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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[1]Kantian view of this and response

[2]problem for Enlightenment critics of religion like Nielsen, Kaufmann

 Believing in Santa Claus and and Believing in God – Just a Thought

   Some people compare believing in God to believing in Santa Claus.  I think there is no strong analogy there.

     Santa Claus has different meanings, but there relevant one here can be put like this: many children are encouraged literal belief in the existence of Santa – by having children write letters to Santa, by leaving milk and cookies out before children go to bed on Christmas Eve, and perhaps explaining away skeptical questioning (e.g. How does Santa make it to every child in the world on one night?). In other words, what is not at issue is treating Santa playfully as a pretend character, a make-believe figure. Analogously, God is conceptualized as an imaginary character (e.g. from stories in the Old Testament) that people have been encouraged to believe in literally. He (as with Santa) is portrayed like a human agent, only all-powerful and all-good; both are like an existing entity, although they neither come to be or pass away, but exist outside of space and time (which of course doesn’t make sense). Both to differing degrees are said to have performed miracles, to be able to grant petitions, to intervene in history, and more besides, although as spiritual beings they do not exist as part of the furniture of the universe (again, which doesn’t make sense). Whereas the most positive psychological purpose of encouraging children to believe in Santa is the joy and excitement the belief if thought to bring, the best purpose of taking God literally is the comforts of religion: for instance, that death is not the end, that ultimately all will be judged according to laws of justice and mercy by an absolutely wise, good, and merciful judge. There are, of course, more problematic motivations for belief both in Santa as well as in God as well.

            Moreover, both the Santa and God beliefs are thought to have explanatory power: how did those presents get there if, as the parents claim, they did not put them there? Who drank the milk and ate the cookies if the parents didn’t? How did the universe come to be? Where does our moral sense – our conscience – come from? Both children and the religious are encouraged to believe in a mythical, mysterious explanation for what has a presumably clear, everyday or scientific explanation. They are encouraged to think of the existence of Sana Claus and God as questions of fact, logically no different from the existence of tables, chair, and stars.    

            Both Santa Claus and God are characters in a set of mythical narratives, logically no different from traditional mythical creatures such as unicorns or the Greek gods. Yet, whereas philosophers and theologies have seriously debated the question of God’s existence, no serious empirical question about the existence of Santa Claus troubles the minds of any adult, unless one thinks of imaginary creatures as having a kind of existence. (On the different meanings of existence I will say something below.) Parents simply encourage children to believe that the fictional character does exist in the world and not only in the imagination for the sake of making their children happy. The point of the analogy of God to Santa Claus is to underscore the irrationality of religious belief as well as the powerful psychic needs that motivate such irrationality.

            As children mature, some of them begin to question this literalizing of the fictional, the mythical. They ask familiar questions like how does Santa find time to visit every child in one night, why does Santa fail to visit so many poor children, how can it be that the presents are the same as those in the toy store, and so on. Santa’s existence is again thus treated, logically, as a straightforward question of fact, no different from the existence of water on Europa. But unlike the question about water on Europa, we know that not only does Santa not exist; he cannot exist. There is no serious question of his existence. It makes no sense to think of Santa Claus existing as we think of things existing. Children just do not know this yet. When they find out the truth, Santa ceases to play a role except perhaps in memory and nostalgia – children no longer write wish lists to Santa, for example, or if they do it has a different meaning – to let parents know what they want, or to perpetuate a tradition hard to give up for sentimental reasons. This might be taken as a paradigm account of the development of mankind from the infancy of belief to the maturity of secular attitudes.

 

I want to call this analogy into question.

 

            Atheism has two main forms: one that accepts the question of God’s existence as a factual question, claiming then there is no evidence or explanatory necessity for God. The second finds the attribution of existence to God to be conceptually, logically confused. The first atheism accepts the normal meaning of existence as applied to things, and rejects God’s existence owing to the absence of proof or evidence – treating the question, logically, as a question of fact:  like this example – it is not impossible that dinosaurs have survived on some remote island, but in fact they no longer exist; as though it would make sense to look for God with a telescope. Of course, in the monotheistic religions God as never been conceived as a physical object – thus to think of God as an object which science could discover and investigate would have seemed as absurd to the medieval theologian as it does to us moderns. That we cannot speak except using the language of physical objects – of this the medieval theologian was also perfectly aware. The language we must use to speak of God must necessarily be “analogical” (metaphorical, figurative). This leads to further problems of making sense of religious language. For now, it is enough to be clear that no serious theology has ever confused God with a physical object. And those who have felt to need to speak of God as a spiritual entity (that nevertheless acts in the world) were by and large aware that this involved a figurative use of language.

            However, for the deeper second atheism, the very idea of God’s existence – like Santa Claus’ – has no meaning. To predicate existence to a being that ex hypothesi did not come into being nor will never pass away, that is not in time or space, and so on, is not a factual mistake but a conceptual, logical one – rather like positing circularity to a square. And again, to attribute agency to an actor, and then attribute absolute goodness, infallibility, omnipotence, to the actor, making him outside of space and time in addition, makes nonsense out of the concept of agency. When speaking of God, so the claim of the second atheism, speakers use the concepts of existence, reality, and agency without respecting the logical preconditions that make such talk meaningful. Believers know that they will not find God with a telescope or come across him while taking a Sunday walk. However, they fail to realize that this robs the use of concepts of existence and reality of any possible sense. The notion of a spiritual entity – an entity that does not exist in space and time, that does not come to be or pass away – is not to speak of an entity at all. Yet only a something can act in history.

           

            Theological and philosophical defenses often embrace the same assumptions on which both atheisms rest, showing the cultural hold of thinking of reality in terms of physical objects. While no philosophical defense of God’s intelligibility features holding God’s reality to the standard of a physical object, an object in principle investigable by science, many “proofs” of God’s existence do rely on facts or general statements about large sets of facts such as the universe having a beginning, or events having cause. But most attempts to overcome second view, involving the paradoxical meanings of reality and existence when applied to God, rely on some version of Aquinas’ extension of the concept of analogy. God’s existence or agency is like human existence or agency on the one hand, since God is partly revealed through the Creation; what these words mean when applied to God, however, is beyond human comprehension. God’s reality is on a higher plane of existence, and no creature on a lower plane can know anything positive about realities on a higher plane. Believers are the privileged of a mysterious, divine revelation: no independent path to God’s reality is possible. DEAD END

 

The Historical Context

            It goes without saying that these by no means original reflections do not take place in a vacuum. In pre-Galilean centuries, cultural elites showed very little intellectual interest a science that viewed the material world solely through the lens of understanding its causal workings (this tightly connected with a will to control natural services for the sake of the purposes of particular human groups – some of these mostly interested in power and wealth). Theologians and mystics were thus free to conceive (in various ways) nature as a manifestation of God’s majesty: “The world is charged with the grandeur of God,” as Gerald Manley Hopkins wrote. And (by way of reminder) the medieval church was perhaps the most important institution for setting the frameworks in which men understood and legitimated their various actions and practices. Given those various interests which motivate modern scientific investigations played little role in this cultural matrix, cosmology was not surprisingly conceived in ways that reinforced the narratives in which God’s majesty and benevolence (or the dire consequences of revolt) were communicated. Nature was Creation, and the Creation was imbued with divine (moral) purpose.

            With the increasing role that modern science came to play in society, the lens investigating causal workings of nature ceased be a lens and became a mirror of how nature was thought to truly be, apart from any human conceptualizations or projections; and in this mirror God did not appear. One use of God in pre-scientific culture was to function as a quasi-mythological explanation for various natural phenomena; this weaving of God into all aspects of life was a part of complex psychologically and sociological process that reflected the church’s cultural and political power. In the new mechanical worldview, everything natural – and thus real – could be explained scientifically, and this too was part of cultural and political changes that weakened the influence of the church.

  

Alternative Direction: Religious Language and Attitudes Toward the World           

       Without going further into these directions, I would like to suggest an alternative direction, one traceable to Wittgenstein and to philosophers influenced by his thought: Rush Rhees, Peter Winch, Raimond Gaita, and D. Z. Phillips. 

            To begin with, the role God has played in people’s lives seems radically different from any role that Santa (or unicorns, or other mythical creatures) could ever play. Think of the role God played for Bonhoeffer in that Nazi prison awaiting grisly execution and let that stand for the complex and varied ways God has entered the lives of many people of faith (and many cultures). The main weakness of the analogy with Santa Claus is hereby revealed. God can be connected to the meaning of people’s lives in ways that Santa cannot, however important the Santa belief may be for children. The way a concept enters people’s lives determines the sense it can have. Compare the child’s wish list letter to Santa with Bonhoeffer’s prayer from prison.

 

O Lord my God, thank you for bringing this day to a close; thank you for giving me rest in body and soul. Your hand has been over me and has guarded and preserved me.

 

Clearly, Bonhoeffer was not confused about his situation. He knew in physical terms he was at the mercy of the Nazis holding him captive; he knew that in a different sense their decisions resulted in a day in which some respite was possible; he knew things might change any minute. The meaning of his prayer is not to be sought in any confusion about that.

 

Forgive my lack of faith and any wrong that I have done today, and help me to forgive all who have wronged me. Let me sleep under your protection, and keep me from all the temptations of darkness. Into your hands I commend my loved ones and all who dwell in this house…. (9)

 

Now even those would tend to see God as a mythical being on analogy to Santa would not be inclined to accuse Bonhoeffer of  irrationality or using logically empty language in his prayer, as if he were writing asking something of the present King of Prussia – that is, of someone who does not exist.

            Clearly, Bonhoeffer’s prayer only has point against the background of faith in God. And his faith in God is a different act from treating the question of God’s existence as a speculative question and constructing more or less implausible proofs of his existence. Bonhoeffer cannot separate God’s existence from prayer and worship, from what this means in the life of this believer. It comes out of the prayer that Bonhoeffer does not think of God as a super magician who will come and break him out of prison. He asks only for courage and insight; he expresses only the hope that his family will be safe – hope again without the expectation of magical intervention. I suppose he could make a theological argument to that effect, but then he would be doing something different. The speculation depends on the practice of praying, even though theological speculation may influence the practice of praying. But clearly the primary act is the prayer. This is where God talk has sense, and theology at its best seeks to clarify this sense – not provide a rational foundation for it.

            None of this clarifying work so far proves the analogy with Santa Claus weak. The differing roles of God and Santa play in many people’s lives may only reveal the deeper psychic needs involved. Perhaps we look beyond the seeming irrationality of Bonhoeffer’s faith to the enormous courage he showed and the terrible situation he was in and the psychic needs that made for. We may make allowances for the force of his upbringing as an explanation for the role religion played in his life; we may even be tempted to justify the irrationality of his faith because of the consequences it had for him – giving him a foundation for courage and hope in dark times. But none of this would change the fact of the irrationality. Those who believe deep down that Bonhoeffer was irrational or that the language of the prayer is logically empty, analyzable as a cry for help from a man in desperate circumstances, fail to see a different sense of God’s existence that is involved in religious faith such as his, a sense not directly tied to the conceptual problems of God’s logical status as a spiritual entity.

            Of course, outside of the performance of religious acts or the experiences of wonder, existential fear, and so on, if we asked believers to give an account of their faith, they themselves are often hard-pressed to respond lucidly. It is one thing to live one’s faith; another to study theology. Often believers switch language games, turning God from an object of worship, wonder, or prayer (a sublime object beyond positive representation) into an object of speculation in their positive statements of belief. They may find it difficult to communicate to or defend these beliefs against a non-believer who points out that they conflict with the scientific picture of the world. Of course understood in a certain way – as factual statement corresponding to a state of affairs in the real universe – many theological dogmas (e.g. virgin birth, resurrection) do at many points (not all) seem to conflict with the scientific worldview. And this is how religious literalists do want to understand them. At the extreme end, Creationists logically do see God on analogy with Santa, with the difference that the God story is taken to be true (a myth become history) whereas the Santa story is false. 

     But the point here, following D. Z. Phillips,  is that treating such dogmatic statements of belief as matters of speculation needing rational justification obscures the actual point such beliefs may play (or may have once played) in people’s lives, which does imply some metaphysical commitments: for example ‘there is more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in our philosophy – or science, or concepts. Or that the sublime reveals something that goes beyond our human concepts like ‘exist.’ This won’t make a secularist happy. They would discount any evidence for this metaphysical commitment as ‘purely subjective.’ But then the insistence of non-experiential evidence also implies metaphysical commitments of another kind: there is no more and no less in heaven and earth than can be conceptualized by our philosophy and science.

 Facts and Truth in Morals: "Humankind cannot bear much Reality" (T. S. Eliot)

                                                                           orc

 

    The form of misconceiving objects is so similar to the form of misconceiving states of affairs, as the subject-predicate form is involved in both cases. Compare these examples:

 

·       S1 – A vixen is a female fox.

·       S2 – The Jews are a parasitic, malevolent race that through adaptation has come to seem like they belong to the human race but whose collective purposes include scheming to destroy the human race.

·       S3 – Black Africans are members of the human race who as a whole possess significantly more limited intellectual, moral, and cultural capacities, and at the same time heightened sexual and violent potency.

·       S4 – A witch is a woman with magical powers given to her by Satan to cause suffering on earth.

 

     If S4 is true and if, as most medieval people thought, witches really existed, then burning them at the stake would be a logical thing to do. We don’t burn witches at the stake because we don’t believe witches are real. It seems that some of our most important actions, morally speaking, are based on judgments of fact. S4 expresses a definition, which expresses an idea of Jewish people, and it happens to be false – well, not so much false as insane perhaps. Such creatures do not exist in the world. If they did, then perhaps the Nazi worldview wouldn’t have been so insane. But they don’t. Were the Nazis merely guilty of getting the facts wrong?

        A lexical definition expresses the generalized, abstracted meaning of terms as used by the speakers of a language. Language users typically – not always – agree on the range of uses for the words of their language. The philosophy of Hell would have it that conceptual statements like those above are self-evident by convention alone: thus, relative to a language community, it is true by definition that a fox is a female vixen, a line is the shortest distance between two points, a Jew is a malevolent simulacrum of a human being, and a black African is an intellectually, morally, and culturally inferior human being. Given that a member of the language community knows or is in a position to know the definitions, he could be said to ‘know’ that a vixen is a female fox, a Jew is malevolent, etc., but in contrast to knowing that ‘the sun is shining now’ is false, nothing here is known about the world outside language; he only knows the conventions as to how the words are used in his language. Different languages, of course, would attach different meanings – here especially to ‘Jew’ and ‘black African.’

        It is confusing to think that ‘being a female’ and ‘being a fox’ are facts about ‘being a vixen’: they are criteria that tell us what a vixen is. That is what the expression of a concept does. Extend this logic to S2: it is confusing to think that ‘being malevolent and parasitic’ as well as ‘belonging to a different race (race being understood in analogy to our ‘species’)’ and ‘having the purpose of destroying other races’ are contingent facts about ‘being a Jew’; they function rather criteria that tell the users of that language what a Jew is. Now this concept of ‘Jew’ is not only different from the many sub-conceptualizations of ‘Jew’ (e.g. attempts by orthodox parties in Israeli to define ‘Jew’ more precisely); it is a different concept altogether, one that has about as much contact with real Jews as Tolkien’s orcs have with confederate soldiers in the Civil War (from the Northern point of view). 

       People are free to imagine malevolent races – usually for all kinds of bad reasons. The problem arises when in this case real people are seen in the light of such fantastic concepts, are seen as exemplifications of them – worse, if Daniel Jonah Goldhagen is right about this, the fantastic concepts have been part of the cognitive framework of a culture, as the general fantastic concept ‘Jew’ seems to have been for medieval culture and a fantastic racial sub-conceptualization was for Nazi culture. And given that the ‘deviousness’ of mythological Jews was built into the fantastic concept, no evidence of the real humanity of the Jewish people being murdered and tormented in unimaginable ways counted in the eyes of their mostly deluded tormentors except as evidence of deviousness. (I say ‘mostly’ to leave open the possibility that some of these tormentors recognized the mythological nature of the fantastic concept and just enjoyed the evil as an end in itself.)

       Or, it is as though Germans in WWII would have been seen as orcs to be killed without mercy in the spirit of ridding the world of an utterly malevolent, deformed, non-human race: as in fact they were seen by some, perhaps including ‘Bomber Harris’; and some Germans did their best to transform themselves into something non-human. Like the concept of ‘orc,’ the Nazi fantasy concept of ‘Jew’ or the WWII concept of German are empty sets, at least in the actual world we live in. Seen in dry epistemological terms, the disconnect with reality is best described like this: concepts were formed based on fantasy without contact with the real world, and then the fantasy concepts were applied axiomatically to the real world. In terms of the epistemology of Hell, of course, one would have to say: that given that there is no real world (Nelson Goodman), there is nothing but logical constraint on concept formation (internal coherence). Thus there is no fact of the matter about ‘Jews’ or ‘black Africans’ or any other demonized or degraded group. Anything else would be a limit on human autonomy! Outrageous. If the metaphysics of Hell cannot purely logically be refuted logically, this at least seems to be a definitive moral refutation of it.

       We demean or caricature that which we want to destroy and our reasons for wanting to destroy it have nothing to do with the caricatures we create to rationalize the destruction. 

    Of course creating or popularizing evil fantasy concepts is the stock and trade of the Trump cult: immigrants are vermin poisoning good American blood. We can’t seem to eradicate this kind of thinking from the world. We hear from the MAGA world it is protected by free speech.

 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 (geprägt 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”:

 

Does it dry up 

like a raisin in the sun? 

Or fester like a sore-- 

And then run? 

Does it stink like rotten meat? 

 

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.

---

[1]Woody Allen, Crimes and Misdemeanors….

[2]Wittgenstein quote

 Raising Good Children: an Aristotelian Approach to Pedagogy

 

    Aristotle believed that we have an innate sense of what is good and admirable, as well as what is vice-ridden or contemptible. This means that before we learn about moral philosophy or intellectual reasons for why something is right or wrong, we already have a natural awareness of it. Just as we can recognize courage, kindness, or fairness as admirable, we can sense that cowardice, cruelty, or injustice are contemptible. This sense is not something we invent for ourselves; it’s part of being human. There is no argument for the goodness of treachery or betrayal – and there is no real need for one.

     For Aristotle, children must learn to feel the right responses to what is good, true, and beautiful before they can fully understand why these things are good. Reality itself calls forth right and wrong feelings. Bullying does not call forth tears of joy; an act of difficult justice doesn’t nauseate a decent person. This isn’t something that comes purely from reasoning. It comes from habituation—practicing good actions and experiencing the proper, appropriate emotions. Just as a competent pianist experiences pleasure when listening to a piece beautifully played and experiences a kind of pain upon hearing a beautiful piece of music butchered, just so a decent person experiences pleasure when witnessing just or kind acts, revulsion when witnessing cruel or asocial acts. Without this background, philosophical arguments about theories of justice are hollow.

      Just like an athlete or musician practices to develop skills, children are shaped by the environment and education they receive. They learn through repeated experiences what it means to admire courage, to love fairness, or to appreciate beauty in the world. The right emotions must become second nature, so that by the time they are older and can think critically, they already know, deep down, what a good life looks like.

      This idea is easier to grasp when we think about learning a skill like music or sports. A musician or an athlete doesn’t become good or excellent by simply deciding to be great one day—they have a nature that sets certain conditions for what it means to play well. A violinist learns to interpret music through long practice, listening, and understanding how their instrument works with others in a quartet. Similarly, a basketball player learns what makes a good team member by playing, practicing, and cooperating with teammates. Just as there are ways to play well or poorly, there are ways to live well or poorly. A life based on charlatanism, fraud, sexual assaults, and causing political insurrections is not a good way of living, however popular such a man may be today.  Aristotle’s point is that we are not free to define for ourselves the contours of a good life; living well as a human means fulfilling the kind of being we are, just as playing well means fulfilling what it is to be a good musician or athlete.

    The epistemological consequences of Aristotle’s view are profound. Just as someone cannot converse intelligently about music or basketball without first having practiced and gained some measure of excellence, the same is true for understanding ethics. To truly grasp what is good, virtuous, and just, one must already have developed the right habits and feelings. This means that people who have not cultivated virtue or who are not part of a community that reinforces these values are at a disadvantage when it comes to understanding ethics – as though I, unmusical as I am, inserted my ignorant view about how a particular Bach piece should be played in a discussion between two master musicians. There is no discussion based on equality except based on competence – in ethics, virtue (i.e. an ingrained disposition to act justly, bravely, wisely, etc.).

  For instance, if someone has never practiced basketball or been part of a team, they might struggle to grasp the nuances of strategy, teamwork, or sportsmanship – or appreciate what is involved in that when watching a game. Likewise, someone who has never been habituated to feel the right responses to kindness, courage, or justice will have difficulty understanding these virtues intellectually. (Imagine making an argument about the virtue of honesty to a man like Trump.) Virtue is learned through action, practice, and experience, not just through intellectual reasoning. Without having lived a life that reflects these virtues in some way, a person will find it hard to recognize or articulate why certain actions or attitudes are good or bad. They will lack the practical wisdom (phronesis) that comes from lived experience.

     Moreover, just as a musician or athlete achieves excellence only within a community—a quartet, a team—ethics, for Aristotle, is also a communal activity. We learn to be good in the context of others who help us recognize the good. Those who try to live outside of any ethical community or reject the formation of virtue through habit are unlikely to understand moral truths in the way someone who is immersed in that community does. Thus Aristotle argues that ethics is not just about knowing abstract principles, but about becoming the kind of person who can feel and recognize the right things through years of habituation and participation in the life of a community.

   The tragedy of modern industrial society – whether liberal or autocratic – is that the only place where we can experience such community is private: in practices like music or sports. Given the absence of a community, given that we live in a mass society based nominally on the proposition that it is up to the individual to define what is good, bad, real, or beautiful, as long as they don't physically harm others or their property, disagreements about issues that from inside the ethical view are no-brainers become irresolvable: everything from abortion to pornography to the greed of the capitalist elite. This ethos emphasizes personal autonomy and subjective choice as the highest values, suggesting that individuals are free to determine their own moral and aesthetic standards without reference to any shared human nature or community.

      Sartre’s existentialism captures this idea perfectly. He famously asserted that existence precedes essence—meaning that we create our own meaning and values through our choices, rather than discovering them through our nature or community. In this view, there is no inherent good or bad; moral and aesthetic judgments are entirely self-determined. The consumerist model reflects this, as individuals are encouraged to craft their identities and lifestyles through the choices they make, driven by personal preference rather than a shared understanding of what it means to live well. Unlike Aristotle, who insists that true flourishing (happiness, goodness, truth) depends on cultivating virtue in accordance with our nature and in the context of a community, this modern view sees such constraints as limitations on personal freedom. The realm of personal freedom stops short of murder and robbery but is not nearly broad enough to embrace an ethical life. Instead of learning to feel the right responses to objective goods, modern individualism treats all values as equally valid, as long as no direct harm is done, divorcing ethical understanding from any communal or natural basis.

    This individualist ethic deeply shapes the pedagogical assumptions of modern school systems. Education today often prioritizes personal autonomy, self-expression, and the idea that each student should determine their own path and values. The role of the teacher is increasingly seen as a facilitator rather than a guide toward objective truths or shared moral goods. Students are encouraged to explore and express their individual identities and opinions, with less emphasis on forming virtuous habits or developing a sense of duty to the community. Learning is framed as a process of personal discovery, where subjective experience and personal choice take precedence over the cultivation of shared virtues or intellectual excellence. The idea that there is no singular vision of what it means to live well, but rather that each individual creates their own reality, echoes Sartre's existentialism and consumerist individualism: lifestyles and identities are like a shopping preference. As a result, the focus shifts away from moral and intellectual formation in accordance with human nature, and toward equipping students with the skills to navigate a world where values are seen as relative and individual freedom is the highest good. In this framework, education becomes less about shaping character and more about enabling personal choice, reproducing the society as education typically does. The results of that are all around us. You shall know the tree by the fruit.