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ABSTRACT
In this paper, I am going to propose a new reading of Wittgenstein’s cryptic talk of ‘accession or loss of meaning’ (or the world ‘waxing and waning’ as a whole) in the Notebooks that draws both on Wittgenstein’s later work on aspect-perception, as well as on the thoughts of a thinker whom Wittgenstein greatly admired: Søren Kierkegaard. I will then go on to argue that, its merits apart, there is something existentially problematic about the conception that Wittgenstein is advocating. For the renunciation of the comforts of the world that Wittgenstein proposes as a way of coping with the brute contingencies of life seems only to come as far as what Kierkegaard calls ‘infinite resignation’, and this falls far short of the joyful acceptance of existence that appears necessary for inhabiting what Wittgenstein calls a happy world. That is to say, I will show that what Wittgenstein’s proposal lacks is a way of reconnecting with the finite after one has renounced it – the kind of transformation of existence achieved by the person Kierkegaard calls the ‘knight of faith’.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Daniel Whiting, two anonymous referees and Michael Beaney for helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.
Notes
1 In TLP the second clause reads ‘not the facts; not the things that can be expressed in language’ (Ogden translation).
2 And while the acquisition of an ability can, of course, be described, the ability itself – being a knowing how – cannot be exhaustively captured in a set of propositions.
3 For a discussion of the different ways of reading Wittgenstein’s early work, see my A Confusion of the Spheres, chapter 3.
4 See my A Confusion of the Spheres for more on this.
5 This is the way natural scientists tend to view the world and early Wittgenstein may have been over-impressed by this perspective. Later Wittgenstein certainly rejects such a conception, but it seems uncontroversial that he accepts it in TLP (for otherwise all talk of meaning and value would not have to be confined to the inexpressible). Also see TLP 6.4-6.41.
6 Also compare Verbin, ‘Religious Beliefs and Aspect-Seeing’.
7 This seems to contradict TLP 5.5423, where Wittgenstein speaks of seeing a cube in two different ways, and claiming that ‘we really see two different facts’. If my interpretation of the NB passages is correct, this claim has to be taken metaphorically as constituting an expression of – as later Wittgenstein would say – how things strike me. See discussion below.
8 Although I could show you other similar faces to facilitate understanding.
9 Although I could point to particular parts of the figure and prompt you to see them in a certain way; e.g. the ‘appendages’ as ears (but this would of course already constitute an exercise of aspect perception).
10 In other words, once I am in possession of certain capacities and skills, I can, pace Reese, ‘Religious “Seeing-as”’, see certain features directly – that is to say, without interpreting (or transcribing etc.).
11 And it is a natural fact about us that we are the kinds of creatures that can develop such capacities. The biological causes that enable us to develop them are of interest to neuroscientists.
12 When speaking of ‘limits of the world’, Wittgenstein must therefore be using ‘world’ in a different sense to when he speaks of the world as being all that is the case (TLP 1) – otherwise the good will would be changing the facts and this is what Wittgenstein denies. We can solve this problem by remembering that Wittgenstein also says in NB (11. 6. 1916) that ‘life is the world’. In other words, Wittgenstein uses ‘world’ in two different senses – mostly as referring to the world of facts, but, sometimes, in ‘ethical’ contexts as referring to ‘life’. And ‘life’ also includes the attitude that I take towards my life which shows itself in how I live. In this respect, my perspective on my life can change its ‘limits’ by being either a positive or a negative attitude: the duck-rabbit looks different to the person who sees it as a duck, but this difference cannot be explained merely by pointing to the look of the lines (the ‘facts’).
13 Sometimes Wittgenstein speaks of aspect perception as something that would seem to require certain innate capacities and talents, such as a ‘musical ear’, for example (PI, II, §260). This might seem to cause problems for my view that ‘meaning-dawning’ requires the development of certain spiritual capacities (I would like to thank an anonymous referee for pointing this out). But I think this remark is compatible with my reading. For although we all begin from different starting-points – i.e. we are all naturally endowed with different capacities and skills – it is nevertheless possible to acquire, through training and exposure, capacities that one previously lacked. Of course, if one is, say, tone-deaf, developing a sensitivity to music will be an uphill struggle (and may, in some cases, be impossible). But, then, becoming a knight of faith may be similarly difficult (or verge on the impossible) for some people. Nevertheless, it is a perspective that is potentially available.
14 And here Wittgenstein means ‘the world of facts’, not ‘life’ (see footnote 13).
15 Wittgenstein thought, in TLP, that only the factual – what is the case (and what is not the case) – can be rendered in propositional form (TLP 6.4-6.41). Later Wittgenstein rejects this notion.
16 See also Kellenberger ‘“Seeing-as” in Religion’.
17 This does not commit me to the thought that God is an ‘aspect’ of the world, whatever that might mean. Rather, I am contending that becoming aware of God’s reality is akin to aspect-perception in the sense that it enables one to see the world as a whole in a new way. It is not a matter of discovering a new super-empirical object. This does not detract from God’s reality, as it were, unless we believe that the only way for God to be real is to be a super-empirical object. But this is a conception that both early and later Wittgenstein rejects.
18 Although some of the things that he says chime with the interpretation developed here, I reject Rudd’s suggestion that Wittgenstein, in NB and TLP, identifies God with Schopenhauer’s noumenal Will (see Rudd, ‘Logic and Ethics as the Limits of the World’, 53). Wittgenstein was influenced by Schopenhauer, no doubt, but there is no evidence that he endorsed this part of Schopenhauer’s view. For example, in the passage from NB quoted above, he says, ‘God would, in this sense, simply be fate or, what is the same: the world independent of our will.’ If anything, the equating of God and world is more reminiscent of Spinoza. The notion that God is not just one more object in the world – however powerful – and that we consequently need to develop our spiritual capacities if we are to understand the significance of religious concepts, are themes that Wittgenstein picks up and explores in much more detail in his post-Tractatus writings. The later work also has the advantage of no longer being hampered by the TLP conception that only facts are expressible, which means that ethical and religious matters can now straightforwardly be spoken about rather than remaining confined only to altering the ‘limits’ of the world. Nevertheless, in his later remarks on religion, Wittgenstein focuses mainly on how one is to conceive of religious belief and never again takes up the theme of ‘meaning-dawning’ as we find it in NB. For this reason, I have focused on Wittgenstein’s later thought on aspect-perception and on Kierkegaard’s distinction between the knights of infinite resignation and faith in order to explore this dimension of Wittgenstein’s early work, as these discussions throw more light on what Wittgenstein was up to in NB (and TLP) than his own later remarks on religion do. For an in-depth discussion of Wittgenstein’s later conception of religious belief see my A Confusion of the Spheres, chapter 4.
19 Regardless of whether or not he actually believed, in the TLP, that there are ‘ineffable truths’. I suspect that he did – although not in the sense that these are propositional ineffable truths; i.e. they are not, pace what the ‘resolute readers’ claim that the ‘standard’ readers hold, nonsensical propositions with a sense that is ‘nonsensical’. Rather, if there are such things for the author of TLP, they are much more akin to what Kierkegaard calls an ‘ethical’ truth. But whatever the facts on the ground, as it were, it is possible to make sense of the passages that are the focal points of discussion in this paper without attributing a ‘substantial’ metaphysics to Wittgenstein. In this respect, my reading of these passages (which is indebted to Wittgenstein’s later work on aspect-seeing) is perhaps similar to the ‘proto-grammatical’ reading that Moyal-Sharrock attributes to TLP as a whole, although I would not want to endorse her claim that grammatical remarks are nonsensical (see Moyal-Sharrock, ‘The Good Sense of Nonsense’).
20 Unless we have an extremely restrictive conception of what a ‘naturalistic’ explanation might consist in, a debate I cannot go into here.
21 For example, composing like Mozart, dancing like Osipova, painting like Rembrandt.
22 Compare Wiggins, ‘Wittgenstein on Ethics and the Riddle of Life’, 380.
23 Compare Rudd, ‘Logic and Ethics as the Limits of the World’, 55.
24 A ‘joyful acceptance of existence’ is not a moral acceptance; it is not to accept existence because it is ‘good’ or because the existence of the world is ‘morally justifiable’ (whatever that means). Hence, it makes no sense to ask, in the moral sense, whether one should joyfully accept existence (or whether one should not). Rather, it is merely a question of whether one can – or whether one can become the kind of person who can. A ‘joyful acceptance of existence’ is its own reward (as Wittgenstein also recognized in NB), and surely, better, for all sorts of non-moral reasons, than a ‘rejection’ of existence. But, again, none of this implies that ‘joyfully accepting existence’ is any kind of moral imperative or something one should refrain from for moral reasons.
25 All references to the Hong edition; this and the following translations by Walter Lowrie. This is also reminiscent of Nietzsche. See the discussion in the conclusion.
26 In this respect, I have a minor disagreement with Hanson’s otherwise excellent recent reading of FT (see his Kierkegaard and the Life of Faith). Hanson claims that the knight of faith is reconciled to the frugal meal because he loves his wife and regards everything she does as good. While I am sure that this is also true, I think it is more important to emphasize that the knight of faith is not disappointed, because he relates to everything that is given him as a gift and as something that he consequently has no right to expect (even if he wishes for it).
27 Also, see Kierkegaard’s Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses.
28 I am not thereby suggesting that Nietzsche’s conception is Kierkegaard’s (or Wittgenstein’s), merely that the attitude to life developed in this paper is also available to someone who would not wish to endorse a religious view. I am not taking sides on the question of which perspective is preferable, as my purpose was to propose a plausible interpretation of a difficult passage in NB, not to defend a religious conception of the world (or, indeed, the reverse).
29 This reading also chimes with Hanson’s contention that faith is able to effect a marriage between the beautiful and the just.
30
Once the new way of thinking has been established, the old problems vanish; indeed they become hard to recapture. For they go with our way of expressing ourselves and, if we clothe ourselves in a new form of expression, the old problems are discarded along with the old garment.
31 For more on this theme, see my A Confusion of the Spheres, chapter 2.