These problems that he claims to see from a religious point of view are usually technical issues of logic and language. Wittgenstein trained as an engineer before resorting to philosophy and relies on mundane metaphors of gears, levers, and machinery. Wherever you find the word “transcendent” in Wittgenstein’s writings, you are likely to find “misunderstandings” or “nonsense” nearby.
When answering philosophers who fixate on the higher mysteries, Wittgenstein can be stubbornly dismissive. Think, ‘The man who said you can’t get into the same river twice was wrong; a tin enter the same river twice. With such forceful claims, Wittgenstein seems less of a religious thinker and more of a brazen literalist. But a close examination of this observation can show us not only what Wittgenstein means by “religious point of view,” but also reveal Wittgenstein as a religious thinker of astonishing originality.
The “man” who made the observation about rivers is Heraclitus, a philosopher both pre-Socratic and postmodern, misquoted on New Age websites and quoted out of context by everyone, as everything we have in his corpus are fragments isolated. What does Heraclitus think we can’t do? Viouslybviament me tin do some mixing in and out and back again with your foot on the river bank. But it is so the same river at any moment: the water flowing over my foot pours into the ocean as new water joins the river at its source, and am I the same person?
A reading of Heraclitus makes him convey a mystical message. We use this word, River, to talk about something that is in constant flux, and that might make us think that things are more fixed than they are, in fact, to think that there is things Absolutely not. Our substantive language cannot capture the incessant flow of existence. Heraclitus says that language is an inadequate tool in order to limit reality.
What Wittgenstein finds intriguing in so many of our philosophical pronouncements is that while they seem deeply important, it is not clear what difference they make in anything. Imagine Heraclitus spending an afternoon by the river (or the constant flow of river-like moments, if you prefer) with his friend Parmenides, who says change is impossible. They might have a strong discussion about whether the so-called river is numerous or one, but then they can both swim, have a cool drink to cool off, or glide on some waders to fly. None of these activities is altered in the slightest by the metaphysical commitments of the contestants.
Wittgenstein believes we can be clearer about these disputes by comparing things people say to the movements of a game. Just as every move in a game of chess alters the state of play, so does every movement of conversation that modifies the state of play in what he calls linguistic play. The point of talking, like moving a chess piece, is do something. But a movement only counts as that move forward that the game provided a certain staging. To make sense of a game of chess, you need to distinguish the knights from the bishops, know how the different pieces move, and so on. Placing pieces on the board at the beginning of the game is not a sequence of moves. It’s something we do to make the game possible in the first place.
One way of confusing us with language, Wittgenstein opines, is that the activities of setting rules and allocating places take place in the same medium as the actual movements of the language game, that is, with words. “The river overflows its banks” and “The word River is a noun ‘are grammatically sound English sentences, but only the first is a movement in a set of languages. The latter sets a rule for using language: it is like saying “The bishop moves diagonally” and it is no more a movement in a set of languages than a demonstration of how the bishop moves is a chess movement.
From what Heraclitus and Parmenides disagree, Wittgenstein wants us to see, it is not a fact about the river, but the rules for talking about the river. Heraclitus recommends a new game of language: one in which the rule for using the word River forbids us to say that we have entered the same twice, in the same way that the rules of our own language game forbid us to say that the same moment it occurred at two different times. There is nothing wrong with proposing alternative rules, as long as you are clear that this is what you do. If you say, “The king moves just like the queen,” you either say something false about our game of chess, or you propose an alternate version of the game, which may or may not be useful. Heraclitus’ problem is that he imagines that he is talking about rivers and not rules, and in this case, he is simply wrong. According to Wittgenstein, the mistake we often make in philosophy is that we believe we do one thing when we actually do another.
But if we reject the observation of rivers as a naive mistake, we learn nothing from them. “In a sense, one cannot be too careful in handling philosophical errors, but they contain so much truth,” Wittgenstein warns. Heraclitus and Parmenides may not do nothing different as a result of their metaphysical differences, but these differences are profoundly different attitudes towards all they do. This attitude can be profound or superficial, bold or timid, grateful, or mischievous, but it is neither true nor false. Similarly, the rules of a game are not right or wrong: they are the extent to which we determine whether they move inside the game is right or wrong, but what games you think are worth playing and how you relate to the rules as you play them says a lot about you.
What, then, inclines us and Heraclitus to regard this expression of an attitude as a metaphysical fact? Remember that Heraclitus wants to reform our language games because he believes that they distort how things really are. But keep in mind what you need to do to assess whether our language games are more or less suited to some definitive reality. You should compare two things: our language game and the reality it is intended to represent. In other words, you should compare reality as we represent it to ourselves with reality free from all representation. But this makes no sense: how can he represent himself as things are free from all representation?
The fact that we may even be tempted to assume that we can do this makes clear a deeply human desire to get out of our own skins. We can feel trapped by our bodily and time-bound existence. There is a kind of religious impulse that seeks the liberation from these limits: it seeks to transcend our finite self and establish contact with the infinite. Wittgenstein’s religious impulse pushes us in the opposite direction: it does not try to satisfy our aspiration for transcendence, but pulls us away from that aspiration. The liberation it offers is not liberation from our limits though per our limited self.
Wittgenstein’s observation on Heraclitus comes from a typescript from the early 1930s, when Wittgenstein was just beginning to work out the mature philosophy that would be published posthumously as Philosophical research (1953). Part of what makes this late work special is the way in which the Wittgenstein who sees all problems from a religious point of view merges with the practical-minded engineer. Metaphysical speculations, for Wittgenstein, are like gears that have been freed from the mechanism of language and turn wild out of control. Engineer Wittgenstein wants the mechanism to work smoothly. And this is precisely where the spiritual vision resides: our goal, of course, is not transcendence, but a totally inverted immanence. In this sense, it offers a peculiarly technical approach to an aspiration that finds expression in the mystics, from Meister Eckhart to the Zen patriarchs: not to ascend to a state of perfection, but to recognize that where you are, at this moment, it is already all. the perfection you need.
David Egan
This article was originally published in Aeon and has been republished under Creative Commons. Read the original article.