These problems that he claims to see from a religious point of view are mostly technical issues of logic and language. Trained as an engineer before turning to philosophy, Wittgenstein draws on everyday metaphors of gears, levers and machines. Wherever you find the word ‘transcendent’ in Wittgenstein’s writings, you will likely find ‘misunderstanding’ or ‘nonsense’ around.
When responding to philosophers who have their sights set on higher mysteries, Wittgenstein can be stubbornly dismissive. Consider: “The man who said that one cannot step into the same river twice was wrong; a can step into the same river twice. With such blunt statements, Wittgenstein seems less of a religious thinker, but more of a stiff literal one. But a closer look at this observation can not only show us what Wittgenstein means by a “religious view,” but also reveal Wittgenstein as a religious thinker with striking originality.
‘The man’ who made the comment about rivers is Heraclitus, a philosopher who is both pre-Socratic and post-modern, misquoted on New Age websites, and quoted out of context by everyone as we have only fragments of his corpus . What does Heraclitus think we cannot do? I am clear can do a little shuffling in-and-out-and-back-in-again with my foot on a river bank. But is it the same the river moment to moment – the water over my foot flows to the ocean while new waters come at the source to the river – and am I the same person?
A reading by Heraclitus conveyed a mystical message to him. We use this one word, river, to talk about something that is constantly in motion, and that could lead us to think that things are more fixed than they are – indeed, to think that there are stable things all the way. Our noun-bound language cannot grasp the ceaseless flow of existence. Heraclitus says that language is an inadequate tool for limiting reality.
What Wittgenstein finds intriguing about so many of our philosophical statements is that while they seem hugely important, it’s unclear what difference they make to anything. Imagine Heraclitus spending an afternoon by the river (or the constantly changing flow of river-like moments, if you prefer) with his friend Parmenides, who says change is impossible. They may have a heated argument about whether the so-called river is a lot or one, but after that, they can both go for a swim, get a cool drink to freshen up, or slip into a wader for a bit of fly fishing. None of these activities is altered in the least by the metaphysical obligations of the disputants.
Wittgenstein thinks we can make such disputes clearer by comparing the things people say to movements in a game. Just as every move in a game of chess changes the state of play, so every conversation move changes the game mode to what he calls the language game. The point of talking, like moving a chess piece, is: To do something. But a move only counts as Which moving in Which game provided a certain amount of drama. To understand a game of chess, you must be able to distinguish knights from bishops, know how the different pieces move, and so on. Placing pieces on the board at the start of the game is not a sequence of moves. It is something we do primarily to make the game possible.
One way we get confused by language, Wittgenstein thinks, is that the control and location activities take place in the same medium as the actual movements of the language game – that is, in words. ‘The river overflows its banks’ and’ The word river is a noun ‘are both grammatically correct English sentences, but only the first is a move in a language game. The latter sets a rule for the use of language: it is as if you were saying “The bishop moves diagonally,” and it is no more a move in a language game than a demonstration of how the bishop moves, a move in chess.
What Heraclitus and Parmenides disagree with, Wittgenstein wants to show us, is not a fact about the river, but about the rules for talking about the river. Heraclitus recommends a new language game: one that sets out the rule for the use of the word river forbids us to say we have stepped into the same game twice, just as the rules of our own language game forbid us to say the same thing moment took place at two different times. There is nothing wrong with proposing alternative rules, provided you are clearly aware that you are doing so. When you say, “The king moves like the queen,” you’re saying something false about our game of chess or imagining an alternate version of the game – which may or may not turn out to be good. The problem with Heraclitus is that he imagines that he is talking about rivers and not rules – in which case he is simply wrong. The mistake we make so often in philosophy, according to Wittgenstein, is that we think we are doing one thing when in fact we are doing something else.
But if we dismiss the comment about rivers as a naive blunder, we learn nothing from it. “In a way, you can’t be too careful when dealing with philosophical errors, they contain so much truth,” Wittgenstein warns. Heraclitus and Parmenides may not To do something else due to their metaphysical differences, but those differences utter profoundly different attitudes to everything they do. That attitude can be deep or superficial, cheeky or timorous, grateful or scratching, but it is neither true nor false. Likewise, the rules of a game are neither right nor wrong – they are the measure by which we determine or move within the game is right or wrong – but which games you think are worth playing, and how you relate to the rules as you play them, says a lot about you.
What, then, leads us – and Heraclitus – to regard this expression of attitude as a metaphysical fact? Remember, Heraclitus wants to reshape our language games because he thinks they misrepresent what things really are. But consider what you should do to judge whether our language games more or less conform to some ultimate reality. You should compare two things: our language game and the reality it is supposed to represent. In other words, you should compare reality as we represent it to ourselves with reality that is free from any representation. But that makes no sense: how can you imagine what things look like free of representation?
The fact that we might even be tempted to suppose that we can testify to a deep human desire to step outside our skin. We can feel trapped by our physical, time-bound existence. There is a kind of religious impulse that seeks liberation from these boundaries: it seeks to transcend our finite self and make contact with the infinite. Wittgenstein’s religious impulse pushes us in the opposite direction: he tries not to satisfy our striving for transcendence, but to rid us of that striving entirely. The liberation he offers is not liberation from our limited selves in front of our bound ourselves.
Wittgenstein’s comment on Heraclitus comes from a typescript from the early 1930s, when Wittgenstein was just beginning to develop the mature philosophy that would be published posthumously as Philosophical Inquiries (1953). Part of what makes that late work special is the way in which the Wittgenstein, who sees every problem from a religious point of view, merges with the practical engineer. Metaphysical speculations, for Wittgenstein, are like gears that have slipped out of the mechanism of language and get wildly out of hand. Wittgenstein, the engineer, wants the mechanism to run smoothly. And this is exactly where the spiritual insight resides: our goal, well understood, is not transcendence but a fully invested immanence. In this regard, he offers a particularly technical approach to an aspiration expressed in mystics from Meister Eckhart to the Zen patriarchs: not ascending to a state of perfection, but recognizing that where you are, already, right now, is everything. . the perfection you need.
David Egan
This article was originally published in Aeon and has been republished under Creative Commons. Read the original article.