Abstract
This is a paper about the way language meshes with life. It focuses on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s later work, and compares it with Leo Tolstoy and Saint Augustine’s confessions. My aim is to better understand in this way what it means to have meaning in language, as well as meaning in life.
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Notes
The stream of life: Wittgenstein (1980b, 81, 1967, §173, 1980c, §§504, 687, 1982b, §913, 30). Patterns in the weave of life: Wittgenstein (1967, §568–9, 1958, 174, 229, 1980d, §§672–3, 1982a, §206, 211, 365, 406, 862, b, 67–7, 40, 42). Being embedded in life: Wittgenstein (1980d, Sections 16, 150). The bustle of life: Wittgenstein (1980d, §625–6). The flux of life: Wittgenstein (1982a, §246). Concepts find their home within our life: Wittgenstein (1980d, §186). Read and Guetti (1999) dismiss the importance of life for Wittgenstein’s understanding of meaning. They mistakenly claim that the idea of the “stream of life” is Norman Malcolm’s, and has no textual evidence in Wittgenstein’s manuscripts. They are correct, however, in claiming that the appeal to this stream of life leaves the notion of meaning rather vague. This paper is an attempt to be as concrete as the subject matter permits about the link of meaning to life.
Caleb Thompson (1997) draws our attention to the connection between Tolstoy’s book and Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. Another extremely helpful account of Wittgenstein’s early philosophy of life and its link to Tolstoy can be found in Lurie’s (2006) recent monograph, Tracking the Meaning of life: A Philosophical Journey. In this paper, however, I try to continue this line of investigation by placing Tolstoy’s confession in the seemingly unrelated context of Wittgenstein’s later writings. In so doing, my method differs from Lurie’s, who states: “As I read Wittgenstein, a philosophical attempt to answer the question about the meaning of life should aim to draw the transcendental limits of life in three contexts of inquiry: logical, epistemic, and ethical;” which leads him to speak of a “mystical experience as substitution for ethics” (ibid., 115, 136–43). I wish to deal here with the question of life without drawing any transcendental limits, and without reverting to the mystical.
“Augustine, we might say, does describe a system of communication; only not everything that we call language is this system” (Wittgenstein 1958, §3).
“The general notion of the meaning of a word surrounds the working of language with a haze which makes clear vision impossible” (Wittgenstein 1958, §5).
An aspect of language and life that I am unable to fully develop in this paper is the idea that they are both shared. In the same way that Wittgenstein finds it nonsensical to imagine a private language, I find it extremely problematic to imagine a truly private form of life. In the same way that a meaningful language is not merely the consequence of my belief that I make sense, a meaningful life is not simply a subjective decision (it is not enough for Sisyphus to think that his life is meaningful). As Wittgenstein puts it, human beings “agree in the language they use. That is not agreement in opinions, but in form of life” (Wittgenstein 1958, §241).
To speak about “philosophy” or what is “philosophically astonishing” in this context is to speak about the metaphysical temptation that Wittgenstein tries to resist in his view of language, and I try to resist in my view of life, since this temptation lacks not only “philosophical significance,” but, plain and simple, any sense whatsoever. On this matter, see Cavell’s (1995) “Notes and Afterthoughts on the Opening of Wittgenstein’s Investigations.” Nevertheless, Thompson (2000) reads Wittgenstein’s entire Investigations as nothing but a sort of a philosophical confession in its own right. I like this suggestion, because it allows one to see that “working in philosophy” is not metaphysical work, but an ethical work, in the sense that it is always, as Wittgenstein writes, “a working on yourself” (Wittgenstein 1980a, 16).
But here one is tempted to ask: “So what if this is what I do. I demand to know why I do it.” In such a case, Wittgenstein suggests, “it would now be no use to say: “But can’t you see...?” – and repeat the old examples and explanations” (Wittgenstein 1958, §185). From the first remark of the Investigations, his reaction to one’s temptation to offer more and more reasons is simple and unequivocal: “Explanations come to an end somewhere” (Wittgenstein 1958, §1). There are times, he insists, when the best reply to repeated questions about the way we speak, or the way we live, may not be further explanations. In a definitive formulation, he states: “If I have exhausted my justifications I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: “This is simply what I do”” (Wittgenstein 1958, §217). Confronting this inability to fully justify and explain neither language nor life might lead you therefore to be skeptical about the language that you speak and doubt this whole life that you live, since nothing that you say or do can be absolutely and firmly grounded. But you also need to realize that “doubting,” exactly like reasoning, “has to come to an end somewhere” (Wittgenstein 1993, p. 377). When you come to think about it, “a doubt without an end is not even a doubt,” but a sort of a “hollow” doubt (Wittgenstein 1979b, §§312, 625). Every doubt must be, “essentially, an exception to the rule,” since it has to find its place within the “environment” of the rule (Wittgenstein 1993, p. 379). For example, a game does not begin when the players doubt its rules. Doubt may appear only after the environment of the rules of the game has been established (cf. Wittgenstein 1993, p. 381). Accordingly, Wittgenstein can claim that “the primitive form of the language-game is certainty, not uncertainty. For uncertainty could never lead to action” (Wittgenstein 1993, p. 397). In this way, instead of a skeptical attitude of doubt, Wittgenstein promotes what I take to be a gesture of acceptance. The sense of deep skepticism about the meaning of life is never the beginning of the story, and hopefully it is not its end (suicide). If you insist on being skeptical about what you do, then what you do, and your doubt concerning what you do, must be closely related to “what has to be accepted, the given,” which Wittgenstein calls “forms of life” (Wittgenstein 1958, p. 226). Otherwise, how could I even make sense of your doubts?
Wittgenstein could not have known at the time he wrote this sentence that, a few years later, his extremely affluent family would dispense much of its fortune in order to be saved from the claws of the Nazis.
Karl Marx’s depiction of the shift from use value to exchange value, and the creation of what he calls “the fetishism of commodity,” may be connected to Wittgenstein’s comment about the cow, the money, and its use. From this perspective, Wittgenstein’s project can be seen as an attempt to fight against the “fetishistic” character of our language, or our “bewitchment” by our words, which leads us to consider meaning as a mysterious phenomena, and to separate our words from their simple use value (cf. Wittgenstein 1967, §690). Could this be “the most consequential” influence of Piero Sraffa, the Marxist economist, on Wittgenstein’s thought (cf. PI, Preface)? For more on this topic, see Read’s (2000)“Wittgenstein and Marx on Philosophical Language.”
In De anima, Aristotle (1987, 413b3–7) makes a very similar point about the nature of touch.
“...I tell you [my soul] that you are already superior. For you animate the mass of your body and provide it with life, since no body is capable of doing that for another body. But your God is for you the life of your life [vitae vita]” (Augustine 1998, Book 10, §6).
Compare with the following quotes from Augustine’s Confessions: “What Lord, do I wish to say except that I do not know whence I came to be in this mortal life or, as I may call it, this living death?” (Book 1, §6); “That was my kind of life. Surely, my God, it was no real life at all?” (Book 3, §2); “What could all this matter to me, true life, my God?” (Book 1, §17); “When I seek for you, my God, my quest is for the happy life. I will seek you that ‘my soul may live’” (Book 10, §20); “May I not be my own life. On my own resources I lived evilly. To myself I was death. In you I am recovering life” (Book 12, §10).
I believe that the observation that every problem in Wittgenstein’s philosophy can be seen “from a religious point of view” (as Wittgenstein himself once suggested), may lead to very fruitful insights by applying it to the question of the meaning of life. Nevertheless, this approach should be qualified right away in order to avoid misunderstandings. First, it is important to realize that a philosophy seen from a religious point of view is not a religion seen from a philosophical point of view. You need to clarify Wittgenstein’s philosophical project by attending to his religious sensibility, and not the other way around. “Theology as grammar” – this is how he puts it in the Investigations (Wittgenstein 1958, §373). In this respect, theology is not the subject matter of his philosophical work, but, in some sense, the grammar of his work. Second, one must understand that Wittgenstein’s religious sensibility is radically different from the set of beliefs that we are familiar with from institutional religion. For this reason, any attempt to look at Wittgenstein’s philosophy from a religious point of view must search for Wittgenstein’s religious point of view. You will therefore do best if you avert from traditional theological categories, and focus only on the few unique remarks Wittgenstein makes about this sensitive and decisive subject in his own writings. Malcolm’s (1994) posthumous monograph, Wittgenstein: a Religious Point of View, though it is the best attempt so far to pursue this line of investigation, still tends to give in to the double temptation indicated above (on this matter, see Peter Winch’s response to Malcolm at the end of the latter’s book). I think that a good starting point for any account of Wittgenstein’s religious point of view is his idea “that a religious belief could only be something like a passionate commitment to a system of reference. Hence, although it’s belief, it’s really a way of living [Art des Lebens], or a way of assessing life” (Wittgenstein 1980a, 64).
Nevertheless, I would like to suggest that Wittgenstein is not simply rejecting in his later philosophy Augustine and Tolstoy’s link between God, meaning, and life. Yet it is crucial to recognize that “God” is for them not an entity that lies beyond life, bestowing on it absolute sense and invariant moral norms from above. As Wittgenstein shows in his “Lecture on Ethics,” such a metaphysical God, in its “absolute sense,” is simply nonsensical (Wittgenstein 1993, 42–3). For Augustine, as for Wittgenstein, “God” may be conceived as a sign that is used in a completely different way. God is the life of life; God is the happiness and truth that can be found in life, and vice versa. As much as this is a way to think about life, it is also a radical way to think about God. In Tolstoy, this unique approach to the notion of God becomes even more apparent, since his discovery of meaning arises from his appreciation of the ordinary life in his village, of the everyday activity of the peasants around him. At the end of his confession, Tolstoy meshes with the form of life around him, and not with some sort of a mystical divinity. He could therefore claim that his faith in God has nothing to do with the blind acceptance of a doctrine or a dogma, because “faith” is for him nothing more, but nothing less, than “the knowledge of the meaning of human life,” as it manifests itself in the actions of daily existence (Tolstoy 1983, 61). In short, he brings God back from its metaphysical position to its home in the everyday. He can therefore crystallize this crucial idea in a definitive formulation: “To know God and to live come to one and the same thing. God is life” (ibid., 74).
John Cottingham and David Cooper recently offered two seemingly related replies to the question of life’s meaning. Cottingham (2003, 99) states: “The domain that ‘cannot be spoken of’ must be handled through praxis – the practice of spirituality.” And Cooper (2005, 127) affirms: “Human existence is meaningful only if it is ‘answerable’ to something ‘beyond the human’. Those last four words will later be taken as indicating what is beyond conceptualization and articulation: the ineffable or mysterious, in effect.” I hope that it is clear that this paper was an attempt to develop an alternative to such a view, and my mentioning of “God” in this final footnote is not an attempt to return to the ineffable, mysterious, or spiritual (at least not in the way Cottingham and Cooper present them). In fact, I am not sure how to orient my excursus on Wittgenstein’s philosophy in relation to the recent Renaissance in the question of the meaning of life among analytic philosophers. Thaddeus Metz (2007) wrote a very helpful survey of this debate, which bears a rather amusing title: “New Developments in the Meaning of Life.” Metz divides the field between supernaturalist answers to the question of life’s meaning (which can be either God-centered or soul-centered) and naturalist answers (which may be either subjectivist or objectivist). To be clear, this paper fits into neither of these categories.
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Kishik, D. Wittgenstein on Meaning and Life. Philosophia 36, 111–128 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-007-9076-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-007-9076-6