tell us what human beings are contingently at present, but where the limits of possibility lie for any and all human thought and action. These limits are defined by phenomenological conditions of
existence that are so obvious as to escape notice unless we compare
ourselves, collectively, to other forms of life – such as various animals or other intelligent beings very different from ourselves. Note these
passages in the Investigations.56 In the last of them57 the reference to
“this complicated form of life” is clearly indicative of the same thing that Wittgenstein refers to in the first passage58 as the “common
behavior of mankind.”
While on other occasions he may loosely use “form of life”
synonymously with “language game”, so that we humans have
as many forms of life as language games, it is not these which are
the “given” that “has to be accepted.” Individual human beings can
54 Ibid., 190-1.
55 Ibid., 211, 234.
56 Wittgenstein,
Philosophical Investigation, 206, 415; xi, 190, 192, 193; II:i, 148.
57 Ibid., II: i, 148.
58 Ibid., 206.
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grow up in more than one culture, or choose to move and live in
a different culture than that in which they grew up. Thus when
Wittgenstein refers to form s of life as that which must be accepted without any further grounds of justification,59 what he means is that
we could not understand a talking lion60 because lions are “beings
different from ourselves”.61 Some intelligent, language using feline species would still remain largely incomprehensible to us, because
it is another form of life. While we might be able to have limited communication with something like talking lions, since we broadly
share with them some mammalian behavior, Wittgenstein believes
that communication with certain intelligent alien life forms would
be utterly impossible:
‘These men would have nothing human about them.’ Why? – We
could not possibly make ourselves understood to them. Not even
as we can to a dog. We could not find our feet with them.
And yet there surely could be such beings, who in other respects
were human.62
What Wittgenstein means by “who in other respects were human” is
that these beings undertake certain activities that only superficial y appear similar to human activities as opposed to those of mere
animals who lack intelligent consciousness. Presumably, these
activities would include sophisticated purposive manipulation of
the natural environment, something like agriculture, city building,
and so forth. This causes the interlocutor to refer to them as “men”
who nevertheless “have nothing human about them”.
The key sentence of the passage above is very badly translated
as: “We could not find our feet with them.” In the original German
59 Ibid., II: xi, 192.
60 Ibid., xi, 190.
61 Ibid., xi, 193.
62 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zettel (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2007), 390.
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it reads “Wir könnten uns nicht in sie finden.” This should be
literal y translated as: “We could not find ourselves within them.”
Wittgenstein is referring to a phenomenological quality of conscious
interiority that contrasts with the outward, merely superficial man-
like activities of these intelligent aliens. As noted above, the “soul”
does not preexist language games but emerges from out of them,
and language games are in turn defined by certain facts of nature.
Consequently: “...The human body is the best picture of the human
soul.”63 Non-human beings, such as those from this passage in
Zettel,64 have different ‘souls’ than human beings, not on account of their culture but on account of the different facts of nature that
frame their form of life and the language games that they can play
within it.
This last point is also the undoing of any attempt to weave an
ethics out of the thought of the latter Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein
claims that: “What has to be accepted, the given, is – so one could
say – forms of life.”65 This idea that forms of life are “the given”
and must be “accepted” would seem to in itself preclude ethics by
denying individual responsibility. While the following passage from
On Certainty checks this misinterpretation, it only does so in a way that is equal y destructive of the idea of Justice:
“But is there then no objective truth? ...” An empirical proposition
can be tested” (we say) But how? and through what? What counts as its test? –”But is this an adequate test? And, if so, must it not
be recognizable as such in logic?”
–As if giving grounds did not come to an end sometime. But the
end is not an ungrounded presupposition: it is an ungrounded
way of acting.66
63 Wittgenstein,
Philosophical Investigations, II: iv, 152.
64 Wittgenstein,
Zettel.
65 Wittgenstein,
Philosophical Investigations, II: xi, 192.
66 Wittgenstein,
On Certainty, 108-110.
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The beliefs according to which we act are not based upon such
logical tautologies as A = B, B = C, therefore A = C or 2+2 = 4 = 1+3.
None of them have the timeless certainty of a priori logical truths,
they can only be affirmed in deed. In other words, by saying that
we cannot get outside of the “form” within the context of which we
always already experience “life”, Wittgenstein only means that we cannot do so until and unless we, in fact, cease to be human beings
and become some other kind of creatures.
We so-called ‘human’ beings could technological y modify
ourselves into becoming life forms as ‘alien’ to what we are now as any beings lurking in the depths of uncharted space. The Wittgensteinian
“human form of life” is not, in the end, an inviolable “given” that
must be “accepted”. It is not a “form” of life in the Aristotelian sense, not an immanent universal that guides the development of specific
biological genera in accordance with some predetermined end. The
quote from Zettel above certainly makes it clear that Wittgenstein does not view it as a “form” that guides convergent evolution across
the cosmos. Man’s technological prowess has attained mastery not
only over all other life forms on Earth, but now even over his own,
which was supposed to have been the most sacredly fixed idea in the
Divine Intellect.
Human history thus far does not suggest that our common
‘humanity’ has yet been understood as the basis for a universal
ethics of the kind sought by Pythagoras and Socrates at the dawn of
Philosophy. Furthermore, it is not as if “Humanity” is something that
we must all ultimately realize that we share in common, and that it
is only a matter of time before we come to sufficient self-knowledge
so as to stop tearing each other to pieces in ever more violent and
expansive wars. The twentieth century was the most violent, and the
twenty first has not gotten off to a good start. In the end, the ultimate realization of our so-called ‘humani
ty’ will real y be an awakening to the terribly liberating fact that Man alone among the animals is that
creature who will be whatever he wil s himself to be. We are likely
to disagree amongst ourselves about what that is, to disagree more
violently than ever because there will be more at stake than in any
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previous conflict of ideals, and thence could ensue the most total
war of all – ending perhaps in an artificial speciation of the human
race. This need not happen, but it is possible. Wittgenstein certainly makes no case for it being anything other than a contingency of
history whether or not this happens.
The packed earth not only channels the river’s water, but may
be eroded by it as wel . A door cannot be opened or shut without
hinges, but swinging a door hard and fast enough could warp or
break the hinges. The point of these Wittgensteinian analogies is
that the human form of life has thus far provided the context for our
cultural development, culminating in advanced technologies such as
genetic engineering and artificial intelligence, but our use of these
technologies may in turn so drastical y change the human form
of life that it becomes some other life form altogether. This means
that Wittgenstein’s notion of a form of life is not something that can ground a new Humanist ethics. Patterns of behavior may, as a matter
of fact, overlap significantly enough to allow for mutual cooperation, or they might not – in which case we are left with cunning, coercion
or brute force.
What is worse is that Wittgenstein seems never to have been
able to reconcile himself to the grave ethical implications of his
deconstructive method. There are a number of passages in the notes
and transcribed lectures of Wittgenstein’s latter period that echo
the mystical deference to a ‘God Almighty’ that I have argued, in
the first section of this paper, is central to his failure to develop a coherent ethics within the context of the worldview of the Tractatus.
The tenor of these notes attests to their being at least as important
to Wittgenstein as his formal philosophical writings, such as the
Investigations and On Certainty.
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3. Wittgenstein’s Persisting Belief That Ethics
Requires Theistic Faith
Wittgenstein’s tractarian views on God and the necessarily theistic
grounds of ethics were basical y unchanged when he returned
to Cambridge in 1929. In his “Lecture on Ethics” he discusses his
personal experiences of feeling absolutely safe from any possible
harm on account of being in the hands of God, as well as his wonder
at the existence of the world as if it were God’s creation and, final y, of his feeling absolutely guilty in the eyes of God. Even after his
return to philosophy in 1929, Wittgenstein seems to believe that
ethics treats only of “absolute value”, and that otherwise there is no ethics at al .67 Wittgenstein claims that ethics is supernatural, and
that the writing of a book that real y treated ethics could not but
be a divine miracle.68 In a passage from his notebooks of the same
period, Wittgenstein writes: “If something is good it is also divine.
In a strange way this sums up my ethics. Only the supernatural can
express the Supernatural.”69 At the heart of this outlook is a view that human beings cannot better themselves or treat each other justly
without some ‘God’ or higher non-human intervention.
Wittgenstein experienced a religious conversion during the
First World War, much inspired by Leo Tolstoy’s The Gospel in
Brief (as well as by the mysticism of Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, and Schopenhauer).70 He wanted to enter the priesthood after
his completion of the Tractatus, and settled for the second best of schoolteacher because it afforded him an opportunity to read the
67 “Lecture on Ethics” in Anthony Kenny (Editor), The Wittgenstein Reader (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1994/2002), 289-290.
68 Ibid., 291.
69 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 3.
70 Norman Malcolm, Wittgenstein: A Religious Point of View (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1994), 21; Clack, An Introduction to Wittgenstein’s Philosophy of Religion, 31-32.
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Gospels to young children.71 He was a lifelong reader of the Gospels.
Wittgenstein’s confession of his sins to others was surely religiously motivated, and his giving away his inherited wealth probably
was as wel .72 He referred to himself as ‘in a sense a Christian’ in
conversations with his intimate friend Maurice Drury.73 He viewed
belief in a Last Judgment as profoundly valuable if not altogether
personal y compelling.74 All of this may have been motivated by the
juxtaposition of Wittgenstein’s own austere moral sensibility and his
view that a merely human ethics is impossible.
What is most significant for the purposes of this paper is
that Wittgenstein continued to hold this view even after his
deconstruction of the Tractatus. According to Norman Malcolm,
who was an acquaintance of Wittgenstein during his latter years, Wittgenstein personal y expressed to him “a sense of the helplessness
of human beings to make themselves better” without some faith in
Divine Judgment and Salvation.75 At least five passages from his
later notes on matters of ‘Culture and Value’ attest that Wittgenstein himself was at the very least strongly tempted into embracing such a
faith, and into viewing human endeavor as worthless in the absence
of it. The first and second are from 1937,76 the third from 1944/45,77
the fourth from 1946,78 and the fifth from a year later in 1947 has
Wittgenstein reflecting on the work of a lifetime nearing its end (in
1951).79
We can draw several conclusions from these notes taken
collectively. While Wittgenstein stresses the importance of changing
one’s life, he seems to believe that this is as impossible to do in the 71 Malcolm,
Wittgenstein: A Religious Point of View, 9.
72 Ibid.
73 Ibid., 9-11.
74 Clack,
An Introduction to Wittgenstein’s Philosophy of Religion, 65-76.
75 Malcolm,
Wittgenstein: A Religious Point of View, 9.
76 Wittgenstein,
Culture and Value, 32-33.
77 Ibid., 46.
78 Ibid., 53.
79 Ibid., 57-58.
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absence of religious faith in God as it is to forge cold iron.80 He
views his own life’s work as having been entirely in vain unless the
Divine has somehow ordained or graced it “from above”.81 This is
because “wisdom” is merely speculative human intelligence, and
as such, it is worth nothing.82 In fact, it is worse than valueless, it is actual y a living hell to be damned to the uncertainty of human wisdom.83 Despite the entire thrust of his analysis in On Certainty (discussed above), Wittgenstein seems unable to relinquish the
desire for the absolute certainty that is characteristic of religious faith. This certainty is above and beyond all language games in the
sense that, once one arrives at it no change of life circumstances
whatsoever should cause one to re
evaluate or abandon it.84 In
terms of Wittgenstein’s own latter thought, his attraction to the
once-and-for-all certitude of faith amounts to “aspect blindness”
– a phenomenon that Wittgenstein discusses towards the end of
Philosophical Investigations.85 By analogy, it is as if one is only able to see the duck-rabbit as a duck, even once the rabbit aspect has been
pointed out as also implicated by the ambiguous lines in the gestalt
figure.
In these passages, Wittgenstein claims that in so far as we
experience great suffering in life we are each utterly lost, helpless, and condemned to infernal solitude unless there is a Divine Savior
and Redeemer.86 Even when Wittgenstein writes of making a
confession of one’s failings to other human beings, as he himself felt compelled to do, it is only a means of purging the heart of human
vanity and opening it up to the redeeming grace of the Savior. In
1945, only 6 years before his death, Wittgenstein clearly believed that God alone may judge us or “save us” (from our sins); we should not
80 Ibid., 53.
81 Ibid., 57-58.
82 Ibid., 33.
83 Ibid.
84 Ibid., 32-33, 53.
85 Wittgenstein,
Philosophical Investigations, II: xi, 182.
86 Wittgenstein,
Culture and Value, 33, 46.
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judge each other or “be furious even at Hitler”, because “we are all
wicked children”.87
This view of worldly human life as a kind of imprisonment away
from God’s grace, as a cage against the wal s of which one must beat
oneself senseless, is on a continuum with the ascetic mysticism of
the Tractatus. It should not have survived Wittgenstein’s critique of his early philosophy. The fact that it did cal s Wittgenstein’s
latter thought into question, and it precludes the development of
something like a starkly Sartrean existentialist ethics on the basis
of the Investigations or On Certainty. As unpleasant as it might be, these religious writings strongly suggest that Wittgenstein was a
fundamental y conflicted thinker who never sorted out the first
thing about what he real y believed. So far as we can tell from all that he left us, he died a splintered man with a makeshift worldview.
87 Ibid., 46.
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BLACK SUNRISE
Sometime during the last days of the Second World War,
Lovers of Sophia Page 42