Category Archives: religion

Wittgenstein in Christian Categories?

July 19, 2011 By in religion, Wittgenstein Leave a comment

Here are the final few paragraphs from an essay of mine (forthcoming soon in a volume of Orthodox philosophers):

Lately, I have been attempting to transfigure my understanding of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. I have been attempting to understand Wittgenstein’s philosophizing in Christian categories. I believe there is hope for such an understanding. Wittgenstein himself said that he could not help seeing philosophical problems from a religious point of view. Of course, it is not perfectly clear what he meant by saying that, but he certainly could have meant that his work can be understood, maybe even that it is best understood, in Christian categories. (I little doubt that ‘religious’, for him, meant Christian, or at least Judeo-Christian.) I am currently telling myself that the key Christian categories for understanding his work are prelest and podvig.

Consider: “And the Lord God said unto the woman, ‘What is this that thou hast done?’ And the woman said, ‘The serpent beguiled me and I did eat’”Genesis 13: 3.

‘Prelest’: the nearest English equivalent is ‘beguilement’ or ‘bewitchment’— but the meaning of the term seems to be simultaneously somewhat broader and more technical, and so it is best to leave it untranslated. Bishop Ignatiy Brianchaninov thematized ‘prelest’ as the corruption of human nature through the acceptance by man of mirages mistaken for truth. We are all in prelest. I hope the nearest English equivalents show the suitability of the term for discussing Philosophical Investigations. Wittgenstein employs prelest-language throughout the book: ‘bewitchment’, ‘temptation’, ‘superstition’,‘illusion’, ‘scruples’, ‘picture’, ‘haze’, ‘fog’, ‘chimera’, ‘sham’, ‘dazzlement’, ‘preconceived idea’, ‘false appearance’, ‘latent nonsense’, etc. But Wittgenstein target is not spiritual prelest generally, but rather cognitive prelest specifically. (Cognitive prelest is a species of spiritual prelest—so I think and so I think Wittgenstein thought.) We are all in cognitive prelest.

‘Podvig’: the nearest English equivalent is the phrase ‘ascetic struggle’ or, perhaps, ‘moral heroism’—but the meaning of the term is, again, somewhat broader and more technical than these phrases, so I leave it untranslated. Here is a use of the term by Bishop Theophan the Recluse:

The true Christian tests himself every day. Daily testing to see whether we have become better or worse, is so essential for us that without it we cannot be called Christians. Constantly and persistently we must take ourselves in hand. Do this: from the morning establish thoughts about the Lord firmly in your mind and then during the whole day resist any deviation from these thoughts. Whatever you are doing, with whomever you are speaking, whether you are going somewhere or sitting, let your mind be with the Lord. You will forget yourself, and stray from this path; but again turn to the Lord and rebuke yourself with sorrow. This is the podvig of spiritual attentiveness.

What Wittgenstein demands of himself and his reader is the podvig of cognitive attentiveness. We must take ourselves in hand and learn the wiles, subterfuges, ruses and stratagems that (our life with) language employs against us. Wittgenstein knows we will forget ourselves, let ourselves slip out of hand: “…in despite of an urge to misunderstand…” He knows we will stray from this path, fail in our attentiveness or have our attentiveness deceived: “A philosophical problem has the form: I do not know my way about.” The point of cognitive podvig is the gradual cognitive self-perfection of the person undergoing it. Because this is the point, and so is the point of Philosophical Investigations, it is hard to answer someone who asks after the point of Wittgenstein’s teaching, and who expects the answer to take the form of a philosophical thesis. To learn from Wittgenstein is to undertake the podvig of gradual cognitive self-perfection via self-attentiveness, self-denial and self-discipline. It is above all to live a certain kind of life of the mind, to practice a demanding discretio, to wage an unseen warfare. It is not above all to advocate philosophical theses.

Although I will not take the time to develop the thought, Wittgenstein’s work can be seen as targeting the Gnostic and the Barlaamite who hides in the heart of the philosopher, as targeting the notion that it is by progress of knowledge that we become wise.  Wittgenstein’s work, if successful, can be seen as opening the possibility of a vision of God that is no intellectual grasp of an external object, but rather an inward participation in the life of the Holy Spirit, a vision in which to see God is to share in the life of the Holy Spirit, to become divinized, not just intellectually, but as a whole person, body and soul. Wittgenstein opens the possibility that philosophy is finally best understood as an orientation towards grace, indeed as a love of grace.

forthcoming in Turning East: Contemporary Philosophers and the Ancient Christian Faith (Rico Vitz, ed.)

Logos, Tropos and Hamlet’s Ambivalence

July 12, 2011 By in religion, skepticism Leave a comment

I’ve got Hamlet on the brain, I guess.  I was thinking today about the wildly divergent claims Hamlet makes about human beings in the play.  At one point, very famously, Hamlet begins, “What a piece of work is man!”.  But at another point, less famously, he notes, “Man delights not me.” Is this just Hamlet’s antic disposition at work (or at play)? Or is there something else to say about it?

St. Maximus the Confessor in various works follows the Orthodox tradition of seeing something other than a mere parallelism in the Scriptural line,

Then God said Let us make man in our image, according to our likeness…

For Maximus, the image is one thing, the likeness another.  Human beings are made in the image of God—and, for Maximus, this is our essence, our Logos.  But whether we are in the likeness of God is not a matter of how we are made; it is rather a matter of what we make of ourselves (and of course we can make nothing of ourselves outside of (non-hypostatically) participating in God’s life, i.e., we can make nothing of ourselves without our Logos)—and what we make of ourselves is our Tropos.  Our Logos is what we are; our Tropos is the way we are, how we are.

It strikes me that we can use Maximus to gloss Hamlet.  In the vaunting passage, when Hamlet acknowledges what a piece of work we are, he sees our Logos.  In the deploring passage, when he expresses his disrelish of us, he sees our all-too-human Tropos.  For Hamlet, we are made in the image of God, yes; but we all-too-rarely manage even to come close to God’s likeness.

Disposability, Availability

July 11, 2011 By in Metaphilosophy, Philosophical Investigations, religion, Socrates, Wittgenstein 15 Comments

Marcel’s term for ‘disposability’ is ‘disponibilité’.  Here it is translated as ‘availability’:

[Availability] of course does not mean emptiness, as in the case of an available dwelling (local disponible), but it means much rather an aptitude to give oneself to anything which offers, and to bind oneself by the gift.  Again, it means to transform circumstances into opportunities, we might say favours, thus participating in the shaping of our own destiny and marking it with our seal.  It has sometimes been said of late , “Personality is vocation”.  It is true if we restore its true value to the term vocation, which is in reality a call, or more precisely the response to a call.  We must not, however, be led astray here by any mythological conception.  It depends, in fact, on me whether the call is recognised as a call, and strange as it may seem, in this matter it is true to say that it comes both from me and from outside me at one and the same time; or rather, in it we become aware of that most intimate connection between what comes from me and what comes from outside, a connection which is nourishing or constructive and cannot be reliquished without the ego wasting and tending toward death.

Perhaps we might make this clearer by pointing out that each of us from the very beginning, appears to himself and to others as a particular problem for which the circumstances, whatever they may be, are not enough to provide a solution.  I use the term problem absolutely against my will, for it seems to be quite inadequate.  Is it not obvious that if I consider the other person as a sort of mechanism exterior to my ego, a mechanism of which I must discover the spring or manner of working, even supposing I manage to take him to pieces in the process, I shall never succeed in obtaining anything but a completely exterior knowledge of him, which is in a way the very denial of his real being?  We must even go further and say that such a knowledge is in reality sacrilegious and destructive, it does no less than denude its object of the one thing he has which is of value and so it degrades him effectively.  That means–and there is nothing which is more important to keep in view–that the knowledge of an individual being cannot be separated from the act of love or charity by which this being is accepted in all which makes of him a unique creature or, if you like, the image of God…

I supply this quotation as a commentary on and extension of my earlier post, Making Ourselves Disposable.  One striking thing about this, for anyone who is a fan of Cavell’s work, and especially of his essay, “The Availability of the Later Wittgenstein”, is how much like Cavell it sounds, and how much light it sheds on at least one meaning of the title of his essay.  I am quite sure that one sense of ‘availability’ in the title is Marcel’s sense.  The second paragraph reads like a digest of Cavell’s thinking about Other Minds, setting up, as it does, Cavell’s crucial understanding of acknowledgement.

Bittersweet

July 11, 2011 By in religion, skepticism Leave a comment

St. Francis de Sales:

Love is bittersweet, and while we live in this world it never has a sweetness perfectly sweet, because it is not perfect, not ever purely satisfied.

George Herbert (“Bitter-Sweet”):

Ah my deare angrie Lord,
Since thou dost love, yet strike;
Cast down, yet help afford;
Sure I will do the like.

I will complain, yet praise;
I will bewail, approve:
And all my sowre-sweet dayes
I will lament, and love.

Spiritual Disposability (St. Paul, 1 Corinthians 9)

July 11, 2011 By in religion Leave a comment

 19For though I be free from all men, yet have I made myself servant unto all, that I might gain the more.

20And unto the Jews I became as a Jew, that I might gain the Jews; to them that are under the law, as under the law, that I might gain them that are under the law;

21To them that are without law, as without law, (being not without law to God, but under the law to Christ,) that I might gain them that are without law.

22To the weak became I as weak, that I might gain the weak: I am made all things to all men, that I might by all means save some.

23And this I do for the gospel’s sake, that I might be partaker thereof with you.

The Church-Man’s Skepticism 2

July 8, 2011 By in religion, skepticism 3 Comments

I have added bits of poetry in the last couple of posts, one from Johnson, the other from Herbert, as further explorations of what I am calling “Church-Man’s skepticism”.  I suspect some may find my choice to call this “skepticism” as peculiar; perhaps “pessimism” or “cynicism” will seem to them to be more appropriate.  I have puzzled over those terms; I have felt, indeed I feel, their pull.  But I do not think they fit as well as “skepticism”.

I should admit that I use the term idiosyncratically.  I have learnt so to use it from Stanley Cavell and Thompson Clarke.  Cavell, developing a line of thought in Clarke’s work, insists that there is a truth in skepticism.  Now, the skepticism that Cavell and Clarke first are thinking of is more or less Cartesian external world skepticism, a skepticism that pictures the would-be knower as related to the would-be known in something of the way that the Rich Man was related to Lazarus:  between them there is a great gulf fixed.  The would-be knower has thoughts and those thoughts bear on the world, but the question is whether they bear on it in a way that makes them true.  As much as the would-be knower would like to feel the cool water-drop of knowledge on his parched epistemological tongue, he cannot.  His cognitive thirst cannot be satisfied.  Lazarus is barred from him.  But looming behind Cartesian external world skepticism is a larger and darker form of skepticism, Kantian skepticism.  That skepticism questions whether the would-be knower is rightly so-called; it questions whether the “would-be knower” so much as has thoughts that bear on the world; it doubts that the “would-be knower” can so much as produce items that could be truth-valuable.

I will say more about these two forms of skepticism in a later post; I will also say more to connect my use of the term to Cavell’s and Clarke’s in a later post; so treat what I have said so far as partial but I hope helpful background.  But I want now to consider what Cavell in one place (in The Claim of Reason) says is the truth in skepticism, namely that our relationship to the world is not primarily one of knowing.  Gloss: we do not secure a world to know or a world to talk about primarily by acts of cognition, specifically by acts of knowing.  Of course that is not meant to leave us ignorant of the world.  Rather, it changes the way in which we find ourselves as in the world.  We find ourselves in the world in our non-bodily circumstances, oriented away from our bodies, indeed from ourselves, and so away from our bodies as the sufferers or ourselves as the bearers of knowledge.  Finding ourselves in the world in this way makes problems of knowledge recede; they do not press us.  To reverse and amend Schopenhauer’s classic set of claims (near the beginning of vol. 1 of The World as Will and Representation): there is a sun; there is an earth; I do not know an eye that sees a sun or a hand that feels an earth.  But saying this does not solve, resolve or dissolve skepticism.  It simply shunts it aside, shuns it, crowds or reduces the space in which it lives and moves and has its being.  Put another way, this truth in skepticism will not satisfy the skeptic; it will not seem to him or her to capture the truth of skepticism. (As, indeed, it does not, if there is such a thing.)

But thinking about skepticism in this way allows us to remove ourselves from the primarily theoretical predicament of Cartesian and even Kantian skepticism and allows us to return our attention to our practical predicament, and to forms of skepticism that may arise within it.

Church-Man’s skepticism is primarily practical.  It focuses not so much on knowledge as it does on various other ways in which we are implicated in the world, particularly on the world as a scene of values, and of those values’ spheres of influence. Church-Man’s skepticism is not skeptical about our knowledge of those values, but of the valuability of the values themselves, of whether or not they are wholly satisfactory.  It questions not the reality of the values, or their (differential) availability, but rather their fullness (for lack of a better term).  This is neither cynicism, which would question, even deny, the reality of the values; nor is it pessimism, which would question, even deny, their availability.  It is a skepticism, practical or (as I said in an earlier post) existential. It does not deny that life, here under the sun, is livable or that life must deny the wise person any satisfaction. But it does understand that life as enigmatic; its meaning, sought here under the sun evades us–again, not as a theoretical insight, but rather as a practical reality.  Our problem is not ignorance:  it is restlessness.

The Church-Man’s Skepticism

July 7, 2011 By in religion, skepticism, virtue and vice Leave a comment

Here is Mgr. Knox’s translation of the opening of Ecclesiastes:

A shadow’s shadow, he tells us, a shadow’s shadow; a world of shadows!  How is man the better for all this toiling of his, here under the sun?  Age succeeds age, and the world goes on unaltered.  Sun may rise and sun may set, but ever it goes back and is reborn. Round to the south it moves, round to the north it turns; the wind, too, though it makes the round of the world, goes back to the beginning of its round at last.  All the rivers flow into the sea, yet never the sea grows full; back to their springs they find their way, and must be flowing still.  Weariness, all weariness; who shall tell the tale? Eye looks on unsatisfied; ear listens, ill content. Ever that shall be that ever has been, that which has happened once shall happen again; there can be nothing new, here under the sun. Never man calls a thing new, but it is something already known to the ages that went before us; only we have no record of older days. So, believe me, the fame of to-morrow’s doings will be forgotten by the men of a later time.

And here is Montaigne closing “Of Vanity”:

This opinion and common usage to observe others more than ourselves, has very much relieved us that way; ’tis a very displeasing object: we can there see nothing but misery and vanity: nature, that we may not be dejected with the sight of our own deformities, has wisely thrust the action of seeing outward. We go forward with the current: but to turn back toward ourselves is a painful motion; so is the sea moved and troubled when the waves rush against one another. Observe, says every one, the motions of the heavens, of public affairs; observe the quarrel of such a person, take notice of such a one’s pulse, of such another’s last will and testament; in sum, be always looking high or low, on one side, before, or behind you. It was a paradoxical command anciently given us by the god of Delphos: “Look into yourself; discover yourself; keep close to yourself; call back your mind and will, that elsewhere consume themselves into yourself; you run out, you spill yourself; carry a more steady hand: men betray you, men spill you, men steal you from yourself. Dost thou not see that this world we live in keeps all its sight confined within, and its eyes open to contemplate itself? ‘Tis always vanity for thee, both within and without; but ’tis less vanity when less extended. Excepting thee, oh man”, said that god, “everything studies itself first, and has bounds to its labors and desires, according to its need. There is nothing so empty and necessitous as thou, who embracest the universe; thou are the explorator without knowledge; the magistrate without jurisdiction: and, after all, the fool of the farce.”

And here is Samuel Johnson’s Imlac, speaking of the pyramids in Rasselas:

But  for the pyramids no reason has ever been given adequate to the cost and labour of the work…It seems [that this pyramid] has been erected only in compliance with that hunger of imagination which preys incessantly upon life, and must always be appeased by some enjoyment. Those who have already all that they can enjoy, must enlarge their desires. He that has built for use, till use is supplied, must begin to build for vanity, and extend his plan to the utmost power of human performance, that he may not be soon reduced to form another wish.

I consider this mighty structure as a monument of the insufficiency of human enjoyments. A king, whose power is unlimited and whose treasures surmount all real and imaginary wants, is compelled to solace, by the erection of a pyramid, the satiety of dominion and tastelessness of pleasure, and to amuse the tediousness of declining life, by seeing thousands labouring without end, and one stone, for no purpose, laid upon another. Whoever thou art, that, not content with a moderate condition, imaginest happiness in royal magnificence, and dreamest that command or riches can feed the appetite of novelty with perpetual gratifications, survey the pyramids , and confess they folly!

What emerges across these quotations is a form of skepticism that I want to call Church-Man’s Skepticism, after the writer of Ecclesiastes.  It is a form primarily of practical skepticism, not theoretical–call it an existential skepticism.  But it is not existentialism, unless it be Christian existentialism.  I plan to write more about this over the next few weeks.  Let me finish with one more quotation, this time of Mgr. Knox himself, from a remark about Ecclesiastes:

The argument of the book does not progress in strict logical fashion, but the general sense is clear:  no human value is entirely satisfying; life itself therefore is an enigma.  But it still remains livable, and the doctrine of the author is that a wise man will be satisfied with living it, while remembering its deficiencies.

Yet More on Eat, Pray, Love: Following a Rule

July 6, 2011 By in mysticism, religion, Wittgenstein Leave a comment

Wittgenstein famously and rightly disses attempts to follow rules privately.  But it seems to me that ultimately Gilbert’s quest uncovers as an attempt at just such private rule-following:  she will have her own ritual, her own ceremony, her own meaning.  Sure, she gabs on about these as she does everything else; yet she cannot, and in a way knows she cannot, and in a way she does not want to really share them with anyone else.  To be able to do so would be for them not to be hers. As long as it means something to her, it means something. Admittedly, that sounds tautological.  But given what she wants, it is not.  She wants it to mean something only to her, because then it really means something.  She wants something of more grandeur than a bettle in a box; she wants a Beetle, her Beetle, in the Ark of the Covenant.

 Now someone tells me that he knows what pain is only from his own case!–Suppose everyone had a box with something in it: we call it a “beetle”. No one can look into anyone else’s box, and everyone says he knows what a beetle is only by looking at his beetle.–Here it would be quite possible for everyone to have something different in his box. One might even imagine such a thing constantly changing.–But suppose the word “beetle” had a use in these people’s language?–If so it would not be used as the name of a thing. The thing in the box has no place in the language-game at all; not even as a something: for the box might even be empty.–No, one can ‘divide through’ by the thing in the box; it cancels out, whatever it is. –PI 293

Evangelizing for the Patient God

July 6, 2011 By in Kierkegaard, religion 1 Comment

Here’s a nice bit of Kierkegaard:

People are always busy winning disciples.  It is of great importance (to themselves!) that they get them quickly.  They hasten to use every means to this end, and they quickly reject everyone who is unwilling.  God, on the other hand, gains his disciples by long-suffering.  He gains them at the very last moment.  So it comes about that while men’s disciples fall away at the last moment, God’s disciples stand firm.

This was precisely the case with Peter.  Christ gained Peter when he denied him, i.e., at the last moment.  And Peter stood firm.