Two Sunday Meditations on Thoughts of Wittgenstein

Faith and Dogma 

     Wittgenstein wrote:

 

Christianity is not a doctrine, not, I mean, a theory about what has happened and will happen to a human soul, but a description of something that actually takes place in human life. For ‘consciousness of sin’ is a real event and so are despair and salvation through faith. Those who speak of such things (Bunyan for instance) are simply describing what has happened to them, whatever gloss anyone may want to put on it. (Culture and Value, 28e)

 

The connection between religious beliefs – whether personal or in the form of dogmas or doctrines as here – and personal faith is interesting. When I was a practicing Catholic, the biggest problem I had was saying the Credo during mass. I either had to understand the dogma symbolically as I repeated it:

 

I believe in God,

the Father Almighty,

Creator of Heaven and earth.    

 

Or I was merely embarrassed – as when I had to repeat that Jesus ascended into heaven, a dogma I could not even make sense of symbolically. (Comic, blasphemous images of Jesus flying up into the sky like a rocket.)

      Clearly, no one (in his right mind) understands these dogmas as propositions that like those of science can be, should be empirically tested against the independent reality of factual states of affairs, or the reality that can be expressed as mathematical equations. Nor can speculative reason do anything with them. They must be considered revelations: that human reason cannot find fully intelligible though the heart might understand (why must we assume the heart is not connected to aspects of reality that logic and science is not?). Because they cannot be found fully intelligible, and because they might allow a believer to see his whole life in their light, and thus could serve to guide and regular every aspect of his life, … because of these things Wittgenstein would call them religious beliefs. But they are not anything that can be known speculatively or philosophically. Literally, they are nonsensical.

      Any meaning they can have must come from individual appropriations, translations of them in their lives. The notion of God the Creator can make sense out of an experience of the overpowering beauty, majesty, infinity, terror of nature, the universe. One can feel the birth of one’s child or the life of a beloved parent was a gift. One can suffer remorse for evil done and wish with all one’s heart for forgiveness. Even be profoundly moved and shocked by reading the story of the adulteress (‘let he who is without sin cast the first stone’ – words that pierced my heart light a bolt of lightning, transforming the way I understand myself and others). The encounter with the reality of God happens in such sublime experiences; not speculative philosophy, theology, or church dogmas. This powerful, sublime emotional response can be translated into a picture – which for a community of believers can become defining, can become a dogma, an experience recreated in a different mode through ritual (dogma without ritual is blind). The reality to which the picture refers is the experience of the universe as overpoweringly beautiful, majestic, etc.

      The experience should not be thought of as “subjective,” a mere projection onto reality.  It might stand as a symbolic placeholder for an aspect of reality that transcends full comprehension; the image may itself (Being as Creation) be divinely inspired. [I am not doing ontology here, but phenomenology, making no existential assumptions but trying to understand the thing itself.] In any case:  As Wittgenstein wrote, it is not the speculative intelligence that desires salvation but the flesh-and-blood human being conscious of falling short. (And a ‘religious’ belief system that denies that we fall short is for me nothing but the subjective attempt to whitewash one’s shortcomings. It is almost a test of the seriousness of a possible ‘religious’ belief that it confronts this feature of human life. The shamans of modern therapeutic consciousness, of course, are working around the clock to make the reverse true, to make the experience of ‘sin’ unreal and the ego-life a source of angelic purity: psychologists rationalizing! All supported ideologically by secular humanism and appeals to science. Absurd.)

       If the powerful, defining emotional experiences – which can produce religious pictures as well as deriving from the contemplation of religious pictures – are not a part of our experience – and we, the hollow men, may be cut off from such experience (cf. imagine trying to experience the Grand Canyon as did Cárdenas) –  or if the picture cannot translate those experiences, then the dogma will be meaningless; we will not see a point to them. That is all their “falsity”  amounts to, logically. In many or even most cases, to see dogma as contradictions to scientific propositions and therefore false or nonsensical fails to understand how they work (or fail to work) in the lives of believers and skeptics alike. As Wittgenstein put it in the first passage – I could not reject a dogma I now believe in without living completely differently.

         Dogmas make sense only in the context of religious life. To criticize them is always possible, and not only from a religious point of view. For example, I might wonder whether my sublime emotional response really implies a relation to an extra-personal reality, as the Creator dogma implies, or to a subconscious psychological realm deriving from my infancy; and I may doubt that subconscious, infantile psychic realm has any connection to supernatural reality – I might think it has evolutionary explanations, which itself, however, is not scientific; even it has evolutionary causes, the religious need not assume that God is not somewhere present in those causes. God or No-God – neither are possible scientific hypotheses and to that extent, questions about God really are beyond narrowly scientific or everyday reason. But any criticism that fails to understand the peculiar logic of religious belief (perhaps criticizing them for lacking scientific evidence) is completely out in left field. How and why a religious belief-expressed-as-dogma can make sense (or not) is logically a vastly more complex than the reductive syllogism:

 

(1)    Only scientific propositions and what can be translated into scientific propositions can be true.

(2)    Religious beliefs cannot be expressed as scientific propositions.

(3)    Therefore, religious beliefs cannot possibly be true. 

 

  

 Analogies of Good 

       "So, there is no sense to speak about something which is “good”. There is no analogy for “good”. There is no logic of a concept “good”. The concept “good” is not translatable into other languages." Be careful! Recall examples of unproblematic attributive uses:

 

·                 a good knife

·                 a good argument

·                 a good dive

·                 a good teacher

 

It makes perfect sense – also for Wittgenstein – to apply ‘good’ to these objects. ‘Good’ doesn’t mean the same thing when applied to each: a good argument is not sharp and doesn’t literally cut well; a good knife doesn’t feature clear meanings, true premises, and a conclusion that deductively follows from those premises. Still, one can speak of analogical meanings. All these objects fulfill some purpose, and there are criteria that must be met to fulfill that purpose: e.g. the purpose of a knife is to cut, and in order to cut it must be sharp; the purpose of a Borscht soup is to taste good and be nutritious; in order to taste good and be nutritious one must use fresh vegetables, the right amount of spice, etc. Where the analogy breaks down in when ‘good’ is used in ethics or religion:

 

·         God is good.

·         An unexamined life is not worth living (i.e. not good)

·         It is better to suffer than to do evil

 

The analogy breaks down because the references are sublime – not facts in the world, and the purposes are also either not present or at least not present in the same sense: ‘better to suffer evil than to do it’ ‘Why? In order to fulfill what purpose?’ ‘No reason other than not doing evil, evil is something you never should do!’

        I suppose you could say something like ‘in order to be a decent person’, but that doesn’t give a purpose like cutting, something external to the means. I want a good education so I need money – money is a purely external means to get educated; in another social system, money might not be necessary at all. ‘Being decent’ is not an external purpose to which ‘not doing evil’ just happens to be a means (perhaps in a different situation it wouldn’t matter? Nonsense). Being decent is just another way of referring to a person who refrains from doing evil, not the reason for the sake of which one refrains from doing evil.

      And so, according to Wittgenstein in the “Lecture on Ethics” at least, good is being used metaphorically, in a literally senseless way in ethics and religion. I would say: it is being used to refer symbolically to a relation to transcendence, which by definition cannot be referred to with ordinary literally meaningful language, but which nevertheless stands in an analogical connection to that which we do understand.

      The goodness that, for example, Edith Stein showed in a concentration camp, being sublime, may not be without remainder translated or paraphrased into the ordinary language we use. The goodness revealed through her demeanor is on another plane that the goodness of a knife or language instructor. We can’t fully understand it, because we cannot relate it to a clearly understood telos, we cannot see it as a means to any higher purpose at all. And yet, if the word goodness forces itself on a person, as it does me, that means I am conceiving the person’s demeanor under an imaginary telos-like image: that such transcendence of the animal- and ego-fueled fears and desires shows itself in a love that is indifferent to the animal and ego-centered self is like a telos, though again only by analogy. It would be as though the end of being a competent chess player paled in significance to the qualities of losing oneself in concentration was one was learning the game – the losing oneself in concentration is not a telos like mastering the game, but it would be incomparably more valuable than any consequence.

     The strength of the analogy lies in that the telos – mastery in chess, transforming yourself into an image of Christ – is a necessary condition in making sense of the action, and the action takes on the force of something good and necessary relative to that telos; the difference lies in the absolute importance of the good that reveals itself on the way to realizing the telos relative to the telos, and thus the transformed sense of telos that results. In a sense, the telos is a ladder that gets thrown away when one has ascended high enough. The Good (for Christians, Christ) is the judge of all purposes, ends, goals.