Religion and Wittgenstein's Legacy

Mario von der Ruhr, D.Z. Phillips

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351905022
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Wittgenstein was one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century. In this collection, distinguished Wittgenstein scholars examine his legacy for the philosophy of religion by examining key areas of his work: Wittgenstein's Tractatus; Frazer's 'Golden Bough'; and the implications of his later philosophy for the understanding of religion. Assessments are also provided of the philosophical and theological reception of his work. The collection provides an invaluable resource for graduate and undergraduate teaching of Wittgenstein in relation to religion.

PART ONE
THE PROBLEM OF ‘THE HIGHER’
IN
WITTGENSTEIN’S TRACTATUS

Chapter 1
The Problem of ‘The Higher’ in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus

Piergiorgio Donatelli

I: Sense and Nonsense

Wittgenstein is interested in the Tractatus in drawing a contrast between how things are in the world and their significance from the point of view of the higher.¹ The difficulty in understanding the book’s teaching with regards to ethics concerns how we understand this contrast. In order to understand what Wittgenstein wants to say when he writes that the higher is nothing that we can express, we need to attend to what Wittgenstein says sense and nonsense are.² I am here following the lead of Cora Diamond. She has written that if we take an ‘austere’ view of nonsense – a view according to which nonsense is the only thing that Wittgenstein in the Tractatus says nonsense can be, namely ‘mere nonsense’ – we should then be able to see what he means when he writes that ethics cannot be expressed and that there are no ethical propositions.³ Wittgenstein is arguing that what someone who speaks with an ethical intention wants to say is from that point of view simply nonsense. The difficulty in understanding the Tractatus on ethics lies in being clear on this. There is nothing in language that shows our ethical involvement with things. But this means that what has ethical significance for us, the fact that things may appear morally interesting or disturbing, is not something that we have to look for in the proposition or beside the proposition – as most interpretations have done in very different ways – but in our involvement with propositions. The point may also be expressed by saying that anything can become ethically active for us; any talk can express an ethical intention, because what makes it ethical does not reside in any of its internal features but in our ethical use of such language.

Professor Diamond has connected this point with the idea that ethical thought, in the sense in which the Tractatus treats it, does not have a subject matter of its own. There is nothing we can say about what will count as ethical in advance of our being able to draw the requisite contrast, and this requires our being able to enter the speaker’s imaginative intention; there is no possibility of a prior demarcation of ethical talk from other kinds of talk, apart from our being able to understand what it is to invest such talk with an ethical intention. To see this is to see how the two standard readings that have been offered of the Tractatus with regard to ethics – positivist (emotivist) and ineffability readings, as James Conant has called them⁴ –are deeply misguided. They both seek to give content to ethical talk by tracing it to certain independently specifiable features of language: features that pertain to its psychological function (emotivism) or to its ‘deep’ logical nature (ineffability readings). But if we overcome the temptation to look for the mark of the ethical in language itself, then the idea of drawing the contrast between the ethical and the non-ethical will appear as something which is always dependent upon our being able to distinguish sense from nonsense. It will cease to seem to be a contrast that can be drawn within the realm of sense, because it does not concern language, but it concerns us and our possible intentions in wanting to reach for certain words. Among these intentions, as Diamond has written lucidly, there is one ‘that would (though [the speaker] himself may not be aware of this) be frustrated by his sentence’s making sense’.⁵ This also connects ethics with the goal of the Tractatus as a whole.⁶ Being able to draw this contrast, to pick out the ethical, is connected to the sort of self-understanding which the Tractatus as a whole aims to bring its reader. The difficulty in being clear about what this contrast marks is of the same sort as the one that a speaker finds herself in in being clear about the distinction between sense and nonsense.⁷

The contrast between ordinary and ethical ways of speaking is therefore for the Tractatus a contrast between sense and a sort of nonsense, where such contrast is only available to be drawn from the point of view of a speaker’s intentional use of nonsense. There is no contrast to draw at the level of meaningful discourse: at that level all we can say is that ‘[a]ll propositions are of equal value’ (TLP 6.4). Nor can the contrast be marked by aligning side by side meaningful discourse and a kind of discourse which has an extra-logical ingredient added onto it, as has been proposed by emotivist readers of the Tractatus. This fails to respect something which the Tractatus was intended to make clear: that from the point of view of the engager in ethics there does appear to be a meaningful content to her talk – and the emotivist cannot account for this fact at all. An appreciation of the failure of the emotivist reading of the Tractatus gives rise to the opposite temptation to think that, if the would-be engager in ethics does seem to have a content in view, then the contrast must be between a clear sense openly in view and a hidden sense that requires one to see beyond or behind the proposition. And this might seem to account for something that Wittgenstein was always interested in respecting, a difference between what is superficial and what has depth.⁸ But this line of thought is also deeply off track, insofar as it appeals to something that the Tractatus is explicitly concerned to overcome: the illusion that there is a sense behind nonsense, that the limit which separates sense from nonsense can be seen from both sides. We need instead to take seriously Wittgenstein’s statement that there is nothing in a proposition that can express the higher. Thus the contrast can be seen only from the point of view of such a speaker of nonsense, as one which opposes meaningful talk about something with the same talk put to a use that makes it morally interesting.

This is a very difficult contrast to make out, not because it is extraordinary or exotic in any way – it is as ordinary as the fact that, by uttering some words, we may succeed in meaning something or we may fail to mean anything and realize that we have said nothing – but because it is difficult to command a clear view of it. There is a difficulty in seeing what this contrast is, and the main interpretations of the Tractatus have inadvertently shown this by exploring two opposite temptations regarding the inexpressibility of ethics. There is thus a further difficulty, which is actually a part of the same problem. An understanding of this contrast requires one to be able to see differences – between sense and failure of sense – which make themselves manifest in our capacity to overcome confusions about what we ordinarily say. So an understanding of this contrast requires that we see how the Tractatus can be used in the way Cora Diamond has suggested: as a possible instrument of illumination which can be put to work in many areas of discourse.⁹ Some of the things we want to do with language may become clear to us by applying the teaching of the Tractatus to them. Diamond does this by attending to kinds of talk that she finds in literature, in novels and poetry and various kinds of prose, and seeing how the author’s intention can become transparent by understanding these sorts of discourse in the light of the sort of contrast that the Tractatus wants to make clear. It is in this connection that I want to mention a further difficulty. The difficulty has to do in general with this potentially fruitful task of applying the Tractatus as an instrument of illumination. Something we need to do in following through on this task is to take notice of the variety of language-uses that, from the point of view of even early Wittgenstein’s work, should all be seen as belonging to the expressive powers of linguistic signs. (This is also connected to the question of the development of Wittgenstein’s philosophy and of how this relates to a change in his ethics. Cora Diamond has also written about this but I will not touch on this topic.¹⁰) So we need to be aware of the variety of contrasts we should be prepared to countenance as conceptual achievements of some sort and, on the other hand, of contrasts that would be missed if we tried to understand them from within the realm of our conceptual possibilities – precisely because the latter bring in that sort of imaginative entertaining of nonsense which is characterized by the Tractatus as the mark for an ethical attitude.

There is the possibility that what might appear at first sight to be the kind of contrast Wittgenstein is concerned with in the Tractatus when he distinguishes between how things are in the world and the point of view of the higher should be understood to be a very different sort of contrast from that which it first appeared to be: one the description of which may be exhausted by attending to how a certain department of language works, without bringing into view the spirit in which such language is used. Diamond mentions different examples of talk that might illustrate this spirit. So I want to try to show the difficulty in seeing the kind of contrast that is drawn there: how there are cases the description of which may incline us to see them either as an exercise of the expressive powers of the proposition – as a talk of a certain sort – or differently, as Diamond has written, as a way of ‘cutting such talk off from ordinary talk about what goes on, not giving it entry there’.¹¹ I find a possible tension in Diamond’s separation of the two perspectives. In what follows, I will illustrate how the contrast is marked in the Tractatus; then I will approach this tension in Diamond’s treatment.

II:: Moore’s Conception of Value

In the Tractatus Wittgenstein ties what he says about ethics and the higher to the idea that it is the whole world that comes into view in these kinds of talk. He finds it useful to elucidate the separation that he has drawn between a thing and a sense of things (‘The sense of the world must lie outside the world’, TLP 6.41) by saying that what we find meaningful in things should not be understood on the pattern of detecting properties of things, but with a different picture in mind, according to which when something becomes morally interesting¹² it becomes a whole world in itself. Therefore he writes about the ethical attitude as effecting a change in the ‘limits of the world’, and about the mystical experience as one in which the world shows its face to us, as if it took on an expression – happiness or unhappiness, for example (TLP 6.43, 6.45).¹³ In the Notebooks¹⁴ he goes to some length to elaborate this picture. He explains the contrast as one between ‘[t]he usual way of seeing things [which] sees objects as it were from the midst of them’ and the view of them from the outside, ‘[i]n such a way that they have the whole world as background’ (N 7.10.16). And he adds: ‘As a thing among things, each thing is equally insignificant; as a world each one is equally significant’ (N 8.10.16). What these remarks want to show is that there is a profound confusion in the idea that finding an object morally significant is like being aware of one of its properties, that a response to the sense of things is like a response to certain features of things.

There is a criticism here of the idea that our response to what is morally engaging is like a response to how things are in the world. This criticism may be elaborated in different ways and it might prove helpful to compare Wittgenstein’s handling of the idea with other approaches. An interesting comparison may be drawn with G.E. Moore’s position in Principia Ethica.¹⁵ Moore also reacts against a naturalistic view of ethics which equates a judgement of value with an ordinary factual judgement (and more generally with a judgement about the existence of something, in time or out of time). The way Moore does this has some resemblance with Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein writes: ‘The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is and happens as it does happen. In it there is no value – and if there were, it would be of no value’ (TLP 6.41). Moore seems to argue for a similar view when he writes that intrinsic value is something different from anything which can be said to exist. His idea, although it is defended in a somewhat confused way in the first chapter of Principia,¹⁶ is that the property of goodness is not revealed by investigating the nature of an object or a state of affairs. If we stay at that level there appears to be no value. Moore also inherits here an important strand of criticism of naturalism and psychologism both in logic and in ethics, which also has affinities with Wittgenstein.¹⁷ He is committed to defending a position according to which neither ethics nor logic can be accounted for by looking at what goes on in someone’s mind. As the analysis of the proposition delivers concepts conceived as ‘a genus per se, irreducible to...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Religion and Wittgenstein’s Legacy
• Ashgate Wittgensteinian Studies
• Acknowledgements
• In Memory of Gareth Moore O.P. (1948–2002)
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: On Reading Wittgenstein on Religion
• PART ONE The Problem of ‘The Higher’ in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus
• 1 The Problem of ‘The Higher’ in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus
• 2 What ‘Ethics’ in the Tractatus is Not
• PART TWO Wittgenstein’s Lectures On Religious Belief
• 3 Wittgenstein on Religious Belief: The Gulfs Between Us
• 4 Talking of Eyebrows: Religion and the Space of Reasons after Wittgenstein, Rosenzweig and Diamond
• Voices in Discussion
• PART THREE Wittgenstein and Frazer
• 5 Just Say the Word: Magical and Logical Conceptions in Religion
• 6 Contemplative Philosophy and Doing Justice to Religion
• Voices in Discussion
• PART FOUR Wittgenstein
• 7 Wittgenstein’s English Parson: Some Reflections on the Reception of Wittgenstein in the Philosophy of Religion
• 8 Wittgenstein, Religion and the Barren Midwife
• Voices in Discussion
• PART FIVE Wittgenstein
• 9 The Reception of Wittgenstein’s Philosophy by Theologians
• 10 Wittgenstein: The Theological Reception
• Voices in Discussion
• PART SIX Wittgenstein and Culture
• 11 Wittgenstein in Exile
• Voices in Discussion
• Index of Names