These problems, which he says are seen from a religious point of view, are mostly technical matters concerning logic and language. Wittgenstein trained him as an engineer before turning to philosophy, and he draws from everyday metaphors of gears, levers and machinery. Wherever you find the word ‘transcendent’ in Wittgenstein’s writings, you will probably find ‘misunderstanding’ or ‘nonsense’ nearby.
If he does respond to philosophers aiming at higher mysteries, Wittgenstein can be stubbornly dismissive. Think of: ‘The man who said one could not walk twice in the same river was wrong; one can walk twice in the same river. ‘With such blunt statements, Wittgenstein seems less like a religious thinker and more like a sloppy literary man. But a careful examination of this remark can not only show us what Wittgenstein means by ‘religious point of view’, but also reveal Wittgenstein as a religious thinker of conspicuous originality.
‘The man’ who made the remark about rivers is Heraclitus, a philosopher who is both pre-socratic and postmodern, misquoted on New Age websites and quoted by everyone out of context, because all we get from his corpus, are isolated fragments. What does Heraclitus think we can not do? It’s clear that I can do a little in-and-out-and-again-in-again-shuffling with my foot at a river bank. But is it same river from moment to moment – the water flowing over my foot pours in the direction of the ocean while new water joins the river at the source – and am I the same person?
One reading of Heraclitus makes him convey a mystical message. We use this one word, river, to talk about something that is constantly flowing and that can accuse us of thinking that things are more fixed than they are – to indeed think that there is stability things at all. Our noun cannot capture the unceasing stream of existence. Heraclitus says that language is an inadequate tool to limit reality.
What Wittgenstein finds intriguing about so many of our philosophical statements is that while they seem very important, it is unclear what difference they make to anything. Imagine Heraclitus spending an afternoon by the river (or the ever-changing stream of river-like moments, if you prefer) with his friend Parmenides, who says change is impossible. They may have a heated argument over whether the so-called river is a lot or one, but after that they can both go swimming, get a cool drink to refresh themselves or slip into some wading birds for a bit of fly fishing. None of these activities are altered in the least by the metaphysical connections of the doubters.
Wittgenstein believes that we can become clearer about such disputes by comparing the things people say to movements in a game. Just as every movement in a game of chess changes the state of affairs, so every conversational movement changes the state of play into what he calls the language game. The point of talking, like moving a chess piece, is to do something. But a move only counts as that intrek that play offers a certain degree of stage design. To make sense of a game of chess, you need to be able to distinguish knights from bishops, know how the different pieces move, and so on. Putting pieces on the board at the beginning of the game is not a series of moves. This is something we do to make the game possible in the first place.
One way we get confused by language, Wittgenstein thinks, is that the regular and place-determining activities take place in the same medium as the actual movements of the language game – that is, in words. ‘The river overflows from its banks’ and’ The word river is ‘a noun’ are both grammatically sound English sentences, but only the former is a move in a language game. The latter sets a rule for the use of language: it is like saying ‘The bishop moves obliquely’, and it is no longer a move in a language game, but a demonstration of how the bishop moves’ a movement in chess.
What Heraclitus and Parmenides disagree on, Wittgenstein wants us to see, is not a fact about the river, but the rules of talking about the river. Heraclitus recommends a new language game: one in which the rule for the use of the word is used river forbids us to say that we acted the same twice, just as the rules of our own language play forbid us to say that the same moment took place at two different times. There is nothing wrong with suggesting alternative rules, provided you are clear that this is what you are doing. When you say, ‘The king moves just like the queen’, you are either saying something false about our game of chess, or you are suggesting an alternative version of the game – which may or may not be good. The problem with Heraclitus is that he imagines himself talking about rivers and not rules – and in that case he is simply wrong. According to Wittgenstein, the mistake we so often make in philosophy is that we think we are doing one thing while actually doing something else.
But if we dismiss the remark about rivers as a naive mistake, we learn nothing from it. “In a sense, one can not take too much care in dealing with philosophical errors, it contains so much truth,” warns Wittgenstein. Heraclitus and Parmenides may not do anything else because of their metaphysical differences, but the differences are completely different attitudes in the direction of everything they do. That attitude may be deep or shallow, daring or sly, grateful or scratchy, but it is not true or false. Similarly, the rules of the game are not right or wrong – this is the criterion by which we determine or move within the game is right or wrong – but what games do you think are worth playing, and how do you relate to the rules while playing them, many of you say.
What, then, do we – and Heraclitus – tend to regard this expression of an attitude as a metaphysical fact? Remember that Heraclitus wants to reform our language games because he thinks they are misrepresenting how things really are. But think about what you have to do to determine if our language games are more or less adequate for some ultimate reality. You have to compare two things: our language game and the reality it represents. In other words, you have to compare reality as we imagine it with reality without any representation. But it makes no sense: how can you imagine for yourself how things are free from all representation?
The fact that we may even be tempted to think we can do it is a deep human desire to step outside our own skin. We can feel trapped by our physical, time-bound existence. There is a kind of religious impulse that wants to be freed from these limits: it wants to transcend our finite self and make contact with the infinite. Wittgenstein’s religious impulse pushes us in the opposite direction: he is not trying to satisfy our pursuit of transcendence, but to wean us completely from that pursuit. The liberation he offers is not liberation of our limited selves but for our limited self.
Wittgenstein’s remark on Heraclitus comes from a typeface from the early 1930s, when Wittgenstein only began to work out the adult philosophy that would appear posthumously as Philosophical Investigations (1953). Part of what makes that late work special is the way the Wittgenstein who sees every problem from a religious point of view merges with the practically minded engineer. Metaphysical speculations, for Wittgenstein, are like gears that have escaped the mechanism of language and turned wildly out of control. Wittgenstein, the engineer, wants the mechanism to run smoothly. And this is exactly where the spiritual insight lies: our purpose, well understood, is not transcendence, but a fully-fledged immanence. In this respect, he offers a peculiar technical approach to an aspiration that finds expression in the mystics of Meister Eckhart to the Zen patriarchs: not to ascend to a state of perfection, but to acknowledge that where you are, all right now, everything is the perfection you need.
David Egan
This article was originally published by Aeon and is published under Creative Commons. Read the original article.