The Ethical Implications of Wittgenstein's Investigations, As Influenced by Tolstoy

THE ETHICAL IMPLICATIONS OF WITTGENSTEIN’S INVESTIGATIONS, AS INFLUENCED BY LEO TOLSTOY By Joseph Beery A senior thesis, submitted in partial fulfillment of B.A.s at Stetson University in the disciplines of Philosophy and Stetson’s Program for Eastern European and Eurasian Studies. Advised by Dr. Ronald Hall and Dr. Mayhill Fowler 2 3 TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract 4 Introduction 5 Discovering Tolstoy 7 Saying and Showing in TGiB 12 The affectual call of the religious 15 Wittgenstein on Ethics 19 A new Ethics: the radical ordinary 21 Conclusion 27 References 29 Uncited references 30 Author’s Note 30 Acknowledgments 32 4 Abstract Contrary to the common readings of his later works as a-theoretical descriptions of ordinary language, I argue that Wittgenstein intended his works to speak specifically to ethical and religious thought. Leo Tolstoy’s The Gospels in Brief exercised tremendous influence on the younger Wittgenstein, and the religious mode of thinking instantiated by that reading impacted his philosophy throughout his life. Through a close reading of Wittgenstein’s 1929 Lecture on Ethics and Philosophical Investigations, among other texts, it is evident that the religiosity of Wittgenstein’s thought permeated his later work in profound ways, despite the arguments that he merely cared about philological unclarity. I propose that, owing to Tolstoy’s influence and the work done throughout Wittgenstein’s philosophy by the idea of language showing content beyond what is said, later works like Philosophical Investigations and On Certainty were Wittgenstein’s efforts at expressing what could not be said by making it manifest in his description of a miracle. 5 Bach wrote on the title page of his Orgelbuechlein, ‘To the glory of the most high God, and that my neighbour may be benefited thereby.’ That is what I would have liked to say about my work.” – Ludwig Wittgenstein Introduction The life of Ludwig Wittgenstein was one driven by the belief, implanted in his youth by Weininger’s work, that any accomplishment short of “genius” in one’s vocation is a grave failure. Accordingly, Wittgenstein wrote three philosophical treatises and numerous smaller works, devoting himself wholly to living up to that standard of genius. Though he himself would likely never admit it, Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations is a work of such high caliber, proving itself to be one of the most important texts written in the twentieth century. However, though a well-worn path of scholarship exists regarding Wittgenstein’s enthrallment with religion and ethics, the works that he produced later in life seem to address these vital issues little, if at all. I propose that, building on the well-accepted thesis that Wittgenstein’s later philosophical works were efforts to provide an escape for philosophers from the endless, useless, “philosophical problems” that plague the discipline, these texts were furthermore Wittgenstein’s own efforts to engage the religious in a meaningful way. In defense of this idea, I first draw the reader’s attention to the eminent interaction Wittgenstein had with Leo Tolstoy’s «Краткое Изложение Евангелия», or The Gospels in Brief (henceforth TGiB). The tale of how Wittgenstein discovered TGiB is the material of legend: in 1941, whilst serving in World War I as an artillery commander, already deeply embroiled with scholarly pursuits and with the Tractatus well under construction, Wittgenstein walked into a 6 bookshop in Tarnow, Poland. The only book on the shelf was The Gospels in Brief by Leo Tolstoy.1 Wittgenstein, a man given over to depression, loneliness, and thoughts of suicide, was swept away by the short text, which is Tolstoy’s interpretation of the Christian gospel of Jesus of Nazareth, stripped of its miracles and woven with a vicious polemic for the religious establishment. Wittgenstein became known in the trenches as “the man with the Gospel,” having committed passages of the text to memory, and he would quote it vociferously to any individual who happened across his path with any sort of problem (Monk, 1991, 114). The story of TGiB and its immediate influence over young Wittgenstein’s life are almost universally considered important—however, this seems to be the claim where most scholars rest their pursuit of any deeper ramifications for Wittgenstein’s philosophy, and the influence Tolstoy posthumously exerted on it. A better understanding of Wittgenstein’s relationship to TGiB, I argue, helps us to grasp the nature of Wittgenstein’s projects more fully and possibly more sympathetically. For example, in PI, he expresses, using no uncertain terms, that it is philosophy which obfuscates ordinary thinking and inhibits human capacity to engage the problems mathematics, science, ethics, and religion. Left alone, this observation demands a query: why did one of the most vigorous critics of philosophy, a man who at one point quite literally fled from academia, undertake philosophical projects throughout his life? There may be clues to be found in the trenches of World War I, where Wittgenstein’s ferocious pursuit of the religious, and his renunciation of his adopted youthful atheism, came at the hands of Tolstoy’s work. In a 1 After conversations with Dr. Mayhill Fowler, I have been convinced that it is likely TGiB was rather the only German book that he was able to find on the shelves, amidst a sea of Polish and Slavic literature. 7 collection of thoughts from his personal notebooks, eventually published posthumously as Culture and Value (hf. CV), Wittgenstein once wrote, One of the things Christianity says, I think, is that all sound doctrines are of no avail. One must change one’s life … That all wisdom is cold; and that one can no more use it to bring one’s life into order than one can forge cold iron. A sound doctrine does not have to catch hold of one; one can follow it like a doctor’s prescription. —But here something must grasp one and turn one around … Once turned around, one must stay turned around. Wisdom is passionless. In contrast faith is what Kierkegaard calls a passion (Wittgenstein, 1980, 53). This passage demonstrates two themes that underpinned Wittgenstein’s entire life: a deeply held affection for faith, and the belief that within language, within the what-is-said, lies the must-be-shown. This latter point, the idea of saying and showing, is where the second piece of my argumentation is rooted. Throughout Wittgenstein’s first published work, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (henceforth TLP), and persisting through Philosophical Investigations (hf. PI), Philosophy of Psychology—a Fragment (hf. PPF), and On Certainty (hf. OC), is the idea that there are aspects of life that must be shown, or made manifest, that lie beyond what is said. Though his tactic of addressing the relationship of saying and showing changed throughout the course of his work, it is evident that Wittgenstein never ceased to affirm that there is more to language than merely what is said. I further argue that Tolstoy’s Gospels is replete with this idea—this may explain both Wittgenstein’s affinity for the text and may shed light on the progenitor of Wittgenstein’s religious mode of thought. Finally, I propose that Wittgenstein lived a life dedicated to philosophical thought not because, as many have proposed, Russell affirmed his genius (though it is likely that this affirmation resulted in the preservation of his life), but because he believed that once the 8 problems with language were finally dissolved, he would arrive at the faith of the patriarchs who enthralled him for his whole life: Kierkegaard, St. James, Augustine, and, of course, Tolstoy. It certainly seems, seen both in his laments about the inherent limitations of our language regarding ethical conversation and in his failure to drop out of the world to live a monastic life, Wittgenstein harbored some envy for the faith of others. This envy is neither a malicious nor possessive trait, but rather a rueful feeling of alienation from a world he desired to know, and an ability he wished he had. Whether Wittgenstein felt, even as he declared his life to have been “wunderbar” from his death bed, that he had accomplished this mission, is too much to say. However, through an analysis of Wittgenstein’s early and late works, coupled with a close reading of TGiB, we can glean a modicum of insight into the world of genius that Wittgenstein inhabited, and thus better understand the essential philosophical points he strove to make; moreover, we may uncover some ethical and religious pursuits thus far overlooked. Discovering Tolstoy His time in the army was certainly not the first spell of suffering that the young Wittgenstein had experienced. Sparing the biographical details, the angst of Wittgenstein’s childhood is exemplified by two of his brother’s committing suicide, and his contemplation of following in their footsteps. The comment that peace was found in the pages of Tolstoy’s book is, therefore, an unrivaled praise, and a telling remark about the depth of impact this account of the Christian life seemed to have on him. As is well catalogued by Wittgenstein scholars, TGiB essentially restructured Wittgenstein’s life. A Russian source points out that “The ethical teachings of the late Tolstoy, developing ideas to counteract evil as a delusion, non-resistance to violence and his selfless 9 service to the people, made a huge impression on Wittgenstein,” and quotes the latter as saying “This [Tolstoy] is a genuine person. He has a right to write” (Dubrovsky, 2005).2 There are two questions which must be answered: how did TGiB influence both Wittgenstein’s life and philosophy, and why did the man who famously claimed that no sensible statements about ethical and moral principles can be said invest so heavily in a text which tries to speak constantly about the ethical and moral. Although the remarkable narrative of Wittgenstein’s stumbling upon TGiB deserves attention when considering its importance to his life, the explanation cannot simply end there, as it has in many accounts. But, if not rooted in some sense of destiny, then the question looms of what precisely drew Wittgenstein so intimately into Tolstoy’s work. One possible explanation is that Wittgenstein saw in Tolstoy a kindred spirit, or at least an exemplary life. Both were born to wealthy families, and came to spurn their wealth (Ray Monk points out that every time Wittgenstein encountered material gain, he quickly distributed it amongst those around him). A further parallel between the worldviews of Tolstoy and Wittgenstein is that of an intellectual resenting intellectualism, and encouraging the departure from academia for manual labor. This idea is compelling for many reasons—not the least of which was Wittgenstein’s decision to teach young children about the Christian gospel in rural Europe for a decade subsequent to the war. Much as Tolstoy seemed to think that his elucidation of the true teachings of Jesus were an apt concluding point for authentic theology, Wittgenstein intended to allow TLP to settle the matter of philosophy, and to be his legacy as he pursued what he undoubtedly considered a more significant life. However, this retirement was 2 «Этическое учение позднего Толстого, развивавшее идеи противодействия злу как заблуждению, непротивления ему насилием и бескорыстного служения людям, произвело на Витгенштейна огромное впечатление» и «Вот настоящий человек. У него есть право писать.» 10 not to last—the doubts of TLP’s finality are evident in the concluding pages of the text itself and, eventually, Wittgenstein’s furious intellect overwhelmed his patience; he struck a young girl during class, which forced him to flee the pastoral life and return to the rarefied air of Cambridge (Rhees, 1981, 50). There is a passage of TGiB dealing with the substance and preservation of the human soul, and it is likely these words that bore into Wittgenstein’s conscience on the train ride from Austria to England: He who wishes to follow me, let him put aside his own will and be ready to endure all hardships and sufferings of the flesh throughout every hour; then only can he follow me. He who wishes to take heed for his bodily life will destroy his true life, but he who obeys the will of the Father, even though he may destroy his bodily life, will save his true life. And what profit is it to a man if he gains the whole world but destroys or harms his true life? (Tolstoy, 1896, ch. VI)3 Wittgenstein may have further felt connected to Tolstoy by the amount that both coveted a certain amount of personal privacy. Once, when asked by an agent about some biographical information for a publisher, Wittgenstein retorted “Write what you like, but I cannot understand why the referee needs to know my age. He may believe in astrology, then he can tell you the date and hour of my birth, and how he was able to make my horoscope” (Dubrovsky, 2005).4 The 3 Owing to the relative uselessness of providing Kindle locations for quotes from Евангелия, I will instead provide references to the chapter number. “True life” is the common scholarly accepted translation of the text, but most mainstream readers would see “soul.” «Кто хочет идти вслед меня, тот пусть откажется от своей воли и пусть будет готовь на всякие лишения и страдания плоти на каждый час, тогда только он может идти вслед меня. Потому что тот, кто хочет заботиться о своей плотской жизни, топ. погубить истснную жизнь. А кто, если и погубить плотскую жизнь, исполная волю Отца, тот спасет истинную жизнь. Потому что какая же выгода человеку, если он и весь мир заберет, а жизнь свою загубить или повредит?» 4 «Когда издатель однажды попросил его дать о себе биографические сведения, Людвиг был взбешен: «Пишите, что вам угодно, только я не могу понять, зачем рецензенту нужно знать мой возраст. Возможно, он верит в астрологию, тогда я могу сообщить дату и час своего рождения, чтобы он смог составить мой гороскоп».» 11 aversion to private details leaking out into public life shows the guardedness of the two men, and moreover, demonstrates Wittgenstein’s own self-consciousness about what he commonly termed his own ‘sins.’ Each of these instances is important because it demonstrates the influence that Tolstoy’s work had on Wittgenstein, but none of these accounts is enough to explain why he was enraptured to begin with. Perhaps the explanation really does extend only as far the little information that we have; Wittgenstein was a man in need of hope during a dark time in his life, and it was in the Gospels that he found this hope. That sentiment expressed, the above examination was not in vain—it provides important contextualization to Wittgenstein’s thought and character, which are fundamental to the questions at hand. I would here like to address a claim that has been made in some Russian scholarship on this issue, specifically by Vadim Rudnev, who argues that Wittgenstein became a “Tolstoian” after reading TGiB. Yuri Kozik, a Ukrainian scholar working in a similar space, catalogues in his work on Wittgenstein and Tolstoy some of the similarities between the lives and views of the two thinkers. The first is that neither “took part in the life of the organized church.” Wittgenstein “did not talk about himself as Catholic,” while Tolstoy was labeled “by the Orthodox Synod as having ‘fallen away from the church’” (Kozik, 2004, 227). 5 Furthermore, both thinkers were 5 «Витгенштейн не говорил о себе как о католике, несмотря на то, что в детстве был крещен католиком.» и «В свою очередь, православный Синод признал, что ЛевТолстой «отпал от Церкви».» 12 convinced that religion consisted not in “views and knowledge of doctrine,” but in “changing the direction of one’s life” (ibid, 229).6 Kozik, however, also points out an important difference in the worldviews of Tolstoy and Wittgenstein. As has already been mentioned, Wittgenstein grew acquainted with TGiB during the war, and then dove into the fiercest fields of conflict two years later “believing the war would make him a decent person” (ibid, 230). 7 The oddity is that the author of the text that propelled him to pray to God for the strength to be baptized by fire was an ardent pacifist. Rudnev makes a nearly sarcastic comment that “Wittgenstein must have been in a paradox as he held Tolstoy’s Gospel in his knapsack on one hand and fired from the machine gun … with the other.”8 Furthermore, as Rudnev remarks, it was Tolstoy that (using the terminology of Richard Rorty), “privatized Christianity … centralizing the claim that the kingdom is inside you … desacralizing Jesus and … showing the church is unnecessary” (Rudnev, 2011, 166).9 And yet Wittgenstein was the man proselytizing furiously in the trenches of the war, sharing what he had experienced as lifesaving truth to all that he came into contact with. Proselytization, or at least spreading of good news, was central to Wittgenstein’s religious revelation. 6 «Они оба считали, что в религиозной жизни важнее дела и поведение, нежели воззрения и знание доктрины. Для Витгенштейна религия была тем, что должно было изменить чью-то жизнь или направление жизни: «Надо изменить свою жизнь.)»» 7 «Витгенштейн воспринимал войну, как своего рода инициацию, и в 1916 г. (т. е. через два года после ознакомления с «Кратким изложением Еванге- лия») он хотел быть храбрым в бою и считал, что война может сделать из него «приличного» (decent) человека [Руднев, 2011: с. 68]» 8 «Вероятно, лишь для парадоксалиста Витгенштейна было в порядке вещей, с одной стороны, носить в ранце Евангелие от Толстого, а с другой, расстреливать из пулемета георгиевских кавалуров» [Руднев, 2011: с. 164]. 9 «Толстой “приватизировал”христианство и тем самым редуцировал его к сугубо внутренней душевной жизни (тезис о том, что Царство Божие внутри нас), то есть сделал следующий шаг после Лютера – десакрализовал Иисуса и попытался пока- зать, что церковь не нужна» 230 13 I am compelled to argue that this is one of the areas where Wittgenstein was not as eager as his Russian idol to break from the orthodox tradition. Moreover, it can be well affirmed that while Tolstoy railed against the church as the “perverter of Christ’s teachings,”10 Wittgenstein was more a candid friend to the world of cathedrals as his life progressed. For these two important reasons, though I affirm confidently that while Tolstoy was the catalyst for Wittgenstein’s perspective shifts on life and the intentions of his later philosophy, I agree with Kozik when he says that “it takes more than to be influenced by Tolstoy to be a Tolstoian.”11 Saying and showing in TGiB Fundamental to the project of understanding Wittgenstein’s religious conversion and subsequent philosophical works is a comprehensive understanding of the text so far only cursorily mentioned. Tolstoy’s Gospels was written as a condemnation of the Orthodox religious establishment’s (alleged) misunderstanding of the teachings of Jesus, and as an apologetic document designed to provide, at least in Tolstoy’s eyes, a more truthful and accessible account to bring Christians to understand the internal kingdom of God. Tolstoy believed that the lines of the Lord’s Prayer were the essential teachings of Jesus, and that the prayer itself is the perfect analogy of the Christian life. The title of this text is in many ways a subtle representation of saying and showing; no matter how unorthodox Tolstoy believed his approach to scripture to be, he still saw in Jesus’ teaching the ultimate revealed truth. Thus, the “brevity” of his gospel indicates that what is said is brief, but what is shown is infinite. 10 Preface to TGiB. 11 «Это нечто большее, чем человек испытавший влияние Толстого.» 232 14 The book is broken up into twelve chapters, each bearing as a title a line of the Lord’s Prayer. This act of paralleling the words of the prayer with the life of Jesus is another example of the shown going beyond the said—it is through the exemplar life of Jesus that the language used is understood. Interestingly, the term ‘show’ appears thirty-eight times in the Russian text of TGiB, and twenty-four of those times it is spoken by Jesus and indicates his own life as the authority by which he speaks, or how the lives of the disciples must impact the world.12 A passage which I imagine had a profound influence on the young Wittgenstein is found in the chapter titled “Parting conversation” (Прощальная беседа): “You do not choose my teaching of your own will, you choose it because I have shown you the one truth by which you can live, and from which you will have all that you wish (emphasis mine)” (Tolstoy, 1896, ch. XI).13 Here, Jesus tells his apostles, in his last words before departing from them, that the lessons and meaning of life that he has come to give has been shown to them, within and yet beyond what he has merely said to them. In the surfeit of the lessons that Jesus taught, unspoken, were the fullness of his instructions about how Good life can be lived. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine any expression of such a truth—this appears to be the kind of expression that cannot be said, but rather must be shown in conjunction with the saying. An instance where Tolstoy seems to explicate the idea of the shown going beyond the said is found in Gospels XI, during the following exchange between Jesus and the apostle Thomas: Thomas said: But we do not know where you are going and so we cannot know the way. We want to know what there is after death. 12 The English word “show” is translated from the Russian «указавать», «показывать», 13 «Вы не по своей воле, выбираете мое учение, но потому, что я указал вам это единое истинное — такое, при котором вы будете жить и будете иметь все, чего желает.» 15 Jesus said: I cannot show you what will be there; my teaching is the way and the truth and the life. It is impossible to be joined with the Father of life except through my teaching. If you fulfill my teaching you will know the Father (ibid. ch. XI).14 Although the terminology seems to indicate a deficit of showing, the second clause of the sentence regarding “teaching” is a paradigmatic example of the-manifest transcending the-said. For this reason, the claim Jesus makes about his teachings being the way, the truth, and the life, immediately following a comment about showing, is important—apparent in the distinction Jesus draws is that it is not necessarily the words or the parables that he speaks which are to draw his followers into eternal life, but rather that which he is showing them in the unsaid, or the impossible to say, within his teaching. Parables serve as particularly poignant cases of the truth contained in them going well beyond the benign appearance of the stories expressed. Although Wittgenstein’s conception of saying and showing deals more with showing the grammar, the way that Tolstoy deals with language serves as a striking parallel to Wittgenstein’s own story of language, and I suggest that this is one of the reasons that the latter was so attracted to the work of the former. The last example of the shown-in that I want to draw from TGiB is Tolstoy’s use of the word istina (истина) for “truth” throughout his text, rather than the more commonly employed 14 «Фома сказал: но мы не знаем, куда идешь, и потому не можем знать путь. Нам надо знать, что будет там после смерти. Иисус сказал: я по могу показать вам; что будет там; учение мое есть путь, истина и жизнь. И нельзя соединиться с Отцом жизни иначе, как только через мое учение. Если вы будете исполнять мое учение, то вы познаете Отца.» 16 pravda (правда).15 The difference between these two words is somewhat difficult to parse, which is fitting for the point that I am to make. Istina references a deeper truth, one that almost must be worked for in order to be understood, while pravda is used in situations of verifying that a certain proposition accords with the known state of affairs in the world. Admittedly, I am unfamiliar with TGiB in the German Wittgenstein likely read it in, but some English translations of the text try to express this difference in phraseology through context or varied translation; however, usually both terms are translated “truth.” The depth of situations and grammar of the words is unsaid in such sentences, but there is much made manifest in the drastic difference between the two different words and how they are used. This is a paradigmatic case of showing going beyond what is said, occurring in the text of the Gospels. The affectual call of religious faith It is generally agreed upon amongst Wittgenstein scholars that he was seized by the religion of Tolstoy as a young soldier, and even admittedly graced with the “religious perspective” with which he claimed to see problems over the subsequent years of his life. The grand majority of these scholars, however, firmly assert that Wittgenstein was not a religious man. Although often we are discouraged to divorce the work of philosophers from their personal convictions, the question of piety is worth serious consideration here because, if these scholars are allowed their druthers in assuming Wittgenstein’s functional atheism, then a reading of the Investigations as I suggest is preposterous. However, fortunately for the project at hand, the evidence from a close reading of both Wittgenstein’s personal journals, a look at how he acted 15 While истина occurs 11 times in the text, прада only occurs 8. 17 throughout his life, and the memoirs of those who knew him indicate that, although distant from Orthodoxy (much like Tolstoy), Wittgenstein remained thoroughly and intimately gripped by the Christian faith throughout his life.16 Establishing the arguments of my interlocutor falls under the auspices of hermeneutic good manners, and thus I will. Throughout his diaries during the time when he began to mold TLP into a document rooted in ethics, of which the scope contained all the world, Wittgenstein often writes long prayers and references to the immediateness of God, but then succeeds such claims with verbatim quotes from Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation (Monk, 1991, 143). Wittgenstein further wrote “We are dependent on what we call God. In this sense, God would simply be fate, or what is the same thing: The world—which is independent of our will. I can make myself independent of faith. There are two godheads: the world and my independent I” (Monk, 1991, 142). If such claims are to be taken at face value, then discipleship to Schopenhauer and self-deification are marks of a deep-seated humanism. However, to read these comments as such would be to read them in a vacuum. Wittgenstein, at this point in his religious conversion, was as a baby giraffe taking his first few steps in the world—his views on God shifted with great frequency during the days of the war, as he hurried to finish TLP and hurled himself into dangerous situations to experience genuine life. Bertrand Russell wrote a letter to his lover shortly after Wittgenstein’s discovery of the gospel containing a chronological, if not terribly specific, timeline of Wittgenstein’s interaction with religious texts and how they seemed to draw him into the religious. Although, as has been demonstrated by the scholarly community, Russell is not the most reliable biographer, this 16 Conversations with Drury (Rhees, 1981, 123, 129, 153, 163, 178). 18 account seems general enough as to be trustworthy. The remarks begin with a notion of Russel’s “shock that [Wittgenstein] has become a full mystic,” and saying that the latter’s curiosity had been first piqued when he read Henry James’ Variety of Religious Experiences. Subsequently, after a winter percolating on such thoughts in Norway, Wittgenstein had the aforementioned encounter with TGiB during the war, and “penetrated deep into mystical ways of thought and feeling,” though Russell somewhat sarcastically remarks that he believes Wittgenstein is only enthralled with mysticism “because it keeps him from thinking” (McGuinness, 1995, 140, all above). The question at hand is just how long these feelings of mysticism and religiosity stuck to Wittgenstein, and how exactly he exercised them in his life. The faith that Wittgenstein viscerally fought with, enviously wishing it was that of Kierkegaard or Abraham, but also held dearly to his breast throughout his later life is a tricky concept to pin down. Beginning with the words penned by the man himself, there are two revelatory passages in CV that begin to enlighten us: What inclines even me to believe in Christ’s Resurrection? It is as though I play with the thought. —If he did not rise from the dead, then he decomposed in the grave like any other man. He is dead and decomposed. In that case he is a teacher like any other and can no longer help; and once more we are orphaned and alone … If I am to be really saved— then I need certainty— not wisdom, dreams, spec-ulation— and this certainty is faith. And faith is faith in what my heart, my soul needs, not my speculative intelligence. For it is my soul, with its passions, as it were with its flesh and blood, that must be saved, not my abstract mind (Wittgenstein, 1980, 33). Life can educate one to a belief in God. And also experiences can do this; but not visions and other forms of sense experience which show us the ‘existence of this being’ —but, e.g. sufferings of various kinds. These neither show us God in the way a sense impression shows us an object, nor do they give rise to conjectures 19 about him. Experiences, thoughts, —life can force this concept on us (ibid. 85– 6). It is the interest in certainty of the first quote and the focus on a form of life lived in the second, springing into a belief, that are of utmost importance here. The biconditional that Wittgenstein draws between certainty and faith colors both PI and OC, as these texts are explicitly focused on recovering ‘certainty’ from Cartesian skepticism. Now, we must look further to the actions of Wittgenstein’s middle to later life; after the war, believing philosophy laid to rest by the Tractatus and finding the idea of attending seminary “abhorrent,” he moved into the Austrian countryside to “read the gospel with children” (Malcolm, 2002, 9).17 After his time spent rurally teaching and searching his own soul, even after he had returned to Cambridge, Wittgenstein was not the same man he was before the Gospels. Rhees points out that in 1931, after spending long stretches praying in a cabin in Norway, Wittgenstein wrote a substantial confession, which he implored both those whom he respected academically (Moore, Pascal) and morally (Fania Pascal) to read, an act which he would have no doubt recognized paralleled him with Augustine (Malcolm, 2002, 12; Rhees, 1981, 48).18 And finally, Wittgenstein cultivated a relationship with Drury, who will be mentioned at length presently because the relationship between the two men was started and almost exclusively fueled by discussions of religious thought. M.O.C. Drury was a student at Cambridge and, in later life, a dear friend of Wittgenstein’s. In Drury’s recollection of his many conversations with Wittgenstein, he recalls his 17 Brevity demands I reign in my instinct to comment extensively on the very fact Wittgenstein considered seminary at all. 18 There are further parallels between the thought of Augustine and Wittgenstein. This will need to be fleshed out in a longer text. 20 former professor saying that, “I am not a religious man but I cannot help seeing every problem from a religious point of view” (Rhees, 1981, 113). Norman Malcolm, another friend of Wittgenstein and one of his biographers, claims this statement infers an “analogue to religious thought,” not a statement that a specific religious lens conditioned the thoughts that Wittgenstein had (Malcolm, 2002, 16). However, Malcolm goes on to say that, “Wittgenstein’s mature life was strongly marked by religious thought and feeling. I am inclined to think that he was more deeply religious than are many people who correctly regard themselves as religious believers” (Malcolm, 21/2). Moreover, Malcom makes note of the commentary that Wittgenstein made about religion in his life: he wrote, “Christianity is not a doctrine; I mean, not a theory about what has happened and will happen with the human soul, but a description of an actual occurrence in human life. For ‘consciousness of sin’ is an actual occurrence, and so are despair and salvation through faith,” and “[What I am doing] is surely only worth labour … if it receives a light from above,” this latter appearing to be playing on a motif of James 1:17 (Malcolm, 16, 18).19 Wittgenstein on Ethics Tied intimately to the religious allure Wittgenstein felt during his life were the ethical evolutions he underwent. To grasp the fullness of Wittgenstein’s ethical thought, it seems apt to start with the lines from the TLP where the saying/showing distinction was brought into full effect: ethics, metaphysics, and aesthetics are “things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical” (Wittgenstein, 1922, ch. 6.522). The next time 19 “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.” ESV 21 Wittgenstein spoke publicly of ethics was shortly after returning from his self-imposed exile, when he delivered a lecture at Cambridge in 1929, the central focus of which was a concern about just how far language could reach concerning ethical and aesthetical questions. Wittgenstein’s return to academia was a forced one, as previously mentioned, and it is almost certainly not a coincidence that his first lecture back amongst scholars was on ethics—his tortured soul was undoubtedly replete with such concerns. Though Wittgenstein makes numerous interesting claims about the field of ethics and aesthetics in his talk, there are two which strike particularly close to the heart of this project. They are, Although all judgments of relative value can be shown to be mere statements of facts, no statement of fact can ever be, or imply, a judgment of absolute value. and My whole tendency and I believe the tendency of all men who ever tried to write or talk Ethics or Religion was to run against the boundaries of language. This running against the walls of our cage is perfectly, absolutely hopeless. Ethics so far as it springs from the desire to say something about the ultimate meaning of life, the absolute good, the absolute valuable, can be no science. What it says does not add to our knowledge in any sense. But it is a document of a tendency in the human mind which I personally cannot help respecting deeply and I would not for my life ridicule it (Wittgenstein, 1965, 4/11). These two thoughts combine to form a straightforward thesis: one cannot make factual statements regarding absolute ethical values, and to try to do so will inevitably bump against the walls of language. By the context and framing of these lines, it is apparent that Wittgenstein is not welcoming relativism or rejoicing in the death of ethics—rather, he seems morose in his inability to make any positive statements which might contribute to the absolute ethical situation in which humans find themselves. Wittgenstein went on to provide a related powerful 22 image in PI: trying to go beyond the bounds of language “feels like we have to repair a torn spider web with our fingers” (Wittgenstein, 2009, §106). 20 However, there is a kernel of a new project within Wittgenstein’s words, one which forebears the markings of a certain philosophical, observational therapy. If one is unable to attack ethical truths head on by proposing facts about the world, then perhaps there is another approach that one could take. A final quote from the Lecture on Ethics alludes to such an alternate avenue: that it is not through language that the miraculous nature of the existence of the world is expressed, but rather by the existence of language itself. Through an engagement with grammatical questions, and a therapy of philosophy, Wittgenstein seems to see the road to the future of any meaningful engagement with ethics. The sacre Coeur of Wittgenstein’s later philosophical work, PI, is just such a project. This idea is key to understanding the ramifications of Wittgenstein’s interaction with TGiB as a younger man, and the real value of his later philosophy. A new Ethics: the ordinary radical Having fleshed out the background story and named the supporting cast, it seems appropriate to address the dilemma underlying the life of Wittgenstein: “If ethics and religion are the most important facets of the human life but nothing meaningful can be said about them, then how is one meant to ever discuss those aspects of life that are most important?” During the 20 There are clear parallels between this line of thinking and that of Kierkegaard. This will need to be better fleshed out in a longer text. 23 weeks that Wittgenstein spent in the trenches of WWI, after being moved into the position he so sought on the front lines, he wrote of TLP that it had “broadened out from the foundations of logic to the essence of the world” (Monk, 1991, 142). As I will argue subsequently, the fundamental aims of TLP and PI were not different—they were only deviant in their forms. Wittgenstein’s answer to the question of how to make any ethical or religious points was The Philosophical Investigations, a text comprised of 693 demarcated musings which challenge the reader to tease out the problems with the traditional picture-theory of language and embrace a much broader understanding of how to determine sense and nonsense.21 More than these general claims, however, PI was written as a therapy of sorts, filled with descriptive rather than normative comments about the way that language is ordinarily practiced amongst linguistically competent communities. If we call to mind the distinction between saying and showing that underpinned TLP, which as seen earlier seems to have some of its roots in Tolstoy’s Gospels, it is apparent that PI was an effort to, by making numerous descriptive statements about language (which he saw as the ultimate miracle), show the vital concepts of life.22 As a philosopher well documented in his criticism of philosophy, Wittgenstein’s purpose in writing philosophical texts is necessarily of interest, and it is evident as early in his work as the conclusion of his self-written preface to TLP (Wittgenstein rejected Russell’s foreword as overly simplistic and wrong; Russell responded, “Proud as Lucifer”). Wittgenstein wrote, I believe, less with the pride that Russell attributed him and more with a sigh of relief, that “the truth of the thoughts presented here seem to me unassailable and definitive" (Wittgenstein, 1922, xi). This 21 See PI, §305. 22 I use ‘manifestly’ here likely because Ray Monk is prone to employ the term regarding the distinction between saying and showing, and I have been so influenced to do likewise. 24 thought slightly paraphrased reads, “All major philosophical issues have been resolved as far as possible.” The study of philosophy no longer need concern the minds of geniuses—they can be refocused. The topic of this refocusing, Wittgenstein believed, were the questions of mathematics, science, ethics, and perhaps the most important in his life, religion. On the aforementioned reading, Wittgenstein’s work had the express purpose of making room, or enabling, inquiry into the most important questions in life. Ordinary language necessarily underlies both the abstract and the transcendent. There is, then, a point of access in the ordinary language approach to ethical and religious queries. This thought is taken for granted by Kozik, who writes, “Wittgenstein didn’t write a special text on religious thought, [and] only dedicated some of his Cambridge lectures to ethics.”23 One demonstration of this project’s success on this reading is Langdon Gilkey’s Naming the Whirlwind, a book written in response to the so called “death of God” theologians who wrote during the mid-to-late 20th century. Gilkey draws heavily on PI, and though he doesn’t believe that the work done by ordinary language is sufficient to rescue intelligible discussion of religious topics from the secular milieu, he does admit that Wittgenstein’s advances provide a foundation from which theology can begin to rebuild its linguistic house (Gilkey, 1969, 267-277). While it is true that a central aim of Wittgenstein’s project was the enabling of intelligible discussion about the essential questions of life, it does not go far enough: the man so vividly portrayed in the many biographies and letters as a ferocious mind relentlessly assaulting those topics which seized his interest would have been discontent simply clearing the brush away for 23 « Как было указано, Витгенштейн не писал специальных работ о религии, поэтому витгенштейниан-цы опираются на некоторые из кембриджских лекций о религии.» 25 later thinkers. Wittgenstein longed to engage the ethical and religious, as is evident from his entries in his notebooks.24 Thus, I would like to pursue a different angle; perhaps Wittgenstein believed that in PI he was crafting a meaningful religious treatise which, by making comments that show the miracle of language, points to the deepest truths in life. This project, by Wittgenstein’s own admission, is only possible by virtue of it never explicitly mentioning ethical or aesthetical theory. Philosophical Investigations is undoubtedly one of the most important texts written in the 20th century, but calling it an ethical and moral treatise seems somehow dangerously novel—PI is a self-pronounced effort at description, not normativity. The conversations bound within PI concern language games, criteria, privacy, Moorean propositions, aspect, and several other philological observations; the closest passages to a reprimand are Wittgenstein’s characteristic polemics towards the proclivities of philosophers. However, as one reads the text, there is a constant reminder of Wittgenstein’s remark in his 1929 lecture, “I am tempted to say that the right expression in language for the miracle of the existence of the world … is the existence of language itself” (Wittgenstein, 1929). Wittgenstein firmly carried with him throughout his life the belief that he could not write any meaningful article about religion or ethics in the traditional vein, even as he carried on conversations about such topics until he died. Thus, I propose that Wittgenstein believed that in PI he had revealed the miracle, thrusting the reader into real life, and through his salvation of certainty, he saved faith. 24 Culture and Value notes here; at least once every 5 years Wittgenstein remarks on religion or faith in some capacity. 26 However, if PI is in fact a religious and ethical document, designed to bring about a kind of salvation and implore the reader to embrace faith, it is imperative to flesh out both how the text supports this mission, and what exactly is this invitation Wittgenstein extends to his readers. I want to underpin these thoughts by pointing out that though Wittgenstein says, “we may not advance any kind of theory…and description alone must take its place,” his work does in fact bear a sharp normative edge (Wittgenstein, 2009, §109). Throughout the investigations, Wittgenstein writes polemically, often sarcastically, against his interlocutor that “I would not know what you mean,” or “but do you really mean to say [x]?”, i.e. accusations of nonsense. This charge is a quite serious one if we are to accept that, as Wittgenstein proposes, words are active tools that do work—to misuse them, to do violence to language, is an offense, and he seems quite keen to compel language users to take what they do more seriously to mitigate such violence. One particularly venomous admonition reads, “[w]hen we do philosophy, we are like savages, primitive people, who hear the way in which civilized people talk, put a false interpretation on it, and then draw the oddest conclusions from this” (Wittgenstein, 2009, §194). There is a certain obligation, it seems, that Wittgenstein calls members of linguistic communities to: an obligation of intelligibility. This claim is auspiciously ethical in its nature, and if Wittgenstein understands the most important miracles of the world to be shown through our discussion of language, then it is also deeply religious. Language users are to be held accountable for the speech acts they commit, particularly if those acts are nonsensical. The second major implication of the Investigations is somewhat subtler; Wittgenstein moves the reader to part from the cerebral world of intractable philosophical questions and stipulative definitions and return to ordinary life. Though many would argue that a religious 27 perspective would be antithetical to this call for a return to the immediate, I argue that this call to return is the watermark of Tolstoy as the catalyst for Wittgenstein’s faith. Throughout Tolstoy’s Gospels, and indeed Tolstoy’s prolific portfolio, he demands that the religious life be lived out, and not merely argued about or debated, and points out that it is in the moments of life lived that the kingdom within can be experienced. In line with these ideas, Wittgenstein once remarked whilst on a walk with Drury that, “if you and I want to live religious lives, it mustn’t be that we talk a lot about religion, but that our manner of life is different” (Rhees, 1981, 133). These words, coming from the author who strove to root all of linguistics in the grammar that is entrenched in “forms of life,” have a profoundly deep meaning—the return to a rootedness in ordinary life and ordinary language is where one encounters the deepest areas of humanity. The work that Wittgenstein does in the investigations to pull his reader back from the precipice of Cartesian thought is made further evident in his work with self-referential reflections. Borrowing from Gary Hatfield’s excellent gloss of the Cartesian state of affairs: the goal of Descartes’ meditator is to separate “any consideration of body or bodily processes from her conception of self” and compile a unified body of “undoubtable things”: thoughts, which comprise “me” (Hartfield, 2014, 123). Wittgenstein makes a simple, dismissive remark about this line of thought: “’I’ is not the name of a person” (Wittgenstein, 2009, §410). Hans Sluga works to unpack this remark, naming it the “antiobjectivist claim that ‘the I is not an object’ … I take this to mean that the I cannot be constituent of the world at all, that the word ‘I’ can neither be a name for a simple object nor a description of a complex” (Sluga, 328). Some scholars, like William Child and Anat Biletzki, have made comments that ‘I’ then becomes superfluous, and comment that the “perspectives proposed” by Wittgenstein in PI are often “downright 28 destructive,” and open the door to solipsism (Biletzki, 2014). However, I align with Gary Hallett’s response to this criticism: “no such convention [as communicating sans the pronoun I] exists in the English language; so the pronoun is not superfluous, even in the sense that a variant form of expression is available in which the pronoun does not appear … As W. says here, the ordinary expression ‘performs its office.’” (Hallett, 1997, 446). “I” is a term that makes room in conversation for the sensory datum and mental states of other individuals to have interplay with the perspectives of one’s own. “I” in this sense is not an object, but a universally available subject, and its use acknowledges that universality. “You” and “I” are interchangeably “you” and “I”; the presence of “I” as a contrast class fundamentally allows the subjective use of “you”. Wittgenstein is right that I don’t need “I” to talk about my own experiencing pain - the reason that we use “I” is so that I can understandably say that “you are”. The work done by fleshing out Wittgenstein’s ‘I’ is telling for the claim that PI is an ethical document; Wittgenstein says that language demands neither the abstention nor the dissolution of persons. Rather, what is shown in these lines is the necessity for community, and the Goodness of the subsequent intersubjectivity. Conclusion As it has been demonstrated that Philosophical Investigations deals intimately with questions of faith, human ways of life, and the individual self, it now seems as if the underpinnings of my primary claim have been written; as Wittgenstein himself remarked, “once I have exhausted the justifications, I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned” (Wittgenstein, 2009, §217). Though I call the reader to embrace a radical break from the 29 traditionally assumed motivations for PI, the result of this Gestalt shift is immediately worth its difficulty. PI is transformed from a document merely about the observations of how people talk, with a few jabs of philosophy as a wayward physician thrown in, to a deeply considered approach to all the most meaningful truths in life. Wittgenstein, influenced by the writing of Tolstoy in his youth, longed to see the hand of God on earth, and I propose that in writing the therapeutic, observational Philosophical Investigations, he believed that he had. 30 References Biletzki, Anat (2014), “Ludwig Wittgenstein”. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Stanford University Online Press. Drury, M. O’C. (1981), “Conversations with Wittgenstein” in Ludwig Wittgenstein: Personal Recollections, ed. Rush Rhees. New Jersey: Rowan and Littlefield. Дубровский, Игорь (2005), “Мировоззрение Витгенштейна”, Вокруг Света. http://www.vokrugsveta.ru/vs/article/1505/ Gilkey, Langdon (1969), Naming the Whirlwind: The Renewal of God-Language. Indianapolis and New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc. Hallett, Garth (1977), A Companion to Wittgenstein’s “Philosophical Investigations” London: Cornell University Press. Hatfield, Gary (2002), Routledge Guidebook to Descartes and the Meditations. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. Козик, Юрий (2004), ТОЛСТОВСТВО ЛЮДВИГА ВИТГЕНШТЕЙНА, Філософська думка: Спецвипуск Sententiae II. (227 – 233). ISSN 0235-7941. Malcolm, Norman, and Peter Winch (2002), Wittgenstein: A Religious Point Of View?: A Religious Point of View? (1). London, US: Routledge. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 12 February 2017. Monk, Ray (1991), Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Duty of Genius, London Vintage Press. Руднев, Вадим (1999), Божественный Людвиг (Жизнь Витгенштейна), Sluga, Hans (2000) “’Whose house is that?’ Wittgenstein on the self”. The Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein. Ed. Hans D. Sluga, David G. Stern. Cambridge University Press. 320 - 353. Толстой, Лев Николаевич (1896), Краткое изложение Евангелия (Russian Edition). Kindle Edition. Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1922) Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Kindle Edition). Trans. C.K. Ogden. New York. ---. (1965) “I: A Lecture on Ethics”, The Philosophical Review. 74:1. Duke University Press: 3 – 12. ---. (1968) The Blue and Brown Books. 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd. ---. (1975) On Certainty. Trans. G.E.M. Anscombe and Denis Paul. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 31 ---. (1984) Culture and Value. Trans. Peter Winch. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd. ---. (1995) Cambridge Letters, ed. Brian McGuinness & von Wright. Oxford: Blackwell Inc. ---. (2009) Philosophical Investigations. Trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte. Edited by P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte. 4th ed. Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Contextual Works Davies, Stephen (1988) “Kripke, Crusoe, and Wittgenstein”. Australian Journal of Philosophy, 66. Auckland: 52-66. Descartes, Rene (2013) Meditations on First Philosophy. Edited by John Cottingham. Cambridge University Press. McGinn, Marie (2013) The Routledge Guidebook to Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. Mulhall, Steven (2007) Wittgenstein's Private Language: Grammar, Nonsense and Imagination in Philosophical Investigations, 243-315. Oxford: Clarendon Press. McDowell, John (1992) “Meaning and Intentionality in Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy”, Midwest Studies in Philosophy 17:1. Sept.: 40 – 52. An Author’s Note: Wittgenstein’s continued pursuit of Russian Though not of immediate import to the work at hand, the influence and impact of Russia, from the language to the politics, was another driving force in Wittgenstein’s life. Having urged Fania Pascal to give him Russian lessons, Wittgenstein went on at least two major excursions to the Soviet Union to better understand the people and to better grasp the political ideology taking root there. After these visits, Wittgenstein commonly toyed with the idea of moving to Russia to get away from the academic world; he never did. The impact that the Russian language had in the life of Wittgenstein is notable at two points in PI: the first is when he comments that Russian would say “stone red” rather than “red 32 stone,” and the second is when he remarks on the grammatical structure of a Russian sentence. It is unknown whether Wittgenstein ever returned to TGiB to read it in its original language. However, it is clear that the works of Tolstoy, and likely in many respects Dostoyevsky, played foundational roles in launching Wittgenstein’s interest in Russian thought and, thus, very likely, in Russian language. 33 Acknowledgments I would be remiss if I failed to thank my family for the encouragement, financial and emotional support, and childhood that have allowed me to succeed in college today, and thus to produce this piece of scholarship. Special thanks are earned by my advisors. Dr. Fowler, thanks for sitting with me and talking about obscure philosophical jargon, and helping me research the Russian side of this project far better than I could have on my own. Dr. Hall, thank you for sharpening my argument with numerous excellent conversations and welcomed challenges, along with your constant willingness to share your expertise. To Cole Reeves, who was the first person to read this document in its entirety, on extremely short notice, I will be forever grateful. I appreciate the coffee and conversation about parts of this with Paul Petrowski and Peter Fiore, as well as the welcome distractions that they provided when language philosophy chipped away at my soul. To the Stetson University library staff, who helped me with immeasurably with book recovery, and for their willingness to lend me resources indispensable to this project. To Trilogy Coffee Roasting Co., for a stellar environment and a staff that brightened even the hardest days of writing, coupled with a product that is 6 out of 5 stars. Even through nine-hour power writing sessions, they didn’t kick me out, and I cannot thank you enough. To Dr. Andre Nilsen, who tutored me at Oxford and laid the foundations for my interest in Wittgenstein. To Dr. Michael Denner for planting the seeds of this idea and then fleeing the country when it was time to cultivate them, forcing me to stand on my own two feet. And finally, to my wife McKenzie, whose love and support has sustained me through long nights of translating a ridiculous language, and whose trained eyes are the best proofreading tool anyone could want. To try and say how much I love you would run up against the walls of language. 34