will is the solution to the problem the facts set, the problem that there is a world at all.49 This meaning does not lie in the world, but, according to Wittgenstein's 11 June 1916 entry in the Notebooks, outside it. 50 It is at this point in the 11 June 1916 entry that Wittgenstein equates life with the world. This is not hard to understand: the exercise of the will is an act in life, and a good exercise of the will results in a different way of living from a bad exercise of the will. This different way of living is the alteration of the limits of the world. It is the act of giving meaning to the world. If the good or bad exercise of the will constitutes the world differently, then the world of the good person is different

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from the world of the bad person.51 So it is that my life choices determine my world: the life I lead is my world: I am my world. Wittgenstein writes on 11 June 1916, 'This meaning does not lie in the world, but outside it'. 52 In fact, 'The meaning of life, i.e. the meaning of the world, we can call God5.53 If the meaning of life is God, and if the meaning of life does not lie in the world, then neither does God. Indeed, God does not reveal himself in the world.54 If the meaning of life is the solution to the problem of existence, and if that meaning is not worldly, but is, rather, wholly other than the world, union is not with the world. Pace McGuinness, Wittgenstein's mysticism cannot be nature mysticism. The exercise of the will that gives meaning to life - a good exercise of the will — alters the limits of the world in such a way that one is not concerned with events in the world, nor with time's unchangeable flow, nor with how an object is situated in space. Thus Tractatus 6.41: The sense [Sinn, or 'meaning'] of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is, and everything happens as it does happen: in it no value exists - and if it did exist, it would have no value. If there is any value that does have value, it must lie outside the whole sphere of what happens and is the case. For all that happens and is the case is accidental. What makes it non-accidental cannot lie within the world, since if it did it would itself be accidental. It must lie outside the world. Max Black comments that 6.41 'is irredeemable nonsense . . . How could it be shown that there is "value" outside the world? What could at best be shown is that there is no value inside the world'. 55 Black is correct - it can only be argued that there is no value inside the world — if one assumes there is only one world. However, in the Tractatus there are two orbs, one factual and one spiritual. The separation between fact and value The world is given me, i.e. my will enters into the world completely from outside as into something that is already there . . . That is why

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we have the feeling of being dependent on an alien will. However this may be, at any rate we are in a certain sense dependent, and what we are dependent on we can call God. In this sense God would simply be fate, or, what is the same thing: the world, which is independent of our will. I can make myself independent of fate. There are two godheads: the world and my independent I. I am either happy or unhappy, that is all. It can be said: good or evil do not exist.5 In this passage from the Notebooks, Wittgenstein has two 'subjects', one locked on to the world of fact, and one completely independent of that world. The two godheads of which Wittgenstein speaks are the two subjects, the two senses in which 'I am my world'. I am the world of fact in the sense that I, the subject of experience, coincide exactly with my world of factual apprehension. This world owns nothing beyond: the subject who experiences it fits exactly. This subject is without extension, and so to this subject, the notion of seeing beyond cannot make sense. To see beyond would presume the ability to see beyond the transcendental barrier of facts, of human experience. (What is transcendent is beyond human experience, what is transcendental, not derived from human experience, is a condition of it.) There is no other access to facts but through human experience. The other sense in which I am my world, or live or experience my world, is the ethical or religious sense. This is the experience of the mystic, who looks at and accepts all the facts. Value lies ineffably outside this limited whole. So too it is impossible for there to be propositions of ethics. Propositions can express nothing that is higher. It is clear that ethics cannot be put into words. Ethics is transcendental. (Ethics and aesthetics are one and the same.) 57 Value does not alter, or even enter into, the world of facts. Rather, value in the Tractatus resides in an attitude of one's acceptance of all the facts. This segregation of value from the world is a form of silent understanding and way of life. In the letter to Ficker in which Wittgenstein says the important part of the book is the unwritten part, he explains the importance of

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the last few pages of the Tractatus, the pages that Carnap said he should have paid more attention to: [T]he Ethical is delimited from within, as it were, by my book; and I'm convinced that, strictly speaking, it can ONLY be delimited in this way. In brief, I think: All that which many are babbling today, I have defined in my book by remaining silent about it. Therefore the book will, unless I'm quite wrong, have much to say which you want to say yourself, but perhaps you won't notice that it is said in it. For the time being, I'd recommend that you read the foreword and the conclusion since these express the point most directly.58 Wittgenstein reiterated this idea of the importance of the unsaid in conversations with the Vienna Circle. I quote from a conversation recorded by Waismann: To be sure, I can imagine what Heidegger means by being and anxiety. Man feels the urge to run up against the limits of language. Think for example of the astonishment that anything at all exists. This astonishment cannot be expressed in the form of a question, and there is also no answer whatsoever. Anything we may say is a priori bound to be mere nonsense. Nevertheless we do run up against the limits of language. Kierkegaard too saw that there is this running up against something and he referred to it in a fairly similar way (as running up against paradox). This running up against the limits of language is ethics. I think it is definitely important to put an end to all the claptrap about ethics - whether intuitive knowledge exists, whether values exist, whether the good is definable. In ethics we are always making the attempt to say something that cannot be said, something that does not and never will touch the essence of the matter. It is a priori certain that whatever definition of the good may be given - it will always be merely a misunderstanding to say that the essential thing, that what is really meant, corresponds to what is expressed (Moore). But the inclination, the running up against something, indicates something. St. Augustine knew that already when he said: 'What, you swine, you want not to talk nonsense! Go ahead and talk nonsense, it does not matter'. 59

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Wittgenstein refers to Heidegger's Sein und^eit, published in 1927, to Moore's Principia Ethica, and to St Augustine's Confessions I iv: 6Et vae tacentibus de te, quoniam loquaces muti sunt' St Augustine here addresses

God: 'And woe to those who are silent about You [that is, do not praise You], for the ones who chatter say nothing!' Wittgenstein has nothing to say in the Tractatus about a transcendent reality. The transcendent cannot be put into factual language. 60 It is at the border of experience. Here the fit is, again, perfect. There is no ray of light from beyond, or crack through which one might peer to see the beyond, much less any sense of talking about a beyond. Through our living, we see the beyond. Thus: There are, indeed, things which cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical. The correct method in philosophy would really be the following: to say nothing except what can be said, i.e. propositions of natural science - i.e. something that has nothing to do with philosophy - and then, whenever someone else wanted to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had failed to give a meaning to certain signs in his propositions. The 'propositions of natural science' means factual language. On 1 June 1915, Wittgenstein writes in his Notebooks that his philosophy is connected entirely with the question, 'Is there an order in the world a priori, and if so what does it consist in?' 62 In addition, on 2 August 1916, he writes that his work 'has extended from the foundations of logic to the nature of the world'. 63 The letter to Ficker suggests that by elucidating the nature of the factual world, Wittgenstein wishes to achieve a purification of the function of morality. The two 'godheads' are the world of fact and the mystic who is to accept that world realistically. At Tractatus 6.43, Wittgenstein tells us that our will can change the limits of the world but not the facts; that is, it can only change the aspect, the view, of the totality, not the parts within the totality. The world waxes and wanes as a whole, according to our general attitude of acceptance or non-acceptance. This morality is religious. Tractatus 6.44, 'It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists', is followed by 'The contemplation of the world sub specie aetemi is its contemplation as a

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limited whole'.64 We experience or express more purely, according to the Tractatus, if we are able to look at the factual world from the outside. Facts are what can be expressed in language. There is no place for any ideal of'moral facts' or 'religious facts', much less 'philosophical facts'. Nor is there a place for the development of a special vocabulary for morality or religion or philosophy. Indeed, this is central to the Tractatus: the vocabulary of factual language is the only vocabulary there

is. Philosophy and theology do not have a special vocabulary at their disposal. Such a vocabulary would be nonsense, for signs in it would not have meaning. Meaningful signs belong to factual discourse, the 'propositions of natural science'.65 This limitation to factual discourse is, indeed, cool, but the Tractatus 'cool attitude preserves the ability to ascertain the facts, the silent corollary of which is mysticism. The Tractatus may be an extreme and pure case of the idea that fact and value must not be allowed to contaminate each other. Indeed, with its numerous visual metaphors: the limited whole, inside and outside, looking from a certain perspective (sub specie aeternitatis), it conjures up something like a picture by Blake, with the factual world spinning as a sort of glimmering steel ball and the spirit of value silently circling around it. The factual world Wittgenstein describes at the end of the Tractatus, the world outside which value lies, is the everyday world, which logic demarcates. It is this world the mystic looks back on once he has transcended it. Since God is transcendent,66 it follows that union is with god. In the Notebooks, Wittgenstein asks: 'What do I know about God and the purpose of life?' He answers: 'I know that this world exists ... That something about it is problematic, which we call its meaning. That this meaning does not lie in it but outside i t . . . The meaning of life, i.e. the meaning of the world, we can call God. To pray is to think about the meaning of life'.67 In this passage, 'in' and 'out' are indices. This use suggests that Wittgenstein draws a line between the factual world, the profane, and the spirit of value, the sacred. Although Wittgenstein does not talk about the world and God as profane and sacred, he secures God as sacred by, as it were, desacralizing that which is not God. God, all value, is wholly other than all the facts, the world.

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In this chapter, in addition to arguing that Wittgenstein was a mystic, not just a person with an air of mysticism about him, I argued that Wittgenstein's mystic uses logic to contemplate the world as a limited whole, which the mystic must do in order to have the mystical experience. As well, I argued that Wittgenstein's passages on solipsism do not indicate nature mysticism, as McGuinness suggests, but some form of theistic mysticism. According to my reading of those passages, the mystic realizes that what she does constitutes her world. The mystic limits her world by refraining from any speech that is not factual; the mystic has no special language, no special vocabulary, only the common language. She limits her world in order for it to be an object of contemplation, an object of which to be aware and by which to be awestruck - an awareness and awesomeness that causes the mystic to transcend the world, an orb of mere factuality, to unite with the orb of spirituality. Once the mystic has transcended the world, she has nothing left to say; thus silence. The central claim of this chapter is that in the Tractatus there is the notion of being limited to a common language. This notion leads us one step further to uncovering the relation of the logical to the religious in the Tractatus. If the meaning of religious and ethical expressions is the agreement in behaviour and the use of words in them, these uses are everyday uses and these words are everyday words. However, this sets up a dilemma: often words are used in religious and ethical expressions in ways that are not understandable in the common language; what are we to do with these uses? I take this up in the next chapter.

Chapter 4

Reconstructing meanings

The fundamental principle of the sceptical system is especially this, namely, to oppose every argument by one of equal weight, for it seems to us that in this way we finally reach the position where we have no dogmas. Sextus Empiricus [A] written composition on any subject must be to a large extent the creation of fancy . . . nothing worth serious attention has ever been written in prose or verse . . . lucidity and finality and serious importance are to be found only in words spoken by way of instruction or, to use a truer phrase, written on the soul of the hearer to enable him to learn about the right, the beautiful and the good. Socrates In Wittgenstein's letter to Ficker, quoted in full in Chapter 3, Wittgenstein writes that the Tractatus '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 one'. 1 The aim of the part presented in the pages of the Tractatus, Wittgenstein states in the Preface, 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.2 The subject of the presented part of the Tractatus is, in accordance with this aim, the sayable: factual discourse.

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The subject of the unwritten part is the unsayable, that which is on the other side of the limit of the sayable. In another letter to Ficker, Wittgenstein claims that, by being silent, he puts 'firmly into place' that about which 'many others today are babbling [das Schwefeln]'.3 This includes the propositions of religion, ethics, and aesthetics. He writes in the text of the book that these 'things cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is the mystical'.4 In the book, however, Wittgenstein writes about these things, and what he says about them, he claims in the Preface, is incontestably true. Russell, in his Introduction to the Tractatus, views this inconsistency with scepticism: Mr Wittgenstein manages to say a good deal about what cannot be said, thus suggesting to the sceptical reader that possibly there may be some loophole through a hierarchy of language, or by some other exit. The whole subject of ethics, for example, is placed by Mr Wittgenstein in the mystical, inexpressible region. Nevertheless he is capable of conveying his ethical opinions. His defence would be that what he calls the mystical can be shown, although it cannot be said. It may be that this defence is adequate, but, for my part, I confess that it leaves me with a certain sense of intellectual discomfort.5 Russell does not attempt to interpret Wittgenstein's notion that the unsayable shows forth in the sayable, the say/show distinction, even though he recognizes it as key to understanding the Tractatus. He cannot, however, be faulted. Interpreting the Tractatus is complicated. As has often been noted, Wittgenstein's tone is oracular and hieratic. For example, he opens with what reads like a creation myth: 'The world is everything that is the case. The world is the totality of facts, not things'.6 And it ends with a Zen-like koan: 'Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent'.7 Rarely does he argue, and when he does, he does not clearly explain the framework of assumptions and the terminology that make these arguments effective. The result is that the reader must have some acquaintance with the issues and a propensity to see them Wittgenstein's way. Indeed, Wittgenstein warns in the first two sentences

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of the Preface that the Tractatus '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'.8 Contra this assurance that it is not a textbook, Wittgenstein arranges the Tractatus like a textbook. It is structured by a numbering system, which follows the logical ordering of Russell and Whitehead's Principia Mathematical a system common to mathematical textbooks. Unlike textbooks, however, the purpose of this numbering system is, at first glance, unclear. In the only note in the book, footed on the first page of the text, Wittgenstein explains that: The decimal numbers assigned to the individual propositions indicate the logical importance of the propositions, the stress laid on them in my exposition. The propositions n.l, n.2, fl.3, etc. are comments on proposition no. n; the propositions n.ml, n.m2> etc. are comments on proposition no. n.m; and so on. There are seven whole-numbered propositions. According to this note, they are the propositions Wittgenstein wishes to stress. However, 4.0312 contains his 'fundamental idea', namely, 'that the "logical constraints" are not representatives; that there can be no representatives of the logic of facts'. This notion, that logical constants (negation and disjunction, for example) do not tell us anything about the truth or falsity of a proposition in general, is of general importance. Why, then, does Wittgenstein bury it deep within the book's numbering system? An answer lies in his own suggestion, made in correspondence with Ficker, that the Tractatus 'is strictly philosophical and at the same time literary'.10 The notion of the Tractatus as literature will no doubt shock those who have read its turbid prose. For Wittgenstein, though, a (truly) philosophical work is literature. The literary style of the Tractatus and the notion Russell recognized as key to understanding the Tractatus, the say/show distinction, are of a piece. The form of expression Wittgenstein employs, like a poem, attempts to convey something, yet this something defies the very prose that conveys it. This attempt to show the unsayable in the prose of the Tractatus is the literary style of the book. A general example of this style is

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one that baffles many readers: one proposition often refutes another. Wittgenstein intends this ironic self-refutation, B. F. McGuinness suggests, in order to question the very notion of straightforward philosophical propositions.11 Indeed, one purpose of the Tractatus is to turn its readers away from the notion of philosophy as a body of doctrine. Instead, philosophy is the activity of analysis. Everyday language, though in perfect logical order, depends upon enormously complicated, tacit conventions,12 and so, analysis is necessary to clarify it and to sharpen its boundaries.13 Analysis of the propositions of natural science sets limits upon natural science, to keep its propositions free of speculation.14 When turned on the propositions of philosophy, however, analysis uncovers nonsense, pseudo-propositions that appear to have sense but do not.15 Thus, while Wittgenstein is convinced that his work contains the final solution of the problem of factual discourse, and that its value in the first place consists in how well this is expressed, the very fact that he has the final solution enables him to say in the last sentence of the Preface: 'And if I am not mistaken in this belief, then the second thing in which the value of this work consists is that it shows how little is achieved when these problems are solved5. Showing the unimportance of philosophical propositions is part of the value of the unwritten half of the book. So Wittgenstein's placement of his fundamental idea in a commentary of a commentary of a commentary on a 'more important5 proposition, is a literary device: an attempt to force the reader to think about the value of this idea in particular, and the value of philosophical truth in general. Wittgenstein is not alone in decrying the written philosophical word. Scepticism, according to Sextus Empiricus, is a way of life, not a codified body of doctrine. If one follows Sextus5 philosophical method in the first epigraph, as Wittgenstein seems to, argument spirals into regress, until one gives up on the notion of accomplishing anything by means of argument, except, of course, to show the vacuity of argument. In the second epigraph, from the Phraedrus, Socrates argues that written works (including the Phraedrus) do not convey the lessons of true philosophy. Only in living speech are they found, and only on the soul are they written. Like Plato's resistance to his mentor's views (Plato certainly wrote much), however, Wittgenstein wrote the

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Tractatus and published it. Like Plato, he uses irony and other subtle literary devices to convey ideas he thought he could not put into prose. My concern in this chapter is to make patent one of those unsaid ideas about the philosophical enterprise Wittgenstein attempts to convey in the prose of the Tractatus. This idea is particularly relevant for contemporary philosophy of religion, which confronts the question of whether there is room for religious uses of language in today's real world of cultural relativism and religious pluralism, of scientific and historical understanding. The idea is that we are to look for the purpose of everyday living for which the original meanings of words were intended, and, if the present meanings do not cohere with that purpose, to find meanings that do. In Chapter 3,1 focused on the connection between the subject of the written part of the Tractatus, factual discourse, and the unwritten part, the mystical. They both share the same object, the world. Factual discourse represents the world. Religious experience, or more precisely for Wittgenstein, the mystical vision, is seeing the world as a whole. In order to have the mystical vision, Wittgenstein instructs his readers on the one hand not to burden factual discourse with more than it can bear, by limiting speech to the world, and on the other hand, to find in this limit the object of the mystical vision. If speech is limited to factual discourse, it is then possible to see, or as Wittgenstein says, to feel the world as a whole. This does not give up on words that have hitherto had nonfactual meanings, words like 'eternity'. Rather, we are to give them factual meanings; for example, the factual meaning for 'eternity' is, according to Wittgenstein, 'living in the present'. My argument is bipartite. The first part is to make sense of the apparent contradiction in the Tractatus that troubled Russell. If nonfactual prose, such as the prose of the Tractatus, is nonsense, then all the propositions of the Tractatus are nonsense. Wittgenstein admits this. At Tractatus 6.54, he calls them 'nonsensical'. My reading of the Tractatus on this issue bolsters my claim in Chapter 1 that we are to focus on what act is effected by the use of language in particular contexts and my claim in Chapter 2 that ordinary, factual language is the only language philosophers have at their disposal. According to my reading, some nonsense is important nonsense, and for a time we see it as important, even if in the end we come to see it, as we must, as just

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nonsense. My reading is guided by the principle, expressed in Chapter 1, that there is not a great discontinuity between the early and later Wittgenstein, but rather, a development in his thought across periods. The second part of the argument is by means of example. I show how philosophy is an activity that uncovers nonsense, which for a time was important, and, when the important nonsense is given up, offers locutions that make sense.

Non-sense or nonsense? James Conant 17 and Cora Diamond18 in separate essays have expressed dissatisfaction with commentators who advance the view that, in the Tractatus, Wittgenstein countenances the doctrine of nonsensical but significant language. In an essay in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Daniel Hutto and J. Lippitt 19 call Conant's and Diamond's interpretation the 'doctrinal interpretation'. They go on to argue in their paper for a different interpretation, which they call the 'developmental interpretation', an interpretation that takes seriously the Tractatus' account of factual language and takes seriously that there is something about the propositions of morality and religion that sets them apart from other kinds of nonsense. But first, on to the doctrinal interpretation. The doctrinal interpretation Representative of this interpretation are three commentators. They distinguish between nonsense (bad) and non-sense (good) to understand Wittgenstein's claim that some propositions are nonsensical but important. David Pears reads Wittgenstein as including religion, aesthetics, and ethics among non-sense, not just the propositions of the Tractatus. Pears explains: By refusing to locate the truths of religion and morality within factual discourse, [Wittgenstein] was not rejecting them, but trying to preserve them. They are non-sense because they lack factual sense.

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But to make this point about them is not to condemn them as unintelligible. It is to take the first step towards understanding them.20 According to Pears, to understand the truths of religion and morality is to understand that, although they cannot be said in factual discourse, they can be apprehended through it, though he gives no examples.21 G. E. M. Anscombe puts very clearly the idea that some sentences would be non-sense and would say something true if, per impossibile, they could be said. However, what they would say, if they could be said, is shown (or exhibited) in what can be said. The sentences that would be true if they could be said are distinguished from sentences that are attempts to contradict the truths that show through what can be said. For example, though nonsensical, the sentence * "Someone" is not the name of someone' is an attempt to say something correct. However, its contradiction,' "Someone" is the name of someone' is not correct, but is, Anscombe says, 'quite incoherent and confused; the demonstration that this is so completely destroys the idea that there is anything at all behind the would-be statement'.22 Peter Geach, in 'Saying and Showing in Frege and Wittgenstein', argues that Wittgenstein's idea that various things that cannot be said in factual discourse can be seen through it has its origins in the writings of Frege. Frege, according to Geach, held that there are logical category-distinctions that show themselves in a well-constructed formal language, but they cannot be properly said in everyday language. The logical distinction between concept and object, for example, can be shown in formal language, but the attempt to convey the distinction in everyday language results in sentences which themselves cannot be translated into formal language. These sentences are well formed but non-significant; they are non-sense. Their non-sensicality notwithstanding, they are necessary, for by them one learns to work in the formal language. According to Geach, Wittgenstein extended the logical doctrine of what shows forth but cannot be said to some of the utterances of religion, aesthetics and ethics. These utterances would serve the same sort of purpose as do in logic the elucidatory sentences that introduce us to the use of logical notation: namely,

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none of these sentences are syntactically well-formed and semantically supplied with [references] for the expressions employed, but they may nevertheless succeed in conveying insights.23 Religious and moral utterances that may not succeed in conveying insights are radically confused, and thus are plain nonsense. Examples of what Wittgenstein considered plain nonsense are, according to Geach, 'a once familiar style of would-be rational apologetic from Catholic priests . . . and Moore's Principia Ethica\24 Religious and moral utterances that are non-sense rather than plain nonsense are those that convey insights. In logic the insights gained from 'nonsignificant elucidatory sentences . . . can definitely be tested . . . by University examiners'; but what, Geach asks, 'is to be the test that ethical... or religious sentences have similarly conveyed . . . insight? So far as I can tell', he ponders, 'no answer is to be found in anything Wittgenstein wrote'. 25

The therapeutic interpretation Conant's and Diamond's exegesis typifies the therapeutic interpretation, so-named by Hutto and Lippitt. And both Gonant and Diamond write in opposition to the doctrinal interpretation. Conant objects to the doctrinal interpretation because, he argues, it is discontinuous with Wittgenstein's claim at Tractatus 4.112 that 'Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity'.26 Diamond, whom Conant follows, likewise argues that the doctrinal interpretation does not take 'seriously what Wittgenstein says about philosophy itself'.27 Those who read the Tractatus as containing 'numerous doctrines which Wittgenstein holds but cannot put into words' are, in Diamond's words, 'chickening out'. 28 Not to 'chicken out' as a reader of the Tractatus is to read it as not containing any doctrines at all, and more so, as disabusing the reader of the very notion of philosophical doctrines.29 Instead, Diamond suggests we read the Tractatus' gesture toward something external to language - something metaphysical - ironically.30 Central to her interpretation of the Tractatus is proposition 6.54, where Wittgenstein informs us that the propositions of the Tractatus are elucidatory in the following way:

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'anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them - as steps - to climb up beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.)' Thus, 'the notion of something true to reality but not sayably true', a notion she admits to be in the prose of the Tractatus, 'is to be used only with the awareness that it itself belongs to what has to be thrown away'. 31 This type of philosophy is therapeutic. The therapeutic interpretation intrigues (nearly entrances) and, at first glance, has much to recommend it. It does not read the Tractatus as radically different from the later Wittgenstein's work. Rather, the early Wittgenstein is as important and illuminating as the later. Both have a shared aim, although, as Conant writes, there is a 'significant discontinuity in the form of the investigation through which the aim is prosecuted'.32 This aim is to help the reader uncover nonsense.33 (A striking difference between the early and the later works, to be sure, is that the early insists on one method for uncovering nonsense, whereas the later uses a variety of methods.) In addition, the therapeutic interpretation provides a way of making sense of Wittgenstein's plea to 'throw away the ladder' without committing us to the contradiction Russell spoke of and which the doctrinal interpretation tries to undo without sacrificing what the Tractatus says about language. The key to Tractatus 6.54, Diamond thinks, is the phrase 'understands me' in the remark: 'anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them [my propositions] as nonsensical'. Setting much store on the nuance of these concluding words ('understands me' instead of something like 'understands these propositions'), and on the prefatory remark that the goal of the Tractatus is to set a limit to what cannot be said within sensible language, Diamond insists that Wittgenstein employed a strictly incorrect method so that we understand the utterer of nonsense.34 We understand by an imaginative activity, which is [a]n exercise of the capacity to enter into the taking of nonsense for sense, of the capacity to share imaginatively the inclination to think one is thinking something in it. If I could not as it were see your nonsense as sense, imaginatively let myself feel its attractiveness, I could not understand you.35

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This imaginative activity allows us to find within ourselves the possibility of meaning for the non-significant sentences others utter, thereby taking nonsense for sense.36 By imaginatively giving content (that is, sense) to the utterance that has none, we reach the aim of the Tractatus: to see the impossibility of 'traditional' philosophy by first letting readers 'imagine' they can find sense in the Tractatus' pseudopropositions and then pulling the rug out from under them, so they can see that the pseudo-propositions are mere nonsense.37 As Hutto and Lippitt point out, the therapeutic interpretation, however commendable, obscures some important aspects of the development of Wittgenstein's thought, and in so doing, obscures important ideas in the Tractatus. For example, the Diamond-Conant approach to the Tractatus cannot answer the question why Wittgenstein alters his later approach so substantially, while keeping the aims of both the early and later works the same. Why did he abandon the 'strictly incorrect' method for the later method of offering up reminders? Why does he write in the preface to the Investigations that 'since beginning to occupy myself with philosophy again, sixteen years ago, I have been forced to recognize grave mistakes in what I wrote in that first book'? What are these mistakes? To call them mistakes does not allow for the therapeutic interpretation's notion of the 'strictly incorrect' method: one views something as a mistake if one previously thought it was correct. In addition, by ruling out tout court the notion of important nonsense and instead arguing that for Wittgenstein all nonsense was mere nonsense - that is, 'garden variety gibberish'38 - the therapeutic interpretation neglects the places and ways in which nonsense is important in the Tractatus. There is a way round the Scylla of reading Tractatus 6.54 as involving a contradiction that has to be undone and the Charybdis of setting too much store on one phrase in it - 'understands me' - and a few prefatory remarks. Hutto and Lippitt's developmental interpretation Hutto and Lippitt propose a different, and convincing, interpretive strategy, the developmental interpretation. They say that if we read 6.54 as a problematic conclusion, not as a therapist's gentle nudge,

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we can see that, sixteen years after having written it, it stimulated Wittgenstein's later philosophy.39 This is to read Wittgenstein developmentally. According to Hutto and Lippitt's interpretation, the revocation of 6.54 is evidence of a tension that is genuinely present in the Tractatus. On the one hand, Wittgenstein inherited from Russell and Frege the notion that the essence of language is representative of facts.40 This, on the other hand, is at odds with his transcendentalism, inherited from Schopenhauer and which he so clearly expressed to Ficker. Hutto and Lippitt suggest that we read the Tractatus in light of this tension, which is the origin of its internal contradictions, its irony, its fighting against itself, as well as the source of its continuities and discontinuities with the later work.41 We see this tension at 4.1272. There, Wittgenstein attacks the notion that logical constants represent objects, and analyses the socalled propositions of logic as nonsensical. However, before this attack, at 4.126, he introduces the notion of formal concepts, to contrast with the notion of proper concepts: We can now talk about formal concepts, in the same sense that we speak of formal properties. (I introduce this expression in order to exhibit the source of the confusion between formal concepts and concepts proper, which pervades the whole of traditional logic.) When something falls under a formal concept as one of its objects, this cannot be expressed by means of a proposition. Instead it is shown in the very sign for this object. (A name shows that it signifies an object, a sign for a number that it signifies a number, etc.) Formal concepts cannot, in fact, be represented by means of a function, as concepts proper can. For their characteristics, formal properties, are not expressed by means of functions. The expression for a formal property is a feature of certain symbols. So the sign for the characteristic of a formal concept is a distinctive feature of all symbols whose meaning falls under the concept. So the expression for a formal concept is a prepositional variable in which this distinctive feature alone is constant.

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In short, employing the say/show distinction that the doctrinal interpretation relies on, Wittgenstein's thought here is that the nature of a formal concept cannot be expressed by propositions, which only picture states of affairs, but can only be shown in the way it is used. Thus 4.1272: Thus the variable name V is the proper sign for the pseudo-concept object.

Whenever the word 'object' ('thing', etc.) is correctly used, it is expressed in the conceptual notation by a variable name. For example, in the proposition, 'There are 2 objects which ..'., it is expressed by 6(vx,y) ...' Whenever it is used in a different way, that is as a concept-word, nonsensical, pseudo-propositions are the result. There is no 'thing' the pseudo-name 'object' (or variable, x) goes proxy for. No object with a Platonic-like character answers to the name 'object'. Rather, what we mean by the general term 'object' shows forth in the use we make of it as a variable. The same is true for the so-called propositions of logic; they are purely formal, and logical 'names' have no corresponding objects and logical 'propositions' picture no states of affairs. Most important, however, is that we come to awareness that the meaning of 'object' shows forth in its use as a variable and that logical 'propositions' are, strictly speaking, nonsensical, against the backdrop of the Tractatus account of factual language, which articulates the conditions for the probability of representation inherent in the way factual language operates. By holding in tension the notion of factual language as representational and the notion that through the prose of the Tractatus Wittgenstein tries to show what cannot be said, we can understand how his 'fundamental idea' at 4.0312 - that 'logical constants' are not representatives - amounts to the claim at 4.1272 that the pseudopropositions oflogic are non-representational.42 Throughout the Tractatus, Wittgenstein appeals to alternative notations to show us how symbolism can obscure what is important with regard to the nature of logic, namely, its purely formal character. He focuses us on the use of logical symbols to prevent us from mistakenly thinking of them as representational, which is the capacity of factual language alone.

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Reading 4.1276 and 4.1272 as Lippitt and Hutto do, whom I have followed here, allows us to see at work Wittgenstein's view of philosophy as a clarifying activity that aims to avoid nonsense. Read this way, there are not two different Wittgensteins with regard to approach, for we can see the later Wittgenstein's rejection of the idea that language has a general form as an expansion of the fundamental idea of the Tractatus. Logic cannot be forced into the box of factual language, so too the post- Tractatus Wittgenstein understands that language cannot be forced into the box of a general form. Incipiently present in the Tractatus is the later Wittgenstein's fully developed focus on the use of language in particular contexts, an idea in development in 'A Lecture on Ethics', as I have shown in Chapter 2. To further substantiate this claim that a sharp focus on the use of language in particular contexts illuminates all periods of Wittgenstein's philosophy, compare the approach of the later period - devising alternative language games as a philosophical tool - to the earlier period's use of truth tables.43 In the later period, Wittgenstein asks us to imagine situations in which other peoples use concepts differently, in order to illuminate the grammar of our language.44 In £ettel, as Hutto and Lippitt point out on page 274, Wittgenstein introduces the possibility of other language games that might surround the concept of pain. He imagines a tribe that employs two different concepts: 'one is applied where there is visible damage and is linked with tending, pity, etc. The other is used for stomach-ache for example, and is tied up with mockery of anyone who complains'.45 Accordingly, unless members of this tribe can locate some kind of outer bodily damage, they will not regard the person as experiencing what we in our language game would call pain. Their notion of what counts as pain cuts much more finely than our notion. As Wittgenstein puts it, they 'have concepts which cut across ours'. 46 This imaginative exercise forces us to realize that 'We are not analysing a phenomenon (e.g. a thought) but a concept (e.g. that of thinking), therefore the use of the word'.47 Likewise, as Lippitt and Hutto point out, in the Tractatus Wittgenstein uses the truth-tabular analysis to reveal the misleading nature of Russell's notation. The truth tables show that the signs for logical connectives do not correspond to anything. For instance, the so-called logical relation 'if p then q* can be represented by

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using the truth table as an alternative sign, as it were, thus removing the temptation to think that there are logical objects in some Platonic realm. 48 By reading the later period as an expansion of the scope of this Tractarian approach to include all forms of symbolism (for example, ordinary words like 'pain'), Lippitt and Hutto's developmental interpretation of the Tractatus is no less consistent with Wittgenstein's Tractarian remarks about the nature of the 'proper' philosophical method than the purely therapeutic reading. More important, Lippitt and Hutto's reading takes seriously, which the therapeutic interpretation cannot, Wittgenstein's remark to Ficker that his Tractarian views about ethics, aesthetics, and religion are central to the book, and his remarks in the Tractatus that ethics, aesthetics, and religion are transcendental - anything said about them is nonsensical. Although the propositions of ethics, aesthetics, and religion do not involve what is internal to language, as the propositions of logic do, they, like the propositions of logic, are nonsensical because they are non-representational; factual language cannot capture them. Understanding their nonsensicality trades on understanding the Tractatus account of factual language. Diamond is in an awkward position when it comes to accommodating the importance of ethics and religion within the Tractatus because she does not take the Tractatus account of factual language seriously. She attempts to get around the problem of countenancing ethical propositions as important nonsense by distinguishing the attractiveness of the ethical from other pieces of nonsense. 'If we read the Tractatus right', she writes the upshot of the book will be different in regard to the two sorts of utterers of nonsense. The attractiveness of philosophical sentences will disappear through the kind of self-understanding that the book aims to lead to in philosophers; the attractiveness of ethical sentences will not. But if we understand ourselves, ourselves the utterers of ethical nonsense, we shall not come out with ethical sentences under the illusion that we are talking sense.49 If, however, all nonsense is the same - mere gibberish - how can one bit of nonsense be more attractive? We should treat ethical cases, she

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responds, as 'cases of understanding a person as saying in his heart something that makes no sense, [as] something which we have the imaginative resources to grasp as attractive where that imaginative capacity is tied to our own capacities as moral agents5.50 However, this leads us to ask why nonsense in an ethical context affects us in a way that nonsense in a non-ethical context does not. Following Lippitt and Hutto's developmental interpretation, I believe Wittgenstein was committed in the Tractatus to the idea that there were important forms of nonsense, the nonsense of morality and religion, as contrasted with the confused nonsense that arose with respect to logic. Both are nonsense because what they try to say cannot be said in factual language. However, as Wittgenstein's Tractarian conception of the essence of language faded, he no longer needed to regard certain arenas of discourse as nonsensical just because they lie outside the bounds of factual language. Their profundity and importance, nevertheless, remain, and logic, the transcendental basis of factual language in the Tractatus, is replaced by 'forms of life', which are 'given' and are the ground of our linguistic practices.51 A reading that does not take the Tractatus account of factual language seriously rules out this continuity. More important, it is only against the background of a reading that takes the Tractatus view of language seriously that we can begin to make sense of the idea that there is something about the propositions of morality and religion, though nonsensical, that sets them apart from other kinds of nonsense. The therapeutic interpretation is not all wrong: its continuity thesis is important. However, in its strongest form, it does not allow us to understand the development of Wittgenstein's thought. When, however, we consider the links and breaks between the early and later writings, it becomes clear that it is a mistake to think that all Wittgenstein regards as nonsensical in the Tractatus can be treated alike. The task that befalls me now is to apply Lippitt and Hutto's developmental interpretation to a passage in the Tractatus that is an example of not mere gibberish but important nonsense. This is difficult. For, to substantiate this interpretation, the passage must be an instance of important nonsense, while an instance of uncovering it as nonsense. It must be an attempt to rid us of the notion of philosophical doctrines and theses, and in it must be the germ of the idea that for the

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meaning of words we are to look at their specific use. Tractatus 6.4312 is that passage. The issue it takes up - a religious issue - is the immortality of the soul.

A case of important nonsense E. V. Thomas interprets Wittgenstein as rejecting the belief that the self survives the body: Wittgenstein says in the Tractatus that the idea of surviving death presents us with a problem: if this life is only meaningful in terms of another, what is it that makes that other life meaningful? In TLP 6.4312 we are told that the idea of temporality of the human soul fails to accomplish the purpose for which it has always been intended. cIs not this eternal life itself as much of a riddle as our present life?' He opts . . . for an acceptance of the end of the self at death.52 Tractatus 6.4312 reads: Not only is there no guarantee of the temporal immortality of the human soul, that is to say of its eternal survival after death; but, in any case, this assumption completely fails to accomplish the purpose for which it has always been intended. Or is some riddle solved by my surviving for ever? Is not this eternal life itself as much of a riddle as our present life? Thomas' reading rightly attempts to point out a particular instance when Wittgenstein does not proffer a doctrine, but a way of living that enables a person to continue through despair and hopelessness. However, by suggesting that at Tractatus 6.4312 Wittgenstein espouses the finality of death, he reads Wittgenstein as talking about what is not on the other side of the limit of factual discourse. This reading fails to take seriously the limit of factual discourse, and thereby willy-nilly attributes to Wittgenstein the doctrine of 'the finality of death'. In addition, he does not set 6.4312 within the context of

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Wittgenstein's biography as seen through his pre-Tractatusjournals, a context that sheds light on Wittgenstein's attempt in 6.4312 to uncover nonsense. At 6.4312, pace Thomas, Wittgenstein illumines the question of the survival of the soul as a pseudo-question. It is a pseudo-question because any answer to it would transgress the limit of factual discourse and result in incoherent and confused speech. The problem of whether there is a soul, or a self, distinct from the body, and if so, whether it survives the body, confronted Wittgenstein during the First World War. In August 1914, while on a ship in the Vistula in Russia just behind the front lines of battle, he prayed to God that he should not 'lose himself, a concern far more important than and different from staying alive.03 A few weeks later, he exhorted himself, 'Wenn es mit mir jetzt zu Ende geht, so moge ich einen guten Tod sterben, eingedenk meiner selbst. Moge ich mich nie selbst verlieren\ What-

ever happened to his body in battle was an issue of indifference; whatever happened to his self, however, was not. Nearly a year after being on the ship, Wittgenstein wrote Ficker a letter, from which it is apparent that Ficker had reported to Wittgenstein some 'sad news'. Wittgenstein replied: I understand your sad news all too well. You are living, as it were, in the dark and have not found the saving word. And . . . I . . . should offer some advice . . . . Are you acquainted with Tolstoi's [sic] The Gospel in Brief? At its time [that is, when Wittgenstein was on the Russian front], this book virtually kept me alive.55 Specifically, Tolstoy's Gospel had allowed Wittgenstein to live the feeling of 'absolute safety' that he had had while watching the play Die Kreuzelscheiber some years earlier,56 the same feeling that he reported years later in 'A Lecture on Ethics', the feeling that whatever happened to his body, nothing could happen to him, to his self.57 When Wittgenstein speaks of 'the self in the Tractatus he is not speaking about what he calls the 'human soul'. Philosophy, he writes, treats not of'the human soul, with which psychology deals', but of the metaphysical subject.58 As we saw in Chapter 2, in the Tractatus Wittgenstein equates the self to the metaphysical subject in the propositions on solipsism, and that, although he does not espouse

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'traditional' solipsism, to the extent that it is true, its truth shows forth in what the solipsist says.59 The truth, as I argued in Chapter 3, is that we cannot view or talk about what lies on the other side of the limit of the world. We also cannot talk about what is not on the other side of the limit, for to exclude something from the other side of the limit would presume a view of what is on the other side. 60 To read Tractatus 6.4312 as a contradiction of the notion of life after death, as Thomas does, is to say both that Wittgenstein peered on the other side of the limit and saw that death is final, and that the contradiction of the notion of life after death, the finality of death, is true. If one cannot do the former, one cannot do the latter. The appropriate question to guide exegesis of 6.4312 is: what is the purpose of the doctrine of eternal life? We find Wittgenstein's answer in passages in the Notebooks and in Geheime Tagebiicher, passages that not only predate 6.4312 but also in which Wittgenstein works out that purpose for himself in a way that succeeds. On 16 May 1916, Wittgenstein exhorts himself in Geheime Tagebucher to be content.61 To be content is to live completely in the present. 'Whoever lives in the present', he journals in the Notebooks, 'lives without fear and hope'. 62 So-called contentment that comes from hope of an afterlife is not true contentment, for the future hope is but an escape from present circumstances. The content person accepts present circumstances, even if they may include, for example, the possibility of falling in battle. If we remember that Wittgenstein was in the foxholes of the Great War witnessing death all around and contemplating his own, this 8 July 1916 entry in the Notebooks sheds light on Tractatus 6.4312: CI am either happy or unhappy . . . A man who is happy must have no fear. Not even in the face of death. Only a man who lives not in time but in the present is happy. For life in the present there is no death. Death is not an event in life. It is not a fact of the world'. 63 Living in the present falsifies the dilemma of whether to fear a Judgement Day or to hope for eternal bliss,64 and does away with the question of whether the purpose of life is in the life to come: 'The man . . . fulfilling the purpose of existence . . . no longer needs to have any purpose except to live'. 65 Then even death, which 'is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death', 66 is beyond the limits of the language of the present - of, that is, factual discourse - and anything

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said about it, beside being nonsensical, will detract from the purpose of life: living in the present, being content with the present. To afford its adherents purpose in life was the intended purpose of the doctrine of the immortality of the soul. However, since it relies on the other side of the limit of factual discourse, it is inexpressible in factual discourse. The doctrine of the immortality of the soul, like all nonsense, is not about present circumstances, which are all the facts. It therefore keeps one from living in the present, and so, we must expose it as such and not speak it, lest we not live in the present. To say this about nonsense is, according to the Tractatus, itself nonsense, but nonsense of which Geach speaks: important nonsense. Important nonsense undoes reliance on nonsense that detracts from living in the present. Important nonsense, like the passages of the Tractatus, which set out the limit of factual discourse, is nonetheless nonsense, and like unimportant nonsense, we must give it up. We cannot give it up, however, until we take it seriously, until, that is, we are able to live completely and without remainder in the present, the cardinal indication of which is that all we say is factual. (A test of whether some piece of nonsense is important nonsense is whether the nonsense spurs one to speak only factual discourse. Unimportant nonsense invariably spurs one to say something metaphysical - garden-variety gibberish.) So while I agree with the therapeutic interpretation's idea that the Tractatus aims to uncover all nonsense, whether gibberish or important, as nonsense, there is a fundamental difference between gibberish, which detracts from living, and important nonsense, which helps us to live. Tractatus 6.4312 is important nonsense, in that it attempts to showr the doctrine of the immortality of the soul as gibberish: nothing about the doctrine of the immortality of the soul moves us to live in the present, to keep our speech factual. Tractatus 6.4311 shows us how to keep our speech factual. There, Wittgenstein says that cIf we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present'. Let me explain. The correct method, Wittgenstein writes in the penultimate proposition of the Tractatus, is to demonstrate to someone who says something outside the bounds of the factual that he fails 'to give a meaning to certain signs in his propositions'. This is reminiscent of Tractatus 5.4733: 'And

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I say that any possible proposition is legitimately constructed, and if it has no sense, that can only be because we have failed to give a meaning to some of its constituents'. Wittgenstein decries not legitimately constructed propositions that contain within them, for example, the word 'eternity', but the meaningless use of the word 'eternity'. If, however, we use 'eternity' to mean 'timelessness', or as Wittgenstein says in the Notebooks, 'non-temporality', it causes us to view the world as outside time, that is, as a limited whole. As I expounded in Chapter 3, this limits our speech to the factual. To limit our speech to the factual is to ensure that no circumstances, no facts, in life are without meaning. If all facts have meaning, then one lives in the present without remainder, which is what the meaningless use of the word 'eternity' had intended to achieve. Giving meaning to the facts is an act in life. It is, in its own way, a sort of speech act. It is, to borrow a phrase from Diamond, 'a sort of piety in action, in life'. Indeed, the very act of giving meaningless words meaning is to live with purpose. To judge from remarks Wittgenstein makes in Culture and Value, it is to live religiously: A confession has to be a part of your life.68 Religion says: Do this!69 Language - I want to say - is a refinement, 'in the beginning was the deed'.70 Words are deeds.71 Christianity is not a doctrine, not, I mean, a theory about what has happened and will happen to the human soul, but a description of something that actually takes place in human life.

In 6.4312, Wittgenstein is not telling us that there is no soul that survives death. He could not say this, lest he violate his own strictures, for such a statement is not factual: has anyone been able to say factually that the soul does not survive death? He is, however, trying to show us the limits of religious doctrinal language.73 That limit, as I construe it, is that whatever we say must keep our speech in the present.

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Reconstructing the meanings of words There is here a lesson for theology. Theology must reconstruct the meanings of words that have lost the ability to keep us in the present. These new meanings, to break out of metaphysical nonsensicality, must describe what actually takes place in human life. I offer one contemporary example. Gordon Kaufman, in 'On Thinking of God as Serendipitous Creativity',74 argues that the intended purpose for the word 'God' is 'to call attention to that reality believed to be of greatest importance for ongoing human life'. The notion of creativity, 'the coming into being of the new7, is central to that purpose. In earlier cultures, Kaufman notes, when the earth and its immediate environment were regarded as all that existed, God was understandably thought of as 'an almighty personal being who existed before and apart from the universe and by all-powerful fiat brought it into being'. However, what we have come to understand about how the universe evolved throws this concept of God into question: As far as we know, personal agential beings - the model on the basis of which this idea of God was constructed - did not exist, and could not have existed, before billions of years of cosmic evolution of a very specific sort, and then further billions of years of biological evolution also of a very specific sort, had transpired.75 This conflict between evolution and the traditional notion of God as an agential being notwithstanding, the concept of God is important to ongoing human life; it is 'the only proper object of worship, devotion, faith, the only proper ultimate point of reference for all our valuing'. We therefore are not to give up on the use of the word 'God' altogether. Rather, Kaufman says, we are to give it a reconstructed meaning that takes into account what we know about evolution. The reconstructed meaning Kaufman proposes is 'serendipitous creativity'. The notion of creativity on the one hand preserves the idea of God as the ultimate point of reference, even if we think of creativity as that exemplified in the evolution of life. The notion of serendipity on the other hand (1) emphasizes the profound mystery at the root of

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this creativity, which no matter how detailed the theory, evolution does not overcome; (2) ceases to reify person-agent metaphors; and (3) encapsulates the reality that apart from the evolution of life, we would not exist at all. Understood as 'serendipitous creativity', the word 'God' becomes a necessary and essential part of the description of what actually takes place in human life.76 The sense of this reconstructed meaning shows in the course of a person's life, in his or her reactions, values, actions, hopes, and fears. For example, the reconstructed meaning encourages equal treatment of genders, in that God is no longer seen as exclusively male, much less as anthropomorphic at all. With emphasis on the creative process, it encourages the just treatment of other humans, of other animals, of the earth and the environment, indeed, of all creation. This reconstructed meaning, in essence, forces agreement in behaviour and use. In the first section of this chapter, I argued that the style of the Tractatus is part of Wittgenstein's attempt to shun philosophical doctrines and theses. This style shows what cannot properly be said: there are no philosophical doctrines. This cannot be said properly because it cannot be put into factual discourse, and by the lights of the Tractatus, if anything can be said it has to be said in factual discourse. If for the moment we hold in abeyance what we know from the later Wittgenstein and take seriously this straight]acket view of language, we see that even what the Tractatus attempts to tell us cannot be told: a philosopher cannot put into prose the conviction that true philosophy is an activity that uncovers undue reliance on doctrines. This and other such convictions, however, show forth in how one uses words; this is the force of these convictions. We find these convictions in living speech, and to borrow Socrates' phrase, we write them in our souls - not in books. In that the Tractatus is an attempt to show such, it cannot but fail. It is, after all, a book. This failure, though, is key. With it in mind, we can now say what the relation of the logical to the religious is in the Tractatus. What Wittgenstein wrote in the book is, by its own account of logic, nonsensical, but it is non-sense, in that it conveys the insights necessary for the mystic to transcend the world. This insight is: if the mystic is to transcend the world, all speech must be factual, and so the mystic

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must give up non-sense, no matter how illuminating. One way for the mystic to keep speech factual is to reconstruct the meanings of words so that they have factual meanings, and the Tractarian test whether they have factual meanings is if by them one can live purposively. In other words, the reconstruction of meanings of words must force agreement between behaviour and use. The other way to keep speech factual is to be silent, and there is in this silence an agreement in behaviour and use (or in this case, non-use). At the end of this chapter, I extended this idea of reconstructing meanings of words to the problem in theology of what to do with words that fail to have meaning in a modern context. I used Kaufman's reconstruction of God as an example. In the next chapter, I develop the idea of theology as a constructive process more fully, with the aid of Wittgenstein's 'Lectures . . . on Religious Belief.

Chapter 5

Slipping into a way of life

How words are understood is not told by words alone. (Theology.) Wittgenstein1 In this chapter I attempt to apply more fully the notion of force to theology. This application causes us to think of theology not just as being about words and systems and essays on method. Theology, with this application, is about giving an account of a way of life from within that way of life, 'to display', as Miroslav Volf so poignantly says, 'its coherence and its beauty5.2 By looking at this application, through exposition of Wittgenstein's lectures on religious belief, I come to a guiding principle for theology in a twenty-first-century context: theologians ought to keep in the fore the question of what effects the usage of words will have on everyday life, with the aim of picturing theologically and displaying in vivo a coherent and beautiful way of life that anyone, sceptic or believer, would want to live. Theologians, that is, must give words used in theology force, human (and humane) force; they must attempt to effect agreement between how believers speak and their very actions, thus keeping theology in the common language of the public square, in which theology has the power to transform everyday living. This living aspect of theology Wittgenstein brought up in a conversation with Waismann on 17 December 1930. 'Is speech essential for religion?' Wittgenstein went on: 'I can quite well imagine a religion in which there are no doctrines, and hence nothing is said. Obviously the essence of religion can have nothing to do with the fact that speech occurs - or rather: if speech does occur, this itself is a component of religious behaviour and not a theory.'3 The lectures on religious belief contrast speech about belief that remains just at that level, speech alone, with the everyday kind of speech that is connected with

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the behaviour of belief. What emerges in these lectures is not a theological method so much as a call to theologians to present a way of life that is, to use Volf's terms, coherent and beautiful, a way of life that one might like to slip into. Wittgenstein begins the lectures by comparing how the word 'belief is used in non-religious and religious contexts. In religious contexts, the word seems to be used in a different way from non-religious contexts; it is used in a way that can only make sense within the whole religious way of life, and evaluating the status of the believer's claims is not possible. In such a situation, the grounds or criteria the believer expresses as central might be evaluated, or the 'states of mind' or the types of'understanding' between the believer in the Last Judgement and the non-believer might be compared. The comparison will indeed show a difference. However, this 'difference might not show up at all in any explanation of the meaning'. 4 The meaning of belief (and non-belief) is wrapped up in the pictures believers (and non-believers) use. For example, when comparing one way of life with another, the way of life in which someone believes that his illness is a punishment with the way of life in which someone does not believe that at all, Wittgenstein says that these are not opposite beliefs. These two people, rather, think differently, say different things; they operate from different pictures. The purpose of the expression of religious belief is to try to express belief through a picture of the way of life from within which one operates. In some cases, one might successfully 'translate my very words into a picture'. 5 An image of the Last Judgement or the Resurrection, for example, may be 'constantly in the foreground' for some people when they express these beliefs.6 Or, when speaking of God as the creator of humanity, one may imagine the Creator as painted by Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel.7 At the very end of the lectures on religious belief, Wittgenstein states clearly the import of these pictures: the 'whole weighf of the expressions of belief 'may be in the picture'. 8 Following the say/show distinction of the Tractatus, that which religious uses of language attempts to say showsforth in pictures. This notion of a picture, however, is not without its problems, which Wittgenstein recognized by the time of these lectures, which,

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according to Cyril Barrett, he gave during the summer of 1938.9 He explores these problems in a long excursion on thinking about a brother in a far-off land (America, in the case Wittgenstein uses in the lectures), namely, of holding that the thought inside one's head is a picture of the brother. One problem that arises is the question of 'what method of projection' is used.10 The person who thinks of his thought of his brother as a picture of his brother is 'absolutely certain' that his thought is a picture of his brother. This certitude suggests 'a projection relation': 'rays projecting from my words to my brother in America'. However, Wittgenstein states clearly, 'there is not a projection relation at all'.11 If a picture is not a projection, then what is it? It is the whole way of life, the context of the way of life.12 The picture of my brother in a faroff land is a technique, Wittgenstein goes on to say in the lectures. A simple and short explanation will not do, for a technique is complex, and often the only way of elucidating the technique is to practise it, to show someone else how to get on with the technique, like showing a child how to do sums. (See pp. 52,53 above on Anscombe's translation ofAufgabe.) To get on doing sums, to apply any technique, we cannot operate 'entirely independent of what came before and after' the particular sum we are doing. To do sums correctly, we need to know the basics of arithmetic. The same is true when using pictures to express religious belief: we have to refer to 'the technique of ... usage'.13 We have to know what comes before and what goes after the expression of religious belief; we have to know the whole technique. We have to pay attention to the religious person's words and actions, and the consequences the person draws from the force of them, force being the agreement between those words and the actions that attend them. Indeed in the lectures on religious belief, Wittgenstein emphasizes action.14 This action draws meaning from its situation within a way of life - from, that is, its context. This is true, too, of theology. John Clayton makes clear how theology cannot be abstracted from the context that gives it meaning. In 'Religions, Reasons and Gods',15 Clayton shows how to make sense of theistic proofs, not as proofs outside the context of the lives of everyday believers, but as proofs within that context; and within that context, these proofs have more of an explanatory, not a justificatory, function.

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We often need to provide context not only for (say) debates between traditions but also for those within a tradition. Clayton, for instance, details roles of theistic proofs in two Islamic groups, the scholastic philosophers and the scholastic theologians. The different sorts of proofs they preferred arose out of their differences regarding the proper function of the proofs within the religious way of life. The scholastic theologians, who approached the proofs from the standpoint of the primacy of faith and the 'unique authority of the Qur'an', chose 'the proof from temporality alone' because, Clayton argues, it 'preserved their Qur'an-based belief in God as creator ex nihilo\ These scholastic theologians shunned the Aristotelian argument from contingency, which, because it encouraged a 'defective view of God', differed little 'from atheism, to which it would inevitably lead': a self-sufficient, eternal universe has no need for a God to sustain it causally. The 'over-riding concern' of the Islamic scholastic theologians, then 'was by means of rational argument to protect the Qur'anic doctrine of God as creator and sustainer of all that is'. For the scholastic theologians, faith led to rational reflection about the nature and existence of God as revealed in the Qur'an. The Islamic scholastic philosophers, on the other hand, held that 'only those doctrines which can be rationally demonstrated are finally worthy of belief..'. Thus, in order 'to construct on the basis of universally agreed principles an argument for the existence of an eternal God who acts as cause and sustainer of all that is', they suspended appeal to the authority of the Qur'an. This argument was consequent to affirming God's existence, not a prerequisite, as for the scholastic theologians. According to scholastic philosophers, 'God's causal priority over the world could be adequately protected without recourse to a doctrine of temporal creation', and so this led them to deviate from views taught in the Qur'an and in Muslim tradition. While the scholastic theologians used proofs to confirm traditional doctrine, the scholastic philosophers used them to correct or to reform traditional doctrine.16 Clayton's comparison of these two groups within Islam highlights the point that arguments for the existence of God serve a purpose in the piety of those who construct them. In the context of this piety, the proofs carry force - the use of words cohere with the acts to which

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these words are put; and we cannot understand them fully without consideration of this context: what came before and what went after; what, in other words, they were used for. Indeed, as Clayton writes in 'The Otherness of Anselm', 'To understand an argument is to understand what it is used to do'.17 In that essay, Clayton again provides the context necessary to understand Anselm's proof in the Proslogion. To understand that proof we must remember that when Anselm wrote it, he was a Benedictine monk at Bee. According to the Rule of Benedict, monks were to chant and meditate on the entire Psalter once a week. However, at Bee, the abbot demanded that monks chant and meditate upon the Psalter each day, and so Anselm would have chanted the passages in which the Fool, who plays so central a role in the argument, appears daily for as long as he was at Bee. He, then, would have encountered twice daily the Fool who said in his heart that God does not exist. In addition, the argument of the Proslogion came to Anselm, by his own report, 'when he was engaged in what he understood by "theology" ' - an activity of everyday life: prayer. If we couple this biographical awareness with the textual awareness that Anselm's proof is not directed apologetically to unbelievers outside the order, nor to heretics within the order, but as a guide to those in the community who wished to know God more deeply, then we can see that his argument uses reason contemplatively. Anselm constructs the argument 'in terms of a "believing reason"'. Clayton explains: 'Anselm seeks more profound understanding of God's being - "that you exist as we believe you exist and that you are what we believe you to be" - but still recognizes that such understanding can come only as a gift'.18 Clayton surmises: If the religious uses of argument I have been trying to elucidate in this essay are not uses with which we ourselves can identify, that may be because we do not identify with the kinds of activities with which those uses of argument were associated. Indeed, if theistic arguments no longer make sense to so many of us today, this may be because we no longer find it possible to participate fully in the forms of life in which they were once so firmly embedded. That, I say, rather than the reverse.

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It is not because they make no sense to us that we no longer participate, but because we do not participate, they no longer make sense. Understanding can often be gained more readily in doing than in thinking.19 Clayton situates these theistic proofs (the proofs of the Islamic philosophers and theologians and Anselm) in their public context. The lesson for theology and philosophy of religion is this: they cannot go on outside of the contexts of the everyday lives of believers, the context of practice, lest they be empty words, words with no force; for outside this context the words of theologians and philosophers of religion cannot carry force. In addition, only by situating theology and philosophy of religion within the context of everyday religion will we be able to evaluate whether it is a humane force that is effected by the practices. I agree with Kaufman that theology is not committed to an unchanging concept of God; it is - or ought to be - committed to a dynamic process of engagement and criticism in the common language of everyday life. For it is only this way that the practices of believers remain relevant. An example of keeping theology relevant is Fergus Kerr's Theology after Wittgenstein, in which he seeks to move theology away from the Cartesian view of the self. Although the origins of the Cartesian view of the self lay in theological concerns, it unwittingly sets up an insuperable dichotomy between us as subjects and others (God, for instance) as objects; because of their status as objects, we then have to represent to ourselves. Kerr undoes this dichotomy by keeping theology within the bounds of the human condition, namely, that of being embodied.20 For, according to Kerr, we find the most direct illumination about God in our human world - in what we say and do. It is 'only by listening to what we say about God . . . and to how what is said about God ties in with what we say and do in innumerable other connections, that we have any chance of understanding what we mean when we speak of God'.21 Indeed, we can conceive of all language, not just religious uses of language, as embodied.22 Linguistic practices intertwine with all other practices, and so in a sense they are embodied. As Kerr writes, 'it is our bodiliness that founds our being able, in principle, to learn

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any natural language on earth'. In a dualistic conception of the self, on the other hand, 'our bodies . . . get between us and prevent a meeting of the minds ...' If, however, there is to be mutual understanding, the human body is the foundation of it, 'with its manifold responsiveness and expressiveness5.23 One of these expressions is the embodied movement of dance, and Kerr goes on to suggest that theology is danced out by believers. This is apt, for it conjures up the image of theology as an everyday act. Other examples of theology as an everyday act exist. Volf's Free of Charge and Liz CarmichaePs Friendship: Interpreting Christian Love24 are

just two. They both have in common the central goal of explicating an embodied aspect of the Christian way of life, giving and forgiving in Volf's case and friendship in Carmichael's. They both do so in ways that consider how words used in the everyday lives of believers cohere with their acts. In cases of incoherence, Volf and Carmichael call us to change either how we use words or how we act. In addition, both aim to show how the aspects of the Christian way of life they explicate fit into a Christian way of life that is beautiful; more beautiful, that is, than not living that way of life. In essence, both free theological language from the bindings of technical books on theology,25 and reclaim it for the public sphere, where, in the common language, it has the power to transform the lives of everyday people. Indeed, the goal of a theology in the twenty-first century ought to be to present a way of life that is so coherent and so beautiful that it causes us to want to slip into it, to live it ourselves. In this short chapter, I applied to theology the notions of force, the common language, and the reconstruction of meanings I found woven together in the answer to the interpretive question in Wittgenstein scholarship with which I dealt in Chapters 1, 2 and 3. Through an brief exegesis of the 'Lectures . . . on Religious Belief, I argued that theology is an activity of understanding how believers communicate in a religious practice. This communication contributes to the ongoing practice itself; this is the notion of force as articulated in Chapter 1 but expanded to include all types of embodied communication. This theology is an activity itself that aims to distinguish better from worse communication. This evaluation is concerned with what

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are the ethical, the humane, effects of the practices. While this evaluation cannot abstract practices from their contexts - we understand them through the ways of life of which they are a part - the goal of this evaluation is to make successive practices interesting, relevant, and appropriate to all creation. This is the notion of a common language of Chapter 3, but expanded to include not just the common language spoken now but all human communication now and in the future. The guiding principle for this evaluation is to discern in what ways communication can be reconstructed to change positively the ongoing actions of which they are a part; this is the notion of reconstruction of Chapter 4, but again, expanded to include all forms of communication. The Wittgensteinian theology I have sketched places practice at the heart of the evaluative activity of the process of reconstruction. This ongoing evaluative activity is a way to keep the practices of religion meaningful - coherent and beautiful - in our present time and in times to come. This is the importance of the contribution of this book to Wittgensteinian theology.

Chapter 6

Conclusion

Much has been written on Wittgenstein's later philosophy and religion, but little has been written on his early work and religion. What has been written about it fails to consider the difficult question of what is the relation of his discussions of logic to his discussions of religion and ethics. I addressed this question directly. In my answer to this interpretive question lies my answer to another question I confronted along the way: what are we to do with religious uses of words that no longer have meaning vis-a-vis the modern world we live in. This is a critical question in philosophy of religion. The question of what is the relation of the logical to the ethical and the religious in Wittgenstein's early work was difficult to tackle, for answering it required untying a knot of Wittgenstein's own making. Wittgenstein says little about ethics and religion in the Tractatus, and, according to his own view of what is meaningful, what he says about them is nonsense; but he writes in a cryptic letter to a friend that they are the whole point of the book. This is the knot: how can they be the whole point of the book if they are nonsense? Wittgenstein's ethics lecture was a useful place to begin untying this knot, for in it he says more about religion and ethics. In Chapter 2, which was exposition of the ethics lecture, I found that Wittgenstein's view of religious uses of language is neither expressivist nor verificationist. If religious statements only express attitudes toward the world, they would simply be statements that describe facts, for it is a fact that so-and-so's attitude toward the world is such-and-such at a given time. However, religious and ethical statements are not factual statements. The view of language Wittgenstein operates with in the ethics lecture is his Tractarian view: factual statements alone possess sense. Religious statements do not have sense; nonetheless, Wittgenstein lectures make sense to those who use

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them. This distinction, though insightful, left the knot tightly in place, but it revealed which thread to tug on to go about undoing it: the thread of the question of whence the sense of religious and ethical statements. I considered Swinburne's word-verificationism as a possible answer to the question of whence the sense of religious and ethical statements. His theory is that if a word used in a non-factual statement is used meaningfully in an understandable and grammatically alike factual statement, its use in the non-factual statement can be verified. I agreed with Swinburne that words used in unverifiable statements do not necessarily mean something different from what they mean in verifiable statements. However, the use of a word in a verifiable statement does not guarantee its meaningfulness in an unverifiable statement. Rather, the meaning of a word in an unverifiable statement consists in what acts are performed by its use. That quality of a word that determines what act it is a part of is its force. The force of a word used in an unverifiable statement and the force of the same word used in a verifiable statement may differ, because the uses to which they are put - the acts performed by them in the way of life of which they are a part - may differ. It is, then, to the agreement between the way of life, as evidenced in the speaker's behaviour, and the use of words that we are to look to for the meaningfulness of religious and ethical statements. This is not to suggest that religious ways of life are isolated from the multiplicities of ways of life. We cannot a priori separate religious language from the varieties of discourses. Although full appreciation of religious uses of words depends on deep acquaintances with the practices of that way of life, religious ways of life also depend on a background of core beliefs shared among all ways of life. Words used in a religious way of life, if they are to have any meaning, must also carry force in other ways of life shared in society. My interpretation of Wittgenstein's ethics lecture in Chapter 2 disclosed the thread we were to follow to find an answer to the problem in philosophy of religion of what to do with words that no longer have meaning: the notion of force. In addition, it told us what threads not to tug on to undo the knot of the relation between the religious and ethical and the logical in the Tractatus (expressivism

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and verificationism), and gave us a clue as to how to go about unravelling it. In the lecture, Wittgenstein said that he knew something about the ultimate meaning of life, but he could not put this into words; this suggested mysticism, which was the clue followed in the next chapter. Indeed, in Chapter 3, following McGuinness, I argued that Wittgenstein was a mystic. However, his mysticism was not nature mysticism, as McGuinness argues, but some sort of theistic mysticism. In Chapter 3, I sketched his mysticism along these lines. Wittgenstein's inquiry into logic was to demarcate the world, outside which God is and in which God is not revealed. By constraining himself to factual discourse, Wittgenstein's mystic limits the world, which allows him to transcend it to unite with God. This separation between the world and God is the separation between fact and value. Facts do not have value; they are cold and hard. Ethics and religion have value, and so there are no ethical facts, no religious facts. Consequently, the vocabulary of factual discourse is the only vocabulary, yet it is sufficient for the mystic to unite with God. A special vocabulary is unnecessary. In Chapter 3,1 uncovered more of the thread that answers the question of what to do with religious uses of words whose meanings fail given modern understandings: as philosophers and theologians, we do not have a special vocabulary, only the common language of society. This constraint prevents us from offering remedies that would have no truth in the other discourses that share the common language. While Chapters 2 and 3 focused on the knot of the relation of the logical to the ethical and religious in the Tractatus from the sense (or meaning) side, Chapter 4 attacked it from the nonsense side by examining the issue of what is nonsense in the Tractatus. I followed Anscombe, Geach and Pears by interpreting Wittgenstein as holding to a distinction between nonsense, which is incoherent and confused speech, and non-sense, which is speech that attempts to convey important insights but lies outside that which possesses sense. I went beyond their interpretation, however, to argue that we must assess whether non-sense has force. Non-sense has force if it moves one to live purposively in the present - that is, to keep speech factual. In addition, I argued that non-sense, though important, is to be given up because it is not factual discourse, and, as we saw in Chapter 3, factual discourse

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is what Wittgenstein's mystic must constrain himself to if he is to have mystical union with God. In this respect, then, I agreed with Anscombe, Geach and Pears' rival interpreters, Conant and Diamond, who argue that we are to give up nonsense, regardless of its type (nonsense or non-sense). However, I argued that we are to give it up only after it has accomplished its purpose of constraining us to factual discourse. I thus disagreed with Conant and Diamond, in that they do not take seriously the distinction explicit in the text of the Tractatus between factual discourse and speech that attempts to convey something meaningful but is not factual. By taking Wittgenstein seriously on both issues - that there is a distinction between nonsense and non-sense, and that nonsense, regardless of type, is to be given up - I can explain Wittgenstein's development in a way the rival interpretation taken alone cannot. My ability to account for this seriously intractable contradiction in the Tractatus comes from my view that the Tractatus is Wittgenstein's early stage of philosophy that he did not repudiate in toto but built upon in his later work. Indeed, he gave up untenable positions - for example, that factual discourse alone possesses sense and the separation between fact and value - but he also expanded important Tractarian ideas - for example, that philosophy seeks to uncover nonsense. More important, however, my interpretation of Wittgenstein's view of nonsense/non-sense unravelled the knot of the relation of the logical to the religious and ethical in the Tractatus, in which Wittgenstein views religious and ethical statements as non-sense, because they convey important insights. However, they are not factual discourse, and so they detract from the goal of the mystic only to speak factual discourse, so that the world can be limited and thereby transcended. Two options are open to the mystic: either to reconstruct words so that they have factual meanings, or to remain silent. Wittgenstein does both. He reconstructs the meaning of the word 'eternity', so that he means something factual, and, at the end of the Tractatus, he invokes silence. The penultimate proposition, in which Wittgenstein calls all but factual discourse nonsensical, is a plea to examine whether all one has to say is factual. The propositions of the Tractatus are entirely nonfactual, and so, they are non-sense, non-sense in that they convey the

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insight of how to limit the world and transcend it; and yet, because of their nonsensicality, in the final proposition of the Tractatus Wittgenstein changes his behaviour by invoking silence about that which is not factual. This silence, Wittgenstein said, is ethical. It is also religious: it is the silence of a mystic, who, using logic to transcend the bare facts of the world, unites with God. From my interpretation of Wittgenstein's notion of non-sense in Chapter 4, I was able to provide a full answer to the question in the philosophy of religion of what to do with words that no longer have meaning across all discourses in the common language. Following Wittgenstein's example, I suggested that we are to reconstruct the meanings of words so that by them we can perform acts that are meaningful - that is, so that they possess force - across all discourses in the common language. I offered Kaufman's reconstruction of the meaning of the term 'God' as an example. Given what we know about evolutionary biology, the traditional meaning of'God 5 , a person-agent, has difficulty carrying force in both theology and science. As a term that indicates the ultimate point of reference, however, it is too important to give up its employment altogether. Kaufman thus offers 'serendipitous creativity' as a reconstructed meaning. This meaning preserves the idea of God as an ultimate point of reference, but it ceases to reify person-agent metaphors that, given what we know about evolution, are now dead. It also forces speakers to act appropriately when in worship and everyday life they use the term. For example, the new meaning undoes sexism rooted in anthropomorphic understandings of God as Father. It encourages healthy treatment of other humans, of animals, of the earth and the environment - indeed, of all creation. It, in essence, forces agreement in behaviour and use. To focus on what behaviours are effected by the uses of words is to focus on the actions of everyday life. In Chapter 5, I argued that, in evaluating the meaning of religious uses of words, we must consider the whole of human communication - the activities of life engaged in by these words across the discourses of life. This frees theology from the confines of the religious way of life alone and places it in the open, where all people speak one language and where it has the power to transform all of everyday life. We are not to insulate religious uses of language. Instead, to understand religious uses of language

96

The Early Wittgenstein on Religion

fully - theistic arguments, in particular, I argued - we are to place these uses within the context of their origin, and analysis needs to take a back seat to the appreciation of the actions of which uses of words are part. The active nature of the religious uses of words is inherent in the notion of force. However, I brought it out more clearly in Chapter 5 through a reading of Wittgenstein's 'Lectures . . . on Religious Belief. In these lectures, Wittgenstein emphasizes the ongoing nature of practices; we act them out over time. This does not lead to a fixed notion of the meanings of words or rules for the meanings of words. Rather, we must continuously evaluate whether practices have force, for, as Wittgenstein remarks as late as 1950, ongoing practices give words their meaning. It is for this reason that I claimed that theology is to be action-oriented. Theology thus understood resists analytical reduction. It is, rather, an ongoing process of engagement and criticism, with the aim of making successive practices interesting, relevant, and appropriate to all creation. The emphasis on the active in the 1938 'Lectures . . . on Religious Belief is a development of the notion of force. The notion offeree is incipient in the Tractatus in that one does something - one acts - with non-sense. On the other hand, the non-sense of the Tractatus conveys insights by which one, in the case of mysticism, transcends the world, and on the other hand, by which one reconstructs the meaning of a word in order to live purposively. The notion of force is clear in the 1929 'A Lecture on Ethics', in which we are told that for the meaning of religious and ethical expressions we are to look at what commerce we conduct with them. In the 'Lectures . . . on Religious Belief and in later remarks, Wittgenstein develops this notion fully to suggest that the meaning of religious expressions is bound up in ongoing practice. This development strengthens my claim that Wittgenstein did not repudiate completely his early work, but built upon it. Wittgenstein's logical discussion in the Tractatus relates to his discussion of religion and ethics through his notions of force, the common language, and the reconstruction of meanings I adumbrated herein. The lesson for theology is that it must engage the common language in its modern context in a continual reconstructive process, with the aim of keeping successive practices relevant and interesting.

Notes

Preface Gordon Kaufman, 'Reading Wittgenstein: Notes for Constructive Theologians', The Journal ofReligion 79 (1999): 404-21.

1

Introduction

1. The most interesting and prolific commentator I have in mind is D. Z. Phillips, whose work I shall come to below. Other commentators include: Patrick Sherry (Religion, Truth and Language-Games [New York: Barnes and Noble, 1977]); Alan Keightley (Wittgenstein, Grammar and God [London: Epworth Press, 1976]); Dallas M. High (Language, Persons and Belief [New York: Oxford University Press, 1967]); William Hordern (Speaking of God [New York: Macmillan, 1964]); W. D. Hudson (Wittgenstein and Religious Belief New Studies in the Philosophy of Religion [New York: St Martin's Press, 1975]); John A. Hutchinson (Language and Faith [Philadelphia, PA: The Westminster Press, 1963]); Frederick Ferre (Language, Logic and God [Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1981]); and Ignace D'hert, OP (Wittgenstein's Relevancefor Theology, European University Papers, series 23; Theology Vol. 44 [Bern: Herbert Lang & Co., 1974]). The best work for understanding the relation of the religious to the philosophical in Wittgenstein's later work is Norman Malcom, Wittgenstein: A Religious Point of View?, ed. with a response by Peter Winch (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994). 2. Cora Diamond, 'Ethics, Imagination and the Method of Wittgenstein's Tractatus\ in Bilder der Philosophie: Reflexionen iiber das Bildiche und die Phantasie, ed.

Richard Heinrich and Helmuth Vetter (Vienna: Oldenbourg, 1991); Eli Friedlander, Signs of Sense: Reading Wittgenstein's Tractatus (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); this question, of course, is the central question of my dissertation: James Mark Lazenby, 'On the Nonsense of Religion: A Study of the Relation of Logic to Religion in Wittgenstein's Early Work with Implications for Theology and Philosophy of Religion' (PhD diss., Boston University, 2001).

98 3.

4.

5. 6. 7.

8.

9.

10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

Notes In personal conversation of 11 October 1998; also see his'Saying and Showing in Frege and Wittgenstein', in Essays on Wittgenstein in Honour ofG. H. von Wright, ed. Jaakko Hintikka, ActaPhilosophicaFennica 29 (1976): 54-70. Wittgenstein emphasized this point in an undated letter to Ludwig von Ficker, probably written in early November 1919 ('Letters to Ludwig von Ficker', ed. Allan Janik, in Wittgenstein: Sources and Perspectives, ed. C. G. Luckhardt [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979], 94-5). Peter M. S. Hacker, Insight and Illusion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975) ?83. 'Letters to Ludwig von Ficker', 94. Brian F. McGuinness, Wittgenstein, a Life: YoungLudwig (1889-1921) (Berkeley, GA: University of California Press, 1988), 299-300; Friedlander, Signs of Sense, 15. This older brother, Paul, lost his arm in the First World War. Ravel wrote for him the 'Concerto for the Left Hand', a rather difficult piece, whose basic charm, for me, is that it strengthens my left hand, as I am a right-handed pianist. 'Letters to Bertrand Russell', 22 June 1912, and 26 December 1912; and Appendix 1 in Notebooks 1914-1916, 2nd edn, ed. G. H. von Wright and G. E. M. Anscombe, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1979), 93-107. 'Notes Dictated to G. E. Moore in Norway', Appendix II, in Notebooks, 108-19; and Notebooks, 2e. Fergus Kerr, Theology after Wittgenstein, 2nd edn (London: SPCK, 1997), 193. Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty ofGenius (New York: The Free Press, 1990), 15. Monk, Duty of Genius, 18; Norman Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir, with biographical sketch by G. H. von Wright, 2nd edn with Wittgenstein's letters to Malcolm (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 18. Letters to Russell, Keynes, and Moore, 22 June 1912. Monk, Duty ofGenuis, 115-6; see the entries for May, June, and July 1916 in Geheime Tagebiicher 1914-1916, ed. W. Baum, with a foreword by H. Albert (Vienna: Turia & Kant, 1991). Rudolf Carnap, The Philosophy ofRudolfCarnap, ed. P. A. Schlipp (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1963), 27. Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir, William W. Bartley III, Wittgenstein, 2nd rev. edn (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1985); McGuinness, Wittgenstein, a Life. Monk, Duty of Genius, 25. Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin, Wittgenstein's Vienna (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1973), 168. Janik and Toulmin, Wittgenstein's Vienna, 168 and 48. TLP 1-1.1: 'The world is all the case. The world is the totality of facts, not things . . ' .

Notes

99

22. TLP 6.421. 23. Janik and Toulmin, Wittgenstein's Vienna, 197. 24. One problem, among others, with trying to determine, for instance, what was Wittgenstein's personal religion is illustrated by the disagreement on this point among those who knew him best. Malcolm says that Wittgenstein did not have a religious faith (Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir, 60). G. H. von Wright says: 'I do not know whether he can be said to have been a "religious" man in any but a trivial sense of the word. Certainly he did not have a Christian faith. But neither was his view of life un-Christian, pagan, as was Goethe's' (ibid., 18). G. E. M. Anscombe declared that nobody understood Wittgenstein's views on religion (Garth Hallet, A Companion to Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977], 426; see also G. E. M. Anscombe, 'Misinformation: What Wittgenstein Really Said5, The Tablet 203 [1954]: 373). M. O'.C. Drury records a twentyyear-long theological discussion with Wittgenstein, in which Wittgenstein displays what might be called deeply held religious convictions, in Recollections of Wittgenstein, ed. R. Rhees (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984). Finally, Fergus Kerr says (Theology after Wittgenstein, 193) that, though von Wright reports (Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir, 18) childhood discussions with Gretl relieved Wittgenstein of his faith, Gretl later (1958) demurred at von Wright's remark. 25. This is not, however, to ignore the biographers' important work, but to place a greater emphasis on the philosophical issues on which Wittgenstein worked, issues that most certainly arose in a specific philosophical milieu. See Peter Hylton's Russell, Idealism and the Emergence of Analytic Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990); P. M. S. Hacker's Wittgenstein's Place in Twentieth-Century Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996); and M. A. E. Dummett's Origins of Analytic Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994). 26. Frederick Sontag, Wittgenstein and the Mystical: Philosophy as an Ascetic Practice (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1995), 9; James C. Edwards, Ethics without Philosophy: Wittgenstein and the Moral Life (Tampa, FL: University of South Florida Press, 1985), 11-75; Michael Hodges, Transcendence and Wittgenstein's Tractatus (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1990); Phillip R. Shields, Logic and Sin in the Writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 10-51. 27. P. M. S. Hacker, 'Was He Trying to Whistle It?', in The Mew Wittgenstein, ed. Alice Crary and Rupert Read (London: Routledge, 2000), 356-60. 28. TLP, p. 4. 29. TLP 6.4311. 30. This notion of the reconstruction of meanings is not tantamount to Moore's scientific method. The Tractanian test is whether a reconstructed meaning carries force if Tractanian by it one can live in the present, and about this one

100

31. 32.

Notes can say that one either does or does not. In the end, the notion of force is about human behaviour. See D. Z. Phillips, The Problem of Evil andthe Problem of God (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2005). William P. Alston, Perceiving God: The Epistemology of Religious Experience (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991); John L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 2nd edn, ed. J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisa (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962); John Searle, Expression and Meaning: Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts (New York: Cambridge University Press. 1979); H. Paul Grice, Studies in the Way of Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989); Michael A. E. Dummett, Frege: Philosophy ofLanguage (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973).

2 The force of words 1. On the 'value-ladenness' in theory, including deduction, see Robert C. Neville's Normative Cultures (Albany, NY: State University Press of New York, 1995), 38-44. 2. LE, 37. On the scientific orientation of the Heretics Society, see Monk, Duty of Genius, 276. 3. G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica, rev. edn with a preface to the 2nd edn, ed. with an introduction by Thomas Baldwin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 4. Quoted in 'Editor's Introduction', ibid., xi. Peter Geach described the reaction of his father, Professor G. H. Geach, to Moore's Principia Ethica: The influence of Principia Ethica is an extraordinary phenomenon in the history of English philosophy. Cambridge men of that generation really thought (I remember my father continuing to think) that now for the first time in the history of philosophy ethics had been given a really rigorous foundation. This was Moore's claim . . . men like Russell, McTaggart, and Maynard Keynes accepted it (P. T. Geach, Truth, Love, and Immortality [London: Hutchinson, 1979], 174-5). 5. 6. 7. 8.

LE, 37. Moore, Principia Ethica, 35. Ibid., 54; cf. 192:' "Good" is the notion upon which all Ethics depends'. Ibid., 69, and 72-8. Moore uses 'states of things', an infelicitous expression; when trying to show the relation of Wittgenstein's 'A Lecture on Ethics' to Moore's Principia Ethica, I use 'states of affairs', except when quoting Moore. 9. Ibid., 232-6. 10. Ibid., 62. The locus classicus for the critique of Moore's analogy is M. Warnock, Ethics Since 1900, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), 16.

Notes 11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

37. 38. 39.

101

Moore, Prindpia Ethica, 17. Ibid., 14. Ibid., 9-93. The difficulties in Moore's account about what is and what is not natural cannot be gone into here; see Thomas Baldwin, G. E. Moore (London: Routledge, 1990), 86-100. Peter T. Geach, 'Good and Evil', in Theories ofEthics, Oxford Readings in Philosophy, ed. P. Foot (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967). Ibid., 71-2. LE,38. Note that in Moore's definition, the word 'good' is not used in both a relative and an absolute sense. LE,39. LE,38-9. Ibid., 39. Shields, Logic and Sin, 42. Quoted in Shields, Logic and Sin, 42, original emphasis; cf. LE, 40. LE, 40; emphasis added. LE, 39. Ibid., original emphasis. G. H. von Wright, 'Wittgenstein in Relation to his Times', in Wittgenstein and His Times, ed. B. F. McGuinness (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982), 108. Ibid. Alfred J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic, 2nd edn (London: Victor Gollancz, 1962). Indeed, perhaps one of Wittgenstein's goals in this lecture was to set the record straight that his views in the Tractatus were not the views ascribed to it by logical positivism. This claim is more than I can argue here; here, I only wish to argue that in the ethics lecture he differentiates himself from logical positivism. Ibid., 79. Ibid., 35. Ibid., 148. This double test is true too for F. Waismann in Chapter 16 of The Principles ofLinguistic Philosophy (New York: St Martin's Press, 1965). Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic, 60. Ibid., 129. Ibid., 120. A clear limitation of Ayer, and the general English philosophical scene at that time, is that he treats God as a simple being. This is an unsophisticated view of God, or at least of God-talk, since there is a long history in theology of talking about God in other ways, for instance, apophatically. Ibid. Ibid., 121. Ibid., 124.

102 40. 41. 42. 43.

44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

55.

56.

5 7. 58.

Notes Ibid., 125. See John Foster, Ayer (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985),passim. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic, 17. One can imagine the horror of a child when in the presence of his schoolmates his father questions him: 'Are you fagged out?' when in contemporary usage 'fagged' symbolizes 'homosexual' and in the older (defunct, as it were) usage, it symbolized 'tired'. On the point that usage has been shaped by philosophers with philosophically pregnant meanings, see Juliet Floyd and Burton Dreben, 'Tautology: How Not to Use a Word', Synthese 87 (1991): 23-49. Cf.TLP 4.063. See Geach, 'Saying and Showing in Frege and Wittgenstein', 54-70. See G. E. M. Anscombe, An Introduction to Wittgenstein's Tractatus (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1996), 150. LE, 40, original emphasis. Ibid., original emphasis. Ibid. Ibid., 42. Ibid. Ibid., 41. Ibid., 42, original emphasis. See Michael Dummett's 'What is a Theory of Meaning? (II)', in Truth and Meaning: Essays in Semantics, ed. G. Evans and J. McDowell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 67-137. Cf. G. E. M. Anscombe, 'The Reality of the Past', in Philosophical Analysis, ed. M. Black (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1950); Anscombe argues against the view that a theory of knowledge has anything to do with a theory of meaning. Reading Dummett is no easy go. At once he seems to argue for realism with regard to the past and then at another time for anti-realism. Whatever his viewpoint, however, the centrality of theory of knowledge in his view is hard to swallow. In 'Reality of the Past' (in M. A. E. Dummett, Truth and Other Enigmas [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978]), there is a kernel of what he develops later in The Logical Basis of Metaphysics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991); namely, that, for an adequate theory of truth, the law of double negation needs to be abolished. It is hard to understand how ~ ~ p is not the same as p, and why one cannot say so. 'What is a Theory of Meaning? (II)', 114; cf. Hans Reichenbach, 'The Verifiability of Meaning', in Readings in the Philosophy of Science, ed. H. Feigl and M. Brodbeck (New York; Appleton-Centure-Crofts, 1953) 97. ' Verificationism and Theories of Space-Time', in Space, Time and Causality, ed. R. Swinburne (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1983), 63-4. See Lawrence Sklar, 'Semantic Analogy', Philosophical Studies 38 (1980): 217— 34. Sklar elegantly makes the point that verificationist theories of meaning lack meaning-rules. Also: D. Z. Phillips makes this point about Swinburne in

Notes

103

The Problem of Evil and the Problem of God (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2005), though I had not read Phillips' book before I myself came to see that this is the problem that besets almost all Swinburne's work. 59. Gottlob Frege, The Foundations of Arithmetic, trans. J. L. Austin, 2nd rev. edn (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1980), x; cf. 73, 116. Though J. L. Austin's translation uses the word 'proposition', I opt for 'sentence' to distinguish between Frege's notion of an expression and Russell and Moore's notion that a proposition is the thought a sentence expresses. 60. Frege asks, in the Foundations, how numbers are to be given if we cannot have a mental image or idea of them. He answers: Since it is only in the context of a proposition that words have meaning, our problem becomes this: To define the sense of a proposition in which a number word occurs. That, obviously, leaves us still a very wide choice. But we have already settled that number words are to be understood as standing for self-subsistent objects. And that is enough to give us a class of propositions which must have a sense, namely those which express our recognition of a number as the same again. [The Foundations of Arithmetic, 73, emphasis added)

61. 62. 63.

64. 65.

Here, Frege is characterizing the general form of a sentence in which a certain type of word occurs. See Bertrand Russell, Principles of Mathematics, 2nd edn (New York: W. W. Norton, 1938), 35. Lewis Carroll, The Complete Works of Lewis Carroll (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1994), 1104-8. See Begriffsschrift, section 2 (in Frege and Godel: Two Fundamental Texts in Mathematical Logic, comp. J van Heijenoort [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970]); compare Begriffsschrift, section 2 with Anscombe, An Introduction to Wittgenstein's Tractatus, 113-21. LE, 43. It is important to say that ways of life form in a multiplicity of ways. Each has its distinctive way of going from an event, or some input (like a man growing a lion's head) to a belief (like looking at the input as a miracle or looking at it as a physical phenomenon that needs dissecting). In addition to this generative side, each way of life has an evaluative side. By applying its principles of assessment, a way of life corrects beliefs. However, each way oflife contains a core set of beliefs about what the physical and social worlds are like. Both particular physical facts (for example, about what distinguishes my house from my neighbour's) and general regularities (for example, what happens to water at zero degrees Celsius) hold across ways of life. Thus, ways of life are not isolated, and so, when evaluating the uses of words in the religious way of life, the multiplicity of ways of life must be kept in mind. While it is true that full appreciation of certain religious terms depends on the practice in that religious

104

66.

Notes way of life, the background of core beliefs builds up from the use of a number of different practices in different ways of life. In that this core is an integral part of all ways of life, appeal to this core in evaluating the meaningfulness of uses of words does not strictly count as going outside the context of the religious way of life that generated the use. Practice is, by its nature, social. Society is larger than a religious practice, and so terms like 'religious language' are infelicitous, for society uses a common language, enriched by certain distinctive (and often technical) terms and concepts. Establishing the uses of words in a religious way of life, or otherwise, is then thoroughly interwoven with other ways of life in the society in which the user is a member. Words used in a religious way of life, if we use a common language, must carry force in another way of life within the society. Thus, though Wittgenstein may have direct mystical experience of God, as I argue in the next chapter, the forces of words gained from this practice do not place him at variance from those formed in other practices. Because of indigenous factors (like mystical experience), religious uses of words are not judged solely by external confirmation. Even if there is no external support for the meaningfulness of a religious use of a word, there may be sufficient support within the way of life to support the use, and vice versa. Each use must be considered individually. This is the thrust of my argument with Swinburne: the context of use - what it contributes to the way of life and whether it coheres with other relevant ways of life shared within the society - is paramount. My acceptance of other ways of life as (possibly) relevant to the determination of the meaning of a word places me strangely in the same bed as Swinburne. I am forced to envisage a 'cumulative case' for religious belief, in which diverse considerations are combined into a structure of support that is stronger than any girder taken by itself. Recollections of Wittgenstein, 90-1. I render Augustine's passage: But you [God] are Goodness itself and need no good beside yourself... Who can teach another to understand this truth? What angel can teach it to an angel? What angel can teach it to a human? We must ask it of you, seek it in you; we must knock at your door. Then, only then will we receive what we ask and find what we seek; then the door will be opened.

67.

LE, 44.

3 A common language 1. 'Letters to Bertrand Russell 1912-1935', 82. 2. Rudolf Carnap, The Logical Structure ofthe World, with' Pseudoproblems in Philosophy', 2nd edn (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1967), 293.

Notes 3. 4. 5.

6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23.

24. 25.

105

Scheinprobleme and Auflau were both published in 1928 as separate volumes, and were combined as one book in 1961. Carnap, The Logical Structure of the World, x-xi. Rudolf Carnap, 'Intellectual Autobiography', in The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap, ed. Paul Arthur Schlipp, The Library of Living Philosophers series (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1963), 25. Ibid. Ibid., 26-7. Ibid., 26. Friedrich Waismann, Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle: Conversations Recorded by Friedrich Waismann, ed. B. F. McGuinness, trans. J. Schulte and B. McGuinness (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1979), 15. Garnap, 'Intellectual Autobiography', 27. Anscombe, An Introduction to Wittgenstein's Tractatus, 170. Bertrand Russell, 'Ludwig Wittgenstein', Mind60 (1951): 297. Anscombe, An Introduction to Wittgenstein's Tractatus, 170. Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays (Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1981), 16. B. F. McGuinness, 'The Mysticism of the Tractatus', The Philosophical Review 75 (1966): 306-7. McGuinness, 'The Mysticism of the Tractatus1, 324—5. Ibid., 327. Ibid., 321. Ibid. TLP 1-2.01. In the opening propositions, Wittgenstein seems to use 'objects' {Ding) and 'things' (Sache) interchangeably; at least there is no exegetical evidence that he contrasted the two. NB, 77. See Paul Holmer's 'Wittgenstein: "Saying" and "Showing" ', in Neue Z^itschriftfiir Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie 22 (1980): 222-35. While in general I agree with much of what Holmer argues in this justly famous essay, Holmer does not extend the notion of the mystical in the Tractatus to God and to religious and ethical statements, as I think it can be. Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose, trans. William Weaver (San Diego, CA: Harcourt, Brace and Janovich, 1983), 502. This leads to an interesting observation about the early Wittgenstein that Nancey Murphy pointed out to me in personal conversation: if reference is the source of meaning, then meaning in its ordinary sense drops out. This is why the problem of: x is red and Ox is not green is so devastating. It is a purely syntactic conception of knowledge. One may as well not have words because we know as much about the world with a set of propositions such as Fa-Ba as we do from the sentence 'Angela is either fat or bald'. Further study on this is

106

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63.

Notes necessary and pertinent, since I think it is a peculiar view of language persistent among linguists and analytic philosophers of some sort today. Bertrand Russell, 'Introduction to the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus', in Wittgenstein TLP, xviii. David F. Pears, The False Prison: A Study of the Development of Wittgenstein's Philosophy,\o\. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 164. Ibid., 157. McGuinness, 'The Mysticism of the Tractatus1,318-21. Pears, The False Prison, Vol. 1, 174. NB,82. NB, 83. Ibid., original emphasis. Ibid., 84. Ibid., 83, original emphasis. Ibid. Ibid., 84. TLP 6.373-6.374, original emphasis. TLP 6.423. TLP 6.423. Anscombe, An Introduction to Wittgenstein's Tractatus, 171. TLP 6.44. TLP 6.374. NB, 73. Ibid. Ibid.; cf. TLP 6.43. TLP 6.43. Ibid. TLP 6.44. NB, 73. TLP 6.43. NB, 73. Ibid. TLP 6.432. Max Black, A Companion to Wittgenstein's Tractatus (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1964), 370. NB, 74, original emphasis. TLP 6.421. 'Letters to Ludwig von Ficker', 94-5, original emphasis. Waismann, Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle, 68. TLP 6.421. TLP 6.521, 6.522, 6.53. NB, 53. NB, 79.

Notes 64. 65. 66. 67.

TLP 6.45; Ogden translation. TLP 6.53. TLP 6.432. NB,72-3.

4 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18.

19.

20. 21.

107

Reconstructing meanings

* Letters to Ludwig von Ficker', 94-5. TLP, p. 3. 'Letters to Ludwig von Ficker', 95, original emphasis. TLP 6.522, original emphasis. TLP, p.xxi. TLP 1-1.1; Ogden translation. TLP 7; Ogden translation. TLP, p. 3. TLP, p. 5. 'Letters to Ludwig von Ficker', 94. McGuinness, Wittgenstein, a Life, 301. See TLP 5.5563 and 4.002. See TLP 4.112. TLP 4.113 and 6.54. TLP 6.53. TLP, p. 4. James Gonant, 'Must We Show What We Cannot Say?', in The Senses ofStanley Cavell, ed. R. Fleming and M. Payne (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1989); 'Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, and Nonsense', in Pursuits ofReason, ed. T. Cohen, P. Guyer, and H. Putnam (Lubbock, TX: Texas Tech University Press, 1993); 'Putting Two and Two Together: Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein and the Point of View for Their Work as Authors', in Philosophy and the Grammar ofReligious Belief ed. T. Tessin and M. von der Ruhr (London: Macmillan, 1995). Cora Diamond, The Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy and the Mind (Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1991); 'Ethics, Imagination and the Method of Wittgenstein's Tractatus\ in Bilder derPhilosophie: ReflexionenuberdasBildicheunddiePhantasie, ed. Richard Heinrich and Helmuth Vetter (Vienna: Oldenbourg, 1991). Daniel Hutto and J. Lippitt, 'Making Sense of Nonsense: Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein', Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Vol. XCVIII, part 3 (1998): 263-86. David F. Pears, Wittgenstein, 2nd edn (London: Fontana, 1971), 57. Pears, Wittgenstein, 35.

108 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

34. 35. 36. 37.

Notes Anscombe, An Introduction to Wittgenstein's Tractatus, 162. Geach, 'Saying and Showing in Frege and Wittgenstein', 69. Ibid. Ibid., 70. Conant, 'Must We Show What We Cannot Say?', 248, see also 266. Diamond, The Realistic Spirit, 18. Ibid., 181-2, see also 194. Diamond's intimations of cowardliness (e.g. 'chickening out') on the part of those who read the Tractatus as Pears, Anscombe, and Geach do, are mild: She says that 'the attempt to take the Tractatus as metaphysical in a straightforward sense (as in Norman Malcolm's Nothing is Hidden) yields plain nonsense or plain self-contradictions' {The Realistic Spirit, 19). Of course, this becomes a doctrine more than a guiding principle when applied dogmatically. Ibid., 19, and 201. Ibid., 182. Conant, 'Must We Show What We Cannot Say?', 246. See PI §119: 'The results of philosophy are the uncovering of one or another piece of plain nonsense and of bumps that the understanding has got by running its head up against the limits of language. These bumps make us see the value of the discovery'. And PI §164: 'My aim is: to teach you to pass from a piece of disguised nonsense to something that is patent nonsense'. Diamond, 'Ethics', 65. Ibid., 68. Ibid., 81. John Koethe, The Continuity of Wittgenstein's Thought (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), describes Diamond's argument clearly: On her account, the Tractatus does not attempt to articulate a metaphysical and semantic theory of the nature of language . . . Wittgenstein's aim is to subject the notions of figuring in that ostensible articulation - states of affairs, objects, logical form, and so on - to 'a destablization from the inside' in an effort to demonstrate their literal incoherence. (37)

38. 39.

40. 41. 42.

See Conant, 'Must We Show What We Cannot Say?', 252, 253, 261; and Diamond, The Realistic Spirit, 106, 197, 112. See also Daniel Hutto's 'Was the Later Wittgenstein a Transcendentalist Idealist?', in Current Issues in Idealism, ed. P. Coates and D. Hutto (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1996), 147. Witness, for example, Tractatus 3.318: 'Like Frege and Russell I construe a proposition as a function of the expressions contained in it'. Lippitt and Hutto, 'Making Sense of Nonsense', 266-75. Cf. Donald Peterson, Wittgenstein's Early Philosophy: Three Sides of the Mirror (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), 47.

Notes 43. 44.

45.

46. 47.

48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55.

56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66.

109

Cf. Lippitt and Hutto, 'Making Sense of Nonsense', 273-4. Cf. PI §130: 'The language games are rather set up as objects of comparison which are meant to throw light on the facts of our language by way not only of similarities but also of dissimilarities'. Ludwig Wittgenstein, £ettel, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1967), §380. Z §379; see also Hutto, 'Was the Later Wittgenstein a Transcendental Idealist?5, 128-9. PI §383: On the uses of imaginary language games, see David Cerbone, 'Don't Look but Think: Imaginary Scenarios in Wittgenstein's Later Philosophy', Inquiry 37 (1994): 159-83. Lippitt and Hutto, 'Making Sense of Nonsense', 271-2. Diamond, 'Ethics', 74. Diamond, 'Ethics', 84. PI, p. 226. E. V. Thomas, 'Wittgenstein and Tolstoy: The Authentic Orientation', Religious Studies ?>?> (1997): 368-9. See Geheime Tagebiicher 1914-1916, ed. W. Baum (Vienna: Turia & Kant, 1992), 19. GT, 22: 'If I should reach my end now, may I die a good death, attending myself. May I never lose myself (my translation). 'Letters to Ludwig von Ficker', 91. Monk, in Duty of Genius, says this: '[The] spiritual sustenance that Wittgenstein derived from reading Tolstoy's Gospel "kept him alive", in the sense that it allowed him, as he put it, to lighten his external appearance, "so as to leave undisturbed my inner being"'. Monk does not cite the location of the latter half of this sentence, though it is not in the letter to Ficker as printed in Luckhardt. It may be from the unpublished Nachlass. Nonetheless, it makes my point more strongly, namely that Wittgenstein believed in an 'inner being' different from his 'external being' (116). As reported in Monk, Duty of Genius, 116. LE, 42. TLP 5.641. TLP 5.6-5.641. See Jaakko Hintikka, 'On Wittgenstein's "Solipsism"', Mind 67 (1958): 157-61. GT, 70. NB,76. NB, 74-5. Cf. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief ed. Cyril Barrett (Oxford: Blackwell, 1966). NB, 73. TLP 6.4311.

110 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73.

74. 75. 76.

Notes Diamond, 'Ethics', 63. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, ed. G. H. von Wright, trans. P. Winch (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 28; hereafter cited as CV. CV, 71. CV,31. CV,46. CV, 28; emphasis added; cf. CV, 31. For the notion that Wittgenstein was trying to show us the limits of religious doctrinal language, see J. M. Ferreira, 'The Point Outside the World: Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein on Nonsense, Paradox and Religion', Religious Studies 30 (1994): 29-44. Journal ofthe American Academy ofReligion 69 (2001): 409-26. Ibid., 410, original emphasis. Kaufman's use of Wittgenstein is, to be sure, the subject of another study, but that it is a legitimate study, consider that for Wittgenstein, 'God' is not to be thought of as a kind of agential person or being: 'The way you use the word "God" does not show whom you mean - but rather what you mean' (CV, 50).

5 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

Slipping into a way of life

Z§144. Free of Charge: Giving and Forgiving in a Culture Stripped of Grace: The Archbishop's Official2006Lent Book (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2005), 229. FriedrichWaismann, 'Notes on Talks with Wittgenstein', Philosophical Review 74 (1965): 16. LRB, 53. LRB, 67. LRB, 56. LRB, 63. LRB, 72. LRB,'Preface'. LRB, 66. LRB, 67. On the importance of context and theology, see Phillips, The Problem of Evil and the Problem ofGod, Chapter 3. LRB, 68. Witness: 'a number of ways of thinking and acting [which] crystallize together' (56); 'what way it is done, what he makes follow from it, what are the different circumstances under which he does it, etc'. (62); 'what sort of impression it gave him' (62); 'how he reacts, that he is in terror, etc'. (62); 'a rule, a practice, etc'. (67); 'what came before and after, the application'

Notes

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

111

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Index

'A Lecture on Ethics' 1,5, 96 interlocution with A. J. Ayer 21 -7 interlocution with G. E. Moore 15-21 interlocution with Richard Swinburne 30-4 propositions of religion and ethics 14-15 absolute expressions 19-21, 28-9, 34 Absolute Good, the 16-17, 35 absolute values 19-21, 34, 35 Abu'l Qusim al-Qushayri 42 aesthetics equated with ethics 6-7, 55 of fin de siecle Vienna

6, 7

as transcendental 73 Alston, William 12 Angelus Silesius 37 Anscombe, G. E. M. 10, 40, 52-3, 66 Anselm, St 86 Apostles, The (Cambridge conversazione group) 15 art as expression of orderliness of world, sub specie aeternitatis

Barrett, Cyril 85 Bartley III, William W. 5 belief 84-8 Benedictine monasticism 86 Black, Max 54 Blake, William 58 Bloomsbury group 15 Blumberg, A. E. 22 body, human 48,49, 76 Boltzmann, Ludwig 4, 6 Carmichael, Liz: Friendship: Interpreting Christian Love 89

Carnap, Rudolf 4,38-40,56 Carroll, Lewis 32 Christianity 79,89 see also theology Clayton, John 85-8 Conant, James 10, 67-8 contemplation 50~2,57-8 contentment 77-8 contextualism 31 -2 creative genius 5—6 creativity, serendipitous 12,80-1,95

50

as sole means to express meaning of dance 89 life 7 death and immortality 75—9 'definition in use' tautology 22-3, 25 see also aesthetics Augustine of Hippo, St: Confessions 35, Diamond, Cora viii, 1, 10, 67-8, 73, 79 Dostoevski, Fyodor Mikhailovich 37 56-7, 104n66 Dummett, Michael 13, 30, 102n55 Austin, J. L. 12 Ayer, A. J. 4 interlocution with 'A Lecture on Eco, Umberto: The Name of the Rose Ethics' 21-7 46 Language, Truth and Logic 15, 22-5 Edwards, James C. 7 treatment of God as a transcendent ego 48-9 being 23, 101 n36 see also self

Index elementary propositions 44, 45, 47 empirical reality 47 empirical verifiability and falsifiability 22, 23, 29-30 see also verificationism eternal life 41,75,77 see also immortality of the soul eternity, reconstructed meaning of 10-11,41,64,79 ethics 'A Lecture on Ethics' see 'A Lecture on Ethics' as enquiry into the right way of living 18-19 equated with aestheticism 6-7, 55 as a human, not scientific, inquiry 8-9, 15-21 as important nonsense 73-9 just treatment encouraged through reconstruction of term 'God' 81 view of Kiergegaard and Tolstoy 6 limits of language and 56 relationship to logic 1-2,9-11 sense of religious and ethical expressions 28-35 as supernatural/transcendental 27, 55,73 as 'the general enquiry into what is good' (Moore) 16,18 evil see good and evil evolution 80-1 existence of God 23-4, 85-8 experience mystical 41-2,45 needed to understand logic 45 facts non-existence of religious or ethical facts 10 objects and 43—4 value absent in/separated from 10, 20, 36, 54-8 world made of 43-4

121

factual discourse factual language as representational 70,71 important nonsense and 75-9 judgements of value and 19—21 limits of 75-6, 77-8 means of keeping to 10-11, 78-9, 82 as medium for seeing what cannot be said 66-7 of the mystic 36, 93-4 reconstruction of meaning of words for factual discourse 10—11,12, 41,64,79,80-2 separation between fact and value 10,20,36,54-8 tests of factual proposition 22, 82 see also verificationism in the Tractatus 43-6, 57-8,60, 63, 73-4, 78-9 fate 55 Feigl, Herbert 22 Ficker, Ludwig von: letters to 2,55-6, 57,60-1,70,76 force of words 14-35,96, 99n29; 104n65 theological applications of 83-9 formal concepts 70-2 Frege, Gottlob Die Grundgesetze der Arithmetik 3 Grundlagen der Arithmetik 3 1 - 2 ,

103n60 influence on Wittgenstein 70 Friedlander, Eli 1,2 Geach, Peter 1, 10, 18,66-7, 78 God Ayer's linguistic analysis of assertion 'God exists' 23-4 dependence on God or fate 55 inherited understanding of 11, 80 meaning of expressions concerning 28 as the meaning of life 54 mystical union with 10, 36,43, 58 proofs for the existence of 85-8

122

Index

language games 72 limitations shown through truth of solipsism 46-9 limited to facts 44, 58 see also factual discourse linguistic acts 32-4 nonsensical see nonsense proscription on metaphysical Hacker, P. M. S. 2 utterances 5, 8, 24, 38 see also Heidegger, Martin 56, 57 verificationism Hertz, Heinrich 4, 6 proscription on religious and ethical Hodges, Michael 7 discourse 10 see also religious Hutto, Daniel, and Lippitt, J. 67, discourse; verificationism 69-74 representational 70, 71 see also factual discourse immortality of the soul 75-9 and silence 11, 36-7 important nonsense 73-9 Wittgenstein's later development of intrinsic value 16 ideas concerning 72 irony 63, 64, 67-9, 70 Islam 86 'Lecture on Ethics, A' see 'A Lecture on Ethics' life James, William: Varieties of Religious after death 75-9 Experience 4 , 3 7 different ways of life 33-4, Janik, Allan and Toulmin, Stephen 6-7 103-4n65 eternal life 41,75,77 Kaufman, Gordon viii, 88 forms of life as ground of linguistic notion of God as serendipitous practices 74 creativity 12,80-1,95 meaning of see meaning of life Kerr, Fergus 88-9 mystic's vision of answer to problem Keynes, Maynard 15 of 46 Kierkegaard, Soren Aabye 6, 37, 56 performances of 12, 83-90, 96 Kraus, Karl 4 in the present 41, 77-8, 79, 99n29 purpose of 58, 77-8 language as the world 49, 53-4 analysis of 22-6, 63 logic common language 28-9, 36-59, confused nonsense of 70—2, 74 80-2, 83-9, 96 formal (non-representational) dialectic of making sense and being nature of propositions of nonsense in religious language 62,71 27,33 limit of language and 47—8 embodied 88-9 as mystic's tool 36, 44-6 ethics and the limits of 56 relationship to ethics and religion factual discourse see factual discourse 1-2,8-11 force of words see force of words role of elucidating the nature of the inadequacy for expressing aesthetic world 9,45-6 6 logical positivism 21-7 God [continued)

reconstruction of term 12, 80-1, 95 value and fact related to 10, 36 good and evil 53, 55 goodness 16-19,35 Grice, Paul 12

Index Mach, Ernst 21 Malcolm, Norman 5 Mauthner, Fritz 4 McGuinness, Brian F. 2, 5,9, 36, 41-2, 63 meaning act of giving meaning 79 determined by force of words in life of user 28-35 determined by the will 53-4 of life see meaning of life meaninglessness of metaphysical statements 5, 23-4, 38, 58 see also nonsense of names applied to objects 45 reconstruction of meaning of words for factual discourse 10-11,12, 41,64,79,80-2 the sense of religious and ethical expressions 28-35,66-7, 96 Swinburne's word-verification theory 30-2, 34, 92 as use 12-13,22-3,30-2 of the world 58 meaning of life art as sole means to express 7 ethics as enquiry into 18-19, 35 God as 54 immortality and 75 prayer and 58 metaphysics proscription on metaphysical utterances 5,8, 24, 38 see also verificationism rej ected by Russell 41 self as metaphysical subject 46-9 Michelangelo 84 minds, existence of other 23, 24-5 Monk, Ray 5-6, 7 Moore, G. E. 1,3,5,56 interlocution with' A Lecture on Ethics' 15-21 PrincipiaEthica 8-9, 14, 15-18, 21, 67,100n4

123

morality 57 important nonsense of 74 see also ethics

Morrell, Lady Ottoline, letter from Russell 37-8 mysticism logic as the tool of the mystic 36, 44-6 mystical union 10, 36,43, 52, 58 need for silence about the mystical 36-7, 57 nonsense of mystical talk (Ayer) 24 restraint from non-factual discourse 46,59,81-2,93-4 Russell on 41 transcendence of the world 9-10, 95 Wittgenstein as a mystic 37-43 naming of objects 26,44, 45, 71 naturalistic fallacy 17 nature mysticism 41-2 nonsense as conveyor of insight 10, 11, 66—7, 94-5 debate on nature of nonsense of Tractatus 10,64-79 developmental interpretation of nonsensical teachings of Tractatus 69-79

dialectic of making sense and being nonsense in religious language 27,33 doctrinal interpretation of nonsensical teachings of Tractatus 65-7 exposed by verificationism 22—3 important nonsense 73-9 limits of language and inevitability of 56-7 of mystical talk (Ayer) 24 therapeutic interpretation of nonsensical teachings of Tractatus 67-9, 73-4, 78

124

Index

Notebooks (journals) 3-4, 45, 49, 50, 51,53-4 on eternal life 77 on eternity as non-temporality 79 on the meaning of life 58 on two senses of being the world 55 on work of examining nature of the world 57 number theory (Frege) 31-2,103n60 objects contemplation of 51-2 contextual meaning of 31,33 denial of Platonic-like objects 71,73 facts and 43-4 presupposition of existence of 45 as pseudo-concepts expressed by variable names 71 Ogden, C. K. 5 past, propositions concerning the 29-30 Pears, David 10, 48, 49, 65-6 philosophy as activity of analysis 63, 67, 72, 81 scepticism concerning 63-4,69,81 therapeutic 67-9 philosophy of religion 88 reconstruction of meaning of words for use in meaningful acts 10-11,12,41,64,79,80-2 see also theology physics 6 piety, as context for theistic proofs 86 Plato 63 denial of Platonic-like objects 71, 73 prayer 4, 58, 76, 86 purpose of life 58, 77-8 Qur'an 86

religion as act of giving meaning 79 everyday religion as context of theology 64,87-9 important nonsense of 74 relationship to logic 1-2, 8-11 speech and 83-4 see also religious discourse transcendental nature of 73 Wittgenstein's personal religion 4, 58,76,99n23, 109n55 religious discourse Ayer'sviewof 23-4,26-7 dialectic of making sense and being nonsense 27,33 expressed through pictures from within a way of life 84-5 and the force of words 26-9, 34-5, 96, 104n65 limits of doctrinal language 79 reconstruction of meaning of words for factual discourse 10-11,12, 41,64,79,80-2 sense of religious and ethical expressions 28-35, 66-7, 96 Wittgenstein's denial of verificationism's applicability to 26-7, 28-9 see also theology Rule of Benedict

86

Russell, Bertrand 5, 15, 21 comments on Wittgenstein's discussion of solipsism 48 influence on Wittgenstein 70 Introduction to the Tractatus 61 letter to Lady Ottoline Morrell about Wittgenstein's mysticism 37-8 on mysticism 41 obituary of Wittgenstein 40 The Principles of Mathematics

3

theory of definite descriptions 23 Wittgenstein's truth-tabular analysis of notation of 72-3

Ramsey, Frank 5 reconstruction of meanings 10—11, 12, 41,64,79,80-2,80-2 test of carrying force for living in the safety, feelings and expressions of present 99n29 28-9, 76

Index Schlick, Moritz 4, 39-40 Schopenhauer, Arthur 4, 40, 70 Searlejohn 12 self dualistic conception of 89 as the limit of the world 46-9 as metaphysical subject 46-9, 76 that survives the body 75—9 Sextus Empiricus 63 Shields, Phillip R. 7, 20 silence 2, 59,82, 94-5 need for silence about the mystical 36-7, 57 on what cannot be spoken 11,61 Sistine Chapel 84 Socrates 63 solipsism 46-9,76-7 Sontag, Frederick 7 soul, immortality of 75-9 space 51-2,54 Strachey, Lytton 15 sub specie aeternitatis view of world

50

contemplation as means of achieving 50-2 Swinburne, Richard 15, 92 interlocution with 'A Lecture on Ethics' 30-4 symbolism assignment of names in Tractatus 26 in developmental interpretation of Tractatus

73

early journal writings on 3 formal character of logic obscured by 71 tautology and 22-3, 25 use of signs in statements about the supernatural 27 Tagore, Rabindranath 5, 40 tautology 22-3,25 theism Ayer's linguistic analysis of assertion 'God exists' 23-4 theistic mysticism 42

125

theology lack of special vocabulary for 58 life's performances and 12, 83-90, 96 reconstruction of meaning of words 10-11,12,41,64,79, 80-2 situated within everyday religion 64,87-9 theistic proofs 85—8 therapeutic philosophy 67-9 thinking as a constitutive act 49-50 Thomas, E. V. 75-6, 77 time 41,51-2,54 Tolstoy, Count Leo Nikolayevich: The Gospel in Brief 4, 6, 37, 76 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

on aesthetics and ethics 6-7 on assigning names 26 bifurcation and relation between logic and ethics/religion 1-2, 8-11 see also factual discourse; nonsense continuity with later thought 72-4, 94 developmental interpretation of nonsensical teachings 69-79 difficulties of interpretation 61-2 doctrinal interpretation of nonsensical teachings 65-7 factual discourse 43-6, 57-8, 60, 63, 73-4, 78-9 fundamental idea that logical constraints are not representatives 62, 71 on giving reference to signs 26 impression on Russell 37 influence on Carnap 38-40 literary style 2, 62-3 mysticism in 40-3, 46, 52~3 nonsense of 10, 64-79, 94-5 see also nonsense philosophy shown to be activity of analysis 63 the presented and the unsayable parts 55-6,60-1,63

126

Index

will 52-4,57 Wittgenstein, Gretl (Ludwig's sister) proscription on metaphysical 4 utterances 5,8 Wittgenstein's early life and role of logic 9 influences 2-5 Russell's uneasiness over the saying Wittgenstein's works what cannot be said 61 'A Lecture on Ethics' see'A Lecture say/show distinction in 46, 61, on Ethics' 66-7,71 background on interpretation of silence invoked by 36-7, 95 early works 5-8 on solipsism 46-9 Culture and Value 79 structure 2,62 Geheime Tagebucher 77 therapeutic interpretation of journals see Notebooks nonsensical teachings 67—9, lectures on religious belief 84-5, 73-4, 78 on truth-conditions of propositions 96 letters 2, 37-8, 55-6, 57, 60-1, 70, 25-6 76 Vienna Circle's interest in 5 on the will 52-3,54 Philosophical Investigations 69 Wittgenstein's stress on importance of Tractatus see Tractatus the unwritten part 55-6, 61 Logico -Philosophicus truth-conditions of propositions 25—6, Zettel 72 29-33 wonderment 28-9 see also verificationism word-verification theory truth tables 72-3 (Swinburne) 30-2, 34, 92 world value, theory of 16-17, 19-20 acceptance of 46, 55, 57 separation between fact and value connection with the will 52-4 10, 20, 36, 54-8 constituted by thinking 49-50 verificationism factual and spiritual orbs 54-8 A.J.Ayer 21-7 as life 49, 53-4 Rudolf Garnap 38 limits changeable by will 57 and the sense of religious expressions looking at the factual world from the 28-35 outside 58 Vienna Circle 4-5, 21-2,35 made of facts 43-4 Wittgenstein's meetings with mystical view of 42-3 39-40, 56 renunciation of 53 see also Ayer, A. J. self as the limit of the world 46—9 Volf, Miroslav 83? 84, 89 transcendence of 9—10, 95 von Wright, G. H. see Wright, Georg viewed sub specie aeternitatis 50-2 Henrik von Wright, Georg Henrik von 21,22 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus {continued)

Waismann, Frederich 4, 56, 83 Weininger, Otto 4, 6

Zen

7