The
Worlds of the Happy and Unhappy Man: Different Attitudes towards the Soul
Nothing in the actual use of
religious language or in most authentic expressions of religious practice
forces us to subject religious language use to speculative, philosophical
analysis. To the contrary, treating religious language like factual, propositional
language often distorts religion. It makes the sacred object of prayer and
worship into an object of rational speculation or empirical inquiry, this
very shift creating per definition the irrationality of faith and religious
discourse. Discursive language is bound to human experience: our normal
sense of reality is bound to physical things existing in time and space as well
as to experiences of meaning (love, grief, remorse, etc). This language
presupposes human categories: agency, consciousness in time, limited
perspective, emotional response, and so on. From this we derive the only
categories we have to speculate, and by reducing God to these human categories,
a mythical Santa-like (logically speaking) character results. The challenge is
to resist the temptation to understand such constructions as empirically
testable propositions or logically questionable uses of language, rather than
attempts to picture what cannot be pictured (as revelation does), which is to
say, is not a possible factual state of affairs in human history; and then to
make sense, if we can, out of what seems by definition condemned to nonsense –
that which cannot be pictured or said.
I would like to explain my view by
reference to a thought by Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein wrote in the Tractatus
that the world of the happy man was different from the world of the unhappy
man. This seems puzzling when one considers his stipulated definition of world
in the first sentence of that book: “The world is everything that is the case”
– that is, the world is the set of all facts. Now the facts are not different
for the happy and the unhappy man. What is different is what Wittgenstein might
later have called their attitude (Einstellung) to the world. Attitude
here should not be necessarily thought of as a consciously adopted belief,
though conscious beliefs might be involved. Rather, as in the older meanings:
the attitude of a compass needle directed by magnetic forces; the way the
attitude of one body while sitting may point to or embody conscious attitudes,
feelings, or disposition. One might say we are predisposed by our biology, our
upbringing, and indeed what Wittgenstein called the “natural history of man” to
respond to certain situations in certain ways – that is, to have take up
certain attitudes.
A brief illustration of this may
help make its relevance clearer. We are raised to be part of a world where,
among a vast multitude of such spiritual-cultural responses, we may be
compassionately moved or react with cold hearts to pain. We become such beings
by being raised by parents and communities to whom we matter (or to whom we
should matter, that being the normative expectation) – we would consider this a
deprivation in instances where this doesn’t happen. Parents and others show
that we matter, for example, when they take joy in us and show this joy –
smiling at us, for example, or playing with us as children; also showing their
concern when we hurt ourselves and are in pain. “Pity is the conviction that
someone is in pain”: this sentence, unpacked, means that our language and
culture of pain – our attitude towards pain – has been ingrained in us since
birth. It is connected to a great variety of typical gestures, responses, and
beliefs about pain – comforting behaviors, compassionate feelings, certain
facial expressions, and so on – and can be escaped only with a most radical
break from our lives as we know it; and even in the event of such a break in attitude,
the new attitude is condition by the first as a response to it.
Other attitudes towards pain than
the set of possible attitudes we know are indeed possible. The Spartans, for
example, made the training of warriors the purpose of their society. This
required in their view a non-compromisingly hard attitude toward pain. I think
they understood that parental love was to some extent a natural condition of
humanity, and that compassionate responses to children at least when the pain
is bad were also to some extent natural. Thus they developed practices, body
language, and typical behavioral responses – all intended to repress these
quasi-natural responses. This training went hand-in-hand with conscious
beliefs, all cohering to ingrain a kind of pitilessness in their
citizen-warriors, if ancient accounts are to be believed. The Spartans had a
different attitude, or probably a different set of intelligible attitudes
towards pain that those of our culture – an attitude that is partly continued
in current military training, where Spartans must be made of Christians. Nevertheless, the human body conditions
what we can ultimately find intelligible – attitudes towards pain are not
unlimited; an alien species with a different biology might have no concept of
pain at all; Data, the android of Star Trek fame, could quote definitions of
pain, recognize pain behavior, understood to some extent the role in played in
human life – and yet have no real conception of pain. Thus his attitude towards pain was clearly
different from the range of intelligible human attitudes: there was (and could
be no) pity in his face when he was confronted with human suffering.
Wittgenstein’s philosophical use of attitude
seems designed to logically describe expressions of perhaps never fully
conscious foundational moral, political, or religious values, values that have
become constitutive of who a person is and are the source of meaning around
which a person’s thoughts and actions revolve. The linguistic form these
expressions may take can be quite variable, from fully conscious statements of
principle (“die Würde des Menschen is unantastbar”) to various types or stories
or even paintings. (That such attitudes can be translated into pictorial form –
in paintings, for example, such as Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel or Rembrandt’s
Return of the Prodigal Son – probably influenced Wittgenstein’s use of the
concept picture in discussions of religious dogmas like the resurrection.) Yet
while such attitudes can be expressed in more abstract philosophical language,
such abstract expression seems further removed from their source in human life,
a source in which no clear distinction between emotional and cognitive response
makes sense – as in a person’s response to the pain of another. As Gaita
pointed out, abstract formulations of human dignity probably get their
intelligibility and force against the backdrop of a emotion-laden language that
are closer to the source of the attitude: for example, the frequent response to stories like “The
Good Samaritan” underlie the sense to abstract formulations like “human
dignity.”[1]
While such stories can be translated
into pictures (cf. Rembrandt’s “The Good Samaritan”), they cannot be translated
into propositional language (statements of facts). The language expressing
attitudes correspond with no possible states of affairs that could be
objectively described by neutral observers; Tractatus-like propositions would
have nothing to picture – or rather, that which could be pictured (the
objective states of affairs) would reveal nothing to the neutral observer about
the attitude; they could only mean the attitude to an insider, one who could
see the states of affairs in the appropriate light. Data, for example, could
describe the external events of the Good Samaritan without grasping the
attitude toward humanity and misfortune that Christians immediately recognize.
In Tractatus terminology, these meanings can only be shown, not said.
From the perspective of the later philosophy, we can more common-sensically put
it this way: we can express these attitudes in meaningful language, but not a
fact-stating discourse; the language will only be fully grasped to those able
to access the form of life shared by the language users. Such stories as the
“Good Samaritan,” for example, (or certain poems) are the medium in which we
express attitudes that perhaps for ideological reasons may be expressed in a
rhetoric of objectivizing, fact-stating discourse; such discourse, however, can
only undermine itself.[2]
With Wittgenstein’s notion of attitude
hopefully clear, I can elucidate the thought about the worlds of the happy and
unhappy man being different. The facts of the world are the same: if science
describes reality, both the happy and the unhappy man would always come to the
same results in a scientific inquiry – say, about the biology of certain kinds
of pain. (Data could understand this biology.) But their attitudes towards this
set of biological facts (this reality) would be radically different, though
this difference would not be entailed by anything factual or scientific. The
source of the different attitudes derives from the meanings things have
for the happy and the unhappy man. These meanings in turn derive from their
lives: both the ingrained attitudes of their upbringing and culture as well as
their biography, and in particular, those features of life that make us happy
or unhappy. A man whose life has taught him that it makes sense to see himself
and others as fantasizing, deluded collections of organic materials has a
different attitude towards the world (and pain) from one whose life has taught
him to see himself as possessing the gift of a rich inner life. This absence of
meaning is also revealed in the attitude of despair. One way of conceiving
despair is illustrated in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, where Macbeth registers
the suicide of Lady Macbeth as a mere afterthought: he could not experience any
meaning in an event that would normally be mourned.
Or to take another example suggested
by Gaita, imagine two women, both pregnant. Though neither pregnancy comes at
an easy time, one responds to the life growing within her with love and wonder;
the other with resentment and bitterness. Or again, imagine two pregnant women
who both respond with resentment and bitterness: one opts for an abortion; this
is impossible for the other, though she may wish it weren’t. It is not possible
partly because she has seen other women respond tenderly to their unborn
children. Others she has known who had abortions and suffered a form of remorse
that she found lucid, and it moved her. For her, such experiences revealed the
reality of what was involved in one language; revealed the meaning of the birth
of a child in another. The biology of the fetus is the same: what is different
is the light in which different people see the fetus – that is, their differing
attitudes towards the fetus. Indeed, the applied science of obstetrics can tell
us no more the wonder at the mystery of birth that some of us feel than the
pathologist can tell us about the meaning death may have for us. Seen
scientifically, birth and death are facts like any others; why these particular
facts take on the significance they do for us is a function of attitude and the
meaning they have come to have in human life. Science cannot tell us whether
the unborn should be seen as a precious human life to be protected or an
appendage to a woman’s body that she may unproblematically choose to have
removed; it cannot tell us whether the world may be seen as Creation, as
“good”, or as a collection of matter and force without intrinsic meaning. Such
formalized expressions of attitude express deeper unexpressed attitudes, which
again form and are formed by our actual lives. (Science brackets out attitudes,
or rather adopts an attitude of neutrality for the purposes of certain kinds of
explanation. But no attitude is privileged in the sense that it is justified by
science or a factual state of affairs – neither that of the believer nor the
atheist.) As with the happy and unhappy man, the same facts, in any case, are
seen in a different light (the attitude being the light in this metaphor); they
mean different things to different people and groups of people.
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