Category Archives: wittgenstein

Reasonable Atheism (14b): Religious grammar continued

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At the risk of making this even murkier than it seems to be already, a few thoughts to expand what I said in the earlier post.

Think of different languages. Think of the different words for ‘cow’. Clearly there are connotations to the word for cow in Sanskrit and Urdu that aren’t present in English or Welsh. However, there is enough in common for the term to be more or less translatable.

You could say that the words for cow across the different languages share a family resemblance. There may not be any one item which is the exact ‘essence of cow’ which all the words for cow correspond to, but there is enough correspondence for people of different languages to understand each other, and recognise what is being referred to, in just the same way that different members of a family might more or less resemble each other, without there being any one specific feature which they all have in common.

My argument is that there is something similar going on with religious frameworks. There may not be any one essential thing which all religions have in common (in fact, I’m pretty certain there isn’t) and there are all sorts of ways in which religions differ – to the extent that even using the word ‘religion’ is suspect – but there are family resemblances across the different religions which mean that they more or less resemble each other.

Much of that resembling comes in terms of what could be called ‘the practice of holiness’, ie cultivating certain attitudes and virtues like forgiveness. Again there may not be one specific element which is ‘the essence of forgiveness’ but, as I see it, there is enough correspondence in behaviour across the different faiths (and even no faiths) for this to become a meaningful analogy.

Now the way in which these different behaviours are described (or justified) across the different cultures may be very diverse, but if the underlying behaviour is sufficiently similar then I believe we are justified in saying ‘these are the same sorts of behaviour’. My point is that when this happens the different religious perspectives do not in reality contradict each other, however diverse the explanations may be. (I would say they each correspond to the will of God – but that’s an example of what is at issue.)

Ponder for a moment what it would be for this not to be true. It would mean that there is no common humanity across different cultures, no way in which, for example, one person could communicate their hunger to someone from a different society. Making motions towards an open mouth, rubbing the stomach and so on – are we saying that human beings are so shaped by their culture and language that no communication is possible?

Perhaps this is true. My wife is a translator, and certainly some things, some concepts, are untranslatable (I’m sure the word logos is one). Yet I would place this into a spectrum of understanding, whereby some things are more or less clearly common to human nature, and other things are more or less untranslatably a product of specific circumstance. This is why the word schadenfreude is used in English – in order to preserve a more specific meaning (and of course, that word may well by now have developed different overtones and connotations to what it had in its original linguistic home.)

The point I would want to drive home is that differences in spoken or written language do not necessarily make for a substantial difference in belief. They may, they may not. The key is the practice or form of life within which the words are embedded, and which give the words any meaning that they possess. I have no interest in saying that Christianity, Islam, Buddhism etc are all the same (they’re not). I do want to say that there are family resemblances, areas of correspondence and compatibility, and that what might seem at first sight to be a contradiction ain’t necessarily so.

I return to that Wittgenstein quotation I make much use of:
“Actually I should like to say that … the words you utter or what you think as you utter them are not what matters, so much as the difference they make at various points in your life. How do I know that two people mean the same when each says he believes in God? And just the same goes for belief in the Trinity. A theology which insists on the use of certain particular words and phrases, and outlaws others, does not make anything clearer (Karl Barth). It gesticulates with words, as one might say, because it wants to say something and does not know how to express it. Practice gives the words their sense.”

Reasonable Atheism (14): A point about religious grammar

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It is sometimes argued that because religious beliefs and experiences contradict each other, they can’t all be true. Whilst I’m sceptical that religions are ‘basically all the same’ I also believe that this criticism isn’t as strong as proponents believe.

Let’s take these four theses for our purposes of comparison:
a) Jesus Christ is the Son of God;
b) Muhammed is the final prophet;
c) the Buddha teaches the noble truth;
d) the Flying Spaghetti Monster is the source of all goodness.

Now on the face of it, it is impossible to reconcile these four theses. At most only one can be true. Yet this is only the case if these theses are certain sorts of claims, principally, that the theses are factual claims about states of affairs in the world. It is as if there is a spiritual equivalent of the periodic table, and the claim in each of the four theses is that a particular entity occupies position #1. The other entities, however wonderful, cannot occupy that position, they have to occupy other numbers. As the Highlander tagline had it, ‘there can be only one’.

To take the religious language in this way, however, is in my view to fundamentally mistake the grammar of religious language. Accepting this way of understanding religious language is, in fact, a hallmark of what I call the humourless perspective (both atheist and theist).

Wittgenstein said (PI § 43) “For a large class of cases – though not for all – in which we employ the word ‘meaning’ it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language.” In other words, to understand what each of those four theses means – and therefore whether there is a contradiction involved – we need to look at what is actually being done with the words.

Now it is perfectly possible to imagine a Buddhist, a Muslim and a Christian whose lives closely resemble each other in certain particular respects, for instance that in response to suffering a wrong (being cheated in a business transaction) they each choose to forgive. Each one explains their behaviour in terms of their religious commitments: the Christian says that forgiveness is of God, the Muslim says he must follow Allah the compassionate and merciful, the Buddhist says something about the importance of cultivating boundless compassion to all creatures.

The point being that in this case, the meaning of the language is identical across the different religious beliefs. There is no more contradiction involved than there is when a Frenchman uses the word ‘vache’ where an Englishman would use the word ‘cow’. Although the surface grammar of the statements appear contradictory, the depth grammar is the same.

Should we find someone who was a genuine worshipper of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, who, as a result of their spiritual disciplines and learning, ends up behaving in the same way (practising forgiveness) then we can say that their language means the same thing. We can even say the same thing about an atheist, or about someone who said nothing more about their behaviour than ‘this seemed the right way to behave’. In each of these cases it is the behaviour which is fundamental and which gives meaning to the language used to describe it.

Which means that contradictions between religions come at the level of behaviour, not of speech.

For it is also easy to imagine Christians, Muslims and Buddhists who use the same language as their brothers and sisters in the faiths, but whose behaviour is markedly different. In response to being cheated in business, each one may respond with violence of thought and action, or resort to legal and judicial processes and so on. In this instance it becomes clear that there is certainly a contradiction between the beliefs of the first group and of the second – but the contradiction isn’t a logical one (which person belongs in position #1 of the spiritual periodic table), the contradiction is one of behaviour.

One can push this a little further and say: the holy in each faith recognise each other and resemble each other. To use Jesus’ language “Not everyone who calls me ‘Lord’ shall enter the Kingdom… but those who do the will of my father who is in heaven.”

The fundamental claim of faith is that there is a right way to live, independent of our own choices. There are some disagreements across the faiths about what that right way is, but the disagreements should not be assessed at the surface level of grammar, but at the depth level of forms of life. Once that is done, and greater clarity is obtained about the claims of each faith, we can more easily see where the real contradictions obtain. Then, and only then, the conversation can become interesting and important.

Reasonable atheism (9): Wittgenstein on language

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It’s possible that my request ‘what sort of language is acceptable for talking about wisdom’ is unclear [hint: the answer isn’t ‘English’ 🙂 ]

When I am talking about the sorts of language that are possible, I am referring to what Wittgenstein calls ‘depth grammar’. We do things with words, and it is the doing (the practice, the form of life) which gives language sense and meaning. So the point of my question is: give me examples of discussions of wisdom (the teaching of wisdom) that you do not think are nonsense. As it happens, I don’t believe that such examples can be given which don’t then fall foul of the same criticisms made of theology. That is the cancer at the heart of our culture. If the criticisms made of theology are valid, then those criticisms also apply to any sort of wisdom teaching – and the prevalent acceptance of those criticisms is why our culture is so unwise, and why we are in the mess that we are in.

Here is something I’ve written before, which may help to clarify things.

~~~

Wittgenstein once said ‘It has puzzled me why Socrates is regarded as a great philosopher. Because when Socrates asks for the meaning of a word and people give him examples of how that word is used, he isn’t satisfied but wants a unique definition. Now if someone shows me how a word is used and its different meanings, that is just the sort of answer I want.’ Wittgenstein had in mind a passage such as this one, from Socrates’ first speech in the Phaedrus: ‘in every discussion there is only one way of beginning if one is to come to a sound conclusion, and that is to know what one is discussing… Let us then begin by agreeing upon a definition’. In the conclusion of the Phaedrus Socrates restates this: ‘a man must know the truth about any subject that he deals with; he must be able to define it.’ For Wittgenstein it is this emphasis upon definability in words which is the source of all our metaphysical illusions, illusions which ‘lie as deep in us as the forms of our language’. Wittgenstein’s view, in contrast, is that “in most cases, but not in all, the meaning of a word lies in its use in the language game”.

Wittgenstein’s positive philosophical achievement lies in an understanding of language which is not predicated on this Socratic perspective. The easiest way to get a quick grasp of Wittgenstein’s view of language is to talk about the difference between what he calls surface grammar and depth grammar. Surface grammar is the explicit content and form of a sentence: the division into nouns, verbs, adjectives and so on. It is what we normally think of as grammar. Depth grammar is the function that a sentence plays within the life of the person speaking the sentence. In other words, an investigation of the depth grammar of a word will indicate the use that the words have. Think of the expression ‘I need some water’. This seems quite straightforward, but depending upon the context and the emphasis placed upon different words, it could have all sorts of different senses. For example, it could be a straightforward description of thirst, or an expression of the need for an ingredient in making bread, or preparing water colours. So far, so straightforward. But think of something more interesting. Perhaps it is an insult: I am a mechanic, and I am working on fixing a car radiator. My assistant knows that I need some fluid, but passes me some left over orange squash: ‘I need some water’ – where the expression also means: why are you being so stupid? In other words, the surface grammar of a comment may be the same, but the depth grammar is radically different dependent on the situation at hand. For Wittgenstein, true understanding came not from the search for definitions but from grammatical investigation – ie, looking at
real situations and seeing what is being discussed.

Now, for Wittgenstein, the point of this grammatical investigation was that you achieved clarity about any questions that are at issue. If there is a philosophical discussion, then the way to proceed is to conduct a grammatical investigation of the words and concepts that are in dispute, to look at how different words are used in their normal context. For Wittgenstein, philosophical problems are the result of conceptual confusion and to meet these problems what is needed is conceptual clarification. The task of the philosopher is carefully to depict the relationships between different concepts, in other words, to investigate their grammar. The concepts are the ones used in our everyday language, and it is the fact that the concepts *are* used in our language that gives them their importance. A grammatical investigation in the Wittgensteinian sense is one that looks at how words are used within a lived context. Hence there is the need to investigate the nature of “language games” and “forms of life”, which are the usual phrases which you hear when people talk about Wittgenstein. This is a method, and it is with this method that Wittgenstein’s true genius lies. In contrast to almost all philosophers within the Western tradition Wittgenstein was not concerned with providing answers to particular questions. Rather, he wished to gain clarity about the question at issue, in order therefore to dissolve the controversy. He wrote: ‘Philosophy can in no way interfere with the actual use of language; it can in the end only describe it.’

An example might help to make his view clearer. A traditional metaphysical question might be ‘What is time’? We want to know what the word means, and because the word is a noun we look to see what it is that is referred to. Yet there is nothing to which we can point and say ‘That is time’. Thus philosophers are puzzled, and trying to answer questions such as this is the classic job of a philosopher, or more precisely, a metaphysician. For Wittgenstein, though, the question is without sense. Wittgenstein would say, why do we assume that there must be something to which the word refers? Look at how the word is actually used in our language, and see if that enlightens your consideration. Thus, when we look at the contexts in which we use the sentence ‘Time flew by’ they would tend to describe moments when we are particularly absorbed in a piece of work, or where we are with friends having an enjoyable evening. The phrase derives its meaning from that context. To then ask, ‘What is time?’ would be absurd. What we must always have at the forefront of our minds is the organic basis of the language that we use. Language has evolved for particular purposes, it has various distinct uses, and there is no necessity that there is a clear and logical basis for it. One of Wittgenstein’s best images is to suggest looking at language as like a tool box, with different tools to perform different functions. Why should there be something which all tools have in common? And why are you so concerned to find it? Wittgenstein is very concerned to ease the philosophical mind away from its tendency for abstract theorising, and to focus it on everyday details, to see what language is actually doing in a given situation.

~~~

One of the main reasons why I’m going slowly – and I understand that it might be frustrating – is because of this need to raise the awareness of different sorts of language, and, eventually, to point out what sort of language theology is, and the place it has in our understandings.

To continue to ask for an explanation of theology in terms of other language games – which is what the humourless atheist requests – is to make a category mistake. This is what leads to the criticisms like “standard theological obscurantism, obfuscation and semantic masturbation”. I can see why it might appear that way, but the description is false.

Wittgenstein, PI 373: “Grammar tells us what kind of an object anything is. (Theology as grammar.)”

I am – in an image Wittgenstein uses – guiding you around a city, walking from street to street, not in a logical way, but in the way that a local would walk around them. Slowly an understanding of the locale would grow, and you will no longer need a guide. ‘Light dawns gradually over the whole’.

A bit more bull

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I’ve been reflecting on the ‘dialogue’ that was taking place over at Stephen Law’s site, about the problem of suffering and so on. A few things come to mind, the first a quotation that I may well have shared before:

The ‘third rate’ critic attacks the original thinker on the basis of the rhetorical consequences of his thought and defends the status quo against the corrupting effects of the philosopher’s rhetoric. ‘Second rate’ critics defend the same received wisdom by semantic analyses of the thinker which highlight ambiguities and vagueness in his terms and arguments. But ‘first rate’ critics “delight in the originality of those they criticise…; they attack an optimal version of the philosopher’s position”–one in which the holes in the argument have been plugged or politely ignored.

I don’t know who originally wrote it, but it was Matt K who posted it on the MD discussion board about five years ago when I came across it. It has more and more resonance with me as time goes on. (NB I’m thinking in this post primarily of the other commenters, not Stephen himself, who seems more circumspect).

The second thing that strikes me, in a sort of ‘background awareness’ sort of way – that is, I might be wrong but haven’t yet seen any reason to suspect that I am – is that my interlocutors mistake the nature of religious language. I have written elsewhere about there being different sorts of knowledge or belief – compare for example ‘Mrs Jones has committed adultery’ and ‘your wife has committed adultery’ – and the point is the embedded nature of religious beliefs within certain practices and forms of life. In other words, the depth grammar of religious belief is not the same as the depth grammar of, eg, a scientific debate. Scientific or philosophical language is simply not the same sort of thing as religious language. My interlocutors seemed to believe that if they could point out an inconsistency or gap in my thinking, in an abstract sense, then this would be enough for my whole way of life to come crumbling down around my ears. Hence the discussion rather rapidly seemed unreal. There is, here, I suspect, a commitment to an Enlightenment-era model of rational discourse, which gives rationality the primary place in shaping a world view. In my view rationality has very definite uses, but there comes a time when it is redundant in assessing truth.

One aspect of this is something I call John Locke’s ghost – that is, I believe that my interlocutors are haunted by seventeenth century terrors. John Locke advanced the argument that we are morally accountable for our beliefs (see this book), and the context for this was the way in which the peace of Europe had been sundered by (supposedly) religious warfare through the preceding 150 years or so. There is therefore a peculiar static charge associated with accepting ambiguity in a world-view – if you quite happily accept that there is something not fully understood in your belief system then you are fall under a judgement of moral failure – and thus a fear for life and property. I think this is often completely unconscious – it’s been absorbed into general Western culture (especially academic culture) – but it isn’t a perspective that can sustain much rational scrutiny itself. It’s a ghost that could do with a proper burial.

Which leads into the final thing I would want to say – the incomprehension and ridicule of mystery. Mystery seems to be assessed as the complete abdication of rational faculties, rather than their fulfilment (which is how mysticism is understood in the Christian tradition). To bring out this point it’s worth making a comparison with the way that science evolves. No scientific view or theory is perfect; each has flaws and gaps; but these are not seen as things which necessarily overwhelm the system as a whole. What causes the system as a whole to collapse – ie a paradigm shift – is when the framework itself is no longer seen as fruitful for further enquiry. This was one of the points at stake in the Galileo debate – even though a heliocentric model was less accurate than the Ptolemaic one in use at the time, the heliocentric model held out the prospect of being much more fertile, which was why the scientific approach embraced it. The same thing applies to the embrace of a religious faith – here there is the possibility of ‘fruitful lines of enquiry’ which, translated from scientific language into religious language means ‘here I can grow as a person’, ‘this is not sterile for me’, ‘this is food for my soul, not just my intellect’. That doesn’t mean that there are no gaps or mysteries – but religious faith is not unique in that – it means that these particular gaps aren’t overwhelming in the context of everything else in play. More than this – it is precisely the intellectual tradition of religious mysticism that gives a proper understanding of what to do in the face of these gaps.

I think my dominant impression – and it is a sad realisation – is that not only do I feel that my point of view was not understood but that there was no desire to understand it. No sense of a genuine dialogue and interchange of views, no sense that a religious believer might be something other than dishonest, intellectually crippled and emotionally cowering. There was a distinct flavour of ‘real men don’t eat quiche’ in the comment thread – where the religious are by definition the quiche-eaters, as compared to the red blooded atheists who are the brave pioneers into the intellectual wilderness. (This despite the fact that this particular wilderness has now been so well travelled that Tesco has decided to open a new store there). My interlocutors seem content to keep their noses pressed to their well-thumbed critiques and have no desire to engage in an honest exploration of what a religious perspective entails. There seemed very little intellectual curiosity on display (and surely curiosity is linked to courage?).

I’ll finish with one more quotation – again, I suspect I’ve quoted it before, but it is a good one – from Denys Turner, in his ‘how to be an atheist’ essay:

“…since today my purpose is to encourage the atheists to engage in some more cogent and comprehensive levels of denying, I shall limit my comment to saying that thus far they lag well behind even the theologically necessary levels of negation, which is why their atheisms are generally lacking in theological interest… such atheists are, as it were, but theologians in an arrested condition of denial: in the sense in which atheists of this sort say God ‘does not exist’, the atheist has merely arrived at the theological starting-point. Theologians of the classical traditions, an Augustine, a Thomas Aquinas or a Meister Eckhart, simply agree about the disposing of idolatries, and then proceed with the proper business of doing theology.”

Wittgenstein’s Mystical Method

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This is my MA thesis on Wittgenstein – the pinnacle of my academic career. (So far 😉
Having just re-read it, six years after production, I feel rather proud of it. Certainly my thinking hasn’t changed, and I think I make a solid case – but then, I would, wouldn’t I?

My essay can be summarised as an argument for the following theses:
a) Wittgenstein had a consistent purpose in his philosophical work, composed of two elements –
i) a belief in the ineffability of the mystical, that value cannot be spoken; and
ii) a consequent need to put limits to the realm of philosophy, in order not to distort our understanding of what is of value; and
b) the change from the early to the later Wittgenstein is only concerned with part ii) above, viz. Wittgenstein’s understanding of the nature of philosophy changed (the division between sense and nonsense in the Tractatus mutated into the development of a new method for philosophy in the Investigations) but the rôle of philosophy within his overall thinking remained constant.

I saw a leaf fall

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Bank Holiday Monday in the UK. It’s been a big weekend, so I take some time off, and (having spent the morning overhauling the garage, amongst other things) I sit and watch my two young boys splash in the paddling pool. I have a beer in my hand, there is clear blue sky, and I am sitting in the shade looking up at the leaves of the tree on the front lawn. A moment of contentment and contemplation.

I once read that every leaf on a tree catches sunlight. Which I thought remarkable; and then I considered how if a leaf doesn’t catch any sunlight, it can’t be doing the tree any good in terms of processing the energy, which is why the leaves grow where they do. There is an explanation available.

Then I saw a leaf fall which wasn’t green, it was a sickly yellow. It wasn’t catching enough sunlight to live.

(I sometimes feel a bit like that leaf, but afternoons like this get my chlorophyll working again.)

And I remember that the explanation doesn’t really make much difference. The tree is beautiful. It is still remarkable how each leaf catches the sunshine; that this is how it all hangs together.

In Remarks on Colour, §317, Wittgenstein writes: “When someone who believes in God looks around him and asks ‘Where did everything that I see come from?’ ‘Where did everything come from?’, he is not asking for a (causal) explanation; and the point of his question is that it is the expression of such a request. Thus, he is expressing an attitude towards all explanations.”

In other words: this is meaningful. Asking the question is an expression of its meaning, not a query about the meaning.

Ricky Fitts: It’s like God’s looking right at you, just for a second, and if you’re careful you can look right back.
Jane Burnham: And what do you see?
Ricky Fitts: Beauty.

The Seriousness of Life

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‘If what we do now makes no difference in the end then all the seriousness of life is done away with’

That’s Wittgenstein, responding to why Origen was considered a heretic for believing in universal salvation.

It’s also the title of the book I’m writing. So when I put extracts onto the blog I’ll title them ‘SOL #1’ etc – normally with something else as well, to indicate the content.

First example following shortly…

The religion of metaphysics

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As you may be aware, I spend too much time arguing philosophy at a place called MD, stemming from my falling in love with the book ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’ in my late teens. I’ve posted a few times about it (they’re the really long ones that don’t get read. This’ll be another).

There was an academic conference at Liverpool University recently, filmed by a crew from the BBC, attended by Robert Pirsig (author of ZMM) and convened by Anthony McWatt, who had just been awarded his PhD for work on Pirsig’s ‘Metaphysics of Quality’. However, it turns out that one of the papers for the conference was a hoax. See here.

This makes me wonder whether all the time and effort that I have put into the MoQ over the last few years is worthwhile (not the first time I’ve wondered that). Grounds for doubt are:
– the MoQ discussion group often functions like an evangelical cult;
– if you accept Wittgenstein (as I do) then what are you doing with ‘metaphysics’ anyway?
– haven’t I got more important things to do?
– aren’t there some severe flaws in Pirsig’s presentation, which make the whole thing useless?

Well, sort of. Maybe I do need to scale back my involvement (or refocus it on a more academically significant outlet). But what this episode has crystallised for me is the way in which metaphysics functions as a religion (and this is where I reconcile the MoQ with Wittgenstein).

Consider the role of agriculture in a human economy. At the subsistence level agriculture simply is the economy, there is no distinction between the two. As an economy develops and become more affluent then part of the economy becomes non-agricultural and the economy can support other things. In our modern economy agriculture is a very small percentage of the whole economy, most economic activity is non agricultural and that is where most development takes place. Importantly, there is influence from the non-agricultural sector to the agricultural, for example scientific advances can help to increase crop yields. However, even though agriculture is a very small part of the economy, the economy cannot exist without agriculture, and remains dominated by it. Unless people are fed they will die, and the sophisticated economy supported by agriculture would collapse (which is something that elements of our culture appear to have forgotten). In this analogy, the whole economy represents our lived experience; the agricultural economy represents our bodily or instinctual nature; the non-agricultural sector represents our understanding, our theorising – our linguistic forms of life in all their variety (in MoQ language, the agricultural is the biological level, the non-agricultural is the social and intellectual).

As I understand Wittgenstein he is trying to argue that the mistake made by philosophers is to assume that the non-agricultural economy is all that there is, in other words he wants to resist the attempt to give a global explanation of our life. This is because these explanations are by their very nature linguistic products, products of our understanding, and are therefore irretrievably part of the ‘non-agricultural sector’. When Wittgenstein talks about a practice having ‘depth’ he is referring to the fact that some practices involve more of us than our conceptual understanding, they resonate with our bodily and instinctual nature. With his remarks on Frazer he is not arguing that all ritual is reducible to this instinct; he is trying to remind us of an inescapable part of ritual experience. Most importantly I don’t think for a moment that Wittgenstein would wish to deny the importance of conceptual reflection upon a ritual, or the way in which ritual can develop into liturgy through the benefit of prayerful consideration. Just as there is interaction between the agricultural and non-agricultural sectors of an economy, so too can there be interaction between our intellectual and instinctual natures.

One implication of this is that for Wittgenstein we will never be able to gain a complete understanding of our experience. This seems to me to be the basis of his ‘religious point of view’, for his position seems ultimately to be apophatic. The roots of our religious and moral life lie outside the realm of the conceptually understandable, and can never be fully integrated within a conceptual understanding. In other words, it is impossible to say anything final about God: ‘If such a book were written it would immediately explode the whole world’.

Wittgenstein is concerned to provoke a remembrance of the importance of agriculture within the economy; that is, of our bodily nature in our humanity. He is not concerned to say that all economic activity is agricultural, or that all our humanity is bodily. This bodiliness is far reaching in its scope: ‘the way in which animals are similar to and different from one another and in relation to man, the phenomena of death, birth and sexual life, in short, everything we observe around us, year in and year out’ . For Wittgenstein we cannot understand our language until we understand our embodiment, and it is in understanding our embodiment that we gain a proper understanding of our language. There are (of course) languages that are remote from our bodiliness – eg maths and logic – but for our purposes, in religion especially, we need to be reminded of what actually happens when religious language is used.

Wittgenstein saw the search for an overarching explanation as ultimately pathological. I understand him to be saying that metaphysics is the attempt to understand conceptually that which will always be beyond our understanding: an attempt by the non-agricultural sector to describe the agricultural sector in non-agricultural terms, to return to my analogy. What Wittgenstein is trying to do is to encourage us to recognise the primacy of our non-conceptually mediated bodily life in order that our language does not try and extend beyond itself. Metaphysics understood as a proclamation ‘this is how things are’ is inevitably totalising. Metaphysics understood as poetic ‘this is where I stand (and this is how it looks from here)’ is ultimately religious, a form of theology, and it allows for a proper recognition and validation of our human nature which does not prioritise ratiocination. It allows for the discovery of the new – it allows room for the Holy Spirit. It is in this sense that ‘all that philosophy can do is destroy idols’ for an idol is that which is put into the place of God, whether a golden calf or a metaphysical system.

By limiting, from within, what philosophy can actually do Wittgenstein allows room for our conceptions to be altered. It is the closed conceptual scheme which is idolatrous – and it is the closed conceptual scheme that the MoQ was slowly becoming. As Struan Hellier put it, some language was used pejoratively for those who hadn’t ‘found salvation’ in the MoQ. But it is a perennial human tendency to seek salvation, to seek an understanding that gives peace to our hearts and minds. Trouble is, in a culture which has a terrible blind spot where it’s own religion (Christianity) is concerned, that religious thirst will be slaked in stagnant water.

What can be salvaged? Or, what do I actually think the MoQ is worth? I would pick out two things that have stood the test of time for me. The first is the way that it integrates scientific understandings with wider artistic understandings. There are commonalities across the different fields, and I think the language of ‘Quality’ is an excellent unifying term. Secondly, the levels – how higher levels are built up out of the lower levels, that still makes profound sense to me. But other stuff, especially grounding it all on “experience” (pretending to be ’empirical’) and using the phrase “Dynamic Quality” in a parallel way to how religious people use ‘God’ – all that is garbage, from my point of view.

Interesting (for me at least). I wonder where it’ll go from here.

Wittgenstein and the philosophy of love

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This is a MoQ post from October 2001.

“The first step is to define the term.” I interpret one of the main messages of ZMM (especially part IV) as being a refutation of the need to define things in every circumstance, that in fact the desire to define can in important cases be radically counterproductive – that is how I understand the ‘victory’ of rhetoric over dialectic. Now I may be biassed in my interpretation of this as a result of my studies of Wittgenstein (my principal philosophical interest), who I think says very much the same thing, but because the constructive part of this post depends on understanding Wittgenstein’s view of language, I’ll spell out his view in a bit more detail. I promise to bring the discussion back to love and the MOQ eventually, and I also promise to try my hardest to avoid jargon. Wittgenstein’s underlying idea is actually astonishingly simple, it just runs completely counter to standard (including SOM) thinking, so people who are steeped in the standard models don’t really ‘get it’. One last bit of preamble – Pirsig says different things to Wittgenstein, they are not the same and there are places where they disagree. The relationship between them reminds me of what Phaedrus says about – I think – Poincare, as someone who was climbing the same mountain, but from a completely different starting point, and stops at just the other side of where he had stopped. But on with the show:

Wittgenstein once said ‘It has puzzled me why Socrates is regarded as a great philosopher. Because when Socrates asks for the meaning of a word and people give him examples of how that word is used, he isn’t satisfied but wants a unique definition. Now if someone shows me how a word is used and its different meanings, that is just the sort of answer I want.’ Wittgenstein had in mind a passage such as this one, from Socrates’ first speech in the Phaedrus: ‘in every discussion there is only one way of beginning if one is to come to a sound conclusion, and that is to know what one is discussing… Let us then begin by agreeing upon a definition’. In the conclusion of the Phaedrus Socrates restates this: ‘a man must know the truth about any subject that he deals with; he must be able to define it.’ For Wittgenstein it is this emphasis upon definability in words which is the source of all our metaphysical illusions, illusions which ‘lie as deep in us as the forms of our language’. Wittgenstein’s view, in contrast, is that “in most cases, but not in all, the meaning of a word lies in its use in the language game”.

Wittgenstein’s positive philosophical achievement lies in an understanding of language which is not predicated on this Socratic perspective. The easiest way to get a quick grasp of Wittgenstein’s view of language is to talk about the difference between what he calls surface grammar and depth grammar. Surface grammar is the explicit content and form of a sentence: the division into nouns, verbs, adjectives and so on. It is what we normally think of as grammar. Depth grammar is the function that a sentence plays within the life of the person speaking the sentence. In other words, an investigation of the depth grammar of a word will indicate the use that the
words have. Think of the expression ‘I need some water’. This seems quite straightforward, but depending upon the context and the emphasis placed upon different words, it could have all sorts of different senses. For example, it could be a straightforward description of thirst, or an expression of the need for an ingredient in making bread, or preparing water colours. So far, so straightforward. But think of something more interesting. Perhaps it is an insult: I am a mechanic, and I am working on fixing a car radiator. My assistant knows that I need some fluid, but passes me some left over orange squash: ‘I need some water’ – where the expression also means: why are you being so stupid? In other words, the surface grammar of a comment may be the same, but the depth grammar is radically different dependent on the situation at hand. For Wittgenstein, true understanding came not from the search for definitions but from grammatical investigation – ie, looking at
real situations and seeing what is being discussed.

Now, for Wittgenstein, the point of this grammatical investigation was that you achieved clarity about any questions that are at issue. If there is a philosophical discussion, then the way to proceed is to conduct a grammatical investigation of the words and concepts that are in dispute, to look at how different words are used in their normal context. For Wittgenstein, philosophical problems are the result of conceptual confusion and to meet these problems what is needed is conceptual clarification. The task of the philosopher is carefully to depict the relationships between different concepts, in other words, to investigate their grammar. The concepts are the ones used in our everyday language, and it is the fact that the concepts *are* used in our language that gives them their importance. A grammatical investigation in the Wittgensteinian sense is one that looks at how words are used within a lived context. Hence there is the need to investigate the nature of “language games” and “forms of life”, which are the usual phrases which you hear when people talk about Wittgenstein. This is a method, and it is with this method that Wittgenstein’s true genius lies. In contrast to almost all philosophers within the Western tradition Wittgenstein was not concerned with providing answers to particular
questions. Rather, he wished to gain clarity about the question at issue, in order therefore to dissolve the controversy. He wrote: ‘Philosophy can in no way interfere with the actual use of language; it can in the end only describe it.’

An example might help to make his view clearer. A traditional metaphysical question might be ‘What is time’? We want to know what the word means, and because the word is a noun we look to see what it is that is referred to. Yet there is nothing to which we can point and say ‘That is time’. Thus philosophers are puzzled, and trying to answer questions such as this is the classic job of a philosopher, or more precisely, a metaphysician. For Wittgenstein, though, the question is without sense. Wittgenstein would say, why do we assume that there must be something to which the word refers? Look at how the word is actually used in our language, and see if that enlightens your consideration. Thus, when we look at the contexts in which we use the
sentence ‘Time flew by’ they would tend to describe moments when we are particularly absorbed in a piece of work, or where we are with friends having an enjoyable evening. The phrase derives its meaning from that context. To then ask, ‘What is time?’ would be absurd. What we must always have at the forefront of our minds is the organic basis of the language that we use. Language has evolved for particular purposes, it has various distinct uses, and there is no necessity that there is a clear and logical basis for it. One of Wittgenstein’s best images is to suggest looking at language as like a tool box, with different tools to perform different functions. Why should there be something which all tools have in common? And why are you so concerned to find it? Wittgenstein is very concerned to ease the philosophical mind away from its tendency for abstract theorising, and to focus it on everyday details, to see what language is actually doing in a given situation. (To come down from the mountain of abstract reasoning, into the valley of life, to misquote Pirsig’s image)

To me, the question of love is is the ‘important case’ par excellence, and if we start down the path of trying to define love, then we are already on the wrong path. I would suggest that, following Pirsig as much as Wittgenstein, we look instead at what is going on when people use the language of love, ideally by taking the best exemplars of what are commonly accepted as loving people, and seeing what they do with it – hence my profound agreement with Platt pointing towards the New Testament as a place to start.

Now, having said what I wanted to say about Wittgenstein, it’s time for something constructive about the nature of religious belief. For me (speaking as a fully paid up member of a religious sect 😉 ) Christian doctrine *is* the philosophy of love. But that requires more explanation.

I think most of the participants in this forum would have sympathy with the argument that Pirsig makes, first in Zen and then in Lila more systematically, that there is something wrong with present-day Western scientific and technological culture. Scientific culture claims to be value-free; and Pirsig offers a beautiful route out of the problems which that dominant view has created. Science was born out of a political and religious context – principally what are traditionally called the ‘wars of religion’ of seventeenth century Europe. One of the consequences of those historical events was that ‘enthusiasm’ was greeted with great suspicion. It was believed that those who were so caught up with their religious views that they ‘enthused’ about them were dangerous fanatics, who had to be opposed. The cardinal virtues were now tolerance and rationality. (Any of this ringing some bells, by the way, given present day events?) This came through most in the work of John Locke. Locke’s principal innovation was his argument that, in order to resolve these disagreements we should resort to the light of Reason. He wrote:

‘since traditions vary so much the world over and men’s opinions are so obviously oposed to one another and mutually destructive, and that not only among different nations but in one and the same state – for each single opinion we learn from others becomes a tradition – and finally since everybody contends so fiercely for his own opinion and demands that he be believed, it would plainly be impossible – supposing tradition alone lays down the ground of our duty – to find out what that tradition is, or to pick out truth from among such a variety, because no ground can be assigned why one man of the old generation, rather than another maintaining quite the opposite, should be credited with the authority of tradition or be more worthy of trust; except it be that reason discovers a difference in the things themselves that are transmitted, and embraces one opinion while rejecting another, just because it detects more evidence recognizable by the light of nature for the one than for the other. Such a procedure, surely, is not the same as to believe in tradition, but is an attempt to form a considered opinion about things themselves; and this brings all the authority of tradition to naught’

Locke fleshed out a practical programme for how our beliefs should be guided. The following aspects are the most crucial:

1. we have a moral responsibility for what we believe,
2. we should apportion our beliefs according to the evidence available to us, and
3. in all things we should let reason be our guide.

Put positively, the beliefs that we can hold should be those which can be rationally demonstrated, either by appeal to self-evident first principles, or to empirical evidence. Beliefs must, in either case, be shown to have a rational foundation. Where a rational foundation is lacking then we are subject to unreason – to the excesses of enthusiasm that had led to the cultural crisis of the 17th Century.

Now I want to pick out two aspects of this project for criticism. The first relates to the nature of religion, the second to the flaw in the scientific world view.

What is religious belief? (I’ll talk here only about Christianity – it’s the only one that I understand from the ‘inside’, but I’m confident that my points would be accepted by people in other faiths, even if not by all.) The secular world has a clear view of what it considers religious belief to be. One of the most outspoken critics of Christianity in the West is Richard Dawkins, the author of The Selfish Gene and other works about the theory of evolution, and someone who (possibly not consciously) is clearly following Locke. He writes:

‘Another member of the religious meme complex is called faith. It means blind trust, in the absence of evidence, even in the teeth of evidence. The story of Doubting Thomas is told, not so that we shall admire Thomas, but so that we can admire the other apostles in comparison. Thomas demanded evidence. Nothing is more lethal for certain kinds of meme than a tendency to look for evidence. The other apostles, whose faith was so strong that they did not need evidence, are held up to us as worthy of imitation. The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational enquiry.’

And in a footnote to this passage he expands:

‘But what, after all, is faith? It is a state of mind that leads people to believe something – it doesn’t matter what – in the total absence of supporting evidence. If there were good supporting evidence then faith would be superfluous, for the evidence would compel us to believe it anyway.I don’t want to argue that the things in which a particular individual has faith are necessarily daft. They may or may not be. The point is that there is no way of deciding whether they are, and no way of preferring one article of faith over another, because evidence is explicitly eschewed.’

According to the Dawkins conception, then, faith is ‘blind’, and not open to rational debate. The distinguishing characteristic of a Christian (or other religious believer) is their belief in certain things, for example that Jesus is the Son of God. This belief is something that is held independently of any grounds that can be rationally demonstrated (at least to Dawkins’ satisfaction). For Dawkins the debate between an atheist and a religious believer is therefore about what can or cannot be believed by an intelligent and aware person. He would argue that there are no credible grounds for believing in the Christian religion and that therefore one should not be a Christian believer (or, at least, the justification for such a belief would not lie in the truth of the matter, but rather in something like social utility or personal psychological need). The secular world therefore sees religious belief as being primarily about certain propositions, certain claims about the nature of the world.

It seems to me that this is the voice of SOM thinking, which Pirsig and Wittgenstein both dismantle, albeit from different directions. To condense quite a long argument, religious belief is NOT a matter of accepting propositions. Let’s go back to Wittgenstein’s view of language – words don’t necessarily refer to something (they aren’t in need of being defined)because we understand the meaning of the word from its use in the language; in other words, what are we doing when we use certain words. In this context, ‘The way you use the word “God” does not show whom you mean – but, rather, what you mean.’ For Wittgenstein (and for me) ‘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. For ‘consciousness of sin’ is a real event and so are despair and salvation through faith. Those who speak of such things (Bunyan for instance) are simply describing what has happened to them, whatever gloss anyone may want to put on it.’ In other words, when religious believers use religious language (eg doctrines) they are actually *doing* something with them – they are not offering descriptions of an outer reality. As Wittgenstein puts it, ‘I believe that one of the things Christianity says is that sound doctrines are all useless, that you have to change your life (or the direction of your life)…the point is that a sound doctrine need not take hold of you, you can follow it as you would a doctor’s prescription. But here you need something to move you and turn you in a new direction’, or, in another place, ‘Christianity is not based on a historical truth; rather, it offers us a (historical) narrative and says: now believe! But not, believe this narrative with the belief appropriate to a historical narrative, rather: believe through thick and thin, which you can do only as a result of a life. Here you have a narrative, don’t take the same attitude to it as you take to other historical narratives! Make a quite different place in your life for it.’ To come to the crunch – a religious statement (eg God made the heavens and the earth) does not function in the same way that a scientific statement does (eg the universe started with a big bang).

As a summary (and my favourite quotation from Wittgenstein): ‘A theology which insists on the use of certain particular words and phrases, and outlaws others, does not make anything clearer…It gesticulates with words, as one might say, because it wants to say something and does not know how to express it. Practice gives the words their sense.’

So: the western scientific outlook systematically misunderstands the nature of religious belief. Onto the second of the flaws (again, something which Pirsig deals with). The scientific outlook completely devalues what might be called the emotional realm. I’m sure you’re familiar with what Pirsig says, so I’ll put it in my own words:

Scientific method is built upon the exclusion of the individual viewpoint, and in particular, upon the exclusion of the individual’s emotional reactions. Science is concerned with providing knowledge that is ‘objective’ and ‘value free’. The ideal is that of disengaged reason (following Locke) which alone can provide a lucid analysis of the way that things really are. Of course, this is impossible, as scientists have now discovered. If you exclude the observer from consideration then you are rigging the experiment. More fundamentally, the act of excluding emotions means that the possibility of finding value in something is intrinsically excluded. The idea that pure reason is a path to truth is an old one, but it is no longer credible. In particular, we now know that our emotions are linked to our reason in a much more fundamental way than hitherto suspected (see Damasio). We are embodied intelligences, and we cannot function without the body and the emotions which reside therein. The
emotions actually play a role in our reasoning capacity. (Which is why the search for artificial intelligence is in one sense deeply misguided; intelligence as a reasoning capacity might be duplicated, but intelligence as something which might provide something separate to our own is tied up with the importance of emotions and our bodily life. AI will therefore depend on the prospects for artifical life). It is the difference between meaning and knowledge (knowledge is meaningless as it stands, it requires emotional engagement to become meaning, and as science excludes the emotions, all it can produce is meaningless knowledge). If, as I believe, religious language is primarily concerned with value, then there is no surprise that the dominance of science has resulted in undermining the structures of religious belief, for the method of science rules the subject matter of religion out of court from the beginning.

In saying this, I do not mean to argue that the intellectual stance is without value. At the heart of science, and also wider academic endeavour, is the conception that any claims might prove to be wrong. It is therefore ultimately a holy activity, because (in theory) there can never be an idol constructed by science. Of course, scientist themselves fall short of this ideal, and therefore promote certain iewpoints as definitive (eg Dennett and Dawkins on Darwinism). There is a necessity for a reengagement of emotion and reason, and the recognition that that is a higher form of intellectual activity than mere science itself (which is what Pirisig has
done with the MOQ). Furthermore, it is the only ‘science’ that has the potential to be religious, for it does not exclude the spiritual – the shaping of the emotional response in accordance with the wider values of the community, ultimately derived from God (or Quality!). The intellectual stance has value because it does produce knowledge, but knowledge as such is unimportant. What is important is the weaving of that knowledge into the fabric of a whole life. Or, put in a different way, the highest academic virtues relate to the discovery of truth, to honest intellectual endeavour. That value, however, is only one value of many, and (even speaking purely
cognitively) that value is subordinate to the values of beauty and the good. Truth is in itself beautiful, but is only one aspect of beauty, and beauty is only one aspect of what is good. What we need is the largeness of spirit to integrate the value of academic truth within a wider sense of the truth, which includes the beautiful and the good. The truth which is provided by reason is ultimately only that of consistency. This is important, but it is limited. A consistency which inspires by its beauty and humanity, which provokes us to fall in love with it, is rather more truthful than one which doesn’t, and, in practise, a consistency which does not embrace these values, even if only in part, will not succeed (Kuhn).

Of course, it is not simply science that suffers from this, it is actually the stance of disengaged intellectual endeavour, ie the academic mind (SOM!). The root of the church’s problems lie in the 11th and 12th centuries, when academic theology became separated from the monastic practice of devotional reading. There was a shift from the quest for knowledge in order to help belief, to the quest for knowledge for its own sake. The disengaged stance required for academic endeavour is incompatible with spirituality, for the latter is concerned with shaping the emotional response, and the former is predicated on the exclusion of emotion from consideration.

Which brings me (at last! Hallelujah!) to what I want to say about the philosophy of love and the MOQ. The principal function of religion (Christianity) is, for me, to educate us in love. The apparatus of doctrine and worship – developed as static latching mechanisms attempting to safeguard the dynamic breakthroughs made by Jesus – are things which are primarily functional, not definitional or descriptive. The traditions of prayer and spirituality are a highly sophisticated means of raising our
emotional awareness – and therefore our cognitive capacity – in a qualitatively superior direction. In other words, if we really want to describe and understand a philosophy of love, we have to live it, not just talk about it.

~~~~~~~

If you’ve made it this far – thanks, and congratulations. A summary of the above might be handy:
1. Definitions are worse than useless in some contexts. Talk of love is one such.
2. If Wittgenstein is right, then we understand what a word means by seeing what is done with it.
3. The West systematically misunderstands the nature of religious belief.
4. Religious belief is not essentially propositional language, but functional language (it shapes our lives in a certain way).
5. The scientific outlook is emotionally defective (and the MOQ removes the defect).
6. If we want to understand the philosophy of love, the religious traditions are a very good place to start.

Only love can believe

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This is a ‘Blue Peter’ post (“Here’s one we prepared earlier”). I wrote it two years ago.

“Only love can believe”
What does it mean to believe in the resurrection?

“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! By his great mercy we have been born anew to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.” (1 Peter 1.3)

The resurrection is both the origin and the definition of Christianity – Christianity could not have come into being without the resurrection, nor can it be sustained except by a belief in the resurrection – “if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain” (1 Cor 15.14). Yet there is still room to ask, what does it mean?

It should first be pointed out that there is no clear harmony between the different accounts given in the New Testament. The appearance to Paul on the road to Damascus, for example, is rather different to the experience of Thomas. So there is room within Christianity for differing understandings of what the resurrection was.

Many people see reason to doubt the resurrection, citing various scientific, critical or exegetical grounds for doubt. Perhaps the story was made up by the early church. Perhaps the apostles had psychological disturbances which they interpreted as ‘appearances’. Perhaps it was a group pscyhosis, brought on by a combination of grief and guilt. And so on and so forth.

To my mind, these issues, although of some intrinsic interest, are beside the point. To explain why, let us engage in a little ‘mind-experiment’. Imagine that somehow, we were able to send a team of scientists back to AD33, to the time of the crucifixion. These scientists can take whatever instruments and techniques they want, and they are to assess the ‘evidence’.

Firstly, they examine the body of Jesus after the crucifixion. They confirm that Jesus is dead – the heart has stopped beating, the brain has stopped functioning, the body has begun to decay.

Let us next assume that, on the third day, they see something like what is described in John’s gospel, specifically the experience of Thomas. Like Thomas, they examine Jesus’ wounds; they positively identify that this person is Jesus; that he is alive.

The scientists then return to our own age, and proclaim – in the manner that scientists are somewhat prone to – ‘Science has displaced religion! We can prove that Jesus rose from the dead!!’

To my mind, this is to miss the point. For Christian belief in the resurrection is not belief in a matter of fact, no matter how wonderful that fact might be. Christianity sees the resurrection as a miracle – as THE miracle – and, as Wittgenstein put it, “The truth is that the scientific way of looking at a fact is not the way to look at it as a miracle”.

There are many reasons for this difference in approach between science and Christianity, which I shall not enter into here. For what I would like to do is give an indication of what Christian belief in the resurrection is actually about. At its core, at its most simple, it is a claim about Jesus, that Jesus was justified by God and raised in glory – and that glory is something which the Christian participates in, by grace. In other words, belief in the resurrection is a belief that Jesus was the Messiah – and vice versa. Consider the sequence of events. Jesus proclaims the gospel, a new law of love and forgiveness, of including the outcast and healing the sick. He comes into conflict with the political and religious authorities, and is crucified. Now this demonstrates that Jesus has been rejected by God –

‘And if a man has committed a crime punishable by death and he is put to death, and you hang him on a tree, his body shall not remain all night upon the tree, but you shall bury him the same day, for a hanged man is accursed by God; you shall not defile your land which the Lord your God gives you for an inheritance.’ (Deuteronomy 21.22-23)

The disciples are shattered, downcast, scattered and leaderless – and these people then establish a church which ‘conquers’ the known world. Clearly something happened, which transformed those downcast disciples into apostles and missionaries, filled with enthusiasm for proclaiming the gospel.

Whatever that something was, it justified Jesus. Instead of Jesus being condemned by God, he was instead held up by God in special honour – he was vindicated against his accusers. The world says this; the world makes this judgement about Jesus – yet God says this, and makes this judgement about Jesus.

We thus have a difference, right at the beginning of Christianity, between the judgement of the world and the judgement of God, and therefore the origin for all contrast between Law and Grace. For Grace is the principle of the resurrection – to stand condemned, and yet to be free from punishment. It is to be forgiven, to be included, to be accepted.

It should be clear, then, that this justification of Jesus cannot be divorced from who Jesus was in his life, and how he lived. For Jesus taught the path of forgiveness, of healing the sick and binding up their wounds. This was rejected by the religious authorities – and yet it was vindicated by God. So clearly God is like Jesus, and Jesus is like God. And the resurrection reveals Jesus in glory, a divine glory – a glory that we are called to share in.

We share in it through living that same life of grace that Jesus lived, ie by following the path of healing compassion, of including the outcast, of forgiving the sinner. That path was broken open by Jesus (the ‘pioneer and perfecter of our faith’), in his life, death and resurrection.

In other words, belief in the resurrection is really a commitment to living the Christian life – that which was opened up and vindicated by the resurrection of Jesus, whatever that event could be described as in scientific terms.

Once more, Wittgenstein demonstrates his sure understanding of Christian identity:

‘Only love can believe the resurrection. Or: it is love that believes in the resurrection. We might say: Redeeming love believes even in the resurrection; holds fast even to the resurrection. What combats doubt is, as it were, redemption.’ (Wittgenstein, 1937)