These problems that he claims to see from a religious point of view tend to be technical issues of logic and language. Wittgenstein graduated as an engineer before turning to philosophy and uses worldly metaphors for gears, levers and machinery. Where you find the word ‘transcendent’ in Wittgenstein’s writings, you are likely to find ‘misunderstanding’ or ‘absurd’ nearby.
When responding to philosophers who seek higher mysteries, Wittgenstein can be stubbornly dismissive. Consider: ‘The man who said that you cannot enter the same river twice was wrong; 1 I can step on the same river twice. ‘With these rude statements, Wittgenstein seems less like a religious thinker and more like a boring literalist. But a close examination of this observation can show us not only what Wittgenstein means by a “religious point of view”, but also reveal Wittgenstein as a religious thinker of remarkable originality.
‘The man’ who made the observation about the rivers is Heráclito, a philosopher at the same time pre-Socratic and post-modern, erroneously quoted on New Age websites and out of context by everyone, since everything we have from his corpus they are isolated fragments. What does Heraclitus think we can’t do? Obviously I I can make a small back and forth motion with your foot on the river bank. But that’s it the same river from moment to moment – the water that flows over my foot spills towards the ocean as new waters join the river at its source – and am I the same person?
A reading of Heraclitus shows him transmitting a mystical message. We use this word, River, to talk about something that is in constant flux, and that can lead us to think that things are more fixed than they are – in fact, to think that there are stable stuff absolutely. Our substantive language cannot capture the incessant flow of existence. Heraclitus is saying that language is an inadequate tool for the purpose of delineating reality.
What Wittgenstein finds intriguing about so many of our philosophical pronouncements is that, while they seem profoundly important, it is unclear what difference they make to anything. Imagine Heráclito spending an afternoon downstream (or the constant change in the flow of river moments, if you prefer) with your friend Parmenides, who says that change is impossible. They may have a heated argument about whether the river is too many or one, but then they can take a dip, have a cold drink to cool off, or glide over some waders to catch some fish. None of these activities is in the least altered by the metaphysical commitments of the contestants.
Wittgenstein thinks we can clear up these disputes by comparing the things people say to the movements of a game. Just as every movement in a chess game alters the state of the game, so every conversational movement alters the state of the game in what it calls a language game. The purpose of speaking, like moving a chess piece, is Does something. But a movement only counts as This one log in This one game provided a certain amount of stage setup. To understand a game of chess, you need to be able to distinguish between horses and bishops, to know how the different pieces move, and so on. Placing pieces on the board at the beginning of the game is not a sequence of movements. It’s something we do to make the game possible in the first place.
One way to get confused with language, Wittgenstein thinks, is that rule-setting and place-setting activities take place in the same environment as the actual movements of the language game – that is, in words. ‘The river is overflowing its banks’ and’ The word River is a noun ‘are both phrases in English that sound grammatically, but only the first is a play on a language game. The latter establishes a rule for the use of language: it is like saying ‘The bishop moves diagonally’, and it is no more a move in a language game than a demonstration of how the bishop moves is a move in chess.
What Heraclitus and Parmenides disagree with, Wittgenstein wants us to see, is not a fact about the river, but the rules for talking about the river. Heraclitus recommends a new language game: one in which the word rule River forbids us to say that we have entered the same twice, just as the rules of our own language game forbid us to say that the same time occurred at two different times. There is nothing wrong with proposing alternative rules, as long as you are sure that this is what you are doing. If you say, ‘The king moves just like the queen’, you are saying something false about our game of chess or you are proposing an alternative version of the game – which may or may not be good. The problem with Heráclito is that he imagines that he is talking about rivers and not rules – and, in this case, he is simply wrong. The mistake we so often make in philosophy, according to Wittgenstein, is that we think we are doing one thing when in fact we are doing another.
But if we reject the observation about rivers as a naive mistake, we will learn nothing from it. “In a sense, you can’t be too careful when dealing with philosophical mistakes, they contain a lot of truth,” warns Wittgenstein. Heraclitus and Parmenides may not Does anything different as a result of their metaphysical differences, but those differences reveal profoundly different attitudes toward all They do. This attitude may be profound or superficial, bold or shy, grateful or surly, but it is not true or false. Likewise, the rules of a game are not right or wrong – they are the measure by which we determine whether movements inside the game is right or wrong – but which games do you think are worth playing and how do you relate to the rules as you play them says a lot about you.
What, then, leads us – and Heraclitus – to consider this expression of an attitude a metaphysical fact? Remember that Heraclitus wants to reform our language games because he thinks they misrepresent the way things really are. But consider what you need to do to assess whether our language games are more or less suited to some ultimate reality. You would need to compare two things: our language game and the reality it should represent. In other words, you would need to compare reality as we represent it to ourselves with reality free from all representation. But that doesn’t make sense: how can you represent for yourself how things seem free from all representation?
The fact that we may even be tempted to assume that we can do this indicates a deeply human desire to get out of our own skin. We can feel trapped by our physical existence, limited by time. There is a kind of religious impulse that seeks to free these limits: it seeks to transcend our finite egos and make contact with the infinite. Wittgenstein’s religious impulse pushes us in the opposite direction: he does not try to satisfy our aspiration for transcendence, but to wean us completely from that aspiration. The deliverance he offers is not deliverance in our limited selves but for our limited selves.
Wittgenstein’s observation about Heraclitus comes from a typescript from the early 1930s, when Wittgenstein was just beginning to elaborate the mature philosophy that would be published posthumously as Philosophical Investigations (1953). Part of what makes this late work special is the way that Wittgenstein, who sees all problems from a religious point of view, merges with the practical-minded engineer. Metaphysical speculations, for Wittgenstein, are like cogs that have gotten rid of the mechanism of language and are spinning wildly out of control. Wittgenstein, the engineer, wants the mechanism to work perfectly. And this is precisely where spiritual insight resides: our objective, properly understood, is not transcendence, but fully invested immanence. In this regard, he offers a peculiarly technical approach to an aspiration that finds expression in Meister Eckhart’s mystics to the Zen patriarchs: not to ascend to a state of perfection, but to recognize that where you are, already, at this moment, is everything to perfection you need.
David Egan
This article was originally published on Aeon and republished under Creative Commons. Read the original article.