Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Wittgensteinian?
Kaplan lived at roughly the same time as Ludwig Wittgenstein, the Austrian
philosopher who has been called the most important philosopher of the twentieth
century. Wittgenstein’s work published in his lifetime only touched on religious
issues, but posthumously there has been a wealth of material published which
has shed light into his religious ideas. However, the project is still largely one of
reconstruction: we must extrapolate indirectly what his feelings about religion
and religious language were. That a view consistent with those thoughts he
recorded is found indicates that this is no idle speculation. But it must not be
forgotten that Wittgenstein himself never systematised any dogmatic approach
to the subject. Meanwhile much research has been carried out into the wider
implication of his thought for religion. The early tendency of scholars to
emphasise the difference between his early and late thought has now been
replaced by an understanding of the continuities.
3. The power that makes for the regeneration of human nature. Kaplan
reinterprets atonement as a process by which the human can restore their
harmonious relationship with the cosmos, which is damaged by our
misdeeds; by this process, we regain our integrity and moral wholeness.
This active avoidance of sin and pursuit of atonement are part and parcel
of Kaplan’s focus on individual responsibility. By remaking our natures via
repentance for our wrongs we are aligning ourselves with our sense of
what is moral and just in the world.
5. The power that makes for cooperation. God being understood as the
interrelated unity of all life, our own acting-out of this unity is crucial: we
can only seek God by seeking further and closer integration and
cohesiveness of self, community, species and cosmos.
8. The power that makes for righteousness. By making God the epitomy of
mercy, justice, etc we are proclaiming these ideals as the principal social
virtues: we hypostasize righteousness via our conception of God, and by
seeking to attain holiness we align ourselves with our highest moral
concerns.
It is clear from even a brief perusal of these that for Kaplan the human is
essentially integrated into the wider spheres of society and cosmos. The
individual seems to exist only by virtue of the world that (s)he inhabits. In every
facet and every moment, we have a responsibility to our broader environment to
ensure a true and proper cultivation of value.
The flip-side of this is that society has as its prime motive the liberation of each
individual’s spirit: by lifting them above their base urges and desires, society
ensures that each person is provided the opportunity to realise their freedom,
and in the exercising of their free person-hood, can become the most perfect
example of themselves. If by doing what is right for the broader context of
society, man finds salvation, then it also is the ultimate goal of society to provide
that liberation from ‘atavistic passions’ which will allow humans to exercise
rational choice.
It is egocentricity (in it’s true meaning: a centring on the self) which Kaplan
blames for much of humanity’s sinfulness. This detachment from our context
leads us into ways not conducive to wholeness. He laments “the failure to
integrate our impulses, habits, social activities and institutions in harmony with
those ethical ideals that make God manifest in the world” (182).
However, this is not to disregard the human focus of Kaplan’s theology: His
Reconstructionism is fundamentally anthropocentric. The root principal and
character of any religion is located within human life. He claims, “Religion is
primarily a social phenomenon, to grasp its reality, to observe its workings and
to further its growth we must study its functioning in some social group.” (xii).
Thus, the essence of religion is not a body of belief or dogma but its practice – it
is a doing. In the practice of religion, we experience that power which we call
God, and are connected with the very real heart of the universe. “God must not
merely be held as an idea; He must be felt as a presence if we want not only to
know about God but to know God.” (244) God here is much more than a
postulate; He is experienced as a real force. Kaplan laments the naivety of those
who attempt to find knowledge of God via theoretical means, comparing them to
a scientist who intellectually understands the process by which fire happens, but
does not have as real a knowledge of fire as the child who burns his hand on a
match. For Kaplan it is the human end, that which happens in our experiential
reality which is of ultimate value, and not the abstract physical process which
leads to it. Although he respects science for its discoveries, he argues that these
can never give us the framework for understanding our place in the cosmos.
3
1953:194
change or addition to the elements which constitute reality; it does not posit the
existence of some supernatural being or spirit world. Rather, it rearranges the
elements of life in such a way that a new meaning emerges, and a new kind of
relationship is possible. It localises the believer within a context of universal
direction, whereby meaning is conferred, and ‘salvation’ is possible.
However,
“This should not be interpreted as implying that the belief in God is purely
subjective, a figment of the imagination rather than an interpretation of
reality. One might as well say that, since the awareness of colour is a
subjective experience, it is entirely a creation of the eye, and that no
objective reality is responsible for the eye experiencing colour.”
(1994:306)
This is to say that just because it is an interpretation of reality, does not make it
subservient to any other, putatively literal, interpretation.
Kaplan claims that the true distinction is not between the atheist and the theist,
but between those who see meaning and order in the world, and those who do
not. The former see sufficient reason to work towards a better future, towards
the attainment of personal and social regeneration as a genuine possibility, in
opposition to the chaotic meaninglessness epitomised by Bertrand Russell’s
“brief and powerless is man’s life. On him and all his race the slow sure doom
falls pitiless and dark”. Wittgenstein believes also that if there is a difference
between the world of the believer and that of the atheist, it is mostly in how each
connects the same facts. He muses that if anything could convince one to
believe in God, it is an upbringing which indoctrinates one to sense a tendency in
life toward order (1980:85). The inference from this of an orderer is only
secondary; primary is the intuitive feeling of safety within an ordered world.
If belief in God does not add anything to world but is at root simply a way of
ordering the existing information, what kind of statement does this make it? It
seems to be metaphysical but in the truest sense: it describes that which is
outside the physical, trans-factual; it describes the context of the actual world
taken as a whole. It talks over, rather than of, the physical.
For this reason, Wittgenstein can make a statement almost directly parallel to
Kaplan’s: “In order to live happily I must be in agreement with the world. And
this is what ‘being happy’ means.”(1961:75). To not feel tension between oneself
and the world but to be smoothly at one without disagreement is happiness.
Further, Wittgenstein claims that being “in agreement with that alien will on
which I appear to depend” is the same as “doing the will of God” (ibid).
Wittgenstein does not need to systematise this conception to the degree Kaplan
does, but the sentiment is the same: the individual must locate themselves
within their world; we must not separate ourselves in searching for some
transcendent truth for the truth exists in and as the world we experience. In
finding oneself aligned with the world, we are at peace with ourselves. It is in
finding a context in which everything falls into place that happiness exists, and
that the religious finds its fullest validation.
Brian Clack (1999) believes that Wittgenstein was attempting to place such
behaviour as pre-rational. Religious rites are performed instinctively, without
ratiocination, in the same way that we move away from the cause of pain
instinctively. We do not reason out that the fire is burning us prior to withdrawing
our hand: the opposite is the case. Similarly, Wittgenstein attempts to address
religion as a pre-rational, and therefore pre-linguistic, activity. Once we begin to
rationalise (something we can only do via language) about our behaviour, we
seem to introduce misunderstanding into it straight away (one could argue: any
attempt to ‘understand’ distorts by a process of intellectualisation). This can best
be understood within the early philosophy of the Tractatus, from which it is clear
that God-talk, although valid, can never be admitted into the realm of discourse:
it describes an arena beyond the factual, and therefore beyond the power of
factual, descriptive, language to make sense of. The religious then cannot be
adequately formulated or expressed in any way: it cannot be said, only shown by
its use. That it does not describe facts about the world means that it also cannot
be metaphor for facts about the world. To attempt to explain religious behaviour
by reference to states-of-affairs (including states-of-mind) is fundamentally
flawed. Wittgenstein (1979) disputes the historical-causal account of religious
rites apparent in Frazer’s Golden Bough, not because it is incorrect, but because
it is an unsubstantial justification: the reason religious rites are practised is not
some event thousands of years ago to which they bear resemblance, but is
apparent in the practice of the rites now. We can see here a remeniscence of
Kaplan’s attempt to explicate the practice of Jewish festivals by explicating their
direct relevance to contemporary religious life: their past does not matter, it is
their effect which justifies them.
“This is obviously not based on a belief that it will have a definite effect on
the object which the picture represents. It aims at some satisfaction and it
achieves it. Or rather, it does not aim at anything; we act in this way and
then feel satisfied.” (1979:4)
The ritual and the effect it has on us explain its use perfectly. It is the horror, the
awe, the sense of purpose we acquire from, initially religious rites, but now also
religious thought and doctrine, which explain why we do them.
Thus, religion does not express existing interior mind-states, but if anything, is
itself the realisation of mind-states. Wittgenstein’s project in his later philosophy,
is precisely anti-depth: he seeks to flatten life into a single palate. As the
frontispiece of Philosophical Investigations, he quotes St. Augustine's description
of an infantile acquisition of language via a process of becoming able to express
his thoughts and desires by the name-tools given to him by adults. Wittgenstein
argues vociferously against the dualism apparent in this view: language does not
express thoughts, and it is certainly not to be treated as a means of articulating
interior states which exist regardless of it. To believe this is to hold the mind as
some isolated ghost within the shell of the body, slowly learning how to
communicate across the gulf that bodies create. This isolation of individuals,
what Fergus Kerr has called the ‘epistemological solitude of the self’, is a primal
fallacy of western metaphysics against which Wittgenstein railed: if mind and
matter can be separated at all, this is only a very recent development in human
thought. Instead, our mind or spirit happens through our bodies (and words); we
are diaphanous, transparent to others by our actions except when we
deliberately attempt to conceal ourselves. The implication of this is that one’s
self is realised via action. It is our public behaviour and interaction which
constitutes us; we are what we are by virtue of what we do, not because of some
gaseous thing which lurks inside us. When Wittgenstein states that “The human
being is the best picture of the human soul” (1980:49), and “The face is the soul
of the body” (1980:23), he is understanding the soul not ontologically, yet not
quite metaphorically either.
One can see how Kaplan’s thoroughly immanent theology reflects – and perhaps
expands – upon this. Not only does Kaplan agree with Wittgenstein’s emphasis
on action, believing that the human spirit is forged in the fires of striving and
hard work, but his emphasis on the divine not as a being which communicates to
us through life, but which is realised in the world and in our own actions, serves
to integrate God into the cosmos. God is no longer a metaphysical proposition
separate from real life, who performs miracles to gain our attention: God’s
essence is present to us, happens through and as the world. He laments that
some of his contemporaries express a disconnectedness from the spiritual reality
and presence of Jewish rites. This disconnectedness does not expose a problem
in the rites, or a mistake in the religion, but reveals a disconnection in the
individual from the deep cultural context essential to experiencing the ritual as it
is intended: “It is significant that in past ages...this particular complaint that the
individual could not experience God in the worship of the synagogue was
unheard of.” (1994:263-4). The problem therefore is in what we may be
expecting from the rites. Just as our ontological conception of divinity is deeply
problematic, so our expectation to experience some theophanic presence unlike
anything in the real world or everyday life is a naivety typical of the modern
age’s dislocation from both the function of religion and its integration into
everyday life. Just as for Wittgenstein, we know someone is in pain when we see
them cradling a limb and whimpering, for Kaplan we fully know God in the living
of a religious life. To require further 'proof' is to speculate beyond what is
reasonable, and to postulate a metaphysics which is beyond experience.
Wittgenstein is similarly scathing about the problem of 'other minds': “Do I
believe in a soul in someone else, when I look into his eyes with astonishment
and delight?” (quoted from Kerr, 1986:93). To posit such philosophical questions
is to deliberately lose touch with the immediacy with which truth is present to us
in life.
Thus, we can see a typically modern reversal of metaphysics at work here: For
Kaplan, to the extent that we can talk of religious truth ‘existing’, it exists in and
as human religious action. Rather than the spiritual being a primordial truth
which creates the world and generates the necessity of religious practice, it is
the practice of religion in real life which leads to what we consider to be
transcendental in religion - its theoretical component and the attainment of
salvation within the kingdom of God.
In the same way that Wittgenstein rejects the dualistic picture of language as a
tool for communicating thoughts between minds, so for Kaplan religion is not a
dualistic means of subsuming the material under the spiritual. Rather, it is a
means of realising, or bringing-out, of the spiritual from the material. That which
we call the spiritual is not prior or superior to the physical, but is the elements of
life which are most transcendent in their value, and which are produced when we
are set free from our base desires and animalistic drives. Religion for Kaplan
provides a cohesive system of motivation which allows humanity to achieve their
potential and better themselves and their world. By justifying the integrity of the
individual, we create a freedom and responsibility which is impossible if the
individual is understood as the sum of biological drives; and by integrating the
community, we create a structure which promotes the benefit of all. This anti-
reductionist picture is apparent in Wittgenstein when he reminds us that we still
call a perfume 'beautiful' even though it is derived from foul-smelling acids.
(McCutcheon 2001:52)
Wittgenstein came to the conclusion that meaning does not exist in and is not
created by the individual consciousness but in and by the practical use of
language and signs in the public world. When we analyse language as Russell,
the early Wittgenstein, and the logical positivists did, we are not reaching the
essence which underlies implicit in every linguistic act, we are drawing an
abstract out from language’s home environment of particular, specific usage.
Kaplan addresses theology in the same way: the essence of the divine is not
some ethereal postulation abstracted from the world, but is found in the world, in
every act and every life. Just as for Wittgenstein ‘I’ does not refer to an object in
the world one experiences but to that world itself, (“I am my world” 1992:5.63),
God is completely integrated into the world. He is not concealed from the
physical but revealed by it; as it. Just as the principal role of the rational animal
is not depiction, neither are we here to believe, to merely develop a mind-state
which mirrors reality...not here to ‘be right’. We are here to do right.
Conclusion
For both, the religious defines that which is above and beyond the material facts
described by science. However, they do not speculate about the objective nature
of this, for to do so is meaningless (for Wittgenstein, technically so). Rather, they
understand the role of the human in ordering reality and the fundamental
unsatisfactoriness of a reductionist factual account, which can only be resolved
by the integration of a higher unity into subjective experience.
Secondary Texts.
Clack, Brian R. 1999. Wittgenstein, Frazer and Religion. Macmillan Press Ltd.
Basingstoke