Wittgenstein and The Resurrection
Now we are all familiar with the
idea of imaginary worlds being used to help with escape from, or cope with, the
more difficult, or terrifying realities of the “real world.” Of course the
atheist will recognize that such feelings as Wittgenstein’s do exist, and will
rightly note that there are other ways to make sense of such feelings than the
leap to believing an imaginative world has some ontological (factually real)
status, however inadequate reason is to conceptualize it. That religious
thought and feeling address psychological needs (among other things –
ideological, etc.) seems uncontroversial. And it seems that Wittgenstein
restricts himself to the correspondence between religious thought and feeling
to these needs, perhaps most clearly in this important passage, which I will
quote in full length:
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. And must content ourselves with wisdom and speculation. We
are as it were in a hell, where we can only dream, and are as it were cut off
from heaven by a roof. But if I am to be really saved – then I need certainty
– not wisdom, dreams, speculation – 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.
Now this seems to
an idiosyncratic expression of the thought that religious images (e.g. Christ’s
resurrection) springs from psychic need – people believe it not as they believe
other facts, historical or otherwise (e.g. whether the Truman administration
really knew the Japanese government was trying to surrender while it was
deciding to use the atomic bomb) but whether or not they believe the
resurrection was a fact deeply need to believe it in order to have the psychic
comforts that religious faith affords. ‘I need the certainty, I need to believe
it, therefore, it is true!’
Christianity
is not based on a historical truth; rather, it gives us a (historical)
narrative and says: now believe! But not, believe this narrative with the
belief appropriate to a historical narrative – rather believe, through thick
and thin, and you can do that only as the result of a life. Here you have a
narrative – don’t take the same attitude to it as to anther historical
narrative! Give it an entirely different place in your life. – There
is nothing paradoxical in that!
The Christian
belief in the resurrection of Christ may be seen a imaginative image of an
underlying sense of reality that animates inner life – not only morality but
all meaning-giving inner resources: what Wittgenstein often means with
“attitude” as in the expression “attitude towards a soul.” The Resurrection
pictures an attitude towards reality in light of which human life, when true to
itself, is gracious, forgiving and reconciling (Bachelard). This makes it clear
that, as Iris Murdoch taught, the images (background pictures) that incarnate
our attitudes, which in turn emanate from (geprÃĪgt durch) those experiences
that go deep for us, profoundly stamp how we experience the world. Differences
between people derive not only from different choices made within a common
sense of the reality of the world, but because the reality of the world appears
radically different to those, for example, whose formative attitude is
intertwined with the resurrection and those for whom it is inseparable from
scientific reductionism (e.g. Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Richard Dawkins).
It wouldn’t help the case for
religion, however, to point out that all “attitudes” (including scientific
reductionism) are, logically, quite similar to religious faith, being as cut
off from, as insulated from evidence as faith in God. That is not the right way
to put it: the meaning of evidence here depends on attitudes for its sense; it
makes no sense to subject attitudes to criteria of evidence in this type of
case. But still, perhaps the one rational advantage of metaphysical beliefs
like scientific reductionism is that no one would premise it on propositions
that, on the human-historical-natural plane, seem to fly in the face of common
sense and scientific truth – the scientist would be hurl no such gauntlets in
the face of reason. For no matter how one looks at it, the efficacy of the
belief in the resurrection is tied to a historical event that either did or did
not happen – if Jesus only rose from the dead in our imaginative wishes, it
would not help. If God (purified of the ideological and infantile
psychological) is nothing but a projection of our deepest longings, then
however beautiful the world we may live in by believing, it doesn’t help; in
this case, the mythical only helps if it has also entered the world, meaning
entered the historical (and thus the historical-scientific “language game”).
(In a sense, that thought already implies a negative judgment on the world
without God.)
With God as utterly transcendent as
with the metaphysical presuppositions of scientific reductionism the fact-based
discourses of science, the relevance of evidence confirming hypotheses, and so
on, does not enter in, or if so, only owing to a confusion. But when the word
becomes flesh, the sublime and the mundane fuse in ways that defy all attempts
to keep them apart. This is why Christianity in whatever form must be committed
to both the religious and the historical truth of the resurrection. And why, as
Wittgenstein grasped, faith in the light of the resurrection forces the
believer on a collision course with deep-seated scientific beliefs about what
is real and unreal, what is myth and fact, and what is possible and
impossible.
This seems clear evidence of
Wittgenstein’s alleged fideism – the idea of religious truth as relying on an “exclusive
or basic reliance upon faith alone, accompanied by a consequent disparagement
of reason and utilized especially in the pursuit of philosophical or religious
truth,” according to the most widely recognized definition by Alvin Plantinga
(87). In terms of my analysis, the resurrection would be an image of something
sublime, a conscious belief picturing a truth that cannot be expressed
conceptually, and so on a different plane than historical truth. And this would
make it seem immune from critical scrutiny, just something certain people must
believe, and must take dogmatically as certain to have the consequences of
faith. If the fideist chooses between reason and (human, scientific,
historical) truth and God, he chooses God.[1]
This is under the influence of an attitude towards human life that sees it
as not worth living, as something wretched, absurd or horrible without a
certain faith in God.[2]
However existentially poignant such faith, it is intellectually quite
unsatisfactory – indeed, the whole idea is premised on the differing needs of
the heart from the intellect. Thus Wittgenstein refuses to see the resurrection
as a part of any empirical discourse, correctly understanding that to do so
would distort the meaning it has in people’s lives, but at the obvious cost of
seeming to protect the obvious irrationality of this religious belief from a
certain kind of critique – seemingly insulating the language game of faith from
science if not from other forms of critique.
But to understand Wittgenstein’s
position as fideism, plausible though it may be, is too superficial, for that
would imply ontological and epistemological commitments that Wittgenstein as a
philosopher was never willing to make. Wittgenstein would agree with the
atheist that the resurrection of the flesh is more than false – is nonsensical
by our ordinary standards of reason and language use. He thinks that the role
of such beliefs in the lives of the devout reveals a different grammar, one
that I have tried to describe using the sublime. The meaning such beliefs can
have, and consequently what it means to speak of their truth, or reality, or
the existence of God, must not be disassociated from the point of those who
live these beliefs see in them – to do so would be to caricature them.
When called upon to justify or explain
their beliefs, that the religious themselves often caricature them makes no
difference to Wittgenstein’s point. But no further statements about a possible
reality that informs these religious images are forthcoming from Wittgenstein;
to go further, such as I have in the previous paragraph, definitely violates
the limits of sense. But he does not want to see it as mythical or symbolic
either – as opposed to historical or natural. He refuses to say whether religious
belief is really a psychological projection (as Freud did) or a signifier of
transcendental realities beyond our ability to conceptualize. He refuses owing
to his belief that to say anything at all courts misunderstanding. The sense
the resurrection has in people’s lives, the grammar of the language of those
who authentically live this belief, cannot be made perspicuous when laying it
out on the pathology table of philosophy. (Christianity: the need is for the
one to be present in the other; Ways of understanding Christ’s incarnation,
death in light of the incarnation). That in my case the idea of the literal
resurrection of the flesh has become problematic is connected with the
weakening of the plausibility of God as an agent involved with human
affairs. The scientific implausibility of the idea plays no role here, though
it might play a larger one in making sense out of attitude expressing images
such as the resurrection of the flesh, whereby the empirical improbability does
interfere with the attitude, requiring me to express the attitude in other
ways. This is merely a brief illustration of the way “language games” can be
intertwined, and how one might no longer see the point of certain expressions.
Nothing in Wittgenstein’s writings forces us to deny that this is so. Indeed,
this is as it has always been. (cf. role of theory and religious dogma; “God’s
will” = it’s karma Kierkegaard’s leap.)
As Wittgenstein formulated it in the
“Lecture on Ethics”:
Thus
in ethical and religious language we seem constantly to be using similes. But a
simile must be the simile for something. And if I can describe a fact by means
of a simile I must also be able to drop the simile and to describe the facts
without it. Now in our case as soon as we try to drop the simile and simply to
state the facts which stand behind it, we find that there are no such facts.
And so, what at first appeared to be simile now seems to be mere nonsense.
[In the context of
this discussion, Wittgenstein uses not only simile, but allegory and analogy.
It is clear he is referring to figurative uses of language in general, and not
only similes.] To illustrate what Wittgenstein means, consider the following excerpt
from the poem by Langston Hughes, “What Happens to a Dream Deferred”:
These similes
suggest that dreams deferred tend to either cease representing hopes for those
who defer them or may even become a sort of resentment. These are purported
factual – more precisely, probability statements, statements asserting an
internal connection between giving up dreams that represent authentic hopes of
happiness or fulfillment and certain spiritual consequences. However strong we
find the connection, however diverse reactions may be in different people, and
however much we may need to make precise the kind of dreams in question, the
similes draw on meaningful assertions for their force. Of course, not all
similes express exactly this kind of statement. Others may, for instance,
express a value judgment – friends are like pieces of chocolate cake; you can
never have enough: here the judgment is expressed that it is good to have many
friends (rather than a small circle of very close friends, for example). This
shows that Wittgenstein’s thought is too restricted.
But the basic point still applies:
whether figurative language can be translated back into facts, probability
assertions, or ethical judgments, such language can still be made sense of in
terms of human experience. When theologians or liturgical prayers predicate
goodness or mercy of God, a disproportion seems to open up. God is not a part
of the human world; we know goodness and mercy only because we know of human
beings who specially exemplify these qualities. As Frederick Copleston puts it:
When
we say that God is wise we affirm of God a positive attribute; but we are not
able to give any adequate description of what is objectively signified by the
term when it is predicated of God. If we are asked what we mean when we say
that God is wise, we may answer that we mean that God possesses wisdom in an
infinitely higher degree than human beings. But we cannot provide any adequate
description of the content, so to speak, of this infinitely higher degree….
(136).
Wittgenstein’s
point goes beyond the problems of predicating qualities of an infinite being, a
being that ex hypothesi exists on a higher plane; whose essence (unlike
anything in Creation) cannot be distinguished from its existence; a being that
exists necessarily, outside of space and time, and yet stands in some relations
to spatiotemporal creatures of its own making. Medieval theologians – above all
Aquinas – were aware of these conceptual problems: of the fact that concepts
such as existence, reality, and goodness could not mean when predicated of God
what they mean when applied to human beings and the realities that are
intelligible to us in the material universe and in the meaning-laden human
world – which is to say, they were aware that, in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus
sense (still apparent in the “Lecture on Ethics”), the language of
philosophical theology was literally non-sense; yet they did not conclude it
was empty given their metaphysical assumption (their faith) predisposed them to
attributing reality (even if that word must be understood “analogously”)
to the sublime. The language of theology, for Aquinas and the practice he was a
part of, showed (indicated, pointed to, gestured towards) this reality even if
it could not literally say it. (I shall have occasion to return to Aquinas’ use
of analogy below.)
The difference between Wittgenstein
and Aquinas (and his critics) is that the former steadfastly refused to make
the sublime (the “mystical” in the Tractatus use) a subject of
speculative philosophical theology – of knowledge. While Aquinas understood
that his philosophical-theology could not be founded on propositions except in
an analogical sense, he did believe that a philosophy worth of the name could
be grounded in what natural reason could rule out (via negative) and analogy
could positively reveal to natural reason. The activity of clarifying the
logical problems of predicating concepts of human languages to a being (e.g.
Aquinas's use of analogy), a real spiritual non-thing that by definition
transcends the human, is for Wittgenstein bound to run up against the logic of
our language. The sublime (mystical) transcends conceptual, though not
necessarily the musical, emotion-attuned poetic language and its imaginative
images: in other words, trying to conceptualize the sublime in rational terms
as in philosophical theology itself creates the (unsolvable)
conceptual-logical paradoxes that do not arise in the original, strictly
religious uses of language. It rationalizes the indeterminacy that erupted in
the sublime moment rather than sublimating it. And this shows itself when one
tries to debate Aquinas’ propositions as though trying to arrive at the correct
solution to an intellectual problem, rather than perhaps seeing them as a kind
of poetic language that might show something but could never say
anything (in that paradoxical Tractatus sense).
Wittgenstein’s move here, however, seems
to create paradoxes of its own. By removing religious expression from rational
thought and the logic of meaningful language, he seems to want to insulate it
from reflection and critique. I have just claimed that the conceptual analysis
given by Aquinas – a brilliant philosophical achievement whether one agrees
with it or not – does reflect something real about religious language, with the
point of contact of religious language with its corresponding reality, but in a distorted
fashion, as “through a mirror, darkly.” This seems to imply that philosophy
must, as Wittgenstein famously wrote, leave “everything (here religious
language: e.g. the liturgical language of prayer) where it is.” In one sense,
that is true: if religious language is seen as a figurative-emotive expression
of a phenomenon that Aquinas or one of his critics analyzed more precisely
(truly) in philosophy, making the original religious use of language an
imperfect expression of the more rational philosophically analyzed version,
then philosophy does not leave everything as it is – it changes the sense of
religious uses of language; the liturgical prayer could then be more accurately
expressed in Aquinas’s concepts and propositions; the original language would
be a concession to less than rational, emotional human beings. For a community
of Aquinases, the prayer would be translated into a more accurate
philosophical-scholastic language (Gaita, Good and Evil).
Science could also only reduce the
profound remorse a murderer might experience over his deed or the grief we may
suffer when a loved one dies. Santa’s existence has nothing to do with any such
experience. Belief in God – and not only God but in things like in the reality
of one’s grief, or the beauty of a courageous action – is not like that.
Whatever it might mean to believe in God, the analogy to black holes is weak.
If black holes exist, it must in principle be possible to trace some effect
their existence has in the universe; their existence, moreover, explains certain
states of affairs that we know to be real.
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