The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God

by Watson, Peter

  His point here is this: “We have the potential to grow, struggling together toward the actualization of ideals, instead of assuming that our ideals are ‘already embodied in some supernatural or metaphysical sense in the very framework of existence.’” For Dewey there can be no such thing as “the very framework of existence”—that is woolly metaphysics. Religious feeling, when it occurs, stems from “the sense of awe we have at being part of the immense (but entirely natural) cosmos.”

  There is no ready-made divine reality “out there,” in a transcendent world order, which we will one day penetrate through either religious experience, dogmatic revelation or theological sophistry. There is, rather, the human pursuit of religiously conceptualizable ideals, “an ongoing struggle for the good in the natural world of material and social existence,” an entirely human achievement—crucially, more than the sum of its parts—produced by our own intelligence and imagination. If we want to call the harmony we achieve when the ideal and the actual meet divine, then so be it, but we shouldn’t take it for something it is not.4

  His crucial point was that religion should “return to an intimate connection with our other social pursuits.” In The Quest for Certainty (1929), Dewey characterized the religious attitude as “a sense of the possibilities of existence and as devotion to the cause of these possibilities, as distinct from acceptance of what is given at the time.” As Sami Pihlström says, Dewey’s “God” is something like a combination of social intelligence, democracy and science. Dewey was not a theist, and he dismissed any idea of a transcendent God. “God” for him was at most “a poetic symbol to identify those forces and values in experience that are of ultimate concern to a people in their quest for well-being.”5 Like poetry, religious feeling should be one of the “unforced flowers of life.” He was criticized by theologians for devising what they considered “a watered-down version of faith,” as well as by atheists who didn’t see why he needed to use words like “God” or “divine” at all.

  What is most valuable in Dewey’s work is his rigorous attempt to reconcile scientific and religious thinking. He sums up: “Ours is the responsibility of conserving, transmitting, rectifying and expanding the heritage of values we have received, that those who come after us may receive it more solid and secure, more widely accessible and more generously shared than we have received it. Here are all the elements for a religious faith that shall not be confined to sect, class or race. Such a faith has always been implicitly the common faith of mankind. It remains to make it explicit and militant.”6

  WITTGENSTEIN’S WORDLESS FAITH

  Ludwig Wittgenstein’s views on religion are generally less well-known than the picture theory of language that he sets out in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. He wrote no books on the subject, but he gave a series of lectures on religious belief in Cambridge in 1938. What we know about these lectures stems from a curious publishing venture carried out by Cyril Barrett, who compiled a volume, not published until 1966, entitled Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief. Barrett’s book is based not on Wittgenstein’s own lecture notes, but on those of the students who attended the lectures. He points out that since these students were among the most ardent followers of the master, “we may safely assume that they have provided a faithful record of his teaching.”7

  In these lectures, Wittgenstein explores two areas that especially interest us. First, in characteristic Wittgensteinian style he analyzes the language of belief to show how misunderstandings arise, how believers and non-believers “talk past” each other. And second, he explores the idea of the mystical—this, too, he says, is related to the use and misuse of language.

  He starts from the premise, familiar from the Tractatus, that there are limits to language, that language is, in effect, the limit of our world, and that the idiosyncrasies of language have “bewitched the intelligence.” In the realm of ethics, for example, the sentence “He is a good man” looks like the sentence “He is a good tennis player” but it is not. A man or a woman might or might not want to be a good tennis player, and that would not necessarily be of interest to a third party. But if someone were to say, “I don’t want to be good,” this would seem shocking to most people. The imperative to be good in this latter sense is something we should care about for its own sake, “irrespective of any end to which it may be the means.” Similarly, when we use the term “eternity,” whether we are religious or not, we do not mean by that “infinite temporal duration,” we mean “timelessness.”

  This is more than splitting hairs, because he thinks that the limits of language are really at the basis of what we mean when we say we have a mystical experience. Wittgenstein did not accept that there is any such thing as metaphysics or transcendence in the supernatural sense. Rather, he thought that the mystical arises from the fact that some things can be “shown but not said.” In a vivid example, he identifies how impossible it would be for an artist to paint us a picture of his way of painting. Every artist has his or her own distinctive mode (think of how a Renoir is different from a Degas or a Van Gogh), such that no signature is ever needed. “But what could we be asking for, if we said to one such artist, ‘We don’t want a picture of anything which you see in the world around you. What we want is simply a picture of your way of painting things. Not an example of that way, mark you! A picture of that way itself’!? Patently, this is a request which no artist could fulfill. . . . An artist’s way of painting is manifest in his every picture, but it cannot (logically) be the subject matter of any of his pictures.”8

  In other words, there are certain aspects of experience/the world that cannot be put into words, or painted. He went on to say, more generally: “The propositions of philosophy and logic are not themselves logical pictures of possible states of affairs. They show what the structure of language is, although this cannot be said.” Wittgenstein came to the conclusion that language gives us a feeling of the world as a whole, but a limited whole, and it is this sense of limits, and that there is something beyond those limits, that constitutes the mystical. “Answers to questions concerning the sense of the world must necessarily take us beyond the world (i.e., ‘all that is the case’).” And “[T]he sense or value of what is the case cannot (logically) be answered. . . . To view or feel the world as a limited whole is to be aware of the limits which meaning-rules impose on what can be said.”9

  Wittgenstein thought that mysticism stems, at least in part, from “wondering” at the world, that it should exist at all. This, too, he felt, was a misuse of language, because we can’t really imagine what it would be like for the world not to exist. We can imagine a house that we know not to exist—and we can imagine what that plot of land would look like without the house on it—but we can’t even begin to imagine what the universe or the world would look like without the universe in the universe: it doesn’t make sense, we have come up against the limits of language, and it is at these logical/semantic limits that the sense of the mystical is grounded.

  And this is where Wittgenstein is at his most distant from the logical positivists, in particular in his remark quoted at the start of this book: “We feel that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched [italics in original]” (Tractatus, 6.52).

  Wittgenstein, like Schopenhauer, believed that morality is a sphere for the exercise of the will rather than reason. “It is the will alone that can break out from the limits imposed by language. . . . If the good or bad exercise of the will does alter the world, it can alter only the limits of the world, not the facts—not what can be expressed by means of language. . . . The world of the happy man is a different one from that of the unhappy man.”10

  He further felt that the mystical shows itself in both art and action. He discussed with his friend Paul Engelmann the way the mystical could manifest itself in poetry: the sense of a poem going “beyond” words, breaking the limits of language
, is shared by many. He thought, too, that the mystical showed itself in the school teaching that he undertook between his various spells at Cambridge; Wittgenstein believed that there are aspects of school teaching that also go beyond words, beyond the facts of the case, and that, too, may be regarded as a mystical experience.

  Engelmann says that Wittgenstein had a concept that he called “wordless faith,” a conscious effort to live out the implications of the Tractatus—that is, to do what could not be said but could be shown. In regard to ethics, Wittgenstein believed that any attempt to put them into words, to make of them a doctrine, was invariably a corruption. “The thing to do is to say nothing about ethics or religion but simply to act.” (This coincides with Moore’s idea that “good” cannot be defined.) We must remember that it is logically impossible for the sense of the world to be itself part of the world, “since the meaning of anything cannot be part of that of which it is the meaning.”11

  A concern with the mystical understood in this way could make someone religious in a Wittgensteinian sense, but it would be a religion, as he asserted, without a doctrine, even without doctrinal principles. He saw certain similarities between being religious—in the mystical sense he described—and being in love. No one who has been in love asks the purpose of it, or thinks that it can be put into words without losing some of its experiential quality. This links with Robert Musil’s “other condition.”

  So, always acknowledging that any attempt to put Wittgenstein’s idea of the mystical into words is by definition self-defeating, his ideal type of the mystical/religious individual, who did not embrace supernatural doctrines, would be someone who so loved poetry or paintings or teaching that he or she devoted a lifetime to creating, or intimating—in their art or actions—what could not be said. Living at the limits of language, and being aware of those limits, is to live on the edge of a mystical life. At certain points in his career, Wittgenstein seems to have felt the urge to live in this way, that it was somehow a special form of intensity, a life that was somehow “higher”: “The highest cannot be spoken; it can only be done.”12

  He also tackled the question of the soul. He thought that religious forces had taken over two psychological phenomena and amalgamated them. One is the fact that we know we understand ourselves very differently from the way we understand others. We are “inside” ourselves in a way that we can never be inside anyone else. At the same time, and not so simply, he gives this second example: “When we are grief-stricken, where do we feel our grief?” We could say we feel it more over our right eye than over our left ear, he suggests, but we don’t say it because it’s not what we feel. His point is that we don’t have a language to talk about many aspects of experience, not even after all these years of evolution. This is where areas of ambiguity arise, and “soul” is the name we give to this gap in our self-understanding.

  The concept of the soul is thus one aspect of the mysticism he identified, perhaps the most personal aspect of his wordless faith. Using his illustration, we feel grief in our soul because we have no other way to describe it, there is nowhere else to place it.13

  WHITEHEAD’S FAITH IN PROCESS

  The meeting and subsequent friendship between Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell has become famous. The former turned up unannounced in the latter’s room in Cambridge while Russell was having tea. Wittgenstein spoke little English, but refused to converse in German. Despite this unpropitious beginning, Russell quickly determined that Wittgenstein was a genius, and the Austrian was invited to join the Apostles (see p. 77).

  Like Wittgenstein, Russell was an aristocrat. The godson of the philosopher John Stuart Mill, he was born halfway through the reign of Queen Victoria, in 1872, and died nearly a century later, by which time he, like many others, saw nuclear weapons as the greatest threat to mankind. Once described as “an aristocratic sparrow,” he is shown in Augustus John’s portrait to have had “piercingly skeptical eyes, quizzical eyebrows, and a fastidious mouth.”14 He once wrote that “the search for knowledge, unbearable pity for suffering and a longing for love” were the three passions that governed his long life. “I have found [life] worth living,” he concluded, “and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered.”

  One can see why. John Stuart Mill was not his only eminent connection—T. S. Eliot, Lytton Strachey, G. E. Moore, Joseph Conrad, D. H. Lawrence, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Katherine Mansfield were just some of his circle. He championed the Soviet Union, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature (in 1950) and appeared (sometimes to his irritation) as a character in at least six works of fiction, including books by Roy Campbell, T. S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley, D. H. Lawrence and Siegfried Sassoon. When Russell died in 1970 at the age of ninety-seven, there were more than sixty of his books still in print.

  Of all his publications the most original was the massive tome that appeared first in 1910, entitled, after a work by Isaac Newton, Principia Mathematica. This book is one of the least read of modern times. In the first place it is about mathematics, not everyone’s favorite reading. Second, it is inordinately long—three volumes running to more than two thousand pages. But it was the third reason which ensured that this book—which indirectly led to the birth of the computer—was read by only a few: it consists mostly of a tightly knit argument conducted by means of specially invented symbols. Thus “not” is represented by a curved bar; a boldfaced v stands for “or”; a square dot means “and.” The book was ten years in the making, and its aim was nothing less than to explain the logical foundation of mathematics.

  In December 1889, Russell went up to Cambridge—an obvious choice since the only passion that had been observed in the young man was for mathematics, and Cambridge excelled in that discipline. Russell loved the clarity and certainty of math, and found it, he said, as moving as poetry, romantic love or the glories of nature. He particularly liked the fact that the subject was “totally uncontaminated by human feelings.”

  At Cambridge he attended Trinity College, where he sat for a scholarship, and here he enjoyed good fortune, for his examiner was Alfred North Whitehead. Then barely twenty-nine, Whitehead was a kindly man (he was known in Cambridge as “cherub”), already showing signs of the forgetfulness for which he later became notorious. No less passionate about mathematics than was Russell, he exercised that passion in an irregular way. In the scholarship examination Russell came second—a young man named Bushell gained higher marks. However, Whitehead convinced himself that Russell was the abler man and so burned all the examination answers, and his own markings, before recommending Russell for the scholarship.

  Russell did not disappoint, and graduated as a “wrangler,” as first-class mathematics graduates are known at Cambridge. But if this makes his success sound effortless, it is misleading. Russell’s finals so exhausted him (the same happened with Einstein) that afterward he sold all his math books and turned with relief to philosophy. He said later that he saw philosophy as a sort of no-man’s-land between science and theology. By then he was aware that Whitehead, now a good friend, was working on many of the same problems, and they decided to collaborate.

  The collaboration was a monumental affair, with a few side issues (there are grounds for believing that Russell fell in love with Whitehead’s wife). For a decade the book dominated both men’s lives, and when it appeared in December 1910 it was clear that Russell and Whitehead had discovered something important—that most mathematics, if not all, could be derived from a number of axioms logically related to one another. In the Spectator, the reviewer concluded that the book “marked an epoch in the history of speculative thought” in its attempt “to make mathematics more solid than the universe itself.”

  After Principia, the two men began to go their separate ways. (They would remain friends for the rest of their lives but Russell’s anti-war activities during 1914–18 did not sit well with Whitehead, who lost his son during the hostilities.)

  Both now embraced philosophy
more fully. Whitehead left Cambridge, after twenty-five years, and moved to University College London; then, four years later, he was appointed professor of applied mathematics at Imperial College. He stayed there for ten years, producing The Concept of Nature and a book on relativity, among other works. In 1924, he moved to Harvard as professor of philosophy, sparking the quip that the first philosophy lectures he ever attended were those he delivered himself.

  While he was in London, Whitehead had turned his attention to the philosophy of science, and it was this that led him to reconfigure ideas about God. His knowledge of mathematics, and physics, too, led him to reject the traditional view that each object has a simple temporal and spatial location. Instead, he proposed that all objects should be understood as fields having both spatial and temporal extensions. He illustrated his argument by asserting that there is no such thing as a point, an entity without mass. Nor can there be a line, understood as something with length but no breadth. These are abstractions, not concrete entities. This led him to the view that objects, things, are events, the result of (essentially ongoing) processes, and that this, process, is the “fundamental metaphysical constituent” of the world, rather than substance. The basic fact of life is flux: even stones or pebbles, which appear to lie in just one place for years on end, are changing slowly—the whole world is forever “becoming.” This is the essence of Whitehead’s Process and Reality, published in 1929 (which started life as a series of Gifford Lectures in 1927–28).15