The Limits of Reason and Wittgenstein's Einstellung zur Seele

I want to try to connect what I wrote about the limits of reason concerning the ultimate questions of life to what I take to be a foundation of reason – what Wittgenstein called Einstellung (attitude), as in Einstellung zur Seele / attitude toward a soul. It is easy to confuse it with something too psychological, like a mood or opinion, when it is doing deeper work.

     When Wittgenstein speaks of an Einstellung  (for example, an Einstellung zur Seele) he is not referring to a belief that one holds after reflection, such as “I believe that human beings have souls.” He is pointing instead to a way in which one is always already oriented toward another person, or toward the world, that shows itself in one’s spontaneous responses, language, expectations, and practices. It is closer to what is meant when we say that a compass is “set” toward the north, or when someone is described as being “von Kopf bis Fuß auf Liebe eingestellt.” In such cases, what is in view is not an inference or conclusion, but an attunement or alignment that governs how things appear as meaningful at all. (I owe my understanding to Gaita.)

    An Einstellung zur Seele means that I do not approach another human being as a complex organism to which I then attribute an inner life by hypothesis. Rather, I see him immediately as someone who can suffer, rejoice, hope, or betray. I speak to him, not merely about him. The structuring principle of my interaction, shown in words such as “promise,” “forgive,” “hurt,” or “trust,” presupposes this almost fixed orientation. Language itself grows up holding this stance in place. It would be odd to say that I infer the presence of a soul and then decide to treat him accordingly; my treatment expresses the stance that makes sense of such concepts in the first place.

     This connects with Raimond Gaita’s insight that certain moral realities, such as the dignity of a person or the horror of cruelty, are visible from within love in a way that is not accessible from a detached standpoint. From within an Einstellung formed by love, the claim that a person must not be treated as a mere thing may appear self-evident, not because it has been demonstrated, but because the stance itself discloses what is at stake. But where love is absent, one may understand the words but fail to see their point; the world may appear as a field of manipulable objects rather than as a community of persons. (Trump)

       In this light, the earlier discussion of the limits of reason in affirming the world can be seen as turning on differing attitudes toward reality as such. To be oriented toward the world in trust, gratitude, or love is not to have concluded that it is good, but to be set toward it as a place in which goods are possible and meaningful. To be oriented in distrust or refusal may make the same affirmation appear morally obtuse. Reason can examine the coherence of these stances and the practices that sustain them, but it may not be able to generate an orientation of affirmation or protest from neutral premises. The affirmation of the world may therefore depend, in part, on an attitude formed within relationships of care and beauty, much as the recognition of another’s soul depends upon an orientation that is expressed in the language and practices of love rather than inferred from observation alone.

     A simple illustration might be the difference between how a loved parent and a clinical stranger perceive the same child. A mother hears her infant cry in the night. She does not register this first as a physiological signal emitted by a small organism and then logically infer that something like pain or fear may be present. She hears it immediately as a call, as distress, as the suffering of someone who matters. She goes to the child, picks her up, speaks to her, comforts her. Words such as “hurt,” “scared,” or “needing me” are not conclusions drawn from observation but belong to the stance within which the child is already encountered as a being with an inner life. Her orientation toward the child is what Wittgenstein would call an attitude toward a soul, and the language of care grows up within that orientation. A stranger, by contrast, might hear the same cry in a hospital ward and describe it in neutral terms as a sound of a certain intensity or frequency. He need not deny that the child suffers, but his relation to her does not spontaneously take the form of concern or responsibility. The difference is not primarily one of factual belief but of stance. From within the mother’s orientation, the child’s vulnerability and dignity appear as obvious and morally significant; from outside it, they may be acknowledged without carrying the same immediate claim.

      Something analogous may apply to the affirmation of the world. From within an orientation formed by trust and love, the world may appear as a place in which goods are possible and worth preserving, and its being may seem worthy of affirmation even in the face of its evils. From within a stance shaped by betrayal or deprivation, the same affirmation may seem unwarranted or morally naïve. In both cases, reason can articulate and examine the claims that are made, but the basic orientation from which the world is encountered as affirmable or as hostile may precede the arguments offered in its defense or rejection.

       An attitude for Wittgenstein is not a belief arrived at by argument but an orientation or stance toward reality that is formed through experience and sustained within forms of life, often through language. When a child grows up within relationships of trust, care, and beauty, language comes to be learned within an environment in which the world is experienced as intelligible, responsive, and worth engaging. Words such as “home,” “friend,” “promise,” or “future” acquire their sense within practices that presuppose security and rootedness. In this way, an orientation of affirmation may develop that does not take the form of an explicit conclusion but of a lived sense that reality is, at some basic level, good or hospitable. Conversely, where love and other essential goods are absent, language may grow up within practices marked by insecurity, violence, or deprivation. In such contexts, the same words may carry different resonances, and the world may appear as threatening or indifferent. An orientation of distrust or refusal may develop, not through theoretical reasoning but through the patterns of life within which meaning is formed. From within a loving orientation, the goodness of being may appear as something self-evident, not in the sense of being provable but as a background condition against which other judgments make sense. From outside that orientation, such affirmation may seem unwarranted or even morally suspect.

      This suggests that the question of whether the world is worthy of affirmation cannot be settled by argument alone, because the very capacity to see it as affirmable may depend upon an orientation formed prior to explicit reasoning. Reason can examine, criticize, and articulate these orientations, but it may not be able to generate them from nothing. Thus the limit encountered in our discussion may not lie in a failure of logic but in the fact that affirmation or refusal of the world is bound up with fundamental stances toward reality that are shaped by love, trust, or their absence. In this way, the tension between Ivan’s protest and the affirmation implicit in ordinary love may reflect not only competing arguments but differing attitudes toward the world that reason can illuminate but not finally judge.

      Though limited to inside the beam and invisible from outside, attitudes embodying love (and goodness, beauty, all connected) are self-authenticating and authoritative in a way attitudes born of privation or negation cannot be. One way to put this is that an Einstellung formed within love does not merely add a favorable emotional coloring to an otherwise neutral perception, but discloses goods that are internally connected to the practices and concepts that make our moral (and religious) language intelligible at all. When someone is “set” toward another in love, he does not simply feel warmly disposed; he is oriented so that the other’s vulnerability, dignity, and claim upon him are immediately apparent. Concepts such as “care,” “promise,” “betrayal,” or “cruelty” have their sense within this orientation. They are learned and sustained in relationships of trust and responsiveness. From within such a stance, the recognition that it would be wrong to treat the other as a mere object appears as something that needs no further justification, because it is bound up with what it means to take the other seriously as a person.

     By contrast, an attitude shaped by privation or negation may narrow or occlude these goods without supplying an alternative framework in which our moral concepts retain their point. One might come to see the world like Trump, seeing others primarily as threats, resources, or competitors. This orientation can be described and perhaps even defended in terms of survival or advantage, but it tends to hollow out the very practices in which notions like trust or responsibility make sense. It does not so much reveal a deeper layer of reality as reduce what is encountered to a thinner set of relations. In this sense, attitudes formed within love are self-authenticating not because they are immune to criticism, but because they sustain the conditions under which our moral judgments can be meaningful at all, whereas attitudes formed by deprivation often undermine those conditions. Their authority lies in their capacity to disclose goods that are presupposed in our shared forms of life, even if that disclosure is visible most clearly from within the stance itself.

        This hopefully helps explain why the limit I ran up against in my thoughts in response to Ivan Karamazov may not be a defect in reasoning so much as a feature of the kind of question I was asking. If our most basic moral concepts such as dignity, innocence, betrayal, care, justice have their sense within an attitude formed by love, trust, and responsiveness, then the capacity to see the world as affirmable in spite of its evils may depend upon an orientation that reason alone cannot produce. On the one hand, from within such an orientation, the goodness of being may appear as something that is not inferred but taken up in practice, much as the humanity of another person is not deduced but acknowledged in how we speak and act. Reason can clarify what is implied by that stance and defend it against incoherence, but it may not be able to generate it from neutral premises. On the other hand, an orientation shaped by deprivation or negation may make the same affirmation appear morally obtuse, because the goods that love discloses are not experienced as binding. Such unfortunates look at the world as a dog watches TV, without having the capacity to understand all they see. In that case, arguments for the world’s goodness may seem like attempts to rationalize what is, rather than to respond to what is disclosed as worthy of care. Reason can articulate the tension between affirmation and protest, but it may not be able to decide between them if the very perception of what counts as a good is tied to differing attitudes.

      So the limit of reason in affirming the world may arise because the judgment that the whole is worthy of affirmation presupposes a stance toward reality that reason examines but does not itself establish. Just as the recognition of another’s soul depends upon an orientation expressed in the language of love, the affirmation of being depends upon an orientation in which the goods disclosed by love are taken as authoritative. Reason can illuminate and criticize such stances, but it cannot compel them in the way it compels assent to a demonstration. In this way, the boundary I encountered may reflect the dependence of certain moral judgments on fundamental attitudes that are formed within lived practices rather than derived from argument alone.