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These problems that he claims to see from a religious perspective tend to be technical questions of logic and language. Wittgenstein trained as an engineer before turning to philosophy, and he relies on mundane metaphors of gears, levers, and machines. Where you find the word “transcendent” in Wittgenstein’s writings, you will likely find “misunderstanding” or “nonsense” nearby.
When responding to philosophers who turn to higher mysteries, Wittgenstein can be stubbornly dismissive. Consider, “The man who said you cannot enter the same river twice was wrong; a can enter the same river twice. ‘With such blunt statements, Wittgenstein seems less of a religious thinker and more of a clumsy literalist. But a close examination of this remark can show us not only what Wittgenstein means by “religious point of view” but also reveal Wittgenstein as a religious thinker of striking originality.
“The man” who made the remark on rivers is Heraclitus, a philosopher both pre-Socratic and postmodern, poorly cited on New Age sites and cited out of context by everyone, since all that we have of his corpus are isolated fragments. What does Heraclitus think we can’t do? Obviously I can do a little back and forth with my foot on a river bank. But is this the same river at any moment – the water flowing over my foot flows to the ocean as new waters join the river at its source – and am I the same person?
A reading of Heraclitus makes him transmit a mystical message. We use that one word, river , to talk about something that is constantly changing, and which might lead us to think that things are more fixed than they are – indeed, to think that there are things at all. Our name language cannot capture the never-ending flow of existence. Heraclitus says that language is an inadequate tool to mitigate reality.
What Wittgenstein finds intriguing about so many of our philosophical statements is that while they seem deeply important, it’s unclear what difference they make. . Imagine Heraclitus spending an afternoon by the river (or the constantly changing flow of river moments, if you prefer) with his friend Parmenides, who says change is impossible. They can have a heated discussion about whether the so-called river is multiple or one, but then they can both go for a swim, have a cold drink to cool off, or slip into waders for a bit of fishing. fly. None of these activities is in the least altered by the metaphysical commitments of the opponents.
Wittgenstein thinks we can be clearer about such conflicts by comparing the things people say to moves in a game. Just as every move in a game of chess changes the state of the game, every conversational move changes the game. state of play in what he calls the language game. The purpose of speaking, like moving a chess piece, is to make Something. But a movement only counts as this movement in this play provided a certain amount of staging. To make sense of a game of chess, you need to be able to distinguish knights from bishops, know how different pieces move, etc. Placing pieces on the board at the start of the game is not a sequence of movements. It’s something we do to make gaming possible in the first place.
According to Wittgenstein, one of the ways we are confused by language is that the rule-making and implementation activities take place on the same medium as the actual movements of the language game – that is, with words. “The river overflows from its banks” and “The word river is a noun ”are both grammatically valid English sentences, but only the former is movement in a language game. The latter sets out a rule for the use of language: it is like saying “The bishop moves diagonally,” and it is no more a move in a language game than a demonstration of how the bishop moves diagonally. bishop moves is a blow to chess.
What Heraclitus and Parmenides disagree on, Wittgenstein wants us to see, is not a river fact but the rules for talking about the river. Heraclitus recommends a new language game: one in which the rule for using the word river forbids us to say that we have entered the same twice, just as the rules of our own language game forbid us to say that the same moment happened at two different times. There is nothing wrong with offering alternative rules, as long as you are clear that this is what you are doing. If you say, ‘The king moves like the queen,’ you are either saying something wrong about our chess game or offering an alternate version of the game – which may or may not prove useful. The problem with Heraclitus is that he imagines he is talking about rivers and not rules – and, in this case, he is simply wrong. The mistake we so often make in philosophy, according to Wittgenstein, is that we think we are doing one thing when in fact we are doing another.
But if we dismiss the remark about rivers as a naive blunder, we learn nothing. “In a sense, you can’t be too careful about dealing with philosophical errors, they contain so much truth,” warns Wittgenstein. Heraclitus and Parmenides could not make nothing different because of their metaphysical differences, but these differences testify to attitudes deeply different towards all that they do. This attitude can be deep or superficial, bold or timid, grateful or crab, but it is neither true nor false. Likewise, the rules of a game are not good or bad – they determine whether movements inside of the game are good or bad – but which games are worth playing, and your relationship to the rules when you play them, says a lot about you.
So what is it that drives us – and Heraclitus – to consider this expression of attitude as a metaphysical fact? Remember that Heraclitus wants to reform our language games because he thinks they distort the reality of things. But think about what you need to do to assess whether our language games are more or less suited to an ultimate reality. You would need to compare two things: our language game and the reality it is meant to represent. In other words, you would need to compare reality as we represent it to ourselves with reality free from representation. But that doesn’t make any sense: how can you imagine how things seem free from representation?
The fact that we might even be tempted to assume that we can do this speaks to a deeply human desire to come out of our own skins. We can feel trapped by our limited bodily existence. There is a kind of religious impulse that seeks to free itself from these limits: it seeks to transcend our finite self and to come into contact with the infinite. Wittgenstein’s religious impulse pushes us in the opposite direction: he does not seek to satisfy our aspiration for transcendence but to wean us completely from that aspiration. The liberation he offers is not liberation of our narrow self but for our narrow self.
Wittgenstein’s remark about Heraclitus comes from a typescript from the beginning of 1930, when Wittgenstein was just beginning to develop the mature philosophy that would be published posthumously under the title Philosophical inquiries (1953). Part of what makes this latest book special is the way the Wittgenstein who sees every problem from a religious point of view merges with the practical-minded engineer. Metaphysical speculations, for Wittgenstein, are like gears that have freed themselves from the mechanism of language and are spinning madly out of control. Wittgenstein, the engineer, wants the mechanism to work properly. And this is precisely where spiritual insight resides: our goal, properly understood, is not transcendence but fully invested immanence. In this regard, he offers a particularly 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 recognize that where you are, already, at this moment, c ‘is all. the perfection you need. 
< p> David Egan
This article originally appeared on Aeon and has been republished under Creative Commons. Read the original article .
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