Essays on Kierkegaard & Wittgenstein

On Understanding the Self

Edited by Richarci H. Bell and Ronald E. Hustwit

THE COLLEGE OF WOOSTER

FOR
O. K. Bouwsma 1898-1978

Such was the end, Echecrates, of our friend; concerning whom I may
truly say, that of all the men of his time whom I have known, he was the
wisest and justest and best.
Phaedo
SE DE IT. FC8CFCS CESTE 70125 TERAPICS

The College of Wooster, Wooster, Ohio 44691 © 1978 by The College of Wooster. All rights
reserved.
Printed in the United States of America.

Cover design by Donald L. Hubacher

‫ܛܫܫܬ‬
CONTENTS

Preface Some Introductory Remarks

Richard H. Bell The Anatomy of Self in Kierkegaard
H. A. Nielsen Wittgenstein and the Self
Paul L. Holmer Notes 1*
O. K. Bouwsma The Ethical (Response)
J. L. Craft Notes 2
O. K. Bouwsma Two Views of the Soul: Investigations, Part II, iv*
Ronald E. Hustwit Pictures of the Soul (Response)
Andrew J. Burgess The Grammar of Eternal Happiness*
H. A. Nielsen The Content of Eternal Happiness' (Response)
John H. Whittaker Understanding Fire-Festivals and Revelations*
Richard H. Bell Our Incompleteness and Self-Understanding (Response)
David Burrell, C.S.C. Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein: A Shared Enmity*
A. Dewey Jensen Enmity: A Deep Emotion (Response)
Don E. Saliers Contributors

*Papers presented at the Symposium, "Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein", The College of

Wooster, October, 1926.

Preface
The seed essays for this volume were all given as part of a three day symposium at The
College of Wooster, Wooster, Ohio, in October, 1976. The symposium title was: "Soren
Kierkegaard and Ludwig Wittgenstein: Philosophy as Activity and Under standing Forms
of Life." Each paper read was followed by a seminar session with a formal response and
discussion,
The additional essays by Professors H. A. Nielsen, Paul Holmer, and O. K. Bouwsma have
particularly enriched this volume, and the Nielsen and Holmer essays which open
the volume have given a clearer focus to a central theme of the book —the concept of
the self in Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein. We are also grateful for the responses
prepared for this volume by J. L. Craft, Andrew Burgess, John Whittaker, David Burrell, and
Don Saliers. We would like to thank John P. Murphy of Trinity University for his
active participation in the sympo sium. Each author's own form and style have been left
to stand as presented-even when certain grammatical forms differed.
What cannot be recorded by the essays and the responses alone are the discussions and
reflections of the forty philosophers and theologians from the United States and Canada
who came together for that period of time. Some of the themes drawn out in our brief
introduction are the result of the entire symposium-a thoughtful reading of the essays in
this volume make those themes, and more, easily apparent
We deeply appreciate the generous support given by The College of Wooster for
making the symposium and this publica tion possible, and to many of our philosophy
students, friends, and to our wives who worked hard to make the occasion of the
symposium a pleasant and, we believe, a productive one for all persons involved.

RHB REH

Wooster, March, 1978

Some Introductory Remarks

Richard H. Bell

These essays reflect some common themes about the concept of the self-more generally
they characterize what Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein felt essential to being human.
For these two philosophers, having a self was foundational to all critical and personal
tasks that might engage them.
Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein were what Kierkegaard refers to as "essential authors”—
authors who have their own per spectives. “From first to last", says Kierkegaard in On
Authority and Revelation, an essential author “is attentive to understanding himself in his
own life-view". An essential author is, in short, an "inwardly directed" thinker. In this respect,
both Kierke gaard and Wittgenstein lay claim to the centrality of the Socratic maxim: "know
thyself".
The writers of the essays in this volume all recognize this fact about Kierkegaard and
Wittgenstein and then address them. selves to a number of philosophical and religious
issues which reflect (a) the importance of this inward directedness for under standing the
human self, and (b) how such an understanding bears directly or indirectly on the nature
of philosophical inquiry and its applications. ON STYLE AND POINT OF DEPARTURE
Some comments about the style of the essays are in order. For it is, in part, the
form and style of presentation of certain
perennial philosophical issues that mark the uniqueness of this collection of essays and
responses, and reflect the importance of concir rg two philosophers whose style
departed from the con ventional ways of doing philosophy.
Vost cithe essays work directly with texts from Kierkegaard and litt enstein. Working with
these texts, however, does pre cisely negi Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein intended-
they force the reader back upon himself to analyse the condition of his understanding or
lack thereof. This point is crucial to all the essays in this volume. Whatever the issue at
hand, whether it te ore dealing with human dispositions (intending, willing, hoping,
loving, grieving, suffering); more critical ways of knowing (interpreting, explaining, or
generally making inferences from empirical data); or trying to understand such concepts as
"the soul", "eternal happiness", "revelation", "God", or, indeed, the "self"'—it is this
Kierkegaardian and Wittgensteinian intention of having us look into ourselves and
discover there the conditions for understanding, which is central in each essay.
Furthermore, the essays are largely "inwardly" or “subjectively" oriented. It has not been
apparent to all readers of Wittgenstein that a primary concern of his was "inwardly
directed”, that is, directed toward understanding the Socratic maxim, "Know thyself”. For
Kierkegaard, the Socratic intention is clear; for Wittgenstein it is not so clear. In my
essay, “Under standing Fire-Festivals and Revelations”, I make a direct case for both
philosophers being "inwardly directed", and Bouwsma is explicit in his Socratic linking of
Wittgenstein and Kierke gaard. In particular Bouwsma pursues the linking by
creating a Socratic uneasiness about knowledge.
In his "Notes 1", Bouwsma says that Socrates was a subjective thinker because he
“inspires others with concern and unrest". It is precisely in this fashion that
Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein inspire us, and in these essays one underlying
theme is that Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein inspire concern and unrest by taking
away the thin curtain of certainty and knowledge that reason gives us. Nothing is
pinned down anymore — we have only our own resources, we must look into
ourselves and begin anew. We must as Wittgenstein said in the Investigations, "find
cur feet" as a first step toward understanding. Where under standing is lacking,
it is the job of the philosopher to reorder what is before us so that understanding
once again becomes
possible.
There is another important feature about style, however, that needs to be
underscored. The essays reflect the influences of having worked on Wittgenstein.
The investigative style reflected provides a fresh point of view for reading
Kierkegaard himself, as well as for approaching a number of philosophical prob
lems—a point of view and approach that uses analogies and paradigm case studies
from our everyday experience and in our ordinary language to extend our understanding
of the human self into an area where it intersects with the things people say and do in their
linguistic practice. This provides us with a unique and freshly critical way of reading
Kierkegaard, while at the same time cuts new philosophical ground in a fashion
characteristic of the mode of analysis practiced by Wittgenstein.
The new ground cut is, of course, as Wittgenstein might say, nothing new at all; it is what
is and always has been before our eyes but with which we seldom adequately deal. It
is ourselves, i.e., how we dispose ourselves: think, speak, and act in and toward the
world. The human self is central to the understanding of anything. Whether that 'thing'
be considered the proper subject of ethics, epistemology, or religion, our
understanding of it is really what is central to both Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein. The
concept of understanding itself is rooted in the self-in what Nielsen calls in "The
Anatomy of Self in Kierkegaard" the “conscious core of a human being...." And as a
language user, the human seif, the essential I, is "inseparable from my linguistic, my
grammatical behavior”. It is precisely at this point where Kierkegaard and
Wittgenstein are most deeply intertwined.
The essays and the related responses have their own argu ments and unique concerns,
and cannot be limited strictly to the boundaries I have suggested regarding style and point
of departure. There is a common element: exploring the nature of the self as it is actively
engaged in the search for understand ing—but in that search, each essay stands fully
on its own as an expression of what Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein have taught the
authors.
The Anatomy of Self in Kierkegaard

H. A. Nielsen

The Sickness Unto Death, written under the pseudonym of Anti Climacus and
published in 1849, is subtitled “A Christian Psychological Exposition for
Edification and Awakening." Notice this fragment of the opening passage:
Man is spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is the self? The self is a relation which relates
itself to its own self, or it is that in the relation (which accounts for it) that the relation relates itself to its own
self; the self is not the relation but (consists in the
fact) that the relation relates itself to its own self. ...? Between the reader and any edification or
awakening the book might occasion falls the shadow of this knotted bit of psychology. The aim
of this paper is to untie or at least loosen the knot.
First a word about Kierkegaard's dialectical strategy in pre facing an excruciatingly
personal work with a set of seemingly arid definitions of man, spirit and self. The
personal comes in directly with the idea that something is radically wrong and out of order in
each human self. Despair in one form or another is the name of the sickness, and the name of its
diagnostician andhealer, as the subtitle gives away, is Christianity. The whole thrust of the
work is scandalously personal to an offensive degree, or would be unless the reader
can first recognize himself as naturally constituted in a way that makes him subject to
that
strange kind of disorder. The purpose of the formula for a human self, quoted above, is
to supply in the driest possible matter-of-fact language a nugget of cold, impersonal—and
religiously indifferent-psychology. In short, the author's wider Strategy takes its point of
departure in a bit of science, specifically psychology. Yet not just any systematic
account of the human psyche will answer his purpose. Several traditional ones — for
instance that the self is the rational soul or mind or intellect, or is an incorporeal entity,
or is an incomplete sub stance, or is identical with the brain, or is consciousness
dis tinguished by an awareness of personal identity, or consists of an id, ego and
superego-tend to convey a rather impersonal conception of self. Over against these an
account in a sharply different style, knotted and challenging to decipher, one
that transposes with surprising ease into the scandalously personal, can be a freshener,
or to borrow another term from the subtitle, an awakener. Above all it must be flexible
enough to accommodate what Kierkegaard regards as the most intimately
personal elements of the religious, next to which the psychologies that peer closely at the
individual's your-hairs-are numbered sexuality and related interests can scarcely be called
personal at all except in the sense of moles and what the police call "Other Identifying
Marks". Whether or not the author can carry through his overall strategy with this or
that reader will depend on whether the reader can recognize his own image in that
queerly involuted definition of self. The present discussion begins and ends,
therefore, with the cited opening sentences of
The Sickness Unto Death.
To begin, the passage comes on as an effort to illuminate what a self is. To illuminate,
by altering the lighting somewhat, the self that is always before my eyes and needs
illuminating for perhaps just that reason. How can what is always before one's eyes
ever stand forth as an object of notice or strike someone as worth noticing? For
that to happen the lighting must be changed, and the author seems at the outset to dim
it by calling the self a relation. There is no end of what we may loosely call reflexive
expressions that point to multiple and widely varied links with myself-relations if
you will — although these would hardly lead a person to think of his own self as a
relation, whatever that could mean. For instance
“He refuses to be candid with himself about...." "She was beside herself with grief." "Upset with
myself." "Today I surprised myself by..."
"Another side of me protested..." "'I could never forgive myself..."
“In self-defense I told her..." If such expressions sound vaguely relational, this may
be enough to give us lift-off. One device, I believe, for getting on top of Kierkegaard's formula
is to give it a linguistic turn. That expression has become quite versatile in the last few
decades; in this instance it amounts merely to looking at the things Kierkegaard says
about the self, and wherever possible tying them up with certain uses we all make of
language. This self we are talking about is the conscious core of a human being, and I
shall assume—surely echoing earlier traditions that at the same core of me I am a
language-user, that my 'nature,' to bring in an earlier way of putting it, is inseparable
from my linguistic, my grammatical behaviour. On that assumption it would seem odd
if we found no tight connection between language and that conscious core.
On these terms, then, an opening question might be: what kinds of linguistic
element in my life does Kierkegaard's rela tional way of talking about the self
call to mind? Here we have already noticed a sampling out of countless relations
a person can pass through in everyday life. If we had to speak of a single
underlying relationship with myself --since Kierkegaard at first speaks of the self as
a single relation—it would seem natural to fall back on this truism: a human self
can dialogue with itself. About what? Anything under the sun, not to mention matters
farther out. In the course of that dialogue many evanescent link ups form and dissolve-
surprising myself, patting myself on the back, feeling sorry for myself, and so forth.
The notion that I can and do dialogue with myself sounds linguistic enough for a
starter, though it would scarcely qualify in any circle as a piece of news.
My power of self-dialogue is perhaps not something I have paid much attention to-
why should I if it is always unsur passably handy?- yet possibly Kierkegaard has
observed some things about it that tend to escape us. Even so, it would still
sound odd to say that the relation of dialoguing is my self. Normally I would never
have thought of that equation. Kierkegaard goes on, however, to call the self
a relation (think of it for the moment as self-dialoguing) which relates itself to its own
self. This is the next segment of his formula, but what does it mean? Here let me offer a
guess: the underlying relation to myself that constitutes me a human self is not the presence
or
potential of inward dialogue per se, much less any of the transitory relations we noted
before, but rather those parts or threads of the dialogue which deal with matters of what
I really think it is worth to have a human life, what I privately judge it is worth to me
to have this one. The rest of my self-dialogue will doubtless concern some important
matters amongst the trivial, but the part of the dialogue Kierkegaard seems to want
to isolate and later x-ray concerns in a rather narrow sense how I in my uttermost
privacy feel about being the one I am.
To some that question will at first sound ill-formed. Why would anyone give the same
answer from one year, month or day to the next? Surely, one wants to say, the
answer must vary a lot with the ups and downs of the average life! — Yes, what I am
inclined to answer at a given moment will vary up or down with the weather, but that may only
mean that one side of me is pretty much a creature of the weather-a sort of windsock, a
weathervane, a barometer. I wonder, though, if that side of me is the core self that
Kierkegaard tries to throw into relief. It is entirely possible, in other words, that
beneath the glad starts and sighs that changes of circumstances prompt from me I
can find (if I look for it) an underthought, quite steady, quite evenly pitched, that
expresses with perfect individuality my answer to that question. -Or would someone
want to suggest that the human self is altogether a creature of the weather, wholly
unfixed, changeable as a baby's mood or a puff of vapor? That too is possible, but
the discovery of a steady, drone-note opinion of myself (and Kierkegaard's psychology
is surprisingly empirical in terms of what it invites the individual to discover in himself)
would suffice to falsify it.
To reinforce this point look at the next bit of his formula: "...the self is not the relation
(i.e., the dialoguing per se, the exchanging of words within), but consists in the fact
that the relation relates itself to its own self." In other words, the essentially human
element in my internal dialogue, if I read Kierkegaard correctly, is the one that embodies
a more or less hard-finished opinion of what I really think it's worth to have a human life,
especially this one, whether that opinion finds overt expression in language or not.
For example, a negative opinion of myself might be extracted from the fact that in my
interior give-and-take I try to avoid thinking too closely about myself and prefer to keep
my mind off myself, as we say, and busy about other things, other people, my work and
the like. The character of my self-dialogue will then seem to exclude
what for Kierkegaard is the essentially human ingredient, my estimate of what this life-
package is worth to me. However, would anyone want to deny outright that a firm opinion
could very well be coiled up in the fact that I appear to have no opinion on that matter?
Is something less than an opinion if it is there but I don't announce it to myself? Here
perhaps someone will say, “Surely we couldn't be that complicated!" But why not? At
any rate this is the curious logic of selfhood that Kierkegaard seems to develop. First,
man is essentially self. Second, a human kind of self is a dialoguing in which I
relate to myself inescapably, necessarily, although the particular attitude I opt for—
thankful to be the one I am, resentful, apathetic for in stance - is freely chosen.
Through my tactical silences as well as by words, I form and embrace and cling to
some fixed evaluation of having to be the one I am. Finally, Kierkegaard takes this self
evaluation to be the central nerve of the "relation which relates itself to itself."
It may be possible to throw a glancing light on Kierkegaard's account of the self if we
turn to one that emerged a few decades later as a competing one with a thick Darwinian
accent. In the section of The Joyful Widsom titled “Genius of the Species"
Nietzsche sketches a theory of the evolutionary origins of con sciousness and self-
consciousness. In briefest terms, when pre historic man lived as an endangered
species men gradually built up a surplus of the power to communicate with one
another. One result was a sort of evolutionary mistake, a freak echo chamber in the
individual that allows for internal dialogue of a kind that will facilitate clearheaded
outward communication, but that can also become twisted and pathological if the
echo chamber, or the self, takes itself and its own condition as an object of concern.
Nietzsche writes:
"...As is obvious, my idea is that consciousness does not properly belong to the individual
existence of man, but rather to the social and gregarious nature in him; that, as follows therefrom, it is only a
relation to communal and gregarious utility that it is finely developed; and that consequently each of us,
in spite of the best intention of understanding himself as individually as possible, and of knowing
himself,' will always just call into consciousness the nonindividual in him, namely, his 'averageness—
that our thought itself is continuously as it were outvoted by the character of con sciousness, by
the imperious 'genius of the species' therein-and is translated back into the perspective of the herd.
Fundamentally our actions are in an incomparable manner altogether personal, unique and
absolutely individual-there is no doubt about it; but as
soon as we translate them into consciousness, they do not appear so any lenger.... Finally, the
growing consciousness is a danger, and wroerer lives among the most conscious Europeans knows
even
that it is a disease...."? By Nietzsche's reckoning, then, self-knowledge of a highly
per sonal kind is precluded by the very nature of consciousness. All depth, individuality,
and seriousness in a human life expresses itself rather through the unconscious and the
actions springing from it. Despite the resonance of the terms ‘sickness' and 'disease' ii
would be hard to imagine an account of the self more antithetical to Kierkegaard's.
Yet there seems room here for a distinction so striking as to make a reader go back
over the texts repeatedly wondering how Nietzsche could have missed it. Consider first
the sort of self awareness or self-understanding that turns up in the personality profile
someone might submit to a dating bureau or, mutatis mutandis, an executive employment
agency or the like. In addition to vital statistics it might read: “I am quite popular, not bad
looking, with an athletic build, nimble-witted, romantically inclined, and fond of popular
music, reading and vintage movies." The same point holds if we change the format to
an executive's or professional's dossier, for instance by including particulars such as “I
have had eight years' experience as comptroller of Blenheim Distilleries” or “My
doctoral program in chemistry was under Dr. Otto Strahler's direction." It will surprise
no one that a thinker whose mind is always at the boiling point — Kierkegaard no less
than Nietzsche-should regard this type of self-awareness as superficial, calling into
consciousness only the person's "averageness” and bypassing what is "altogether
personal, unique and absolutely individual.”
It is a long jump from this, however, to Nietzsche's claim that the altogether personal
cannot come into consciousness, and one can land safely on that conclusion only by
assuming a priori that the only really personal thing about a man is his actions and the
uniquely crooked swath they cut through history. As evidence to the contrary, or at
least as evidence that Nietzsche's assumption is an a priori one, I would invite the reader
to look again at the sample underthoughts or self-evaluations given earlier.
Kierkegaard's formula thus seems to introduce a singular sort of complexity into its
picture of the human self. Did I say picture? Nothing really graphic emerges. It is as if
the tortured phrasing in that colourless formula were meant to keep the
reader as far as possible from anything as survevable as a picture or a physical model.
Then what are we to say a human self as represented in Kierkegaard's formula is like? How
modelable, how synthesizeable is the human self as this account gives it to us?
Designing a model is a well known (and often misleading) way of getting a concept to
sit still for us. Does anything visual, then, have an anatomy roughly corresponding to
that of the self in SK's formula?
Start primitively with an upright parabolic mirror rotating on a pivot. Turning, it takes in
light from everything between itself and the horizon, then loses it all in the next instant.
This alone makes it too simple a model. There is no question here of any thing relating
stop and face the first one, each
itself to itself. Now add a twin mirror that can
reflecting the other. This sounds a bit more complex, but not nearly
enough. The light-we cannot very well call it images - passing back and forth does
not register anywhere in the units, nor can they recall pasi reflections. A human, on the
other hand, can review what went on in his interior. To express this difference we abandon
the mirror figuration and speak now of twin cameras taking pictures of each other
over a stretch of time. Things are more complicated now. A terribly intricate third piece
of equipment could now open those cameras, develop the films, compare them,
and judge, for example, which camera has the faster shutter, the cleaner lens, the finer
focus, the less distortion. Something like a third party is needed here, because I do that
sort of monitoring operation-and many more complex ones-on my own self-dialogue. I
not only record and play back, but in various ways referee the give-and-take, judging
that one side has gone too far, the other is getting a little hysterical, and so forth. I can
line up with one leaning or the other, become unconvinced, and change my alliance.
(Do I need a Kierkegaard to tell me that this is what it is like at times to have a human self?
Of course not, but when the facts are always before one's eyes they have a way of
escaping notice.)
This capability, then, of monitoring my own self-dialogue, of 'stepping in' as we say,
of taking a hand as a third party, is "that in the relation which accounts for it that the
relation relates itself to its own self." Just at this point someone might grumble, "Look,
who needs your schoolboy electronics and dinky Rube Goldberg models? There is
no theoretical barrier, after all, blocking the way to a physicalized counterpart of the
human self that will fit Kierkegaard's formula. All we need do for the
self by trying to find something in himself corresponding to its labyrinthine
structure. Certain lines of self-dialogue appear to come closest and, once picked out,
to highlight an aspect of myself, an intensely personal and reflexive side not often
high lighted by more conventional brands of psychology old or new. To get a
clearer fix on that side of myself, it can be tempting to suppose a model might be
helpful, since a great many functions of interior conversation, for instance
calculating, do lend them selves to mechanical simulation. However, conceptual
impasses seem to work against any clear idea of a physical model structured like the
side of me that Kierkegaard takes to be the center of selfhood. On the other hand,
why should anyone need a mock-up when the real thing is so close to each of
us?

1
present is invoke the truism that technology can put together a mird-like unit
as complex as you please. I mean a unit that can simulate any of the dialoguing—or
trialoguing if need be—that you can find in the human mind, self, psyche, or whatever
you want to call it."
These are challenging remarks and have been for some time. It would be too
much to expect to silence them in a short dis cussion. Is it all that clear, however,
that engineers could hope to design a mind-like unit satisfying Kierkegaard's
formula for the human self? If complexity were the problem, engineers could talk
us out of it with staggering data about how many minicircuits they can stuff into a
maxibox, but a stubborn con ceptual barrier seems to stand in the way of our
conceiving this clearly.
To scout that barrier briefly, in Kierkegaard's analysis of the self, at least as I
have been viewing it, the essentially human element and nerve of the relation
that relates itself to itself consists, for each human, in a more or less hard-finished opinion
(whether expressed in so many words or not) of what it is worth to him to be the one he is. A
second example: “I find it tolerable to be this one provided I continue to enjoy generous
helpings of certain treats at life's buffet. On the other hand if supplies should run low, I
reserve the right to review and update that judgement." —This opinion, not
entirely negative, could be called a 'conditional one. Possible variations of tone
and expression are endless.
The conceptual rub occurs when one tries to imagine building that sort of kink
into an artificial intelligence unit. Of course it is a simple matter to make a machine say
or print out anything we want it to, but that is not what I mean. It causes no strain to
speak of a machine that whispers to itself and remembers, even argues with itself and
then 'steps in' to make a sort of resolution. But what would it mean to design a unit
whose silences are charged with ressentiment, one that feels secretly outraged at
being the one it is or--to take it in the other direction-pas sionately thankful? To put
this in a way that echoes Wittgenstein, these are predications we make only of
humans; they have so far been given no application to units of hardware, and if
knowledgeable people were to propose such applications, it would remain to be seen how far
the new predications resembled the old.3
Summing up, this reader's problem at the start was to do a measure of
justice to that unco Kierkegaardian definition of the
NOTES The Sickness Unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Edification and
Awakening. By Anti-Climacus, edited by S. Kierkegaard. Translated by Walter Lowrie (Princeton; 1941).
The Danish reads as follows: "Mannesket er Aand. Men hvad er Aand? Aand er Selvet. Men
hvad er Selvet? Selvet er et Forhold, der forholder sig til sig selv, ellder er det i forholdet, at forholdet
forholder sig til sig selv; Selvet er ikke Forholdet, men at Forholdet forholder sig till sig selv..."

2
The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, translated under editor ship of Oscar Levy
(1909-11), 18 vols. New York: 1964, Vol. 10, pp. 298-299.

These remarks point toward a problem area in the theory of com puter design, concerning
the limits of machine subjectivity. The suggestion is that while difficulties of design and
programming must be left to engineers, the question of how closely an artificial intelligence
to the full range of human thinking poses
unit, or congeries of units, can in principle approximate
a quite different sort of difficulty, a linguistic one. It arises, that is, from the linguistic fact
that we have no existing practice of applying certain expressions to machines, e.g. 'is
pious,' 'lacks common decency, and so on endlessly.

Wittgenstein and the Self

Paul L. Holmer

Wittgenstein was quite sure he was going to be misunderstood. Whatever else

his authorship was, it was not one more permutation in kind upon the long history
of philosophical reflection. Of course, there are some subtle continuities between his
pages and other logicians, between his interests and certain metaphysicians, between
his topics and those of Frege, Russell and even Plato. And with considerable strain one
can construe him in relation to Vienna, to analytic philosophy, to empiricism, to
classical philosophy, even to Kant and Schopenhauer. But none of this helps very much.
One can, indeed, tease out of his pages new views on what philosophy is, novelties
about truth-tables, striking themes linking the use of language with meaning,
startlingly original suggestions about the worth of the Principia Mathematica, and
a veritable panoply of aphoristic remarks that look like theories in embryo. However,
this does not help very much either. For one will not understand him better by spelling
out theories on his behalf, as if his pages are theory-laden without his quite knowing it.
Furthermore, it would be a shocking betrayal of everything he said were it to be re-
stated in forms of writing and ways of talking, in concepts and schemes, that
themselves distort his thought and make him plausible but conventional, pedagogically
useful but intellectually a misrepresentation.
There is striking force to his suggestion that philosophy is an activity and not a body of
doctrines and that it does 'not' issue in
more propositions and theses. Certainly from the beginning to the end of a lifetime of writing
and conversation, Wittgenstein was not one to allow easy assimilation. "I should not like
my writing," he says, "to spare other people the trouble of thinking."2 But this is not an
idiosyncracy of manner nor a peculiar quirk of personality. Early and late, there are
reasons issuing from both what he was thinking about and also from the very processes, the
mode of the thinking and the style of the writing, that gave him the case for saying that he
could not com municate results. Instead his pages have to stimulate the reader to having
thoughts on his own--not borrowing them nor allowing anything vicarious.
No wonder, then, that he was likely to be misunderstood. His thoughts are difficult; but finally,
the difficulty does not reside in the fact that they are utterly confounding, nor too
abstruse, nor fantastically technical. Certainly there are prerequisites for getting at much of
what he writes about, and these are more than good will and general culture. One must have
some near professional competencies to understand some of what he is about.
However, there are other causes for most of the mis understandings, for their persistence,
and for their occurring among sophisticated and academically qualified readers.
For one thing, Wittgenstein eschews the conventional pedagogical apparatus, the
accepted patterns of writing, and most of the pieces of the logical frame within which ordinary
scholars and purveyors work. What is deemed to be the minimal sign of rationality,
the necessary logical scheme, the obvious ploys— point-of-view, hypothesis, presupposition,
argument, doctrine-these, and more, are simply not traded on at all. For in very subtle ways, to
re-think Wittgenstein in such terms, in such concepts, is to illustrate how nonsense is made
and re made. That is his point; and he does not want to spread more nonsense. This is why,
too, his thinking cuts so deep; it forces a new kind of writing upon the author himself and also a
new kind of receptivity upon the reader. If it does not do the latter, then one misunderstands, and
one's misunderstanding, like some philosophical problems, even gets a depth about it. The
misunderstanding involves one's attitudes and even an outlook.
But another kind of difficulty is likely when we confront the Wittgenstein pieces.
One cannot, I believe, conclude that Wittgenstein was exaggerating late in 1919, when
he told Ludwig von Ficker, a publisher and an editor of a general cultural periodical, that
his manuscript (subsequently the
Tractaiks) would not be easily understood; for its subject matter would seem alien to
him. But the fact is, Wittgenstein says that the lock is not alien at all “...because the book's
point is an ethical one." He goes on to say how it is ethical, namely, his pages craw limits to the
ethical from the inside; hence there are two parts: "...the one presented here plus all that I
have ‘not' written. And it is precisely this second part that is the important one."3 There
is, in brief, an intertwining of factors here and almost an 'indirect communication,'
as Kierkegaard noted on his own behalf. For what is said directly is but one part,
may be indeed "unassailable and definitive”; nonetheless, it is a little thing that such
problems be even solved.4 But readers of Bertrand Russell's "Introduction" to the
Tractatus will know how profound yet plain, how almost expository, Wittgenstein's
distinguished teacher and older colleague made the whole book. That 'second part,
Russell tends to omit altogether. That inter twining and that indirectness are simply not
part of our ordinary academic experience. Wittgenstein had even said to Russell in an
earlier letter that the "main contention" had been missed. He notes:
The main point is the theory of what can be expressed (gesagt) by propositions—i.e., by
language-(and, which comes to the same, what can be 'thought') and what can not be expressed by
proposi tions, but only shown (geseigt); which, I believe, is the cardinal problem of philosophy.S
So already we have the ethical and the logical as, respectively, unstated and
stated factors here, but, more, we have some things stated and other things shown. Our
point again is that the dif ficulty Wittgenstein creates for his reader is chiefly here. He
expects capacities of understanding in the reader that are token of a rich and variegated life,
almost levels of human vitality, of passion and feeling, also insight. It is as if he flatters
the reader with the thought that one's life is so finely textured and so thick with content,
so subjectively developed, that the ethical will, of course, be immediately adjacent even
if the text does not provide it, and that one will see with practiced glance the issues
even when they are not overtly expressed. It is probably not a mistake to assume
that Wittgenstein believed that the Tractatus and surely the Philosophical Investigations
would even be a means of capacitating the reader in these directions, but he was not
sanguine.
Russell's Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy was sent to Wittgenstein in a
prisoner-of-war camp in Italy. He read it and
then responded: “I should never have believed that the stuff I dictated to Moore in
Norway six years ago would have passed over you so completely without trace."'? And with
almost heart rending pathos Wittgenstein tells about Frege's failure to under stand the
Tractatus, at least its themes, and then says: "...it is 'very' hard not to be understood by a single
soul."8 With such masters of logical theory already failing to grasp his point, and
Wittgenstein being in a prison camp with all kinds of uncer tainties before him, it is a
wonder that he could keep his con fidence about his manuscript. He can even dare-
a very young man—to say to Russell, the established and Nestorian figure in the new
logic: "...don't think that everything that you won't understand is a piece of stupidity."
The Tractatus sets all kinds of limits. More properly, perhaps, it is not the author who
does it as much as it is the sheer logic of language that does it via Wittgenstein's book. What
lies on the other side of the limit is nonsense, by the logical standards which apply to
propositions; and for most of us who read these things, that, in effect, puts ethics,
transcendental matters generally, the foundations of logic, the meaning of life, the
issues of the self, and much else of first importance, into a kind of limbo. Suddenly, all of
that-granted its importance is beyond our grasp and almost inaccessible. But
Wittgenstein's books, and the Investigations can be included here, do set limits, if not to
the thinking, to the expression of thinking; and the poverty of our own lives is such that if we
cannot have these things in propositions we cannot have them seemingly at all.
Thus it is easy to conclude that all such matters are nonsensical. Wittgenstein
does not say that. He is supposing that we have a first-hand access to such matters,
not via propositions, and that what setting limits does is to force that recognition. It is the
person who has to have the richness otherwise, the transcendental stuff; and it is no
surprise, then, that after so many centuries of learned talk, Wittgenstein should see that his
work is outside the streams of thought of American and European civilization. For the
learned have put what he wants to show into sayings, the ethical into propositions,
and the meaning of life into schemes of argument. In another context,
Wittgenstein says that it is almost "unbelievable” the way in which an issue
becomes "...completely barricaded in by the misleading expressions which
generation upon generation throw up for miles around it, so that it becomes virtually
impossible to get at it."10
12
Wittgenstein thought there were grave mistakes in his Tructurus and that the new thoughts
in the Investigations could best be understood only in contrast with and against the back
ground of his earlier way of thinking. But this suggestion about how to understand does
not touch the difficulties noted above. For the later pages require as much of the
reader, if not more, as do the earlier. Many things are different, but still the
Investiga tions puts great stress upon the games the individual chooses to
play, the way he or she plays them, and even how a life has been formed. These,
too, lie outside the language and can not be quite said. So, the limits upon
understanding, the restraints upon grasping even Wittgenstein's later work, may, in part,
be due to a kind of mislocation of the issues—in a very profound sense; deepened
by the reconsideration of what the logic of certain kinds of issues entails, this might be
called a logical matter.
But it is time to turn to the issue of these pages, the problem of the self. For
the quality of oneself matters greatly to Wittgen stein, as we have already noted. In what
follows, I wish to dis cuss the self in several contexts. First I will note something of
Wittgenstein's comments about himself, mostly in his letters. I am painfully aware
of the inappropriateness of concern with a thinker's life in most instances, and I shall
try to avoid any irrelevant conjecture or psychological interpretation. My case will be a
logical one anyway. Next, we will look at the concept ‘self' as formulated in the Tractatus.
Thirdly, some discussion of the concept in the Investigations, where William James'
reflections are considered and the issue re-thought so carefully. Then, in conclusion,
a reconsideration of the concept 'self' around the notion that concepts themselves have been
under stood in a new and lively way. How this relates to certainty, doubt, and being a
person will amount to another conception of philosophy and of thinking.
philosophy, spiritual talk, cultural syntheses, generalized meta physics, and serve-all
concepts. 11 There was a great deal in him to which all of these could appeal. And the
power and authority of his logical strictures can only be appreciated by someone who
knows how much there was to inhibit. He was rich in proclivities, but his logical
scruples were exceedingly exacting too.
The early Wittgenstein gives us two sets of reflections on the self and they do not
quite seem to match up. Or do they? He says, for example, a number of things
about himself in his letters that do not seem to get any illumination or any
analysis in the Tractatus. For the moment, we can leave the question whether
they should or not. His philosophy is one thing, his personal life another. So in
1912, he says to Russell:
Whenever I have time I now read James' Varieties of religious exp. This book does me a lot of
good. I don't mean to say that I will be a saint soon, but I am not sure that it does not improve me a
little in a way in which I would like to improve 'very much': namely I think that it helps me to get rid of
the 'Sorge' (in the sense in which Goethe used the word in the 2nd part of Faust). Logic is still the
Logic was looming very large for Wittgenstein, and he could tell
melting pot...12
Russell later that: “It's extraordinary, isn't it, what a huge and infinitely strange
science logic is. Neither you nor I knew that, I think, a year and a half ago," Amid
the most strenuous efforts to get logic straight and in the same letters discussing
these efforts he can say: "Inside me everything is in a state of ferment."
"Everyday I was tormented by a frightful 'Angst'..."; "My life has been one nasty
mess so far..."13 But nothing is quite so poignant as a judgment about himself
which he notes in a letter of mid-1914:
But deep inside me there's a perpetual seething, like the bottom of a geyser, and I keep on
hoping that things will come to an eruption once and for all, so that I can turn into a different
person. I can't write you anything about logic today. Perhaps you regard this thinking about myself
as a waste of time—but how can I be a logician before I'm a human being! ‘Far' the most important
thing is to settle accounts with myself!14 The point here is not to stress facts that are
unpleasant or that explain Wittgenstein's writings. But it is, rather, to note that
Wittgenstein was concerned with himself, apparently with what he was as a moral person, and
that he had all kinds of words at his behest to describe himself. It surely would be a mis
II

There are silly things said about Wittgenstein's thought; and one of the
silliest is that it is only about words. But say that and it is a small step to
concluding that Wittgenstein must have been a shriveled and half-
developed personality. On the contrary, he was a richly endowed and many-
sided personality. One cannot fathom his negative remarks about the limits of
philosophy until you know how tempted he must have been by edifying
14
well a theme he was striking in his early notebooks, "The I, the I is what is really
mysterious!" he says in 1916. And he is not talking only about the concept 'l'. That I "is
the bearer of ethics," and “if the will did not exist, neither would there be that centre of
the world, which we call the I, and which is the bearer of ethics. What is good and evil is
essentially the I, not the world."19
The themes of the Tractatus on the self are anticipated in the Notebooks, "The I
is not an object," we are told, and, therefore, though we objectively confront every
object, we do not confront the 1. But ethics is inexpressible and is not a part of a
propositional scheme, and the bearer of ethics, the I, is outside all of that too. For good
and evil come about through the subject, the I, but that I is not a part of the world
and of propositions.20 And, herewith the rift between what is shown and
what is said, between what is not expressed and what is expressed,
acquires histrionic thrust. Wittgenstein is not dismissing ethics and moral concern, as if
it were a nothing; for his letters show us how powerful these cares were for him. That
concept of the self, exercised in his letters, has an enormously tangled and replete
context. It is rich, variegated, and important. But the difficult matter to understand is the
very status of the concept 'I'. For as we turn to the Tractatus, we will see that the logic of
language will not give it the substance that his everyday concerns actually have already
done.
---
-
-

take to think that such remarks as these were about par ticularized matters in his life, his sexual
life, his temper, or a failure to get his work done. For he was acute enough, and surely candid
enough, to name particulars. Instead the words here show a concept of the self that is in
command. And there is a rule-governed character to his language about himself that
indicates how deeply it had permeated his life. For it is not only to Russell that he writes
this way, but also to Engelmann. In early 1917, he says: “I am working
reasonably hard and wish I were a better man and had a better mind. These two
things are really cne and the same."15
The strange but familiar business of judging oneself was not at all alien to Wittgenstein.
All of this has an analogue in St. Augustine who tells us in The Confessions that one
day the pre terses were stripped from him and "...the time had now come when I
stood naked before my own eyes, while my conscience upbraided me." The
concept of self stood obviously right in the middle of Wittgenstein's life--and for a
long time, not just episodically, and often because he was so very concerned
about himself. All kinds of words are used:"accounts with myself," "better human
being," "better man," "inner struggle," etc. It would be a mistake to lump these too
easily, but also a mistake to assume that a different concept is being deployed with
each differing word,16 For he was castigating, judging, and correcting himself in
ways here that are usually thought to be moral, and the concept 'self' comes forth
quite naturally. It has its place in that range of concerns and judgments. The very
plainness of all this forced Wittgenstein to the same kind of recognition that he
articulates in the Tractatus. He tells Engelmann:
But what am I to do? I am clear about one thing: I am far too bad to be able to theorize
about myself; in fact, I shall either remain a swine or else I shall improve, and that's that. Only let's cut out
the transcendental twaddle when the whole thing is as plain as a sock
The practices here are unmistakeable and well established. They go on much
in the jaw.17
later too. Wittgenstein suffers when he is not clear about some intellectual issues and
when he cannot work. But these, too, cannot be altogether divorced from the other
questions about the kind of person he is.18 Once more, that strenuous concern,
that worry about the quality of life, was also what made the concept 'myself' and 'self
very substantial. For it was 'his' life that was the concern, not life in general.
There is no doubt that Wittgenstein's letters bear out very
--

III Wittgenstein tells us that a book entitled "The World as I Found It,"
ostensibly complete, would include a report on the author's body, accounts of what were
subject to his will and what were not, but nothing about the subject. From the point of
view of such an account, there is no subject "...for it ‘alone could 'not be mentioned in
that book,"21 One can assume that the subject here is the bearer of ethics, the self, the
I, that he admits to being troubled about, who is there, amid plants, animals and
stones.22 In a peculiar manner, then, we can say that the ordinary working
concept, T', has no logical status—at least it does not belong to the Tractatus.
And this is as much as to say that this ethically rich and essential notion has no
philosophical status. That remark, 'no philosophical status', is not a bit of whimsy. It is
as much as to say that the ethical 'self' or 'l' does not lend itself to sense. If it does
enter into language
like the Tractatus describes, it will be bogus talk.
But, Wittgenstein knew that there was a way in which another concept of the self-and it is
another concept expressed by the same word ‘self'-did become philosophically
appropriate. "What brings the self into philosophy is the fact that the world is my
world'."23 The self is not a part of the world but a presupposition of its existence. But this
concept of the self is a philosophical one, and it is not surrogate for the human
being, the body, the soul, or even whatever psychology describes. It is a kind of
metaphysical T, a limit to the world, not a part of it.24 Seemingly, a concept of self then
arises, like Phoenix coming out of the ashes, not because a person is the bearer of good
and evil, but rather from the analysis of what it is simply to have language and to have a
world. Both 'world' and "language' are limited—they are not indefinite and without
qualification. Both are 'mine'.5 But the '1' there, the 'self', is a logical concept; it
plays a role in the logic of language and of world. It is needed logically. And the
limits of language mean the limits of the world, but more, the limits of ‘my'
language mean the limits of 'my' world. Adding difficulties perhaps, we can say
that logic pervades the world, and logic sets limits to both language and the world. We
cannot have a world or a language without it being mine.25 Thus this concept of the self
is needed to round out the complexities and logic of language and world. It is
there necessarily, not in virtue of observation.
But this metaphysical subject is not to be found in the world. 27 So there is no state
of affairs that is being pictured. This must be one more instance of Wittgenstein's
"fundamental principle”, namely, “that whenever a question can be decided by logic at
all, it must be possible to decide it without more ado," And related to that is a kind of
corollary, that when we have to look at the world for an answer to such a problem, that itself
shows that we are on a completely wrong track.28 In the Grammatik Wittgenstein insists that
the way one goes about, e.g., a proof already determines the sense of what is being
said and proved. “Tell me 'how' you seek and I will tell you 'what you are
seeking."29 These two concepts of 'self' are different, Our point will be served only
to say that the concept sought out in the Tractatus does a very limited job indeed; if it
were used else where as a foundation for talk in daily life, only nonsense would ensue.
It must be the case that nothing in the world pictured by propositions or, for that matter, nothing
in the propositions
themselves, reveals an existing self. It is almost as if Wittgen stein knows that too well. There
is another way of concluding what he did. For it is the whole of thought, the whole of
language, the world and not a state of affairs within it, that requires the self, or at least, the
concept, 'self'. For, Wittgenstein thought it absurd to have language without the self, so,
too, for a world and language, Ideas and words have to belong to some bodies; otherwise
there is no sense to them. Yet in saying this, we cannot admit that Wittgenstein is putting
very much into that self. His later writings require not a bare logical subject, but a
person, a mouth, situations, and living contexts. That is the normal
accompaniment of being a self, and all of that does not get in here. Here he is
doing a kind of metaphysics, not description. Thoughts, word, world have to be
owned, almost as William James had insisted too. And it is interesting that Wittgenstein
does not ask the question he thought was so crucial in his later reflections: "Is the world
(self] ever actually used in this way in the language-game which is its original home?"30
So, then we have two concepts of the self. The informal concept that is used in his letters
is not very precise, but it is still very powerful; and it is hard to miss what he says using it.
In fact, this use of the concept is an instance of an everyday usage. But the formal
concept in the Tractatus does not suggest anything like the Investigations, where he
says: “What'we' do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday
usage."31 That has to wait further development.
Obviously, neither is the concept 'l' in everyday life identical with the concept of the 'l'
or 'self' as one might have it in any one particular and erstwhile descriptive
discipline, We do talk about the 'psychological concept of a person, perhaps contrast ing
it with 'sociological', 'physiological', 'anthropological and, maybe, even an 'historical or
'literary' concept too. Somehow our own command of 'I' is not given us by the
sciences of the self. Where then do we get it? The Tractatus tells us it is frankly
metaphysical, being required by 'world', 'language' and even 'thought'. There is something in all
of this that is right. For the concept 'l' is not representative, the I is not an object. “One
of the most misleading representational techniques in our language is the use of the word
'I'," says Wittgenstein a decade or so after the Tractatus, "particularly when it is used in
representing immediate experience, as in 'I can see a red patch','32 And to say it
does not belong to any one discipline, is in part a recognition of its
transcendental character-it does
18
19
transcend all kinds of contexts. The 'l' is, however, also made clear for us by the grammar and
the variety of uses. But that lies in the domain of the Investigations, where the grammar,
not a particular context and not an artificial metaphysical use, does give one the
essence,

IV

Witigenstein says:
You have a new conception and interpret it as seeing a new object. You interpret a grammatical
movement made by yourself as a
quasi-physical phenomenon which you are observing 33 Perhaps we have with the
self a picture that has obtruded itself upon us and it is of little use. That
deployment of the word 'I' gets caught up in the picture of a subtle identity, the true 'me',
and 'l' siarts to mislead us by being representational, But we are not sure of just what. We
do seem sure that the fact that I say: "I see the room's odd shape' is to admit that the
visual experience of the room cannot just hang there. It has to be somebody's
experience. So, we are prone to make a philosophical point out of this kind of
familiar bit of language. The 'I' begins to look like a name of something. "'' is not
the name of a person, nor 'here' of a place, and 'this' is not a name. But they are
connected with names,"34
Ownership of images, moods, emotions, pains, thoughts looks like a necessary
acknowledgement, And it is true that we must talk about the person who has
such experiences. But the 'l' looks like a more particularized identity, which has to
be there even for others, before their proper name and even my own can be used. We
are still prone to get that concept 'l' caught up in a theory or a definition, or even a
search for the plain facts. We want the true doctrine about the 'I'. Instead of learning content
ment with the many responsible uses of 'I', we want to infer to something more
fundamental, That 'l' looks like it is being used referringiv, like a name, but not to my
body, but to something without a body, the real and immaterial ego, within the body.
Perhaps without stretching the point, we can say again that Wittgenstein could
not have written so well and so ardently about these matters if he, too, did not
feel attracted. William James' common sense and plain talking must have greatly
appealed to him. So, we read James saying that...
all men must single out from the rest of what they call themselves some central principle. .
Now' let us try to settle for ourselves as
definitely as we can, just how this central nucleus of the Self may feel. . .For this central part of
the Self is 'felt'.... it is at any rate no mere ‘ens rationis', cognized only in an intellectual way, and no
'mere' summation of memories or 'mere' sound of a word in our ears.... it is difficult for me
to detect in the activity any purely spiritual element at all. Whenever my introspective
glance succeeds in turning round quickly enough. . .all it can ever feel dis tinctly is some
bodily process, for the most part taking place within the head.'. . .In a sense, then, it may be
truly said that, in one person at least, the 'Self of selves', 'when carefully examined, is found to consist mainly of the
in the head or between the head and throat. ...our entire
collection of these peculiar motions
feeling of spiritual activity, or what commonly passes by that name, is really a feeling of bodily
activities whose exact nature is by most men
overlooked.'35Here the ego becomes an activity of a physical sort. And
Wittgenstein finds that trying to lay hold of something directly here is a little
like saying: “At any rate only I have got THIS." There is something appealing
about James here but also some thing wrong-headed. One insists upon getting at the
THIS—the uniqueness, and James, at least, had moved from the silly business of
positing an immaterial ego. But, Wittgenstein notes:
...James' introspection shewed, not the meaning of the word 'self' (so far as it means
something like 'person', 'human being', 'he, himself', 'I, myself'), nor any analysis of such
a thing, but the state of a philosopher's attention when he says the word 'self' to himself
and tries to analyze its meaning. 36 By 1930 or so, Wittgenstein was insisting on
something dif ferent: “I want to say the place of a word in grammar is its
meaning." And years later: "...A meaning of a word is a kind of employment of
it.''37 James and the early Wittgenstein had made mistakes about the 'l'. But the
mistakes were plausible because:
...the idea that the real I lives in my body is connected with the peculiar grammar of the
word 'I', and the misunderstandings this grammar is liable to give rise to. There are two
different cases in the use of the word 'I' (or 'my') which I might call "the use as ob
ject" and "the use as subject” 38 Thus, he goes to show that when we are talking "my
broken arm" and "I have grown six inches”, we are identifying a person; and that
the importance of this 'I' and 'my' use, here, is in consequence of the fact that we
might be recognizing the wrong person or associating all sorts of things with the
wrong individual. At this juncture, there is a kind of logic of informa
tion governing the use of ‘l' and 'my'. The point is then a kind of grammar governs the 'l'
and gives us the capacity to use the word in a certain way. More broadly, there are
situations and 'games' we are involved in that occasion our using 'l' in an informational
way.39 But the 'l as subject puts the stress else where. There we get sentences like "I see
the rings around the moon", "'I feel the temperature rising”, “I hear the echo”, and “I
have the pain". There the logic is different, for the question cannot occur: "Are
you sure that it's you...?" The point is such that the language does not secure
your recognition nor give reasons for doubting it—the 'l' does not identify you nor point
you cut. But here I believe we need a sharper distinction than 'cbject' and
'subject'. For in these latter cases, the language is 'of' the seeing, hearing,
feeling, etc., not 'about them. The 'l' assures its role without a case being made for it. In
the Tractatus, Wittgenstein had said that an ethical way of life would not be
important because the facts in the world would be changed; instead, the limit of the
world, that metaphysical self would be changed. 10 Language, too, could not change, for its
grammar was co-extensive with the logic of the world. But in the later writings, language
itself does not belong to the world, it belongs to people. But it belongs to them by
being a part of pain behavior, of loving, of caring, of wishing, etc. Then the l' falls into
place in all of that. Language does not choose the mouth which says it, as the Blue Book
notes (p. 68), for the person has to say it. The rules of the game simply are that a person
cries, contorts his face, also says some things. But the 'l' is not always a demonstrative
pronoun-its logic is not standard. The 'I' assumes a role in a game that already goes on. - So
we have another concept of 'T', giving us a very elemental and almost primitive certainty. Once
more, we must remember that eariy, Wittgenstein thought that being a self was being the
bearer of ethics. The world was a limited whole; and there are surely times when we all
want to say that sort of thing. But to say it, is to recognize that one speaks not from inside
the world, but from the outside. The 'self' is a limit, is on the outside, and if the person is
happy or unhappy, the world as a whole waxes and wanes. 41 But the admission that
the world is subject to such vast predication, that it can be this or that, is obviously a piece of
metaphysics; and again, to say it, is to talk nonsense (accord ing to the Tractatus). The self
has to be almost speechless in the Tractatus; and that is why his letters from the early period
are so touching, almost plaintive. For the letters and the early book do
not support each other.
But if we follow the Investigations, we have our attention drawn to some of the facts.
Indeed the world is this and that, happiness makes us see the world differently, But now the
place of language is shifted, and expressly in the direction of fitting it to that subject, that person.
That ‘fitting' does not happen because of a philosophical doctrine; rather, it takes place when
is an emergent in a life-
games are being played and lives are being formed. Then the 'I'
history. It is not only the ethical subject, however, that is brought to our
attention. Rather it is that language, all language, belongs to people, to
subjects. And these subjects do a variety of things, they are involved in 'games',
and one cannot know the significance of what is being said until one knows how a life is
formed, how a deed is done, how the language works. Then the ethical subject, who had no
language save at the expense of galimatias (in the Tractatus), now is the veritable
necessity in meaningful speaking.42 There is, apparently, something plain about this
matter. It must be some thing like this, that if one knows the 'seeing' language, the 'pain'
language, not just ‘about it (for that will not help), but knows it because you also 'see'
and 'have pains' and talk accordingly, then that 'seeing', 'feeling', and experiencing
pain already puts the 'l' within your command. And this 'I' is not an inference from an
experience to the owner of the experience (as the footnote from Frege's essay suggests),
nor is it a logical necessity like the ‘limit', but it is a capacity, a power (a subject) made by
one's living and its context. The subject is there as a cer tainty—it cannot be doubted. The
subject is laid down; and our very ability to speak at all supposes that we are subjects
just as the speaking exercises and is a part of our pains, feelings, hearing, wishing.
Language becomes what it is because of what we make of ourselves. Hence the variety
and rich manifold of the grammar of 'I'.
But is this a case of calling something the 'I'? Do we have two things, the I and the 'I'? Do we
know the first introspectively and then use the 'I' accordingly? The reader of
Wittgenstein's pages may think that once more the force of this kind of reflection
is to give up the transempirical and transcendental self altogether and probably settle only for a
use of words, even a linguistic fiction. However, one factor stays alive from the Notebooks,
through the Tractatus, and into the Investigations and the later writings, On Certainty
and the Remarks On Colour, namely, that the most important matters of all
are not
22
23
susceptible of philosophical formulation and exposition. So, there still is no
philosophical doctrine about the self. Frege, Janies and his early writings
notwithstanding, the self is firmly in place and not in virtue of philosophy or anything
intro spective or very special.
But it is time to sum this up in another way and in virtue of issues that Wittgenstein's
literature has put within our reach. For Wittgenstein has not given us a new philosophy, if we
mean by that new resolutions to old issues, in this case the problem of the 'self'; instead his
influence is of a more subtle sort. He has pushed certain obstacles aside and caused us to see
what we ordinarily overlook. Once that happens, we are enabled our selves to think
something, even be something (and these two do blend), that our reflection previously
had estopped. To these we now turna

Surely the metaphysical self drops out of the Investigations too. There is
nothing to say philosophically about the self. On the other hard, a long look at
everyday usage will show us that 'I' is not the name of anything, Cartesian, mental,
spiritual or inner. It does not, finally, designate an owner, but it does not stand
obliterated either. For something else besides philosophy brings it into everyday
use.
We are at a point once more where a certain kind of reflection tends to force something upon
us, And a passage in the Investigations can here be used as our point of departure.
There he worries about pain-behavior accompanied by pain and pain behavior without it.
He goes on to say:
We have only rejected the grammar which tries to force itself on us here. ...The paradox
disappears only if we make a radical break with the idea that language always functions in one
way, always serves the same purpose: to convey thoughts—which may be about
houses, pains, good and evil, or anything you please.43 Language is not only
‘about'; it is also 'of', and this in a rich variety of ways. More particularly, we can
say the difficulty cuts even deeper. We all share an assumption with
philosophers like Descartes, Locke, perhaps Plato, that a concept is also
about something. It is likened to a copy or an image in the mind, as if then using 'l' meant
that one ought to have a copy of the I in mind as one spoke. Once more, the concept is
supposed to be about or otherwise it is unclear. Wittgenstein's point is that
mastery of the concept 'l' does not require a picture of the I at all. Instead, being able to
discuss oneself as happy, joyful, even in pain, requires nothing like a copy. Other
competencies are effected by the language, so that being able to teil about pain, joy,
and dismay, these and more, are also done in language and with the help of 'l' or 'my', etc.
The role, therein, is what we mean by the concept. We do something - we do not
necessarily convey images, thoughts or copies.
A kind of skepticism tends to overcome us if we do as James and Frege, even
Wittgenstein, had done. The 'self' looks like a fiction, an owner, immaterial, even a
'motion' between head and throat.44 But the skepticism arises also because we cannot
resolve the issues in the terms that such discourse provides. So, we slip from one to other,
we take positions; we decide one time this way, another this way; or we might even
become eclectic and try to be fair to all thinkers and admit that the self is mysterious. It
is so mysterious and deep, so inexpressible, that almost like God, all notational
schemes are thought inadequate. We might then want a new system of
concepts, more refined and better able to lay hold of the essence of selfhood. In any
case, this leaves the self quite uncharted and our best thought cannot deliver. And the
unfortunate consequence is that we are left uncertain and without confidence. What
looks like the foundation, the self, is what is least certain; and our thought life, if not our
ethical endeavors, seems to be vitiated. There is no hinge on which the door of life can
swing. A kind of reflection then keeps us looking for an answer without there being a
method for finding the solution.45
But Wittgenstein also knew that such skepticism was deeply wrong. More than
that, the lack of certainty about the self must be in consequence of the wrong
orientation. The quest does not make sense. Those two senses of 'l' come back again. 'I'
in "I am overjoyed" is different than 'I' in "I have twelve toes". If the grammar is different, then
different than the other. Is Wittgenstein right?
the understanding of one is of a kind
In the second instance, we can say in response: “I had never noticed"; “I
wouldn't have thought it of you--the way you run and walk is no different"; "Can it be? You
have never told me before". In the first instance, the way of understanding the
language does not require that you know the person better, that you make certain of
a fact; instead, the words here require that you too be a subject, that you know what it
is to get in on joy or pain. The language fits kinds of subjectivity, it expresses a kind
of realized
24
23
capacity and achievement in the person; but it is not like a sigh or a grunt. Language also is
part of the capacity and the ability, not just an expression of it, Wittgenstein's point is that
most language actually gets its logic and rule, its morphology and recognizable
intelligibility, from standard practices and activities. After a while the 'l' comes forth
naturally and holds everything in place. All that a philosophical interest can do is to
describe that emergence, it cannot justify and does not need to. Arid, above all, we cannot
treat the language as if it needed further elucidation and explanation, if it is already
doing a recognizable task. The role needs no justification.
In that first instance, to understand what is being said vitiates the question:
"You mean yourself?" That question is nonsensical and is completely pseudo, For
saying "I am overjoyed" is part of being joyful, just as "I have a pain" is part of
being pained. Therefore that real 'l' that Wittgenstein had to indulge non
philosophically in his early letters, that he could not get into the Tractatus except
illegitimately, that working ʻl' is seen to have a legitimate birth, non-philosophical to be sure.
It is there and has to be reasoned 'from', not 'to'. The more there are small achieve ments,
the joys, griefs, hopes, thoughts, wants, the more there is to be linguistically exercised. Thus,
one's language will be as rich and many-sided as the achievements of joy, grief,
seeing, hearing, etc., will give occasion, More than this, the concept 'I' only begins to
take shape for us when there are these small achievements. That is the grammar of 'l'.
The 'l' is ingredient in all of these achievements.
Put in another way, the criteria for self-knowledge are not laid down philosophically or in
some meta-language. They are instead laid down by the kind of activities that make up our
life. There is no self 'per se' to know. For the self is, indeed, not an object. But it is not a
'nothing' either. There is no characteristic self-activity; certainly neither consciousness
nor thought are truly singular marks of personality. 46 But there are all kinds of
other activities. And self (and 'I') when studied conceptually turns our attention to how
I' is tied up with living, with responses, with actions, beliefs, and feelings. Therefore, if it is
said that Wittgenstein is a linguistic philosopher and worries about words, then there
is a point. But philosophy is a con ceptual study, and it issues in a grammar-a rule or
rules—that tie us up with a kind of natural and human history. To get clear on 'l' is, instead,
like becoming aware of the forms of human life in which 'l' is at home, and, more, it makes
us aware of the kind of person we are.in
But there is a kind of certainty that we all need. Skepticism is a kind of fault. That 'l' which is
brought into philosophy as a limit was not actually the 'I' used by Wittgenstein when he spoke
in a moral way about himself. But the Investigations have changed that. The two strands
are brought together. Philosophy has no special concept of the self. The only concept
or concepts of the 'I' are those born because the 'l' is the bearer of ethics, but also
knowledge, pathos, and art, That use of 'l' to which we have been alluding is natural and
unquestionable, but only if a kind of capital accumulates. There has to be valuation,
judgment, and responsible pathos. Once there are all these, the 'l' shows itself. It
then has a substance, and its identity is not in question. - This is how Wittgenstein's later
reflection shows us that philosophy does not have to produce concepts at all. Instead
it can study them, but only if other capacities have already pro duced them. And this is the
point. A human life is also a growth in capacities and powers. One of the most
impressive of all concepts (also a power and a capacity, not just a general word) is the
'T'. But we have to study what it does or rather what people do with it. Language is not
only about capacities, but language (not least general words) is also a way to exercise the
capacities, to effect the power, to be something. Language becomes the medium in which
the concept grows; and to see its role is all that is required in understanding it. After a
while, the 'T' is used for a genuine achievement, the self, the I. For that is how a life is.
It is also being made, and the word 'I' or 'self', 'me' and 'my', only become
appropriate when some things have been done. To be uncertain about who
you are, about one's identity, then is no longer a philosophical problem at all. Rather
it is a moral problem. For if one is a subject, or subject to thoughts, virtues, judgments, the
concept will be there,
The bane of the philosophical schemes, perhaps the psychological, maybe the theological
also, is that here only skepticism can reign. The effect of their way of posing the issues is a
series of pictures in which all criteria for certainty were and are removed. (Hence Wittgenstein's
worry about the pictures that our learning produced!) But if Wittgenstein will be followed on
these matters, then we begin to see that there is a wisdom of life available after all, Philosophy
might lead to real wisdom despite its linguistic bent. No, precisely because of it! One sees
that the certainty about who you are cannot be borrowed from a philosophical
doctrine, But it can be achieved by a quality of deed, feeling, talking, and thought. This is what
Wittgenstein tells us finally about these familiar psychological verbs. For
6
"It is not impossible that it should fall to the lot of this work, in its poverty and in the darkness of this time,
to bring light into one brain or another—but, of course, it is not likely." PI, p. x.

7
Letters to Russell, Keynes and Moore, a letter of June, 1919, p. 70.

8
example, we ail can look if we have eyes, but we all do not see. We have ears and
are able to respond to sounds, but we do not hear what is probably
available. The difference is that looking is an activity, but seeing is a capacity.
One can describe 'looking' in rcn-personal terms, just as 'feeling' can be captured in S-R
graphs that mark intensity. But 'feeling grief', like 'seeing the detail',
bespeaks a growth in the person. The locus is not a place, it is a person.
Language is not only an expression of the self, it is_ also a po; erful means of
being one.
Such a conversion of activities into capacities is what being a person entails. The
more dependent we become upon our capacities, rather than our activities, the
more use we have for an T. Finally the problem of personal identity has no
single resolution, for there is no single criterion.47 There are a host of them.
But the problem takes care of itself, not by being answered by a philosophical
doctrine, but by disappearing altogether. Almost, if we live right, the self is there
at hand - we are persons. This is a long road, and a bloody one to a
fundamental certainty. But, at least, there is no cheating on the way, ♡
Again from the letter of August 19, 1919. Correspondence with Frege must have been
going on for some years, so this was not just another case of misunderstanding because of
slight exposure. Note here the "Historical introduction, the origin of Wittgenstein's
Tractatus", by Georg Henrick von Wright, pp. 1-34, in Protractatus. Cf. especially pp.
13-14.

9 Note the 'foreword', November, 1930, to Philosophical Remarks,

edited from Wittgenstein's posthumous writings by Rush Rhees, transl. by Hargreaves
and White (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1975), P.
7.

10 In Philosophical Grammar, edited by Rush Rhees, trans. by Anthony

Kenny (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1974), p. 466.

All of this does not suggest for a moment anything negative about his interests in
Kierkegaard, Augustine, Tolstoy, Dostoievsky, Samuel Johnson, and others. But, here again he
read these authors from within his distinctions earlier alluded to, and not as philosophers who
"gassed”-i.e., tried to bridge these distinctions.

12
Letters to Russell..., p. 10. This one dates from June, 1912.

1
NOTES Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Trans. by D. F. Pears and B. F.
McGuinness (New York: Humanities Press, 1961), 4.112.
13
The quotations noted here are from Letters to Russell. Respectively the four are from
letter 24, p. 45; no. 23, p. 43; no. 25, p. 47; no. 27, p. 54.
2
Philosophical Investigations, Trans. by G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell,
1953), foreword, p. X.
14
Letters to Russell, no. 29, pp. 57-58.

15
3 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Briefe an Ludwig von Ficker, ed. by G. H. von
Wright (Salzburg: Otto Müller Verlag, 1969), pp. 35-26. Wittgen stein's words are: “...denn
der Sinn des Buches ist ein Ethischer." The translation above is by Mr. Brian McGuinness and
is found in L. Wittgenstein. Prototractus, ed. by McGuinness, Nyberg, and von Wright
(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971), pp. 15-16.
Paul Engelmann, Letters from Ludwig Wittgenstein, With a Memoir, trans. by L.
Furtmüller, ed. by B. F. McGuinness (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1967), p. 5.

16

4
Tractatus, Author's Preface, p. 5.
Wittgenstein thinks it wrong to insist on the use of certain words and phrases, as if there is a
one-to-one correspondence between a word and a concept. Rather, he says: “What I actually want
to say is that here too it is not a matter of the 'words' one uses or of what one is thinking when using
make at various points in life.”
them, but rather of the difference they
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on Colour, ed. by G.E.M. Anscombe, trans, by McAlister
and Schättle (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1977), Part III, no.
317, p. 59.
5 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Letters to Russell, Keynes and Moore, edited by
G. H. von Wright (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1974), p. 71. This par ticular letter to Russell,
written in English, comes from Cassino, Italy, and is dated August 18, 1919. The
distinction between saying and showing is central, of course, to the Tractatus too, as well as the
later writings.
17
Letters from Ludwig Wittgenstein, p. 11.
28
36
Investigations, no. 413, p. 125.
18 For example, when staying with Keynes in August, 1925 (noted in
Engeiriann, p. 55), and in a letter to Moore in 1937. There he says: "Vy work hasn't been
going well since I came back here. Partly because I've been troubled about myself a lot.” Leiters
to Russell, Keures crid Moore, p. 173.
37
Philosophical Remarks, Pt. I, no. 23, p. 59, and On Certainty, ed. by G.E.M. Anscombe and G.
H. von Wright, transl. by Denis Paul and G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1969), no.
61, p. 10.

38
The Blue and Brown Books (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958), p. 66.
19 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Notebooks 1914-1916, ed. by G. H. von Wright
and G.E.M. Anscombe, trans. by Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1961), p. 80.
39
20
Notebooks, pp. 76, 79, 80.
The expression, 'the logic of information', occurs in Remarks on Colour, but his point is that
no one, not even the psychologist, tells you what 'seeing' is. Therefore, he, too, uses 'seeing without his
learning constituting it. But, something like this has to be said about 'l' too; for no one teaches us
the 'l' is, when you say “I have a bump on my forehead”,
the term in an overt way. And what
supposes the use of 'I' before the bump. Cf., nos. 327ff., pp. 61-62.
21
Tractatus, 5.631.

22
11

Notebocks, p. 82. “A stone, the body of a beast, the body of a man, my boay, all
stand on the same level. That is why what happens, whether it comes from a stone
or from my body, is neither good nor bad.” (p. 84, August 12, 1916).
40
Tractatus, 6.42-6.43.

41 Notebooks, pp. 78-79, and Tractatus, 6.43.

23
42
Tractatus, 5.641. In the Notebooks, July, 1916, Wittgenstein also says: "The world is
'given' me, i.e., my will enters into the world com pletely from outside as into
something that is already there.” (p. 74).

24
Tractatus, 5.641. "The world is 'my' world...” (5.62).

25
Ibid., 5.62.

26
Ibid., 5.6; 5.61. Cf., "The I makes its appearance in philosophy through the world's being
‘my' world." Notebooks, p. 80.
"If everything is idea," says Frege, “then there is no owner of ideas. ... If there is no
owner of ideas then there are also no ideas...I am not my own idea; and when I assert
something about myself...then my judgment concerns something which is not a content of my
consciousness, is not my idea, namely my self...Therefore the thesis that only what
belongs to the content of my consciousness can be the object of my awareness, of my
thought, is false." In "Thoughts", included in Logical Investigations (ed. by P. J. Geach and
trans. by Geach and Stotthoff (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), pp. 21-22. It is
reflections like these of Frege that are the point of departure for so much of
Wittgenstein's work. But the issues stayed with him. Years later he tells Moore: "In one sense 'l'
and 'Conscious' are equivalent, but not in another." And the issues noted above from
the Blue Book are dis cussed here, too.
G. E. Moore, Philosophical Papers, “Wittgenstein's Lectures in 1930-33” (London:
George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1959), pp. 309
27
Ibid., 5.633.
28
Ibid., 5.551.

29 Philosophical Grammar, ed. by R. Rhees, transl. by A. Kenny

(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1974), p. 370.
311.
30
Investigations, no. 116, p. 48.
43 No. 304, p. 102.
31 Ibid.
44
Again, Investigations, no. 413, pp. 124-125; also Blue Book, pp. 69ff.
32
Philosophical Remarks, no. 57, p. 88.
45 Philosophical Remarks, p. 172.
33 Investigations, no. 401, p. 121.
46 Note here Investigations, nos. 412ff. and the Blue Book again.
34
Ibid., no. 410, p. 123.
47 "What am I getting at? At the fact that there is a great variety of
criteria for personal 'identity'." Investigations, no. 404, p. 122.
35 William James, The Principles of Psychology (New York: Henry Holt
and Company, 1890), Vol. I, pp. 298-302.
Is this the way to express the issue that concerned K.? Try it. So some people said:
Yes, it is rational. Others said: No, it is irrational. And what does K. say? I do not know
that K. asks this question. I think the response to this should be that this
language does not apply. One might as sensibly ask: Is God rational? And
that means what? Is he still able to take care of his business? In case of an accident a man
may be rendered uncon scious but he may also be delirious and be irrational, speaking of
things of long ago as though they were present. Has God had an accident?
Does Freud in effect say that belief in God, whether Jewish or Christian, is irrational? Another
imaginative realization of mind or wish? And what then is rational? Having a human
father and going to him for help, saying, for instance, “Dad, can I have the car tonight?"
Notes 1

O. K. Bouwsma

"These fragments I have shored against my ruin(s)."*

To inspire with concern and unrest. "The maximum of what one human
being can do for another...is to inspire him with concern and unrest." That
should provide us with a hint con cerning the subjective thinker. The
question is as to how he does that. He cannot do this by saying: "Bosh!” or pulling
faces or wearing a Halloween mask. We must ask more about this concern and
unrest. We may be sure that it is concern about one's life, what sort of man he is and is
to become. This writer is a disturber of a man's peace-or his sleep, as Nietzsche
would say. "Sleepers, awake!"
The Offer. The offer is there on the page. The words are there. They are presented
as spoken by a man. Why indeed should not these words be spoken by a man?
They are, after all, words, only words. But you do not realize what words these are and
what the offer is. Have you ever heard of eternal life, and now of the offer of eternal life,
ever heard of such a thing? You and the rest of us, ever since Socrates helped to make
up one of the favorite syllogisms, Barbara, have known that man is mortal, everyone of
them, except for Enoch and Elijah. And here in this book you can read of a man, a man, mind
you, who offers eternal life, and not to one or two only, to a few favorites, but to anyone
who will accept it. Did you get that? You still do not believe it? Let me add something to
this. Not only is the story the story, for it is a story, of a man who makes an offer, but
also of people, of other men and women who accept the offer. Eternal life, in a
way, who wouldn't go for that? And yet it does seem foolish, a man offering people
eternal life when anyone can see that the man who offers it is mortal like the rest of
us and likely to die quite young himself. And yet there it is, a man passing out,
not to customers, but to anyone, a gift. This is a gift. There is nothing to pay, nothing to
earn. One might well suppose that someone made up the story, a crazy story, for who,
what man, in his right mind would make such an offer ("Come and get it") and who,
otherwise in his right mind, would come forward to accept such a gift. One would
certainly expect that those interested would
Is Belief in God rational?
Is belief in God rational? Is love of God rational? Is worship rational? Is praising God rational? Is
singing rational?

"Ed. Note. ). L. Craft reported to us: "...the quote 'These fragments...he (Bouwsma] did tell me comes from The
Wasteland. He also said: 'Don't ask me what it means.' I didn't."

32
33
windings with new obstacles and new overcomings. Is that the way to speak of eternal
life? Eternal life has a beginning but no end. "I began eternal life a year ago." It is
something like a career. "I began my career (I am a doctor) last May." A career may go
on for 40 years. That too involves a task. The task is open to public view. The doctor
has many patients. He keeps up with the newest. He is successful. But eternal life goes on in
the stillness. There is no public and no office. And there are no yearly reports. “How are you
doing?"
first examine what was offered, much as men do a gift horse, though in this case it
would most likely be the man who was making the offer whom those interested
would examine, not that that would help much. For how would a man who made
such an offer ever assure any who came forward that he could provide what he offered?
Has there ever been anything like this in the history of the world? Perhaps something
like it. At least one can imagine something like it. One can imagine one of the richest
men in the world one day, glad about something, making an announcement in the
newspapers that he will on the next day give away a lot of money, let us say, in front of his
hotel. One might describe this as an offer. Everyone is invited. No one knows who this
man is. He has come into town from nowhere. No one knows whether he has the
money he says he will give away. Of course, nearly everyone would like some of that
money. People read the newspaper. The next day arrives. The rich man walks out of
the hotel at dawn in the morning, expecting to give away money. There is no one to
meet him. A few people pass by and glance at him, and smile. Some laugh. The idea of
a man giving away money to anyone and without asking any questions, and without
signatures, and without a name of his own, anonymous money, has struck most people
as absurd. The money is suspect. It must be counterfeit and if not counterfeit, just
pennies. And who in 1976 is going to get up early or late to receive the gift of a piece of
paper or a penny? Some people are angry. They think the man should be jailed or
driven out of town. It is a hoax. In any case the rich man has unwittingly placed himself
in danger. Surely an investigation should be made. Who is this man? Clearly it is not
safe to give away money so freely.
Eternal life is not money. It does not come in denominations of coins and bills. Still, I
remember now the phrase: "Buy without money and without price”. Money too may
be bought. And in this case money too is offered without money and without price, not
bought.
What did I want this for?
Is K's polemic obsolete? I have said earlier that the polemic against the Hegelians
is now obsolete since there aren't any Hegelians any more. They are few, only fossil
Hegelians. And now I have been reminded that the polemic against the great
uncloud of witnesses who said: "We are Christians", being under the illusion that they
were Christians, is also obsolete. For there are not many of those any more either.
These days there is no advantage in being a Christian. Little prestige attaches to this.
So if we or if anyone were to wage a kind of warfare, such as K. waged, the Hegelians
and "I am a Christian" having passed away, against whom should one go out to fight?
There is always oneself, of course, but one would prefer to fight a whole army. Is
there someone? Is there such an army? Isn't K. obsolete?

K. and our forgetting. In a passage above I introduced the question whether K. was
doing the sort of thing W. was doing. I went on to describe something that K. was doing.
He said he was setting forth the ethical. I went on to say that the situation required this
since men had forgotten what it means to be a man and so on. I wrote in this
connection of two concerns, concerns which may compete within the same person or
between different persons or different groups of persons. "So you are a Nobel prize winner
and you have not read Hamlet since you were in high school nor ever heard of Tolstoy's
23 Tales?" So you make such beautiful lace, the lace of Lilla, and have never asked
yourself: And who or what will make beautiful lace of me? This following is a sentence
from K. which I may have misunderstood: "My principal thought was that in our age
because of the great increase in knowledge, we had forgotten what it means to
exist
35
What is eternal life? It is a form of engagement, a struggle, a striving. It involves a future
in which the end of one's striving is fulfilled. And so what is offered in the offer of
eternal life? A new start. A task. A venture. A never ending river of turns and
and not just to know) and what inwardness signified and that the misunderstanding
between speculative philosophy and Christianity was explicable on that basis”
(Postscript, p. 223). K. describes this as “my principal thought". In case
someone has forgotten something, the thing to do in case it matters, is to remind
him. "Say, you forgot something. Let me tell you." But it isn't that simple. It is not a piece of
information or a whole book or mary memories that one has forgotten and that K.
would bring to mind. The kind of forgetting K. has in mind is more like atrophy. Once
you could read poetry, it was one of your delights, and now all you can think of are the
huge turtles around the Galapagos and what they eat, and do they make a noise like a
fish if a fish makes a noise? Have I got this straight? Isn't Ki's task more like that of re-
educating the explorer of Galapagos? Perhaps it is too late for that, and besides who
said he wanted to be re-educated? Still, in case something has been forgotten, the
remedy is surely the reminder. Perhaps this for getting is more like negiect, like
neglecting exercise, taking a walk. And so what one has forgotten is not something one
once knew but some things one perhaps used to do or used to think about. According to
this understanding of K, written here, K.'s task is to help to prevent such
forgetting by supplying reminders. The reminders, however, are not to take the form
of blunt counsels. One is not to tell one to do something. "Think on these things." The idea is
to awaken in one the desire to do what comes naturally. The question or the problem is:
how are you to get a man who thinks about turtles, who never tires thinking about
turtles, taking their measurements, 24, 36, 36, and studying their toes, etc., one day to
think and to consider what sort of creature he is. If the question is put to him,
as you, together with him, admire turtles, “And what are we doing under the sun?",
he may say: "We are admiring turtles.” And that may be a beginning. Is man more
than a turtle? (“'The voice of the turtle is heard in the land"-a different turtle.)
Obviously I need some help in connection with the thought: "We had forgotten what it
means to exist and what inwardness signifies". Just what have we forgotten? Here are some
questions: "How did that happen? How could one forget some thing as
important as that? Presumably it is important. Is it rather like forgetting to eat?"
There are other questions. If someone should get to worry about this, is there
something he can do? K. seems to think that we who have forgotten are not
aware we have forgotten anything. "We haven't forgotten any thing. Nothing is missing
in our lives. We have simply outgrown our childhood. It often happens to children." I just
asked above: "Is it like forgetting to eat?" but perhaps this is a more suitable
analogy: "Haven't you forgotten to see to your proteins?" ("A one-sided diet.'') IF, of course,
we say that we haven't forgotten anything, then it won't do to tell him what he has
forgotten. He will not recognize what he is told as anything he has forgotten or cares to
remember. Hence he has first to be brought to the point where he begins to miss what
he has for gotten. That is one of K.'s worries. This sounds a little like Socrates. "You
have forgotten something." Socrates spent a good part of his life trying to remember.
And it was terribly important to him. He went about this in a curious way, looking for
what he forgot in other people's memories. K., presumably, knows what it is we have
forgotten.
I have already suggested that we are not simple, not that this is news. It is out of
an aspect of this complexity that a part of K.'s polemic is to be understood. Man is
greedy for knowledge. Men want to know. In 1976 it is sometimes said that man already
knows too much. Man can control a gun with a finger, a finger he cannot control. He isn't
big enough for what he knows. Men used to say this not of what he knows but of his breeches,
too big for his breeches. But there is also the ethical, an interest and a concern older than
this interest in knowing. It is this conflict for dominance, the dominance of this interest in
knowledge that has made manikins of man. As we know, K. uses the words "objective"
and "subjective" to describe the contrast. The idea is that the subjective too requires
attention and nurture. "Why have a few become immortal as enthusiastic lovers, a few as
high-minded lovers...?" Real lovers are very rare. "(Why) a select circle of devout men
and women?" It must be clear that K. in passages such as these is lamenting neglect.
And for what? The worms in the library, the worms in the books, who might have been
Romeos or Horatios or saints. Those worms have said: "It is better to know".
Concerning this reading of something in K. it is clear that W. has no part in this.
("If a lacemaker were to produce ever so beautiful laces, it never theless makes one sad to
contemplate such a poor stunted creature. ...and it is impossible to admire the laces without
shedding tears for the lacemaker." Postscript, p. 268)
36
The hidden inwardness. The hidden inwardness, what is that? What could it be but a
man's resolve, his decision. "I will follow." "I am a pilgrim." "This one thing I do." "I will be
faithful." "I have made my vows." All this goes on unseen. No one may know that any such
vow has been made. It is a matter between a man and his maker. It is this, the decision, the
venture, that K. means by action. And this must now be realized, the vow kept. "I have made
a covenant." This idea or this explication of inwardness may relieve us of a lot of
puzzle ment. It seems now like a beam of light through the haze.
taking those sentences apart and then seeing that they cannot be understood by putting
those words together again. Those sentences are not intended to describe anything as though
those who speak them, with their seeing eyes had discovered the divine hidden in this man
visible to all men. They are not seeing the invisible clothed in this otherwise man like us.
Those who say that in making these declarations these men are projecting their
longings, their wishes, might be considered nearer the truth than are those who say
that they are talking nonsense. When, accordingly, K. says: "Keep off! Stop! It is a
paradox", this is his way of saying: "A confession, a declaration, is not a piece of
information. This is holy ground. Remove your clumsy shoes."
8

The Paradox. K. has a use for such phrases as "the essentially

comprehensible" and "the essentially incomprehensible" and more startling: "Believing
against the understanding" and "Faith's crucifixion of the understanding". These
expressions come into play in K's thinking about the Paradox, "the babe in the
manger”. What child is this? Here is a sentence: “But that the eternal should come. .. ,is
born, grows up, and dies– is a breach with all thinking". There are other expressions
such as "cannot be thought". These are K.'s expositions of: "to the Greeks foolishness”.
We are all Greeks.
The Paradox. I said that there must be a scriptural equivalent of this. And this
occurred to me: None exist. But one may find some clues to this. Consider these
two expressions in the scriptures: "Thou are the Christ, the Son of God" and "My Lord
and my God!" I need not, I think, remind you of the cir cumstances under which these
words are spoken. They are spoken in the presence of and—to a man. If now we ask:
What do these sentences mean? we may understand that question, following W., to be
the same as: How are those sentences used? The answer may be: Those sentences are the
expressions of faith and of commitment. “It is an awful thing." K. is fond of the word
"passion”. This takes place between one man and another. It is a form of surrender. Now if
someone, also present, were to say: "How can that be? This man is a man. —And God is
God. -No man can be God and God cannot be man." And he would shake his head over
this. And K. who is also present in a sense, spanning the centuries, says: "Stop! It is a
paradox”. And this is a way of saying: Those sentences cannot be understood by
Socrates. Perhaps we can understand Socrates as a man who thinks of himself as a subject, as
a servant, but he does not know what or whom he serves nor how. This is his ignorance.
We might say that he knows that he should be virtuous but he does not know what
virtue is. Now I am for once clear about Socrates' ignorance. This would, of course, not
have bothered him except that he still has the burden of his being a servant, a servant from
the beginning. It is as though he knew there must be a Moses or other prophet who
would know what he does not know. Was Socrates distressed about this, worried? He
did not show it. Socrates is a little like those who expect a Messiah—who does not come. He,
the Messiah, will come later. He will. There is risk.
I remember at other times worrying about what to make of the idea of Socrates as a
subjective thinker. I had in mind in those days the idea that Socrates never told
anyone anything but that he always aimed at getting those he talked to to think for
themselves. He never had any results. He stirred things up, kept things moving.
This obviously had something to do with what he regarded as his task. And that now
seemed to be to hold people responsible for what they were saying at the same time
that he pressed them to say something. But following Craft's idea, what makes
Socrates a subjective thinker has to do with how he regarded what he was doing and
why he did it. He did it because he was commanded to do it. He was under orders. The
important thing is not what the task is but that a man should have a task, a task laid upon
him.
What an idea! That a man should have a task, and that he has come to it and that it should not
end. The task is never finished. Hend to the plough. A furrow into the horizon.

10
in having knowledge, makes knowledge so precious to us, and makes us so greedy for
it, that we make of knowing the end-all of our lives. What else could there be? No
doubt in our own time when we are all educated and Knowledge, or what passes
for Knowledge, is rampant among us, and we hear that Knowledge is the good or the
road to happiness, no wonder that we heap up knowledge more and more. There was
once a miser, so they said, who was very rich. He had so much gold. He loved his gold
and desired more gold. He once said that he wished that everything might be changed
into gold. And his wish was granted! That is a little like the way in which K. would have
us think about ourselves. We have had such a passion for knowledge that we too in a
sense have wished that everything should be changed into knowledge. In our case too
the wish has been granted. And we are stunned. (I remember now that the wish was
everything the miser touched should be changed into gold. And it was so. In a similar
way we have wished that everything we read should be changed into knowledge. And it
too was so. In that way we have been deprived.)
This was King Midas. I think it well to add that after he entreated Dionysus to give him
relief, he was ordered to wash himself in a river. And what is a man in our time to do
when everything he reads turns to knowledge? It is not, of course, that he complains of
this. A man may be sick and have rosy cheeks.
The Hegelians and the Passion for Knowledge. The Hegelians were metaphysicians.
The universe, reality, has beginning, middle, and end and they got the grandstand
grand view, from nothing at all through Becoming, a stirring in the old rags, to all's quiet
on the thinking front, reality in its Sunday clothes. You might say that such a view is a
remarkable achievement, something on the order of the Eiffel Tower, or tower of sorts too,
made however not of beams of steel but of ideas, harder and more durable, immoveable like
the conclusion of a syllogism. It must have been a delight and the pride of this
thinker. “I will build you a tower," and then he would put words together and call it
truth. I do not suppose that K. objected to this. He may have appreciated architecture as
he did Tivoli. (That doesn't sound like a Danish word.)
That is not where the trouble lay.
The trouble lay in that those who had such a grand view regarded the scriptures - I
am avoiding the word "Christianity” -as presenting a more or less competing, but not
so complete and grand, view of Reality. So we get the idea of metaphysics No. 1,
being superseded by metaphysics No. 2. It is as though there were people who in
an unadvantageous position had a view of the Grand Canyon and then others came
along who stood closer to the rim and looked and saw more. They said: “We have
seen and saw what you see but we see much more and how glorious the view is!”
Many then came over to the edge of the river and they said: “You are right”.
I am sure that this misconception is common. Liberal theology.
It won't make any difference that the misconception referred to arises out of the fact
that we know so much. If we know so much and that is the source of our
trouble, the remedy would seem to be: See to it that we get to know less. Too
late for that. And so we must find another way. Of course, the scriptures are not
another book in metaphysics. How to show that? The grammar of metaphysics
versus the grammar of the scriptures.
I got this slightly wrong. It isn't that we know so much, though that has something to do with it. It
is that what we have,
11

My Task. My task — well, what is it? When the young man asked: What must I do to
inherit eternal life?, there was a reply. I do not suppose that the task was to seek
eternal life. Is that perhaps the incentive for undertaking the task? And did Jesus then
assign to the man the task: Keep the commandments. "That have I done from my
youth." "What then do I yet lack?" When Jesus told him to sell all his goods, etc., was
that in effect to tell him he had not kept the law? It is very difficult to keep this law,
and keeping this law is keeping oneself. “Follow me" is to follow along a way that
is rough. For one must be rough on oneself. What then is the task? It is “to keep
oneself unspotted from the world". The leopard and his spots. “Out damned spot" —
for everyone.
A man who loves money and, wanting to be rich, gets to know the prices of everything
and knows when to buy and when to sell. He has taken upon himself and may succeed-
in the
41

world. But here is a different task. "Fast from evil.” “Depart from evil and do
good." "Love me and if ye love me you will keep my commandments.” This man has
made a vow and the task of his life is to keep that vow. "The pledge of allegiance.”
It is like a marriage vow, for richer for poorer, "in sickness and in health, until death
do us part". Loyalty. In thought, word, and deed. "Thou good and faithful servant."
A servant.
When K. uses this language intending to make the language new and fresh, he
also risks concealing the meaning. Then one has to use the language one did
not understand in the first place to understand the language designed to help one
understand the language one did not understand in the first place.
The Ethical
12

J. L. Craft
Pricacy. Craft said: You can never know whether or not someone has made a vow,
whether he has said "Yes" and meant it. But, of course, you may trust that
someone has. So if I say: "So-and-so is one of them" that will show something about me.
The vow is made in secret. I may stand in awe of him. My attitude towards him is a
revelation of my trust. Only God knows that I am or am not deceived. The man I trust may put
on the shows and trappings of the devout man. Where are vows made, "in the heart or
in the head"? If a man says "I have made a vow" does that show he has? I think that K.
says about the Christian that he knows about himself what he must do and what he does
when he does it. But he cannot tell his brother. I guess we must ask: Why should he? Still
the question arises: How then is a man "to confess me before men'? What is
"confessing"? If a man makes a vow and serves, he is not to hide his light under
a bushel. "Let your light shine before men." I guess it isn't that what a man says or
does, then, gives anyone information but it may serve to make another pause and
wonder. "Where have you been?" "Sweet bells jangled out of tune, jangled again into
tune." The gospels tell us of people who followed him and gave their lives —so there
could be such people. But the Bible tells us secrets that we could otherwise not know.
After that we must take human beings on trust—not that we can trust a man if he says: "I
did" but there is more than that to a man. Part of the trouble is that even if the man did do some
thing, what he did may not be clear even to himself and even if it is clear it may not be
what is required.
The ethical is a thread which weaves through Bouwsma's fragments, most of which are
lengthier than those other Zettel. (Ed. note: Bouwsma's "Notes I were originally called
"Lengthier Zettel".] Accordingly, there is an urgency, there is a threat of ruin, and there
is an offer. Kierkegaard remarks that for the study of the ethical, every man is
assigned himself. The assignment concerns a responsibility for a whole life
which allows no excuses and has no escape. Importantly, it is not a responsibility for
this or that action or deed, but is a respon sibility for all the years and all the days and
all the moments.
Everyone knows that a man may be responsible for the life of another ending. But how
is a responsibility for one's own life, whatever the cause of death, possible? What does
it mean that one should always be ready to die? The ethical makes a terrible guarantee
to man: the guilty cannot escape punishment—the innocent cannot be punished. How
can there be a punishment beyond the grave?
Bouwsma remarks of Socrates:
It is as though he knew there must be a Moses or other prophet who would know what he does
not know. Was Socrates distressed about this, worried? He did not show it. Socrates is a little like
those who expect a Messiah-who does not come. He, the Messiah,
will come later. He will. There is risk. Without the possibility of a law not devised by
man, of a law given to man by a higher power who stands behind it, there is

42
43
no such thing as the ethical. For this higher authority prevents the escape by death and
makes the 'guarantee'. Is the proper kind of answer to the Socratic kind of question,
then, a command, a ''Thou shalt"?
But how can a man be sure that there is a judgement and a sentence for his entire life and
that this isn't a hoax, a wish, a Iryth, a fairy tale? Human beings would first like some proof;
no one wants to be duped. In fact, proofs of the existence of the Judge are not
unknown. At any rate, the ethical arouses suspicions about itself. On what ground could
such a belief siand? Isn't the absence (not lack) of proof and verification—the solid
ground-precisely a feature of the ethical? “There is risk.” There is no value
without risk.
Kierkegaard puts the following question:
What conclusion would inevitably force itself upon Ethics, if the becoming a subject were not the
highest task confronting a human being?

The conclusion would be: Ethics is impossible—there is no such thing as Ethics.

For becoming a subject is the highest task con fronting a human being. But what
does it mean to become a subiect?
Human beings become subjects. A subject is a person subject to something
which is higher, a higher power. For instance, a king has subjects who are loyal
to him, obey his commands, and pay respect to him. But to what does the ethical man
subject himself? What can a man subject himself to?
King Midas subjected himself to gold, or rather gave gold a certain value in his
life by doing anything for it. “I want gold." A man subjects himself to what he wants.
"I want money ... pleasure ... power ... Knowledge ... fame...." A man's per sonality and
character reflect his wants and if what one wants if overriding, then it exacts a price. A man who
wants money above all else becoines an avaricious man. What a man wants is treasure and
some men plot their lives according to a treasure hunt. What is your treasure? "For
where your treasure is, there will your heart be also."
So a subject is a servant and the man who subjects himself to gold serves
Mammon. Can a man serve two masters? Kierke gaard saw the men of his age—
"an age of reflection, without passion" becoming servants of Knowledge. “I want to
know." My impression is that very few men ever attain to subjecting themselves at
all. Most men are too weak even for evil, for evil
is after all an ethical determinate. Are most neither good nor evil?
So a man becomes subjective by ordering his entire life according to some value. It is
of great importance what the guiding star is. Man needs guidance. Man lives by
command ments and orders. Once some commandment or command ments are
accepted, the problem of obedience enters. The ethical is not something a man ever
wraps up, for the life of the man is the subject of Ethics. Nor does an initial success
imply a second or third, much less, a final success. Indeed a final success
becomes unreachable, for obedience requires a repetition throughout the days of a
life, a preservation of the holy fire. This successful repetition cannot become, as
Aristotle thought, a habit or second nature. Vice can become habitual — second nature.
But first nature is not a second nature and from the point of view of the ethical first nature
is a state of innocence forfeited by man. Obedience never becomes natural.
If obedience never becomes natural, then the ethical demands a terrible overcoming. The
terribleness comes out when a man realizes that his present nature requires an
overcoming, a command, and therefore a commander. This is the realization that his
present nature is disposed to all sorts of evil.
Socrates showed that intentional evil is unthinkable or irrational. No one ever knowingly
does wrong, Socrates remarks, because no one knowingly harms himself and doing
wrong harms oneself. Does that mean there is no intentional evil? Or does Socrates
show that such evil is beyond the powers of reason and hence irrational? No man
understands his dis position for evil.
Ethically speaking, no one can be responsible for anyone but himself. Ethical
responsibility is non-transferable. The ethical subject never sins because of anything
or anyone but himself. That is, sin requires no reasons and can have no reasons. Sin
requires a temptation. Therefore, any interest in another ethical subject is pure
foolishness, distraction, and essentially unethical. No man can do anything for you
nor you for anyone, except avoid the illusion of giving help or seeking help.
Whether another person is ethically good or not is unknowable, for that is settled by a
judgement invested with a particular authority.
One cannot know whether another has made a vow and meant it; knowing
isn't part of this, for the vow is kept in secret and comes out (or not) in the rest of the life
of the man. A vow is watered, cultivated, and tended. How will it grow? Who knows?

Notes 2
Suppose a man subjects himself to the 'idea' that his eternal happiness depends on his having a
certain kind of relationship to something historical which cannot have been historical. fierkegaard
discusses this kind of subjection under the heading "Existential Pathos"'; he subdivides it into the
initial expression, the essential expression, and the decisive expression.
The initial expression is the realization, both intellectually and emotionally, of the
separation of one's life as it is from life as it should be. The day by day details of a life, and
a life does pess day by day, seem incongruous with the hopeful outcome of one's bid for
eternal happiness. This incongruity produces pathos. And yet there it is: how a man lives is
crucial to the hope. There are no born losers, only made losers.
The essential expression is suffering. Suffering is attendant on the persistence of the
individual to remain subject to the com mander and the great commandments of love.
The separation of one's life as it is from life as it should be is suffering. And yet a subject
must be worthy of his suffering. How strange! To be worthy of suffering! This religious
suffering might be expressed: eternal happiness is not yet.
The decisive expression is guilt. Suffering is one's own fault. One is a servant who
has run away and cannot find his way back. If only the master would call! But the servant
has separated himself from the voice of the master. Suffering is being separated
and the guilt is for having separated.
So, not only does one subject himself to God, one admits that one was once a faithful subject
who became unfaithful. The offer, which is on the page, is from the owner: “Come back
and take a place in my house, your debts are forgotten as you have forgotten the
debts owed you, and love as you are loved by me." Intelligible?
O. K. Bouwsma

If a Jew were writing about God, his God, that is, there is no God in general,
whom would he mention? Naturally he would mention Abraham, Isaac, and
Jacob, and perhaps, Moses. There are many names. He might even mention
Jesus Christ. That name would come in for honorable mention. He was a dis tinguished
rabbi. And if Harun El Raschid or Assad Kadat were writing about God, his God,
there is no God in general, whom would he mention? Naturally, he would mention
Mohammed, no, not Mohammed Ali, but the Muphta Mohammed, the Muphta, his God's
prophet. "There is but one God, Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet.” And if a Christian
were writing about God, his God, there is no God in general, a believer writing about
believing that or in his God, whom would he mention? Well, he might mention
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and he might mention King David and Isaiah.
Anyone else, any other name, "a name far above every name"? "And his name shall be
called." You would not expect a Christian, writing about his God, not to mention this name. And
who then or what name would that be? It may be that to mention that name would be to admit to
a certain holy foolishness, especially, foolishness. That would be embarrassing. What name is
that? I forgot.
And what if a man were to write about God in general? I have been saying that there is
no God in general, but devotees of the God in general do write about the God in
general. And who or what name would this writer mention in writing of the God in
general? I have not said "his" God since God in general is an iciza and no God. This God
doesn't do anything and isn't supposed to. And so what name does this writer mention?
Not Abraham, not Isaac, not Jacob, not Mohammed, neither Muphta nor Ali, nor that other
name said by another writer to be greater than any name. In fact this writer would exclude any
foolish ness. As far as I can make out he won't mention any name at all, not even the name of
man in general, were there such a name. And what was that name greater than any
name? I'm sorry. I forgot.
It seems obvious now that there are at least three Gods. And should I add the
god in general? The god in general is sur prisingly popular, especially for a god
who never does anything. Even people who are not devotees love to write about him
or it, presumably under the illusion they are writing about one of the three mentioned
above. If someone were to say, "Oh, you are writing about the god in general,", the
writer might be shocked that anyone should think that. But then if one were to go on to
say, "How is it that you, a Jew, should write all that and not mention Abraham,
Isaac, and Jacob and not refer to your subject as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and
Jacob", he might respond, flustered, "Oh, I forgot". That would be an odd thing to
forget. And was it not the brother of Harun El Raschid who wrote a long piece about
God and who did not mention Mecca or the mountain or Mohammed who was the
God's prophet? That writer when reproached by one of his readers, did he not
say, "I forgot"? An odd thing to forget. Even I, who am not a Muslim would know
that the name of Mohammed should have been mentioned. How should we have known Allah
save through his
prophet?
I do not suppose that any Christian writer, writing blind as it were, writing about God and
believing and about how blessed and crazy it is, would fail to mention that name I referred to
above. There is a good reason for this. For in the case of the Jew these names he might
have mentioned were only the names of servants. "Go from your country...to the land, that I will
show you." In the case of Harun El Raschid the name he might especially have
mentioned was only the name of a prophet. Mohammed was not Allah. But in the case of
the Christian writer, the name he would not have mentioned would not have been the
name of a man who was told to go nor the name of a prophet. What name was that?
Again, I forgot. In any case were there such a writer who wrote and who perhaps
thought about
his God, his indeed, though he could not think of his God's name, and never mentioned
his name in what he wrote, some readers might not understand him. Some would say,
"Oh, he is writing about the God in general, not the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, not the
God of Mohammed nor any other". He might be alarmed at this. He would say, “Why, I
was thinking of him and his name with every word I wrote." "But why then did you not
mention his name''? And to that he would reply, "How could I in the company I keep?
They would laugh at me". I am, of course, just imagining someone who has all the
right thoughts, but is not very good at names. Without names it is dif ficult to
distinguish one God from another. How many Gods are there? Four? (Without a
scorecard you won't know the players.)
First I squared the circle. Then I wrestled with a unicorn. At another time I invented perpetual
motion. On a Tuesday I proved the existence of God. Later I pulled a rabbit out of a hat with no
rabbit in it. After that I circled the square on my tricycle. They say I am a genius. Which God
was that? The one you proved the existence of. If anyone believes all or some of
these things in the Apostles' Creed, he must have won all the prizes in mathematics. He
must be very good at reasoning, syllogisms, and calculation. He must be smart,
eerie-rational. He is perhaps quick as lightning. He read it or he heard it, he
thought, he understood, one, two, three, and he believed. Then he pushed the
button and rested.
"Can a man by thinking add a cubit to this stature"? Why, yes, he can if he is a
philosopher. "And can a man by thinking find out God"? Why, yes, if he is a philosopher.
And which God would that be? The God one can find out by thinking. That is the
God of the philosopher. If Abraham had been a philosopher he wouldn't have had to
wait until God found him. He would then have sat down on a stone and thought and so
found out God. What is a man rational for save that by thinking he should do things?
What things? Things such as adding a cubit to his stature and, of course, finding
out God. Many philosophers have done these things and do. Some try and do not quite
make it. Had Abraham continued to sit on that stone he never would have left Ur of
Chaldees, quite a nice place to bring up a family. As it is he left under orders,
leaving the stone behind, the philosophers' stone.

48

Two Views of the Soul: Investigations, Part II, iv

Ronald E. Hustwit

Here is the passage that I will discuss. It is the whole of “Part II, Section iv” of
the Philosophical Investigations. I have chosen it because I believe that working on it
offers help in coming to understand something of the subject matter put forward
and because it provides a way of seeing the complementary way in which
Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard work on similar subject matter.
My attitude towards him is an attitude towards a soul. I am not of the opinion that he has a
soul.
Religion teaches that the soul can exist when the body has disintegrated. Now do I understand
this teaching?—Of course I understand it-I can imagine plenty of things in connexion with it.
And haven't pictures of these things been painted? And why should such a picture be only
an imperfect rendering of the spoken doctrine? Why should it not do the same service as the
words? And it is the service which is the point.
If the picture of thought in the head can force itself upon us, then why not much more
that of thought in the soul?
The human body is the best picture of the human soul.
And how about such an expression as: “In my heart I under stood when you said that”,
pointing to one's heart? Does one, perhaps, not mean this gesture? Of course one means it. Or
is one conscious of using a mere figure? Indeed not. — It is not a figure that we choose, not a
simile, yet it is a figurative expression. As I understand it, these sections in "Part II” were
working notes which Wittgenstein intended at one time to work into the text of "Part I."
Like the numbered sections in “Part I," this passage in "Section iv" was meant to be a
help for one willing to work to 'bring a little light into his brain." But Wittgenstein, I
am supposing, was not quite satisfied with how the help was constructed.
Some remarks in this section seemed to me quite separate and far removed from
each other, and left me wonder ing what the connection between them was that
made Wittgen stein want to see them as a group to be taken together. This is the
problem with which I hope to offer some help. To prepare both myself and you for
this task, I would first like to get the feel for what might be involved in these early
remarks by trying to think through them out loud for myself.
"I believe that he is suffering.–Do I also believe that he isn't an automaton?"
When would it make sense to say “I believe that he is suffering”? It would surely be
bad form to say it when someone had just pinched their finger in a door. It would be
hard even for one who had mastered understatement to pull this off. Looking at
someone in pain is seldom the occasion for using this expression. The more normal
occasion for its use would be when the person does not appear to be suffering but we
have reason to believe that he in fact is. The word "believe" in such cases
“I believe that he is suffering." -Do I also believe that he isn't an automaton?
It would go against the grain to use the word in both connexions.
(Or is it like this: I believe that he is suffering, but am certain that he is not an automaton?
Nonsense!)
Suppose I say of a friend: "He isn't an automaton". What information is conveyed by this, and
to whom would it be information? To a human being who meets him in ordinary cir cumstances? What
information could it give him? (At the very most that this man always behaves like a human
being, and not occasionally like a machine.)
"'I believe that he is not an automaton," just like that, so far makes no sense.
would indicate that we are taking a guess, making a judgment about what is happening.
Pride sometimes leads us to hide our sufiering. A child can make it all the way home from a
scrape without a tear. But I believe that she was suffering. This I might note is an opinion. I
believe that she is hiding it, but she might not be. We will see when she gets inside the door.
When the tears come and the accused is named, then there is no longer a place for belief or
opinion.
What about the second sentence: “Do I also believe that he isn't an automaton?" What would it
be like to believe that someone was deceiving us when he identified himself? In such a
case, we will have considered the possibility of deception and rejected it. Someone
selling candy door-to-door perhaps, says that he is with the Boys Scouts, but he looks a
little old to us. We consider it for a moment but then the kind face and the story
about buying tenis convinces us, enough at least to order the candy. Four weeks later
he still hasn't come back with the candy. We begin to form a different opinion of him.
What sort of case would we need to find ourselves suspecting that someone was an
automaton? I'm stuck here. Once I tried to run a couple of miles with a long distance
runner. It occurred to me then that he might be one. But he constantly
complained of shin splints so I dismissed the idea. Perhaps it would take
exposed wires?—or an expressionless stare?—the constant companionship of
a wiley computer expert? But this is not a technological problem. It was not
thinking about possible machines in future societies which gave rise to this question,
although it might if the right confusions were cultivated. It arose rather from trying to
imagine a doubt about everything in order to see how much could be known without a
doubt. Laboring under this task one not only entertains the doubt that the lad is a Boy
Scout, but that he and his surroundings are sense illusions. And when this doubt is said to be
managed, perceptions of that suspected Boy Scout's inner states being absent for us, it is
thought doubtable whether he has any such states—any con sciousness-at all. I do not
mean this to be giving a complete or even an enticing account of how that doubt
arises here, but only the important fact that it arises out of the activity of
philosophizing and not out of greeting suspected automatons at one's door. It
shows that we are confused conceptually, not technologically naive. If, in a future
technology, it will be possible to be fooled by mechanized Boy Scout candy salesmen,
we shall have to settle then what is to be said. But doubts in that
case will still have to have their grounds. And we should also have to see what was
meant by an "automaton" at that time.
Wittgenstein writes, "I am not of the opinion that he has a soul.” Who would have
thought that such a thing as an opinion was in order here? One, I take it, who
thought it possible to “prove the human soul distinct from the body" -- Descartes
phrase, you may recall, and equally, someone who thought the soul indistinct from the
human body--Skinner perhaps. The soul in either case seems to be a matter of
opinion. It looks as if one can believe it or doubt it. There are either soul occupied
bodies or there are not. Which do you believe? This sounds like: There are
either flying saucers or there are not. Which do you believe? There is either an invisible
ether filling space and acting as a medium for light waves or there is not.
Either inflation or unemployment, which would you rather have? These questions call for
someone with an opinion to step for ward—someone to speak for a theory of how
things stand. Information should be called forth, arguments presented, false dilemmas
uncovered, doubts and objections spoken to. And that, of course, is what Descartes,
Skinner, and others do.
Why is Wittgenstein so sure that he is not of the opinion that he has a soul? Is he
better at introspection than others? In the face of behaviorism and neurological
research is there not good reason for doubting the soul? — And is not an opinion
precisely what is called for? No. What is called for in the face of these felt threats
is the careful, philosophical excavation of their origins. The remark about "opinions" is a
part of that excavation. It is a grammatical remark. It might be put: In our ordinary
language—that is, in our non-philosophical talk -- we do not have an opinion about
whether or not someone is an automaton. What a strange eery feeling such a
thought would produce!
"But what if," one might be inclined to reply, “in a conversa tion in the cafeteria
line a clever philosophy student presented the idea to me that everyone in the
cafeteria except the two of us were such soulless bodies?” Even so, that would not be his
opinion. That would be an opening move in a philosophical gambit. We should first have
to come to understand what he said-or more critically: to see if he had said
anything at all. Is it that all of these people show hunger, eat, chat, laugh, go
back for seconds, diet, and so on, but they do not really feel the hunger, feel
satiated having eaten, become amused, mean any thing by their talk, etc.? I do not know
how to understand this
52
53

TRT
yet. I am left only with confusions. The philosopher's proposal was meant to
produce an imaginary doubt. The doubt in turn was to lay grounds for my
producing the right opinion: “No, there are really souls in these bodies" or "If there are
souls in any of these bodies, I certainly don't need to talk about them in order to explain
and predict human behavior." We need to get past this confusion in order to have such
"opinions" as these. And whether they in turn make sense, if we could get to them,
would be another matter to consider.
If having an opinion about whether someone is an automaton is predicated, in part at
least, upon whether there is a doubt about such a thing, then this might make it sound
as if having a soul might also be a matter of certainty. Under such a picture we would
not believe that he was not an automaton in the same serse that we would not believe
that a widow was a woman whose husband had died. As 'belief” is out of place here,
then "certainty" would seem appropriate. What could we be more sure of than a widow's
husband? As there is no room for doubt nor for having an opinion, why not say that we
are "certain," then, of someone's not being an automaton? This, I take it, is something
like the way in which Descartes pictured the problem and its solution.
But are we certain that a widow's husband is dead? "Yes, certain! I saw the notice in the
paper." No. I mean, are we certain that a widow is a woman whose husband has died? For
whom would our insistence that we were certain of this be appropriate? I can
only imagine a limiting case here. Perhaps it would be appropriate for someone who did
not know the meaning of "widow." But even that would be odd. What learner of the
language will question the definitions given to him? Of course, I am not suggesting
that being certain that someone is not an automaton is exactly or even much like being
certain that a widow is a woman whose husband has died. It is only that "being certain"
would be off in either case. Our inclination to sav that we are certain about such things stems
from the fact that we say that we cannot imagine them to be false statements. That is, we
cannot imagine a doubt about them. But it is significant to remember that we cannot imagine
ourselves doubting them either. And where the latter does not occur, we do not talk of
being certain of them. This is what prompts Wittgenstein in this section to reply
“Nonsense!" to the suggestion that one could be certain that “he is not an
automaton."
The second paragraph in this section consists of a series of
questions about the sentence: "He isn't an automaton.” The questions suggest that that
sentence conveys no information. How might we understand this? Wittgenstein asks,”...to whom
would it be information?" We can imagine, that for one who did not know the
language and asked about the word "widow," a definition might be considered to be a piece of
information. But no such explanation of the meaning of the word is appropriate in connection
with the word "He." I do not believe that we do much in explaining the use of that word at all.
Descartes' way of looking at this was that "I am not an automaton.” is more like "a widow is a
woman whose husband has died," than “He is not an automaton.” But the word “I” is not
explained in any such way either. The words "he" and “I” are not explained by giving
definitions, and certainly not by the definition that "he" is equivalent to not being an
automaton. Information, through giving a previously unknown definition then, is not
conveyed in this way.
Wittgenstein's question again is: “...to whom is it a piece of information?" If it is not so
to someone who is learning the language, to whom then might it convey information? If I
heard the expression, it would convey some information to me. It would tell me that I was
listening to some philosophers. But that of course is not what those philosophers
intended to be convey ing. And what is the information that was meant to be con
veyed?-- That someone that we see in a cafeteria line really does have those
feelings and thoughts that his body symptoms indicate that he has? "Body
symptoms?" To make this work we are really being asked to imagine someone
not really feeling hungry when eating voraciously. What could not really
feeling hungry possibly mean in this case? The language begins to dis solve in front of
our eyes. Not only do these words convey no information, they convey nothing at all.
And who, again, supposes that such an expression as, "He is not an automaion.",
did convey information? The same, I would suggest, who thought it an
opinion and a belief. If you were on the Sacred Faculty of Theology at Paris, to
whom Descartes dedicated his Meditations, or if you were someone philosophically troubled
by the implications of the most recent developments in mechanics, Descartes himself,
then you might be reassured by the information that people are not
automatons, that the soul is really distinct from the human body, that it inhabits the
body like a pilot in a ship. And if you thought that all of this was wrong, you might
also take such claims as these
54
55
as information-only the wrong information. In this case you would be thinking that
Descartes had an intelligible theory, but that it now had been surpassed by the right
one.
One final observation about this expression, "He is not an automaton.", and its not being
information. A piece of informa tion can be checked. It is correct or incorrect. We can
formulate sentences using information that will be true or false, and we can imagine ways of
finding out which. But if all this is given up, we have given up science as well as sense.
Descartes, naturallythought he was making sense, but I doubt if he thought he
was doing science. In the "Letter of Dedication," he says he believes that the
question of the soul can be demonstrated by "rational philosophy." And I take it that the
mathematically modelled methods of the first two "Meditations" are paradigm
examples for him of what he intends by "rational philosophy." In any case, one
does not expect to, nor in fact find in the Meditations evidence for the hypothesis
of the separate existence of the soul. In Skinner the idea is not that clear.
Sometimes when reading him one feeis that he believes he is constructing a science
of human behavior on the model of physics. He seems to see his task as that of com
bating the philosophers who refuse to stop talking about human behavior in
terms of purposes, intentions, and "mental events." Other times, however, one
feels that he does appreciate the non scientific nature of his work, for example
when he begins About Behavicrism with the sentence: "Behaviorism is not the science of
human behavior; it is the philosophy of that science."? To the extent that the former
reductionist program prevails, I would like to offer the following observation as relevant: If
Wittgen stein is right about sentences of the type, “He is not an automaton.", not
conveying information, then theories which make use of such sentences would be
metaphysical in kind and not scientific. And if Skinner's denials of Cartesian dualism leave
him with some such sentences, then he is in something like the frame of mind of Prof.
Bouwsma's grocer in his essay "Naturalism";
If a man who sold groceries suddenly tired of selling groceries, exclaimed: 'Enough, I am going
to wash automobiles,' and he went out and washed automobiles, there would be no puzzle about this.
But if he repeated his resolution frequently, put on his hat and coat and walked to the door, and then started
for the other side of the
store to sort potatoes, what then?3 This is serious enough for the grocer, but he after all
cannot fool
himself about the fact that he is still sorting potatoes. The philosopher is not so easily
brought to see what he is about. To see, "He is not an automaton.", as not conveying
information is a kind of a guide to sorting out sentences into bins, and this may
have its clarifying effects.
This is all that I intend to do with these first remarks of "Section iv." Despite the
brevity of the text, you will recognize them as containing many suggestions. My
following out some of these suggestions, however incomplete that following was, might be
characterized as rehearsing the grammars of the words "opinion," "belief," "doubt," and
"information" as they pertain to the concept of soul. But after these first remarks of the
text, the tenor of the subject matter seems to change. While the word "soul" is still used,
it is the religious uses of "soul" that are being discussed. And the concept of picturing
the soul comes to the foreground in this connection to religion. Now the
concept of soul in religion is used in a very different way from that of the
metaphysical theories under scrutiny in the first set of remarks. So what is it that holds
these remarks together? Why does Wittgenstein shift from critiquing
metaphysical theories of the soul to a concern for understanding the concept of
soul in religion-all in one section? And further, what is the notion of picturing doing in
the foreground here?
The word "soul," I believe, provides some help in coming to see the continuity of the
passage. The same word is used all the way through this set of remarks, even though
Wittgenstein might have used "mind" or "self" or perhaps "consciousness” in places. But
"soul" has specifically religious connotations. And I believe he chose to use it
throughout for that reason. Consider how the word "soul" is used in the same way
throughout Descartes' writings. When Descartes attempts to prove the
separate existence of the soul, he connects it to a religious picture even though it is a
metaphysical theory about an incorporeal substance. He does not distinguish between
the religious conception of the soul and his metaphysical proofs for the soul.
Wittgenstein regarded these metaphysical proofs as part of a larger set of
confusions, and so he surely must have regarded the identification of religious
conceptions of the soul with the latter as confused too. And it was this identification
which must have occupied him when he set down these remarks in Section iv,''
together as a unit. Not of course, that he meant for us to identify them and be
confused by the word, but that the confusion would already be there. Doesn't
something
56
haring consequences for religious belief seem to be happening when the concept of
soul is defended by Descartes, denied by Skinner, or exorcised by Ryle? It is the
confusions surrounding this nction that Wittgenstein takes to be already there and is
trying to sort out in this section.
Much of the Investigations, of course, is concerned with the very sorts of issues
discussed in the first several remarks of "Section iv" —one might say, about
metaphysical theories of the soul. And Wittgenstein is trying, in a variety of ways, to
display them as nonsense. This is too simplistic a description, but I want to let it
stand for a purpose. If metaphysical theories of the soul are nonsense, particularly
Descartes', it might make it seem as if religious conceptions of the soul are being called
nonsense as well. I remember being troubled by this thought when I first read Ryle. But
I think it is clear from this section that Wittgen stein did not want to be
misunderstood in this way. He wanted to make it clear that religious conceptions of
the soul were not in the same category as metaphysical theories about the soul. Religious
conceptions of the soul were not nonsense, although it is clear that he felt that they
presented difficulties to a philosophical understanding.
Both of these points—that religious talk about the soul is not nonsense and that it does
present difficulties to a philosophical understanding-are related to Wittgenstein's
concern about picturing the soul. In the section now in front of us, he talks of actual
painted pictures and of the human body being the best way of picturing the soul. In
#422 of the Investigations, the dis cussion of the soul again is followed by remarks
about picturing. And the "Lectures on Religious Belief" are replete with comments to
the effect that one's ordinary techniques of language often leave one not knowing what
to say about much of the language of religious belief in general and the soul in par
ticular. What one needs in order to understand such language, Wittgenstein
continues, is a picture which goes along with this language. What picture does a person
have in using the word "soul" in a certain way? This concern for getting a picture to go
along with the uses is in itself a technique for understanding some philosophically
difficult language. Of course, it is not simply getting a picture which helps in coming to
see what is meant by some word. It is seeing how that picture is used. It may be after all
that a picture is what causes a philosophical dis tortion rather than what resolves it.
Seeing how it is used — working with it in our natural language -- will determine that.
Here is a remark from the Investigations that not only tells a lot about why Wittgenstein
is so concerned with getting a picture of the use of "soul" but also gives what I think is a
striking example of how a picture helps:
424. The picture is there; and I do not dispute its correctness. But what is its application?
Think of the picture of blindness as a dark
ness in the soul or in the head of a blind man. These are two vividly different pictures of
blindness. But notice that there is a picture of the soul involved in this as well. What
comes to mind when we think of a blind or dark soul? What sort of life is referred to when the
blind are said to be leading the blind? That picture tells something about how the word
"soul" is used in our language outside of metaphysical theories. I could go on to
describe such a person or make up a story about him. With this, my “ordinary
technique of language" returns. My suggestion for understanding "Section iv" then is
to see its unity through the word "soul” — that Wittgenstein is at first con cerned
with techniques of showing its nonsense in metaphysical theories and then
with techniques of showing its sense in religion. And, to see that it is primarily
the marshalling of pictures and their applications which constitutes the core of
those techniques used in religion. For the remainder of this talk, I would like to work at
the latter in a small way. I will work around to the point of drawing primarily on
Kierkegaard for help in this project, for though cast in dialectical fashion,
Kierkegaard developed the Christian picture of the soul. What I intend is very
elementary. It comes basically from two of his works: Fear and Trembling and The
Sickness Unto Death. And I propose it, not as a way of simplifying difficult ideas in
Kierke gaard, but rather as a way of illustrating and developing the ideas contained in
the second half of "Section iv."
As philosophers looking at religion, we must ask what picture is relevant to our
understanding of the talk about the soul? What is the picture meant to do? The New
Testament talks of the resurrection of the body and a life everlasting. This
suggests that one's personality and in some sense this includes one body — will have
experiences after death. That he will meet God and be judged for how he has lived this life.
One might have thoughts and feelings about what such a judgment would be like. At
times, perhaps, he thinks it will be fearful and that little will go excused. At other times, he is
engulfed with a sense of Divine forgiveness and final peace. These pictures are
variations of a larger picture which fits tightly with the use of the word in the religious
man's language and with the way that person lives out
59
58

T
in

the concept. It will be used, for example, to remind someone that a certain course of action
which he can now choose or reject may so hard on him in the day of judgment. The
reminding will be something like saying, "In God's eye what he would be doing is
reprehensible."
But judgment is not the only thing that connects to religious picturings of the soul.
And at this point, I had better say the Christian picture of the soul, for I am thinking
specifically of that. Judgment and a judgment day imply life after death. They imply that
the way things go in this world—the justice of this world—is not final. There is a final
judgment in God's eye. There is a day after the last day when it will be God's time to
judge -- to put things right. So a soul will have to work in this life in order to be judged
favorably on that last day. And a soul thereby is not just what is left to judge on that last
day, but what each of us has which is potentially judgeable.
This may make it sound as if we do after all need Descartes' conception of the soul to
hold the picture together: That a soul is that incorporeal part of each of us which will later
survive death. It is what we name by "I" in "I am here" and in "I will stand at Heaven's
Gates."
But the help which Wittgenstein is offering in this section is the help of having our noses
think we need such a picture as Descartes' in part
turned in another direction. We
because we think that if there is something left after death to be judged it must be
there beforehand. And if it is only a noncorporeal stuff that can survive death,
then the body now must have a noncorporeal stuff in it. Listen to a remark from Zettel
which expresses exactly this felt need to move to the soul as a non corporeal stuff in
the body:
127. The soul is said to leave the body. Then, in order to exclude any similarity to the
body, any sort of idea that some gaseous thing is meant, the soul is said to be incorporeal, non-
spatial; but with that word "leave" one has already said it all. Show me how you use the word “spiritual" and I shall
see whether the soul is non
corporeal and what you understand by spirit. The pointing our nose in another
direction comes through pointing out the word "spiritual" and its uses. Just as
"Section iy" shifts us to a different conception of soul, the word "spiritual" can shift us to the
same difference. Well, how do we use the word "spiritual" in connection with the soul? We
say: “Man is spirit."; "God is spirit."; "The Spirit was acting in us." What do
these theological expressions mean? “Man is spirit.” Is
it not that we are special in God's creation? That God has a plan and a purpose for each
of us. That we are His children. That we are to love Him and obey His commandments.
That He will not allow us to perish even though terrible things may befall us in this life.
Our very hairs are numbered. "God is spirit." Does this not, in part at least, come to that He
is not something we will find some place in the world?--not something we can find
under a microscope or on an expedition? But that he is with us constantly, unlike a
person who is at one place at a time. That His presence is always and that He is not
only there as a judge but as a protective Father. His love will fill us, support us when we
cannot support ourselves, and care for us when we most need it. He acts in our lives
providing opportunities to serve Him and gifts which make us strong.
This is elementary theology. It is how a religious person might go on to explain
these beliefs to his children. But while it sounds as if they might be given for
children, it is not as if there is some more sophisticated philosophical account of
them held in reserve. These ideas are explained to and for children, but those who delight
in them always remain children in a certain sense. There is no further account of them. And
now Wittgenstein's point is that if this is how one uses the word "spiritual," then we
have no need to talk of incorporeal stuff being in or leaving the body as the
explanation of them. That never was a part of the picture and there is no need to
bring it in now.
The term "spirit," like "self" and like "soul" when used in religion is often primarily an
ethical concept. Ethical in the sense that in a religious picture one is called upon to
live in front of God-to see himself as having a task for a lifetime. This is a common theme
throughout Kierkegaard's works. The following sentence is one expression of it.
It is from the Sickness Unto Death as one might recognize from the language. And I
propose to spend some time working with it in order to use Kierkegaard for my purpose.
Here is the sentence:
Faith is: that the self in being itself and in willing to be itself is
grounded transparently in God. The word "transparently" is a key word in
understanding this. I want to begin briefly with it and then later return to the whole
phrase of which it is a part. To live transparently in this description, I take it, is to live in
the awareness that everything is done before God. What others may make of my life is in this
60
61
regard wimportant perhaps it is inaccessible. Before God however I have a life which is
lived in his presence. In that presence I am transparent-in full view, seen through. This picture
requires work to maintain, for I must learn to see through myself as well. Confession.
The phrases "the self being itself” and “willing to be itself" have a history in the
book which I do not intend to unpack for you here. But they too help to cast the self as
an ethical concept. Perhaps for a start we might regard these phrases as
equivalent: "Be yourseif"; "Make your own way."; "Don't be afraid to stand against
the crowd.”—pieces of conventional wisdom we urge upon our children. Of course
such wisdom must be spoken with authoriti. Coming from the king's lackey,
Polonius, “This above all else, to thine own self be true.", it is comic.
Nevertheless the notion of being oneself is fundamental to the ethical category. If
one is not oneself, then who is he?— Only a pawn in someone else's game.
He's taught in his school From the start by the rule That the laws are with him To protect his white
skin To keep up his hate So he never thinks straight 'Bout the shape that he's in But it ain't him to
blame He's only a pawn in their game.?
“Only a Pawn In Their Game"
Bob Dylan This is an angry song that Dylan wrote. I believe that when he wrote it
he wanted to say the worst possible thing he could think of about the man who
murdered Medgar Evers. And that was that he was only a pawn in someone else's
game. He could not even be blamed, for there is nothing there to blame: nothing
like a person or a self. "He was just the product of his environ ment." Surely that
is one of the worst things that one human being can say about another.
"Being one's own person,” by contrast, entails moral respon sibility. When we urge this
upon someone, I would think that it would usually involve urging them to do their duty. In
such cases it would come to: "Do what you think is right, not what someone else
expects of you." or "Keep your duty in front of you." And duty here becomes that
which holds together the sense of ''Be your own person.” Someone with no duty, with
no
tasks in life, is not a person. There is no moving force in his life. No vectors which
localize and give direction to his energies.
But all of this is not specific enough yet for understanding Kierkegaard's
phrases about the self being itself" and "willing to be itself." "Being your own person"
may entail duty and vice versa, but so far nothing more than what Polonius has
told Laertes is said by this. Kierkegaard's expressions involve con siderably more.
Having a duty to perform and willing to be oneself may not be the same thing at all under
certain con ditions. Consider Hamlet himself. Here is a description of him by W. H.
Auden which captures this possible divorce between duty and willing to be
oneself:
Shakespeare, however, had a vision of the nature of revenge, and transformed the old Hamlet into
the first hero of the romantic type. I.e., Shakespeare's Hamlet is made a hero by the situation in
which he finds himself of having a mother who has committed adultery with his uncle, who has
murdered his father. Before this happened he was no hero, just an ordinary pleasant
young man. The result is that, instead of just avenging his father and getting it over with he secretly
cherishes the situation and cannot bear to end
it, for who then will he be then?8 As long as Hamlet has his duty to revenge his father, he can
be defined by it. He can be his own person by attending stead fastly to his duty.
That is, by refusing to give in to the expecta tions of others and letting the thing
be, he can be defined as the one who is out to avenge his father's death-the one who puts
things straight again. But this would only take a second if he did hold fast to it. The
king is praying, Hamlet is behind him with a sword; we know from the next scene that he is
not afraid to use that sword. Yet he puts it away with the excuse that the king will
be sent to heaven if he is slain at prayer. We don't believe Hamlet when he says this.
He lacks the resolution to settle the matter, for, as Auden puts it, "who will he be then?"
As long as he has his political and familial duty, he has something to define
himself. When this is gone, he has no more duty, no duty for a whole life—and
hence, no self. And so, it is his duty, or more precisely his unwillingness to do it
which belies the fact that he has nothing for which to live. This I am supposing, is
involved in Kierkegaard's phrase, “the self...willing to be it self..."
Here is the whole sentence again: “Faith is: that the self in being itself and in
willing to be itself is grounded transparently in God." I have been concerned
with this sentence in order to
62
use it in showing the self in religion as an ethical concept. This is mysterious language.
What is it for a self to be itself and to will to be itself? To say that it is what Hamlet could not
do and hence what prevented him from avenging his father's murder, is to put it
negatively. What might the positive expression of it be? Perhaps, work on the answer
to this might be divided up. Let me suggest an equivalent question for the first part of
this work, and use a piece of Kierkegaard's now famous terminology in it. Here is the
equivalent question: What does one lose in teleologically suspending the ethical? As a
preliminary answer, one that needs to be both qualified and explained, I want to suggest
that it is a self that one loses or, at least, that one runs the risk oi losing. Of course one's
duty is lost. It is in not doing what one recognizes as his duty that the ethical is
teleologically suspended. But it is one's telos, the highest purpose for which one lives,
that is thereby lost as well in not doing one's duty. Duties come and go, but such a
telos remains for a lifetime. When Hamlet was not able to do his duty for the
longest time, it was because he had no teios. Understood in the light of this
concept, he was not teleologically suspending the ethical in not doing his duty, for he
had no ethical telos in his life.
Having a telos in one's life might be represented by the image of pulling a fishhook
through a bed of seaweed. The whole bed will follow a single point of contact, in tow. A
series of hypothetical imperatives are set up behind the telos, in two, as it were. "If you
desire this as your telos, then you must do such and-such." If I understand this concept
of a telos, one can have all different sorts of them. In addition to the desire to lead a
good life, one can desire to be president, to be a revolutionary, to be rich, to be the
middleweight champion of the world. And if one is fully conscious of his teios, he will
pay careful attention to all of the hypothetical imperatives that it requires: study the
dynamics of revolutions, study the stock reports, study the style of one's next
opponent. If one really desires his telos, he will pay the price in full through the
pursuit of these imperatives, Perhaps not every telos is as worth having as every
other. Perhaps? But having such a telos makes us what we are in some deep
sense. And not having one, leaves us with Auden's question: Who then will we be?
The first song on Bob Dylan's recent album Desire is called “Hurricane." It relates the
story of the events leading up to the dubious trial and conviction of Rubin
"Hurricane" Carter, the foremost contender for the middleweight boxing
championship
of the world. Dylan tells the story in accusing tones and in street language. Carter
is said to be falsely tried of a bar room murder in New Jersey and sent to prison where this
athlete in his prime is made to "sit like a Buddha in a ten-foot cell.” The constant refrain is:
"One time he could'a been the champion of the world.” What actually happened in the
Carter case is difficult for the average reader of the American press to make out. But in the
song he becomes a classic Dylan hero. A bad man in most people's eye is held up as
a hero, not for his supposed evil deeds, but because he wanted something
passionately. Dylan sees to the core of the ethical category in this concept. He sees that
knowledge of what is right and wrong, proper training in moral principles, is not what the
age lacks. It lacks, rather, the desire of a “Hurricane" Carter. It lacks passion. We
have, to use a phrase from another of Dylan's songs, 'bread crumb sins". Dylan's
Carter is worthy of our admiration, because of his singleness of purpose and desire. And
even if Carter's telos was not what each of us would want for ourselves or if we were to judge it
inferior with respect to other more noble teloi, even then Carter is to be admired. He is to
be admired because, unlike most, at least he desired something! This is a simple truth,
and perhaps, one best given artistic expression, but it helps I believe, in thinking
philosophically about the self. Some such notion, I am suggest ing, is involved in
Kierkegaard's talk of the self "being itself" and "willing to be itself.” This idea might be
put in a simple formula: having a self entails having a telos. And there is no teleological
suspension, unless it is in favor of some higher telos, without a loss of the self.
I suggested a moment ago that the work in understanding Kierkegaard's mysterious
language might be divided up. In both the sentence I am working on and in the question,
What does one lose in teleologically suspending the ethical?, the self is being
understood in relation to something else. In discussing Hamlet and Dylan's Carter,
the question of what the self is related to was not the matter that stood out.
Wittgenstein, in the passage under study, and Kierkegaard, ultimately, are
interested in the self or soul as a religious concept. What Hamlet does not have and Dylan's
Carter has a start on is an answer to the question: "Who then will I be?" But so far there
is nothing essentially religious about that question. For the answer to be religious, the telos
involved must be God. That is, the self must be related to God, or in Kierkegaard's
language, it must be "grounded transparently in God." In this picture, and it is the

65
64
chosen this poetry. It is one of Shakespeare's Sonnets.
Poor soul, the center of my sinful earth Fooi'd by these rebel powers that thee array.
Why dost thou pine within and suffer death Painting thy outward walls so costly gay Why so
large cost. having so short a lease, Dost thou upon thy fading mansion spend? Shall worms,
inheritors of this excess, Eat up thy change? Is this thy body's end? Then, soul, live thou upon thy
servant's loss, And let that pine to aggravate thy store; By terms devine in selling hours of dross;
Within be fed, without be rich no more:
So shalt thou feed on Death, that feeds on men, And Death once dead, there's no more dying
then.10
—Sonnet CXLVI I don't see why he should not have chosen it.

NOTES
Christian picture Kierkegaard is drawing for us, a person becomes a self when the
telos passionately desired is to live obediently in God's care and protection. This is
the true nature of the self in Christianity, to be reunited with God, the Father of
spirit. To fail of this purpose, as the Sickness Unto Death works out in detail, may
take a variety of forms, but all forms are despair and despair is sin. This is not
Kierkegaard's construction of a philosophical conception of "self"; this is
elementary theology done with a view towards quickening the concepts for a
philosophical reader.
I will bring my discussion of these ideas in Kierkegaard and of "Section iv" to a
close here. There is much more to be explored in Wittgenstein's remarks about
picturing the soul. But I have by passed these remarks using Kierkegaard as a
surrogate for the same end. Kierkegaard's discussions of the self as an ethical task
helps to redirect our misplaced attention from the soul as a theoretical
incorporeal stuff to its function as a religious idea. And I think that this is precisely what
Wittgenstein's aim in "Section iv" was too.
Before I bring my talk to its end, I would like to call attention to an aspect of the
passage that I would feel missing if not mentioned. That aspect is captured in
this quote of Kierkegaard's which M. C. O'Drury uses to explain why Wittgenstein
thought so highly of Kierkegaard:
It is true as the understanding says that there is nothing to wonder at, but precisely for this
reason is wonder secure, because the understanding vouches for it. Let the understanding condemn What is
transitory, let it clear the ground, then wonder comes in in
the right place, in ground that is cleared in the changed man. This quote
captures precisely for me the feelings that I get from reading "Section iv."
Ground is cleared and wonder is made secure. It sketches out the lines of sense and
nonsense, but within the boundaries of sense nothing of the mystery of the soul is
reduced. If Descartes' and Skinner's theories about the soul have been cleared from
the ground, nothing is erected in their stead. And to give a religious account of the
soul is only to state the mystery. The idea of the soul as that most deep, most real
part of us is not simply untouched by Wittgenstein's ground clearing, but consciously
preserved in his remarks. There is a story that Wittgenstein read poetry at a Vienna
Circle meeting when they discussed the "verification principle" of meaning.
Perhaps on another occasion, if they had discussed the applica tion of that principle
to the concept of "soul," he might have
1 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. by G. E. M.
Anscombe, (New York, 1953), p. 178e.

2
B. F. Skinner, About Behaviorism (New York, 1974), p. 3.

3 O. K. Bouwsma, Philosophical Essays (Lincoln, Nebraska, 1965), p.

82.

4 Wittgenstein, op. cit., p. 126e.

5 Wittgenstein, Zettel (Berkeley, 1967), p. 23e.

6
Soren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death, trans. by Walter Lowrie, (Princeton,
1954), p. 213.
7 Bob Dylan, Times They Are A-Changin', "Only A Pawn In Their
Game," (Columbia Records, 1964).

8
W. H. Auden, The Enchafed Flood (New York, 1950), p. 113.

9
M. C. O'Drury, "A Memoir," Ludwig Wittgenstein, ed. K. T. Fann, (New York, 19670, p.
70.
10 William Shakespeare, "Sonnet CXLVI," The Complete Works of
Shakespeare, ed. W. J. Craig (New York, 19390, p. 1303.

66

Pictures of the Soul

Andrew J. Burgess

One way to appreciate the novelty of Hustwit's proposal, that Wittgenstein's remarks
about the soul may be illustrated from Kierkegaard, is to ask how these same remarks
might have been illustrated from other writings of Wittgenstein himself. In some lectures
from 1946-47 Wittgenstein discusses the concept of the soul by telling a story about
some slavemasters who do not believe their slaves have souls. If we were making a
picture of these two people, he suggests, we might paint a bluish ghost exhaling from the
masters when they die but leave out the ghost when painting the slaves' deaths; or, if
we are to imagine that both groups have souls, we should paint in bluish souls for all
alike.1
The master-slave story fits in perfectly with the main passage Hustwit cites from
Philosophical Investigations II, iv. The story shows a way in which painting a picture of
the soul inight help make the doctrine of souls intelligible, as long as there were a clear
understanding of the use to which the picture would be put. Such picturemaking might
perform the same service as the spoken words of a theological doctrine about
souls, Wittgenstein continues in the Investigations passage, "and it is the service which is
the point.”
Compared with examples like this from Wittgenstein, the stories Kierkegaard gives in
Fear and Trembling and Sickness Unto Death fit Wittgenstein's teaching only loosely if
at all. For Kierkegaard's concept of the self is at bottom an ethical one, as
Hustwit himself remarks; and Wittgenstein's concept of the soul in the Investigations passage
and the 1946-47 notes is not. There may indeed be a way to draw from
Wittgenstein's story a moral-concerning the wrongness of slavery, perhaps—but,
if there is, Wittgenstein is not concerned to draw it here. Wittgen stein's writing in
Investigations aims above all for conceptual clarification. Kierkegaard, while prizing
clarity, strives for edification as well.
Does this distance between Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard mean that Hustwit's
proposal is doomed from the start? On the contrary, the gap is part of what makes the
proposal both pro vocative and important. The very remoteness of the connection draws
attention to aspects of the two men that might otherwise be neglected—for instance,
Wittgenstein's deep ethical concerns as shown in his letters, and Kierkegaard's call for
clarity and honesty in Christian speech, a point that is sometimes over looked because of
his swirling, passionate prose.
The best rationale for a Wittgenstein-Kierkegaard paper is given by Kierkegaard through
his distinction between the "aesthetic" and the "ethical.” Although Kierkegaard dis
tinguishes sharply between the observer's role, the "aesthetic mode" that characterizes a
descriptive philosophy such as Wittgenstein's, on the one hand, and the participant's
role in the “ethical mode," on the other, the two modes do not always present a straight
either/or alternative. The aesthetic mode of thinking can be put to use within an ethical or
religious context, and through Kierkegaard's pseudonymous writings that is just what happens.
Hustwit's paper might also be interpreted in the light of this background. At the start of
the paper Kierkegaard is called upon simply as an illustration of Wittgenstein, a bold
though somewhat risky procedure, as we have seen. By the close of the paper,
however, the Wittgenstein-Kierkegaard relation ship has been put in quite other terms,
in which the task of con ceptual clarification is subordinated to ethical and religious goals.
"Ground is cleared, and wonder is made secure," Hustwit concludes, and nothing more is to be
expected or needed from philosophy than that.

NOTE 1 Jackson's notes on philosophical psychology, p. 47. Cited in Garth

Hallett, A Companion to Wittgenstein's "Philosophical Investigations" (Ithaca: Cornell, 1977), p.
622.

The Grammar of Eternal Happiness

H. A. Nielsen
We have to start with the fact that existence doesn't run us up against anything eternal,
least of all a life. This means for one thing that I can't say what an eternal life or
happiness (or unhappiness) would be like. The point is not that I can't quite fully
describe it; rather, I can't even begin to, unless you'd want to call "It's like nothing on
earth" a description. And I'm not denigrating my talents as a describer either, as if to
suggest that Shakespeare could have done a much fancier job. Shakespeare couldn't
begin any more than I can. And in the sense that there is nothing I can safely
liken it to, I have no idea of an eternal life of happiness. Like anybody else I can
repeat scriptural texts about seeing God face to face or a lot of mansions, thrones, and
dominations, or the text that says no marriages are made in heaven. But do those leave the
idea of eternal happiness any thing but a perfect blank? One thing we find chafing about
the blankness is the fact that certain motifs - joy/peace light/rest/love — are repeatedly
connected with the expression, each purling with associations that seem to make the
accompanying picture so concrete that was in the gospel--one can become anxious
about who is going to be seated at one's left hand or six tiers back, and so forth. That is, we
tend to forget the qualifier 'eternal,' which stamps CANCELLED over all those
associations,
In this paper I want to try to blueprint what Wittgenstein calls the grammar of expressions
such as 'eternal happiness' and 'life
eternal,' a grammar that gets obscured by certain preconceptions about language. D. Z.
Phillips, for example, remarks that "the immediate problem facing someone who believes in
immortality is to explain how it is possible for human beings to survive the dissolution of their
bodies,'3—a task that rivals fetal research in the sheer lukewarmth of its excitement
about per sonal existence. Where would a thinker get the idea that explaining ‘how it is
possible' is a problem for anyone? Or rather, how does it acquire the visage of a
problem for the philosophers and theologians who put their muscle into it?
"Well," someone might answer, “if you're going to believe in something, you want to be able to
say what you believe in, and you want it to make sense and at least fit in with the
established truths of physics, biology and common knowledge." -If a person thinks along
these lines, his natural next step will be to try to pin down something about what life
eternal must be like, He may think in terms of possessing an ethereal body, or perhaps
of going on as the incorporeal mind-half of a mind/body dualism. In short, he will
imagine something, then look closely at what he has imagined to see 'how it is
possible.' What would lead people to think they are expected to imagine something in
relation to those texts? One key factor is an a priori doctrine to the effect that the
primary role of any proposition “is to assert or deny facts."4 Informative discourse is
used to describe the world, and to reason about it."5 According to this doctrine,
the descriptive function belongs to propositions primarily and constitutively in the
sense that no matter what else the proposition might be used for, it is always doing its
thing. As long as that rascally assumption remains unquestioned, such uses of
propositions as inviting, alerting someone, announcing oneself, and calling
someone's attention to himself, all get swept under the rug in a ferment of
concern over the supposed primary function of propositions. That apriorism holds
us less by a single Gordian knot than by the thousand fine silken ones that held Gulliver
down. Let us beware, then, of assuming that the New Testament references to eternal
life are descriptive or intended to stimulate imaginings of something called life after death. If we
go through the passages that speak of salvation, heaven, life everlasting, we don't find
Christ or the apostles telling people to imagine any thing. Somewhere we get told just the
opposite; that the mind of man cannot conceive the treasures God has in store for those who love him.
70
or at least an account untainted by that pollutant?
Think first of this situation. A night-watchman-call him Angus- works in a factory where tanks
of a deadly, odorless industrial gas are stored. His job is to keep unauthorized persons out of
the plant and to admit the occasional night worker with proper identification. Angus knows nothing of
the technical side of the plant's operation, the tanks, valves, dials, or charts of complicated
instruction.
One night in the middle of his shift Angus feels his breath catch and something go numb for a
moment in his chest. It passes quickly, but a few minutes later the same thing happens. His
assignment, Angus feels, is to watch over the plant, not to worry about himself, but those
episodes of breathlessness remind him of one of the few plant posters he is able to make
some sense of. It hangs on several walls and says in large block letters:
AT ANY SIGN OF DIFFICULTY IN BREATHING REPORT IMMEDIATELY TO
THE NUMBER ONE EGRESS
With this caution we can begin to look at some of the grammar of 'eternal happiness.' What I
know to begin with, what everybody knows, is that death looks as much like dust and
oblivion as anything can look, Who needs a revelation to realize there is one sure-shot
sentinel you can't sneak past? But now someone announces he can save me, promise me life
eternal, an everlasting happiness—under certain conditions, which I won't go into now.
This comes in the form of tidings, an announcement, a personal one in the sense of
someone moving to identify himself to me and at the same time call my attention to myself
through the fact that myself is the one he's interested in, I don't have to imagine anything in
order to catch his reference to death-or to me, since I'm queued up for it like everyone else,
But what about his reference to another life, one without end? Here I can imagine
all sorts of things. Since pictures come so easily, though, anyone else's picture of
eternity will be just as close to the mark as mine. Or as far off. But, no, he doesn't ask
me to imagine anything. Then does he assume I understand? Maybe he assumes I
couldn't, and is saving his breath, aware that an eternal anything is beyond my range of
acquaintance. Or, perhaps he figures that the clear references to my life, my death, and his
interest in saving me (whatever 'saved' may mean) add up to enough for his purpose,
and treating me to
previews of eternity would only get in the way.
At any rate, a zero-level of descriptive content is what we get in scriptural
references to an eternal happiness. This fact can generate a kind of philosophical
panic. Someone might reflect, "It's as if Christ said, 'Give up everything for me and I
promise you the best thing of all: a scrudge.' Nobody would take the bait, of course,
because a nonsense-word like 'scrudge' doesn't produce the illusion of understanding
created by the timeworn words 'eternal happiness. But when I look closely at the
phrase 'eternal happiness, does it really say anything more than 'scrudge'? No question
about it, the promise of an eternal happiness holds out a cookie which, when I try to bite
down on it turns out to be a phantom cookie, tasteless, crunchless, crumbless, and all I
get is the click of my uppers and lowers meeting?" — This is the way certain cookies
grumble these days, and their grumbies, I want to say, are at least in part a sign of
a misunderstanding of the grammar of 'eternal happiness' and related expressions, a
misunderstanding rooted in the apriorism mentioned before.
Then what would a correct account of that grammar look like,
Fine, except that Angus hasn't the faintest notion of what an Egress is. For all he knows, it
could be an ogress, If 'Egress' is another word for doctor or nurse, he knows there are none
on the night crew. The phone directory lists 'Electrician' and 'Engineering Staff'
but no 'Egress' at all, never mind the top ranking one. Perhaps it means a courtyard with
plenty of fresh air, or some kind of emergency pill-dispenser. But it is useless to guess. With no
guidelines at all, a guess amounts to a blind stab. For the moment, at least, Angus is in a
fix.
This state of cluelessness -- Angus' situation-could in a sense be worse. Suppose, for
example, that he let himself think he had at least a moderately clear working idea of
an Egress. An egret, as everybody knows, is a rare and gorgeous white bird, and
'Egress' sounds very much as though it might be the female. Tiger/tigress,
priest/priestess, egret/egress — close enough for a presumption. Yes, that must
be it, and the Number One Egress would pretty well have to be the presiding
matriarch of the flock. If Angus let himself go on in this way, he would set himself up for a
host of problems such as, “But how is it possible to help my breathing by reporting to
a large white bird? Besides, if the bird is on the endangered list itself, won't it have
problems of its own? And anyway, what would a gorgeous bird like that be doing in a place
like this?" — Problems like these, though, would arise only if Angus assumed he
had at least a toehold on
the meaning of 'Egress'— when in reality he has none,
We left Angus aware that 'Egress' stands for a perfect blank in his mind, and immune,
therefore, to problems of the form, "How is it possible...?" Now suppose the bell rings
and Angus goes to an entrance door where he admits an office employee who now and then
does catch-up work at night.
“Angus, you're white as a sheet," the man tells him. "Trouble breathing," Angus says.
"Can't you read the sign? Let's get you to the Number One Egress right away. It's down that
long corridor and to the right. Come along, I'll show you."
This is the not unhappy ending of our story, and now for a brief backward look at it. How
closely does Angus' not knowing the meaning of 'Egress' parallel the idea that we have
no determinate idea of an eternal happiness? There are big dif ferences, to be sure.
Lots of people know what an egress is and can explain it to Angus in a few seconds,
but if I am on the right track, we are all just about equally blank when it comes to
knowing what an eternal happiness would be like, and not accidentally so as with
Angus, but in virtue of no one's being in a position to know. Further, an egress turns
out to be something wholly within our sphere, while an eternal happiness is not. Also,
the path I might be led along to an eternal happiness might be considerably more
demanding than a walk down a warehouse corridor,
The point of our story, however, leaves room for those differences and more. The similarity that
makes for a useful parallel here lies, first of all, in the fact that at a certain moment Angus is
just as much at a loss to explain 'Number One Egress' as you and I are right now to say
what an eternal happiness would be like. Notice, though, that Angus, in the very
moment of his embarrassment, can understand the other employee's offer to show
him the way to the Egress, even though Angus couldn't describe an egress for
love or money. That is, Angus can under stand sufficiently for his purpose, which
is not, of course, one of understanding but of getting his emergency respiratory trouble
taken care of. In the same way, I can be in perpetual embarrassment over my inability to
describe an eternal happiness, yet my embarrassment, like Angus', in no way blocks my
understanding an offer of one, and for such an under standing it needn't be at all
presupposed that I know what an eternal happiness would be like.
It turns out that we touch only the surface grammar of
'eternal happiness' or 'heaven' by pointing out that these expressions are bound up in the New
Testament with a promise, an offer, an invitation. That much we can see merely by looking at
the sentence - unless an a priori doctrine about language hoods our eyes. To get at the deeper
grammar it is helpful to lean on Wittgenstein's conception of language-games. What sort
of language-game is working in the passage from Luke 18 in which the rich man
asks, “Master, what must I do to gain eternal life?" What is he using those words, that
sentence, for? As a general rule, it does not move us forward if we merely
paraphrase the sentence in question by saying, for example, "He is using it to
express a concern about life after death." What the sentence expresses and what the
person is using it for can be two very different things. We can begin our account by
noticing that the rich man wants to gain this X-whatever it may be like-in the same way
that Angus wants to report to the Number One Egress, whatever it may be. Angus
wants that because he has a stake in breathing, but what does the rich man-call him
Jonah-have a stake in? Be cautious here about answering 'life' or 'happiness,'
because it's not clear how many of the familiar associations of those words get
annulled by the modifier 'eternal.' Jonah's question, we might more safely say, is
an expression of Jonah's interest in himself, or in his presence to himself. At least at
the beginning of the gospel story he likes himself, finds himself worth having around, would
hate to part with himself, to forget himself, to vanish from himself. Yet he knows he is going
to die. I don't want to thump this point or trade on the fact that sooner or later everybody
experiences dif ficulty in breathing. Jonah is interested in himself, but the look and smell and
stillness of death make it appear impossible for him to enjoy his interest for very long.
So his original question might be reworded in this way: "Master, I know my 9000 camels will
vanish from me when my eyes close. But must I vanish from my own presence when I vanish
from the earth?" Does it make a difference if Jonah uses the idiom 'eternal life? The
point is that he uses it without getting hiccups. Our suggestion is this: What gives that
expression sense for an individual is his interest in himself, or is the fact that he interests
himself. Why, after all, should we expect it to make sense to a non-individual such
as The Scientific Community or the Philosophical—each a turnover of personnel, an
aggregate of replacements. "Well," someone answers, “it had better make public sense if he
is not to fall into a weak subjectivity in which thinking you understand

74
an expression is the sole criterion for understanding it!” — Here, though, we have to refer back
to Angus, and notice that the problem for an individual is not one .of understanding a par
ticular expression. - Let us try now to characterize more fully the kind of language-
practices employed in the scriptural offer of an eternal happiness and in Jonah's
response. Wittgenstein remarks that some philosophical misunderstandings can be
cleared away by substituting one form of expression for another, I want to try that with
the offer of an eternal happiness. Suppose an apostle went up to someone and said,
"You there, I want to ask you about your presence to yourself when you're alone, as we say,
with your thoughts. What's the atmosphere like in there?" Notice that the cruelest kind
of edge can be put on that benign question by various follow-ups such as "Is it a
happy atmos phere?" Even without those it's a question with disquieting overtones, and
makes us immediately wonder whether by raising it a person wouldn't be doing the utmost
violence to another's privacy. For here, in my acoustical heart as it were, I keep everything that's
really private. The rest of me is one big figleaf. Somewhere under it, maybe formulated and
maybe inchoate, is my hard and final opinion of what it's worth to be this, and my private
judgment, binding only on myself, as to the creative talents of whatever created this.
I have other laundry in there, too, some clean, some dirty, all mine. What a side of me
to be concerned about! And for another party to be concerned about mine-talk about
obscene fixations!
At this point I would begin to get pretty annoyed with that apostle, because it
appears he really was asking, sotto voce, Is it a happy presence? Is it peaceful? Or
do warfare, resentment, hatred mar your presence to yourself? Or worse,
perhaps, the silence of those no longer on speaking terms?' "What's going on here?"
I'd wonder. "Here's a fellow who's interested in, of ail things, the smell of my private
laundry closet! He goes on as if that were the most important thing about me! The idiot
ought to be warned that the wrath of mankind falls hardest of all on figleaf-snatchers. In
fact, if he approaches me again, I'll tell him right out: Your question is sheer
impudence. My presence to myself is the most unpublic thing about me, since it
concerns myself alone, and for you to voice your concern about mine-only an
imbecile would stray so far from the baselines of human conversation.'"
Now it seems to me that the fellow who just spoke has a
pretty fair grasp of the grammar of 'eternal happiness' and related expressions, even though the
word 'eternal' doesn't-and needn't turn up in the apostle's question. That question, the ultimate
invasion of my privacy when I unpack it, has the same grammatical silhouette (in
Wittgenstein's sense of 'grammar of depth,' that is) as a proposition to the effect that an
eternal happiness awaits me if I go all-out for it,
This may become clearer if we look at a familiar kind of mis understanding of the
grammar of 'eternal happiness.' Suppose someone says to me, “Look, these
apostles make a point of dropping very disturbing hints about — after death. A
person can do something, they say, to help make that state an agreeable one. But
before you get yourself into a froth about this you ought to ask: How is it possible to
experience anything, agreeable or otherwise, after your brain and nervous system
have powdered away?"
Not only is that a problem, we could reply, it deserves to rank with the most
tremendous ones. Only whose problem is it? Not mine, surely. I can't begin to conceive
either a way to avoid vanishing from myself when I die or what it would be like not
to vanish. So the problem is a problem only to someone who is, first of all, as interested
as I am in my continued presence to myself and, secondly, willing to sit up nights
asking, 'How can I work things so that when this man's brain powders away he can still
have experiences?'
The problem is someone else's, then, and if the man who posed me the problem thinks it's
mine or his, I want to say he has misunderstood the grammar of 'eternal happiness.'
Those words are employed, as our substitution tried to show, not to impart cognitions or
descriptions of something, but to 'get personal' with an individual, to point rudely as we
say at his most sensitive spot, to poke it, to jab it, because right there is his problem.
The problem of contriving somehow to keep him present to himself after he dies is
strictly someone else's. So I misunderstand the grammar of those biblical phrases, the
language-game they figure in, if I suppose that I have to get at the sense of them by
examining entailments, for instance, the seeming entailment of a disembodied thinking
apparatus. Expressions such as 'eternal happiness' entail nothing of the sort. In addition
to this misunderstanding of how the words are used, there must also be an extraordinary
unseeing if a man rivets his eyes on the form of expression instead of noticing the stiff,
steady finger it points at his most private interior.

76
INSTEET. -? CENTRO DE RECHER

All cf this puts us in a better position to say something positive about the kind of language-
practice in which New Testament expressions such as 'eternal life' figure as instru menis, We
call that practice, whether done with words, gestures or other behavior, ‘getting
personal' or, in many instances, 'getting a little too personal.' The expressions we are
examining, in their scriptural habitat that is, carry the business of 'getting personal to an
extreme painfully beyond any ordinary instance. It rubs me the wrong way, for
example, to be asked my religion by a personal interviewer, or when a perfect
stranger rubber necks at my checkbook entries at a bank counter, There are any
number of ways of getting too personal with someone, Now multiply the degree of
impertinence a thousandfold, and we approach the pitch of getting personal that we've
been talking about today: an eternal happiness proposed-to me. Always to be present to
myself! But that means that when the apostle asked, "What's the atmosphere like
in there?" he was really asking among other things, whether I like myself enough to
be endless company to myself. Not whether I like this life or my situation on earth, but just
myself. Do I like myself enough to put up with it for longer than I care to imagine -- when
perhaps all other human presences have vanished? As much a threat in his question,
then, as a promise. The most personal part of me, the acoustical heart, the part that no x-ray
or autopsy can publish to the world--is it at peace or war with itself, of one mind or two,
citadel or house divided? How dare anyone point so audacious a finger at my inner
presence to myself? No one could get per sonal to a more intense degree than by forcing
out of me a manifesto of what it's worth to have that and have it forever. He doesn't ask,
“How fond are you of your sweetest memories?" but "How fond of just your presence to
yourself?" —as if this were the only thing I could be sure of taking on the voyage! Why, the
man half hints that I'd be wise to identify in the strongest possible terms with that
unpublic and not altogether sweet smelling side of me! Have I ever even dreamed of
such a step, such a reversal? His little question snowballs into such an appallingly
strenuous operation that I'm almost tempted to let those words slide off my tongue:
"Master—or anyone at all-What must I do to vanish from myself utterly and
irrecoverably? And if any power, man or not-man, would keep me present to myself,
how can I give that power the slip?"
To sum up, the New Testament uses expressions such as 'eternal life' as instruments in
the kind of activity we call
'getting personal with someone, and it's not disrespectful to remark that the New
Testament gets personal to an offensive degree in various ways, for instance, by
offering the individual equality with God in the sense that my son is my equal. Here we are
concerned only with the grammar of 'eternal happiness,' but in that connection as
well it is helpful to notice that the theme of getting acutely personal is at the
very center of the com munication.
Someone says, “I understand, you point to 'getting personal as the depth-grammar of 'eternal
happiness' and related expressions. This means they have essentially the same
linguistic functions as psychoanalysis and certain forms of existentialist philosophy."
—Remarks along this line reflect a misunderstanding of the grammar of 'eternal
happiness, an attempt to put it on a level with language-practices which do not involve
getting personal in anything like the same sense. It is worthwhile to make this
distinction explicit, though I don't think I can do it very skillfully. It is, first of all, easy
enough to remind ourselves that someone can talk a blue streak about das Ich or
the Self or how ugly the world seemed to me that afternoon on the park bench,
without in the least 'getting personal.' Someone can make himself a veritable
Evel Knievel of prose and write death-defying challenges to every common kind of
piety, yet not get personal at all. If he says with incom parable daring, "I have no
essence and neither have you!" is this an instance of getting personal? If so, it is
surely a stingless one. His communique is addressed 'to whom it may
concern'even if he sends me an autographed copy, and whether his thesis is true
or false, it deals not with the personal but with precisely what we have in common,
When we turn to psychoanalysis the point is harder to make. Highly
sophisticated people take the watchword: "Relax and say anything that comes
into your mind" as the quintessence of the personal, the plucking away of the
very last figleaf. A little practice, a couple of sessions on the couch, and one can
really — relax! And what is the principle that assures me that I can relax with this
attentive human presence?-— for if an equally attentive hangman told me to relax, my
tendency would be just the opposite. Well, with the analyst I can relax because, unlike
the hangman, he has nothing very personal in mind. As regards the really
personal (e.g., one's view of existence as seen through a noose) my analyst and I
are in the same boat, with a common stake in the principle Don't make waves! His aim is to
keep both of us functioning in accord with the health-standards laid down in his
very general theory of the human psyche, and if I should start throwing punches at
him in the course of theraps he won't even take that personally, and he'll tell me I
mustn't either!
"But what sort of material are you saying is too personal to come out in
psychoanalysis?" — Item: The question of how long I'd care to put up with
my own company in a setting stripped of human distractions and amusements
and 'functions.' Item: my attitude toward whatever force or amalgam of forces made
me into this-is it a grateful attitude? Resentful? Fuming? Wait and-see? Or what?
Item: Suppose I were asked to put a grade on the skill and taste of that behind-the-
scenes maker of stars and men— would it be A? C+? F?
Items of this nature are not easy to relate to functioning normally on the domestic or
job scene, and on that account analysts are to be pardoned for steering clear of
them-qua analysts. But like me, the analyst is also a person,
presumably with built-in niches for those personal items. Without
denying that certain personal matters may come out in therapy, would we want
to designate those the quintessence of the personal?

Kierkegaard calls the idea of an eternal happiness "the poorest of all conceptions." "...It
is a desperate task to make anything aesthetically out of such an abstraction...."
Concluding Unscientific Postscript, tr. David Swenson and Walter Lowrie (Princeton,
1941), p. 352.
The lack of descriptive content does not mean we cannot con struct paraphrases such
as 'a happiness that has no end' or 'a life which goes on forever, but such expressions
are far from contain
ing anything descriptive as the one we start with.
But suppose Kierkegaard is mistaken? That is, if someone assimilates the whole matrix
of New Testament teachings, why couldn't his concept of an eternal happiness wax
richer? If he is told, for instance, that someone has departed the earth to prepare a place for
him in the hereafter and that he will be raised up on the last day, will not all of this begin to fill in
his initially empty idea and make it less of an abstraction? Kierkegaard's point, it seems, is that
the offer of an eternal happiness comes with certain strings attached, including a full-time task: "Follow me,"
which does not require the person to know ahead of time what eternity will be like. But couldn't
the related teachings add bit by bit to his understanding until, as the saying goes, he can
almost taste eternity? If so, this would give to the idea the sort of content Kierkegaard
calls 'aesthetic.'
No obvious point would be served by denying this possibility out of hand. However, even if
Kierkegaard is mistaken in thinking that knowing something about eternity would retard
someone in his striving, it is by no means clear what sort of helpful role the knowledge could play
in his religious life, or in what respect he would be deprived if he did not have it.
2 'Someone says, "An eternal happiness must, after all, have
something in common with ordinary human happiness." --But what does ordinary
happiness have in common over the range of its instances?
3
D. Z. Phillips, Death and Immortality (London, 1970), p. 2.

4
B. Russell, Introduction to L. Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico Philosophicus, tr. C.
Ogden (London, 1922), p. 8.

5 I. Copi, Introduction to Logic (New York, 1954), p. 23.

6
"...But this is ethically just as it should be, in order that the existing individual may not be
tempted to waste his time in picturing and imagining, but rather be impelled to action.... And,
therefore, the resolved individual does not even wish to know anything more about this
telos than that it exists, for as soon as he acquires some knowledge about it, he already
begins to be retarded in his striving. ..." Postscript, pp. 352-353.
NOTES

7 Here we have to be careful of a certain sandtrap, I mean the

inclination to define 'eternal life' immanently in terms of the individual's
passionate interest in himself, or to define the word 'eternal' by making it the
extravagant expression for a particular psychological cathexis such as an
attachment to oneself. As Kierkegaard expresses it, "...Eternal happiness as the
absolute good has the remarkable trait of being definable solely in terms of the mode of
acquisition...." Postscript, p. 382.

80
The Content of 'Eternal Happiness'

John H. Whittaker
That one needn't speculate about life after death to believe in the promise of an eternal
happiness is, I think, more than a grammatical reminder. For most of us it is an observation
which makes something difficult and deep clearer than it was before. So I don't want to hurry
over the point, as if it added little to our halting attempts to think about—and perchance
to hope for an eternal happiness. I'd rather let it sink in.
Yet I think that something more needs to be said to prevent misunderstanding. Surely
the claim that an eternal happiness awaits the faithful must have some content, however ill-
defined. Otherwise, one could never affirm it by thinking that it is true. We needn't spell out
this content in terms of a quasi-physical description of an afterlife—this I'm as anxious as
Professor Nielsen to admit. But the believer, if he is to settle an inner score with his own self-
presence, must have something to believe in. For the doctrine of an eternal happiness is not
just an intrusive and unsettling idea; it is a promise. And one must either dare to believe
in such a thing or remain in unhappy admiration.
What worries me, then, is the danger of utterly dissolving the doctrine of an eternal happiness
as a truth claim. I won't argue the merits and demerits of this kind of liberalism; I assume that
Professor Nielsen wants to avoid purely functional or non cognitive accounts of religious
assertions just as much as I do. So instead of arguing about religious claims in general,
I'd like to focus my concern on the case at hand. To do this, let us consider a deceptively
similar doctrine.
The doctrine which I have in mind is Nietzsche's proclama tion of an eternal recurrence. I don't
think that this doctrine makes any sense as a truth claim, since it depends on the
logical impossibility of distinguishing indiscernible cycles of time. To know that history
repeats itself in every detail, one would have to be able to identify the beginnings and
endings of otherwise indiscernible cycles. But without any more encompassing
framework of time, this couldn't possibly be done. No one could do it. It doesn't even make
sense. So conceptually, Nietzsche's doctrine of eternal recurrence lacks the
coherence of a logically possible truth.
Yet—and this is the point of my example—the conceptual incoherence of Nietzsche's
doctrine doesn't prevent it from functioning in other, noncognitive, ways. The very idea of
repeating one's life over and over again can still play a part in a "believer's" life; and
to this extent, it can still have a kind of "grammar." Indeed, the doctrine of eternal recurrence
seems to fill the same grammatical outline which Nielsen has traced for the concept of eternal
happiness. Like the concept of an eternal life, the doctrine of eternal recurrence is not a
question of public debate or scientific inquiry but a matter for inward reflection and personal
avowal. It forces its way just as impudently into the private recesses of the
conscience, saying, "What's the atmosphere like in there?" This, in fact, was the very
reason why Nietzsche set this teaching at the apex of his thinking-S0 that he
could wield it as the means of separating truly self affirmative types from those who still
had the dirty laundry of guilt and self-contempt in their private closets. After all, only those
who are present to themselves in complete contentment could will to repeat their lives
unchanged forever. Here, therefore, the doctrine of eternal recurrence and the doctrine
of eternal happiness are "grammatically” alike: both are means of "getting personal” with
us, of poking and jabbing at our softest spots, so that the issue of our happiness
assumes its proper shape in inwardness.
The doctrine of eternal recurrence, however, needn't be a truth claim at all to serve
this psychological function. For the purpose of probing and testing an individual's
presence to himself, it is enough merely to pose the thought of unending repetition-one
needn't render this idea conceptually coherent as a meta physical assertion. A semblance of
cognitive sense will do. But the doctrine of eternal happiness represents a promise.
Thus, it doesn't simply arouse the inward problem of one's own self-presence; it
speaks to it. And to do this, it must offer the believer something to rely on, to trust
in, and to hope for. In sum, it must give one a truth claim-of some kind—to
believe in.
Not every philosophical problem about eternal happiness and its aitainment can be
brushed aside, then. When we no longer know what, if anything, we must affirm to
embrace the promise of an eternal happiness, we need some further logical clarifica
tions to resuscitate the option of belief. More particularly, we need some
grammatical observations on the concept of truth, so that we might free ourselves of the
religiously inhibiting assumption that every truth claim must be an empirical or quasi-
empirical description. This, I admit, is not an easy thing to do; and I don't want to criticize
Nielsen for leaving such a big job undone. But I do want to know if he means to deny that
the doctrine of eternal happiness is a "factual" claim in every sense of the word, even in
the very general sense in which any true proposition states a "fact." By saying that it is not the
business of this doctrine to "impart cognitions or descriptions," does he mean to abandon all
talk of truth and falsity here?
One would think not. For in his own guiding example, when the more
knowledgeable employee promises to show Angus to the Number One Egress,
he tells him in effect that there is—in fact-a solution to his difficulty. And for him to
say that there is in fact a way out of Angus's difficulty, he needn't describe that egress.
The promise retains some content without that description. Presumably, it is the same with
the promise of an eternal happiness. It too speaks of a way out, a way out of the
difficulties and despair of our common finitude. But if this is so, then we best not surrender
the doctrine as a coherent and cognitively significant truth claim, as if it had no more
content than the bogus notion of an eternal recurrence.
Understanding Fire-Festivals and Revelations
Richard H. Bell

"...everyone should keep silent insofar as he has no understanding to

communicate. Merely to raise an outcry is a sort of glittering idleness."
S.K. (AR., p. 9)
"The truth of my statements is the test of my understanding of these statements.'
L.W. (O.C. 80)

i. Introduction

I would like to pose a problem given public form by Wittgenstein in Part Two of
the Philosophical Investigations. He writes:
We also say of some people that they are transparent to us. It is, however, important as regards
this observation that one human being can be a complete enigma to another. We learn this
when we come into a strange country with entirely strange traditions; and, what is more, even given a
mastery of the country's language. We do not understand the people. (And not because of not knowing
what they are saying to themselves.) We cannot find our feet with
them. (Inv. II, p. 223e).
There are two things here: 1) making transparent the behavior of people who hold
different beliefs and customs than our own, and 2) finding our own feet with respect
to those beliefs and customs. Wittgenstein believes, on the one hand, that we
can fairly clearly determine what these people in a strange country are saving to
themselves. That is, we can determine how it is that the beliefs and customs they hold have
meaning within their own life. But on the other hand, there is still not an under standing—we
have not, as it were, “found our feet" with respect to those beliefs and customs.

The question arises what is the nature of the "understanding that Wittgenstein is looking for
here? For surely to arrive at a clear (or nearly transparent) account of what the people
are saying to themselves is a kind of understanding of their life, And we have a number of
such nearly transparent accounts of strange countries by anthropologists which provide us with
a claim to understanding their culture. What then is the under standing that is lacking? If
we leave the matter, as many philosophers and ethnologists do, with the transparent
account, then we arrive at a kind of culturally relativistic impasse — we make claim
to a kind of "understanding from within," but are left with the enigma of whether
someone who does not view the matter from within can have the same
"understanding"?1 Furthermore, many would persuasively argue that however clever and
insightful the ethnographic description, it is at best an interpretation and not itself an
understanding 2.
Wittgenstein would, himself, side with those who argue this latter point, but is
unsatisfied to leave it at that. He goes on to show us that the deeper, and more important,
philosophical issue has to do with how we might "find our feet" with respect to these strange
beliefs and customs. He does, in the end, hold that there is a way of understanding
those practices we find strange and disquieting, and that coming to such an under
standing is really the only important issue in the whole complex set of relations found
when we confront such strange practices.
I would like to sort out some of the issues here and get a clearer reading on what it is that
Wittgenstein is after when he says: "We do not understand the people," yet insists that we
come to an understanding in ourselves, I will do this in two ways: first by looking into
his critique of Sir James Frazer's, The Golden Bough, and his solution to the
riddle of why people "celebrate by the burning of a man!"3 Second, by showing
that the point of understanding in ourselves lies at the root of Kierke gaard's concern for
how one can come to an understanding of a revelation and communicate that understanding.
Finally, I will say some things on the grammar of understanding itself with the aid of
Wittgenstein's and Kierkegaard's insights,

ii. Understanding and Philosopher's Problems

Rush Rhees, in his introduction to Wittgenstein's remarks on Frazer, lays stress on

Wittgenstein's concern to show the seriousness of problems in philosophy which Rhees
calls metaphysical. Although Frazer sees the seriousness of the practice of human
sacrifice in his treatment of the myth of the succession of the King of the Wood at Nemi, he
quickly trivializes this by offering a solution to the problem by his myriad attempts at
rational explanations. What Wittgenstein sees is that human sacrifice lays hold of such
a metaphysical problem-one that is as deep as life and death itself. Further more,
Wittgenstein sees that this is disquieting- it must be reckoned with in a serious way. It is
the kind of philosophical problem that demands that we "find our feet" with respect to it.
(CF., RF, p. 23ff.)
Wittgenstein's philosophy has often been accused of its own kind of trivializing features.
For example, when he says that he wants to do away with all explanations and replace
them with description alone, he has reduced philosophy to taxonomy. Or when he says
that he wants philosophy to do away with all problems and leave things as they are,
he robs philosophy of its very life. This surely is a misunderstanding. Rather, Wittgen
stein is concerned with the level at which recent philosophy has characterized its
"problems" -"no deep problems seem to exist any more," he said in Zettelf, and Rhees
reported his saying "You can't say 'etsch, etsch!' to philosophical problems, they are too
strong." (CF, RF, p. 24) Where does Wittgenstein see the strength of philosophical
problems to lie? They lie in the depths of understanding human life itself, in the way persons
live in the world and shape that world in the context of their language. It is our linguistic
activity—the uses, customs and institu tions, which forms the course of our natural
history where the problems are rooted, To look into that natural history and to come to
an understanding of it is philosophy's job. It is within the grammar of that history that the
problems can come to rest, that we learn to find our way about.

An important statement of Wittgenstein's intentions and interests as a philosopher occurs in his

Remarks on the Founda tions of Mathematics. In this passage he is criticising Frege's
notion that philosophy's end is to help us "realize certain truths immediately." Frege's
emphasis is on the determination of the character of the truths, while Wittgenstein wants to
change the emphasis to that of the process by which one comes to a truth or a falsehood. He
wants to educate people "to have a way of looking at the matter...," to examine their point of
departure and their means of transport. He says, “...I am asking: what is the
characteristic demeanor of human beings who 'realize' something 'immediately,'
whatever the practical results of this realizirg is? What interests me is not the immediate
realization of a truth, but the phenomenon of immediate realization. Not indeed as a
special mental phenomenon, but as one of human actions." The "phenomenon of immediate
realization" or the process of "realizing" can be translated into how we come to
understanding. This process is foundational to what we say and do--it shapes
and is shaped by the fields and "forms of life" from which our certainty and confidence
in living arises. It is a phenomenon common to all human beings, * In characterizing
what Wittgenstein means by understanding and his objection to philosophers who suffer
from a “loss of problems," let me introduce a distinction made by Kierkegaard. The distinction
is between "the premise author" and "the essential author." The premise author "is
outwardly directed," while the essential author "'is inwardly directed." Kierkegaard writes
that the premise author thinks thus: “If only an outcry is raised then surely it will turn out all
right." But in a time of "outcrys" (or a time of so many philosophical problems), Kierkegaard
thinks it would be more reasonable "if a man were to think thus: the outcry will certainly
be made anyway, therefore it would be better for me to abstain from it and collect myself for a
more concrete reflection," (AR, p. 7, my italics). The premise author has an extraordinary
result or an expectation in mind and then aims for it, thus losing sight of the
immediate.
It is quite the opposite with the essential author, The essential author has his own
perspective, he works out of a world-view and thereby "explains only what he has
understood.” “...He strives forward indeed, but within the totality not after it...from
first to last he is attentive to understanding himself in his life-view," (AR, p. 8, my
italics). And Kierkegaard says finally of the essential author: "In so far as an essential
author may be said to feel a need to communicate himself, this need is purely
immanent, an enjoyment of his understanding raised to the second power...." Premise
authors always need supporting, while essential authors find justfication from
within themselves — they nourish themselves "with the understanding they themselves
earn," (AR, p. 8). I will argue later that Kierkegaard's frequent use of "understanding" is
quite close to Wittgenstein's use of the same concept.
Not only could it be argued that Wittgenstein is an essential author himself, but his
philosophical task is that of uncovering how it is that one comes to understand and
communicates that understanding. If understanding is lacking, then it is philosophy's job to
reorder what we have before us so that we do have understanding. And like
Kierkegaard's essential author, where understanding is lacking, Wittgenstein sees the
first obligation in the recovery of this loss to be that one becomes "attentive to
understanding himself in his life-view"; to, as I said above, explore the depths of human
life itself as life is expressed and lived in the context of one's own "life-view" (or as
Wittgenstein characteristically says, with one's own "Weltbild'9 — world-picture - and in
connection with specific “forms of life”). In this sense, Wittgenstein's philosophy is
“inwardly directed." To illustrate this, let us turn to how Wittgenstein directs our attention
to understanding the fire festivals.

iii. Understanding the fire-festivals

Although there is the urge to find out what is meant by the beliefs and religious practices
of those who live in a strange country, to provide a means of interpreting the meaning of
their life is not the same as understanding their life. Or, at least, to say here that
you "understand" the meaning is limited to seeing and making sense of the connexions
of the various cultural (social, economic, religious, political) strands among those
whose beliefs and practices they are. This "understanding" is bound up with the
interpretations. Understanding in Wittgen stein's more fundamental sense, cannot
primarily be tied to an interpretation, rather it arises from the "phenomenon of
immediate realization" which has its roots in a person and the person's "world-
picture" or "life-view." Understanding is always located in a person and within the totality
of a life-view.

In his remarks on Frazer, Wittgenstein did two things: 1) he criticized. Frazer's

attempt to give rational explanations to various "savage" practices related to the myth of the
succession of the King of the Wood at Nemi, and more generally, he criticized Frazer's account
of magic and religion as "erroneous" or "mistaken" views of the world, 2) He attempted to
locate where and how it is that this fundamental understanding can arise ---how, as he
says, we can contemplate the depth of such practices as are perplexing in the lives
of persons who hold beliefs and customs different from our own; how what is sinister, or strange
in the behavior of another can be something I can see "from the place where I am," (RF, p. 36).
He asks what he feels to be the more fundamental philosophical question: How
can we contemplate such riddles as present themselves in the practices of other
cultures and connect them "with our own feelings and thoughts," (RF, p. 37). This
second focus of his remarks parallels the second noted above from the Investigations,
that is, it is an attempt to give us some insight into how we might "find our feet" with
respect to the disquieting features of such entirely strange customs.
Tied deeply in the myth of the priest-king at Nemi is the practice of human sacrifice, and
among Frazer's extended searches for a solution to his riddle he centers on this practice as it
is (has been) embodied literally and imitatively in the fire festivals in Europe, Frazer
asks: "What is the meaning of such sacrifices? Why were men and animals burnt to death at
these festivals?"10 His search for an answer to the riddle of the "Golden Bough"
moves us through scores of vaguely related myths and ceremonial acts and
myriad hypotheses and theories. 11
Wittgenstein has a different concern, and put it strikingly: “...the fact that on
certain days children burn a straw man could make us uneasy.... Strange that they
should celebrate by burning a man! What I want to say is: the solution is not any more
disquieting than the riddle," (RF., p. 41). With all of Frazer's explanations, a part of
our contemplation is still lacking, says Wittgenstein, we still have not been given
a way to connect up these strange ceremonies with our thoughts and feelings. “We
do not understand the people.” Where would we go then for the
understanding?
So it is strange, indeed, that they should celebrate by burning a man! There is little
doubt that this is a disquieting matter, it strikes deep and serious roots in us. Frazer
recognized its seriousness, but gave us no way to "find our feet" with respect to
such a practice. Wittgenstein insists that, although we might find a way of seeing
how those whose myths and practices they are stand in relation to them, or give
an interpretation of the meaning of what they are saying to themselves, we still
must come to an understanding in ourselves—that is, we must deter mine how we stand
to the myths or practices; how we connect up our own feelings and thoughts
with the burning of a man.

Another way of putting this is by asking the question which occupies Kierkegaard's
essential author: How are we to become attentive to what it is within us that gives rise to our
uneasiness? How are we to collect ourselves for a more concrete reflection?

Wittgenstein points to what he finds fundamentally disquieting in human sacrifice as "the

sinister character of the Beltane Fire-festivals." He locates this sinister impression in
"the inner nature of the practice as performed...'or what he calls the "spirit of the
festival." Furthermore, he says "...that what is sinister lies in the character of
these people themselves." In saying this, it would appear that he has simply placed us at
the point of the impasse—that it is precisely the "inner nature" or the "spirit" that
is impenetrable. He suggests first that by careful description we can go as far
as giving an interpretation of what is meant by those who engage in the festivals,
but that that is not sufficient for our understanding. He goes on:
What I want to sav is: What is sinister, deep, does not lie in the fact that that is how the history of
that,
this practice went, for perhaps it did not go that way; nor in the fact that perhaps or probably it was
but in what it is that gives me reason to assume it. What makes human sacrifice
something deep and sinister anyway? Is it only the suffering of the victim that impresses us in this
way? All manner of diseases bring just as much suffering and do not make this impression. No, this
deep and sinister aspect is not obvious just from learning the history of the external action, but we
impute it from an experience in ourselves, (RF, p. 40).
He asks the question about understanding the fire-festivals in this manner:
How is it that "we impute” what is deep and sinister or fundamentally
disquieting "in ourselves"? It is "in ourselves" that we must see how we stand to
the burning of a man; we must deal with our own feelings of guilt and anxiety-of
disquiet--and find some analogous experiences where we do this or say that, and
then feel satisfied. To con template the depth of the experience or to collect ourselves
for a more concrete reflection, we must contemplate something of ourselves — look into
ourselves for some analogous experience, - When Wittgenstein said that what is
sinister (deep) "lies in the character of these people themselves," he was pointing
to the importance of analogous experiences just because we do not understand
the people, In turning to think out analogies for ourselves, we discover, as he says,
that "the religious actions or the religious life of the priest-king are not different in kind
from many genuinely religious actions today, say of confession of sins. This also
can be "explained" (made clear) and cannot be explained,” (RF, p. 30f). What is
sinister or joyful or fearful (deep) in them is not "different in kind" than what is sinister or
joyful or fearful (deep) in us. "We impure" the sinister, joyful, fearful character of the fire-
festivals "from an experience in ourselves."

Wittgenstein points us in a different direction with his examples. He wants us to come

to some personal satisfaction regarding the disquieting situation, therein lies the
understanding. He asks what kind of experiences we have which bring our hearts and
minds to rest.
Burning in effigy. Kissing the picture of a loved one. This is coviously 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, (RF,
p. 31).
We are asked to look more closely at the "characteristic demeanor of human
beings." When the seriousness of death, for example, impinges on a person or
community any manner of action(s) may arise within the person or community
to enable the person or community to allay anxiety, dispell further fears, or
celebrate a new confidence in the ongoing nature of life in death. In all the
commemorative actions and emergent myths, the aim is not that of providing an
explanation for death, but to give an expression of human life in all its
paradoxicalness. Thus we express ourselves— "human life is like that," (RF, p. 30.
Cf. also O.C. 559). After Schubert's death, noted Wittgenstein, his brother "cut certain
of Schubert's scores into small pieces of a few bars each" to distribute to his friends.
Had he mistaken the value of the scores? Or was this not an act of piety! "And if
Schubert's brother had burnt the scores we could still under stand this as a sign of
piety," (RF, p. 32),

Strange that they should celebrate by burning a man! The impression is carried with the
act, with a host of connections related to the strangeness of one's own natural history.
There is that strangeness in our history—that men should take another man's life,
and this with a seriousness and festiveness that grows in the context of the wonder
of life and death itself. There is a legacy that is embedded in our way of life, but it is
not a genetic legacy that science can explain. We come to the strange ness and to an
understanding of it, says Wittgenstein, as we dis cover "the environment of a way
of acting," (RF, p. 40)— both the environment of the strange happening and our own.
In the end, like those who live out the myths and practices, we must acquire the
capacity for the understanding. We must look into ourselves and to what others are
saying of themselves and put together those links from what we have seen and heard,
from what we have experienced and already understood. As we would approach having
the capacity for understanding the mystery of life and death for ourselves, so too
would we begin to understand the strange and deep character of the fire-festivals.

Finally, I would like to talk about what is meant by coming to an understanding

or having the capacity for the understanding as a process of one who "from first
to last. ..is attentive to understanding himself in his life-view,"

In the Philosophical Grammar, Wittgenstein gives us a good example that focuses our
attention on both the inward factors in our understanding and the importance of the life-
view within which understanding is possible. The situation is this: You receive a card
from a loved one that says, “I arrive in Vienna on the 24th of December!" Wittgenstein
then comments:
They aren't mere words! Of course not: when I read them various things happen inside me in
addition to the perception of the words: maybe I feel joy, I have images, and so on. But I
don't just mean that various more or less inessential concomitant phenomena occur in conjunction with
the sentence; I mean that the sentence has a definite sense and I perceive it. But then what is this
definite sense? Well, that this particular person, whom I know, arrives at such and such a
place, etc. Precisely: when you are giving the sense, you are moving around in the
grammatical background of the sentence. You're looking at the various transformations
and consequences of the sentence as laid out in advance; and so they are (laid out in advance), in
so far as they are embodied in the grammar.12
The reference to things happening "inside me" could, again, lead us to think that
Wittgenstein's position is subjectivist and finally solipsistic, but he clearly avoids that
turn, saying that the sense which one "feels" inside is a definite sense and it is per
ceived. The sense is the familiarity one has with the "environment" of the sentence and
of a way of living. Under standing the sense is bound up-- "embodied" - in the
"grammatical background," i.e., knowing who is arriving, imagining good times (or
bad), being in Vienna, anticipations surrounding Christmas, etc. Embodied in
the grammar are numerous transformations and consequences "laid out in advance"
which, by virtue of one's life-view strike resonant cords in oneself

With regard to the burning of a man— with, say, the human immolations of a Buddhist priest in
Saigon during the Vietnam War, even those attempted in the United States, the
grammati cal background is missing. We have not the environment to "feel" its definite
sense. The disquiet comes from not knowing the grammatical background; from the
disjunctive character of the act with our own experience. The connections we make are, at best,
only indirectly linked with our own familiarity with death- perhaps death in tragic contexts. Or, we
might come closer to the environment if we can link the perplexities found in Christ's passion
and what capacities we may have for under standing that, with the religious tones of the
Buddhist immolations.
The point here, again, is one of searching for a way to make the transformations
in ourselves. Only then are we approaching the capacity for the understanding. The
attention needed is not so much that of knowing just the environment of an action (the
immolation, be it ceremonial or otherwise — though that may be helpful in our making further and
important connections), rather understanding is linked to those things which we can link up with
our own life-view which has been fashioned by its own peculiar conventions. It is here
that possession of one's self is all important. The capacity for understanding is
deeply tied to how one has cultivated capacities in one's self for dealing with the perplexities
of death and life, sorrow and joy, hate and love, despair and hope.

iv. Understanding and Revelations

In his book on Adler, On Authority and Revelation, Kierkegaard is intensely occupied

with the concept of "understanding." He is basically exploring the differences between
an interpretation* and an understanding. Adler, at best, offers us an interpretation of a new
insight he had regarding the Christian faith. Adler claims his new insight was based on a
revelation. Kierkegaard argues that his very actions in writing a book about his revela
tion (a) betrays his having had an authentic Christian revela tion—though clearly Adler
experienced a deep inward emotion which was "religiously worthy," (AR, P. 159f.), and
(b) had Adler's experience been a revelation, as he claims, he demonstrates no capacity for
having understood it. “Essentially," writes Kierkegaard, "my investigation deals only with
the fact of his [Adler's] revelation, and with the question how he understands himself
in such a thing as he has experienced, or with the suspicion that he has not
understood himself in it," (AR, p. 138, my italics). The way in which Kierkegaard
formulates his concern for understanding puts the emphasis at the same place
Wittgenstein did, i.e., he really wants to know how Adler "understood himself in such
a thing as he experienced.” Adler has confused an interpretation of a strange and
disquieting phenomenon with an understanding of it. Let me push Adler's difficulty
further as Kierkegaard perceived it.

Adler is too steeped in the Hegelian conceptualization to have cultivated a proper Christian
conceptualization. He has not taken the time to "collect (himself] for a more concrete
reflection." Furthermore, he lacks familiarity with the workings of Christian concepts which would
enable him to communicate the experience he had "...his misfortune," says
Kierkegaard, "is just this, that he is not sufficiently acquainted with the language of Christian
concepts, that he does not have them under his control." (Cf. AR., p. 165). To put this another
way, he is not familiar enough with the "grammatical background" of a Christian experience to
be able to communicate it in a manner that displays that he understands the
experience. This is, of course, precisely what puzzled Wittgenstein about
Frazer's attempts to understand the fire-festivals. There is nothing in Frazer's
various interpretations which helps our understanding such a deep phenomenon as
the burning of a man. Adler, like Frazer, 'begins to talk in a language which stands in
no relation to his emotion," (AR, P. 165).

Frazer and Adler, for Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard, were masters of

misunderstanding. Although Frazer appreciated the seriousness of human
sacrifice, his understanding of such a phenomenon as presented in the fire-festivals
comes only to offering us an interpretation—an hypothesis or theory that they burned a
man, or an animal, or a plant in order to consume, as he says, "the noxious elements,
whether material or spiritual, which menace all living things with disease and
death."13 And poor Adler, for Kierkegaard, is hopelessly con fused. For all his "lyrical
enthusiasm," he has no capacity for understanding what a qualitative difference is
required of him if he were to understand his revelation as a genuinely Christian one.
Adier has no capacity for transposing or expressing his emotions in words, (CF, AR., p.
163). This is so primarily because of his own lack of self-discipline and his
failure "to be entirely present to himself) in self-concern," (AR, p. 155), or
as Kierkegaard said earlier, he failed to be "attentive to under standing himself in his life-
view."

What is Kierkegaard's more positive view on understanding? Here I would like to

show that it is much the same as Wittgen stein's. In a crucial passage in his Book on
Adler, Kierkegaard writes:
Understanding a thought is something like being able to decline a paradigmn: one can also
decline all the words which come under that paradigm. If one has understood a thought, one
can, by using it in many examples,' seem to make many profound remarks, and yet the many are really
repetitions, and hence (to refer again to the simile of the last) one is not justified in saying that he
has learned many declensions because he has learned the many words which come under the same declension." So
it is too with having under stood one thought: if the repetitions are not to be tedious, there must be
added a poetical factor which makes the application of the examples aesthetically
worthy, (AR, p. 124f.).
To say that understanding a thought is like being able to decline a paradigm
(sentence) is remarkably Wittgensteinian. But Kierkegaard, of course, was a master
of language and its uses and was fully aware of how our understanding was
bound up in both what we say and what we do. Declining a sentence
means that you must be familiar with the grammatical background of the sentence;
that you must have command of different applica tions. Having such command reflects the
difference between understanding and mere repetition.

My son, age 5, can read almost any word now, but often his reading more difficult
words is a mere miming of the sound, there is no life-view, no adequate surrounding at
this point, for understanding to take place. When he asks me, what does that
mean? I give him examples—and hopefully ones that he can place within his
purview. When I lack an understanding myself and attempt examples it inevitably is
repetition (a circular definition) which leaves my son as puzzled as ever. I cannot simply
transfer a different word from another declension because I think the word has a similar
meaning.

Thus, for me and for my son "if the repetitions are not to be tedious, there
must be added a poetical factor which makes the applications of the examples
aesthetically worthy." I must look more deeply into myself to make contact with my
childhood imagination, with the stories of dragons and princes, with Eeyore and Pooh,
the magical kingdoms, and prehistoric times when dinosaurs roamed the earth and
geologic time moves at millenial speeds. This poetical factor will give my examples an
aesthetic worthiness that will enable my son to find his way about with the new word; he
will be able to place it within his own life-view. By "poetical factor," Kierkegaard is
pointing us in the direction of the self to find where understanding the paradigm
lies.

Turning again to an example from how we understand when we read something,

Kierkegaard writes: "It is, strangely enough, a rather common opinion that it is easier
to read epigrams than connected writings. And yet this is far from being the case,
for to have any profit from epigrams one must be in full possession of a connected view in
which one understands himself. This it is that Adler lacks, he does not understand
himself. ...,” (AR, P. 138). An intense inward emotion—a revelation, even-is like an
epigram, it is rarely sustained and connected with our more conventional experiences.
We might also say that what is deep and sinister in the fire-festivals is epigramatic,
not easily connected up with the normal view. Even in a more general sense one might
say that trying to understand myths and ceremonial acts of those in strange cultures are
more like trying to understand an epigram than a connected writing. It is not simply the words
(symbolic items or ritual acts) that must be translated (interpreted), but more important
is that one "be in full possession of a connected view in which one understands himself."
revelations are, by and large,
Epigrammatic experiences like fire-festivals and
unconnected happenings. The connections for understanding them must
come from within oneself and one's own world-picture.

Confronting a revelation, an intense inward emotion and confronting the strangeness of the
burning of a man have this in common: there is a tension between the experience
and our ability to understand and communicate it. And as Kierkegaard said of Adler,
“First and last the task is to get out of the tension, to understand himself in the fact of
revelation...." For Wittgenstein, too, the task is one of resolving a similar tension as
might occur when presented with a ceremonial version of human sacrifice. He asks:
how can we contemplate such riddles so that they connect up with something we can
understand and thus find some satisfaction, some peace of mind and heart? What is
"essential" for both Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein is to move toward resolution of the
tension by giving attention to understanding one's self within one's life-view.

V. Concluding remarks.
Wittgenstein said in the Investigations: "I can only describe piecemeal the
grammar of the word 'understand and point out that it differs from what one is
inclined to say when looking closely... [it is] more complicated than might
appear at first sight.” (Inv. I, 182). In the cases of understanding the fire festivals
and in Adler's case about his understanding of a revela tion, we have piecemeal
instances of the most difficult sort for saying "I understand." The cases, however,
force us to look more closely at the grammar of the concept and its environment
when someone says "I understand."

In what circumstances, then, can we safely say "I understand"? Only when there is
familiarity with the "grammatical background" —there is always a heavy
dependency on knowing our way about within the language and our own life
view. Understanding is bound to persons and to the linguistic environment of a
way of living and acting. One must first acquire the capacity within one's own life for
the employment of the concepts within a language community, and then one might
approach how persons in a different language community employ their own
concepts within their life. The point of under standing between cultures must tap
roots that are at the very depth of what it means to be human. One must look into
oneself to see how one fundamentally stands with respect to matters of death and life,
sorrow and joy, despair and hope. Under standing is a collection of inter-related
processes "against a background. ..of facts of a particular kind, viz, the actual
use of a learnt language or languages."14

NOTES

1.
These issues are aired fully in the collected essays found in Rationality, (ed.) Bryan Wilson,
(New York: Harper Torchbook, 1971) and Modes of Thought, (ed.) R. Finnegan & R. Horton,
(London: Faber, 1973).
2.
Clifford Geertz, for example, says in his Interpretation of Cultures, (New York: Basic Books,
1973): “In short, anthropological writings are themselves interpretations, and second and third
order ones to boot," (p. 15). "Cultural analysis," he goes on, “is guessing at meanings,
assessing the guesses, and drawing explanatory con clusions from the better guesses, not
discovering the Continent of Meaning and mapping out its bodiless landscape." (p. 20).
3.
In the early 1930's, Wittgenstein spent some time with friends reading through Frazer's, The
Golden Bough. He wrote some remarks down which were later published as "Remarks on
Frazer's Golden Bough," trans. A. C. Miles and Rush Rhees, The Human World, No. 3 (May,
1971), pp. 18-41. Henceforth cited in text as (RF, page). Cf. also M.OʻC. Drury, The Danger of
Words, (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973).
4 Wittgenstein, Zettel, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe, (Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, 1967, Section 456.)
5 For detailed argument of this point see my "Theology As
Grammar: Is God an Object of Understanding?" Religious Studies, vol. 11, Sept. 1975, pp. 307-
317

6
Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, trans. by G.E.M. Anscombe, (New
York: The Macmillan Co., 1956, Part III, 32, p. 123c).
7 Kierkegaard, On Authority and Revelation, trans, and ed., Walter Lowrie, (New York: Harper
Torchbooks, 1966), p. 6. Henceforth cited in the text as (AR, page).

8
I will not argue this point here, but have said something about it in two other essays:
"Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard: Two strategies for understanding theology, The Iliff Revieur, Vol.
XXXI, 3, Fall, 1974, and “Ludwig Wittgenstein and Simone Weil: Remarks on the Ineffability of
God and Socratic Wisdom," unpublished paper.

9
This concept appears in On Certainty, ed. Anscombe and G.H. von Wright, trans. Anscombe
and Denis Paul, (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1969), section 162, p. 23e, where he says: “I have a
worid-picture...it is the substratum of all my enquiring and asserting…"
10
Sir James Frazer, The Golden Bough, A Study in Magic and Religion, one volume abridged
edition, (New York: Macmillan, 1922, Macmillan paperback edition, 1963), p. 761.
11
For a critique of Frazer's argument see my “Understanding the Fire-Festivals: Wittgenstein and
Theories in Religion,” Religious Studies, vol. 14, March 1978, pp. 113-124.
12
Wittgenstein, Philosophical Grammar, ed. R. Rhees, trans. A. Kenny, (Oxford: Basil Blackwell,
1974), p. 153.

13

Frazer, op. cit., p. 754. This statement is in the whole context of

Frazer's discussion of the strengths of the "Purification Theory over the "Solar Theory" for the
explanation of rites of human or anirnal sacrifice or their ceremonial re-enactment. Of course,
Frazer's explanations went far beyond this point to embrace even larger hypotheses about the
nature of myth itself and a myth's relation to magic, religion, and science.

14 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Grammar, op. cit., p. 74.

Our Incompleteness and Self-Understanding
David Burrell, C.S.C.
How can we develop a capacity to understand what we cannot understand? If it simply exceeds
our grasp, then there is little hope of doing so, but who knows the full measure of his grasp?
And what if our failure to understand intimates a lacuna in our self-understanding? Such a
diagnosis would be appropriately Socratic, and unwelcome enough to be relatively infrequent.
Yet suppose we could entertain the thought that our failure to understand was itself a sign of a
restricted horizon in our characteristic mode of understanding. What steps might we take
to expand those horizons? How could we go about identifying the lacuna and making
up for it?
In his essay, "Understandin Fire-Festivals and Revelations" (above), Richard Bell
focusses on affronting ritual practices. These offer an excellent paradigm
instance, for a society dis plays its conceptual horizons in its characteristic ritual practices.
Our society, for example, compels millions of men and women daily to negotiate intricate
freeway patterns to and from work. Indeed, these practices have become so
ingredient to the world of work for so many that we fail to perceive them as a slow
process of human sacrifice. Yet one only needs to spend some time in another culture,
and then return, to realize the point of the comparison. It suffices to grow old in our
society, beyond the threshold of coping with the patterns of interaction established
100
101
by an automotive culture, to appreciate how many of life's necessities become enmeshed in that
complicated network. We have come to take it for granted, of course, yet a simple
reflective turn and it presents itself as bizarre and alienating.
So literally everything turns on how we approach thinking about alien or affronting
ritual practices. For the way we approach them offers a measure of the reflective grasp we have
on our own conceptual horizons. It is most instructive to read the careful descriptions
made by nineteenth-century ethnologists of American Indian rituals." Animated by a
scrupulous fidelity to accuracy, these observers recorded every movement the
best they could. Yet they were as convinced as their counterparts—the missionaries—
that what they were describing was rank superstition. Secure in the embrace of
their scientific horizons, and moved by curiosity to canvass the varieties of humankind, they
hoped to expand our understand ing of human nature, but would not think of offering
their work to enlarge our self-understanding. In some instances, of course, the
work itself did lead to just such an enlargement, and we have records of that as
well: journals of researchers or of missioners who preferred to remain with the
people whom they had gone out to study or to convert.2 Somehow what had been an
alien form of life spoke to a dimension of themselves that had not found
expression before. Nor could it find much expression now, except in the desire to remain
there and not to return.

We have become more accustomed to such decisions now, and we comprehend them more
readily the more we recognize how confining a self-understanding our society offers.
Yet we remain relatively inarticulate to express how another culture fills out one's sense of
one's self, and what it is that ours lacks. The enduring value of the Castaneda literature
remains the sus tained encounter between Carlos and Don Juan. And that
encounter unfolds into a tragi-comedy as we are brought to feel just how ill-equipped is
the doctoral student to meet the issues Don Juan raises. If we consider how well-
funded and organized academe is by contrast with the professional teachers of
Socrates' day, we can appreciate how sustained the irony must be to try to work a Socratic
maieutic on an entire system. How can we be trained to incorporate a lively
sense of our own ignorance into a systematic inquiry?

Yet that is precisely the key to understanding another culture, or even another person. We
will be able to go on fruitfully in the measure that we become aware of the limitations of our
own horizons, and critically perceive how those limitations have hitherto blocked our
understanding of the matters at hand. This is surely the point of Peter Winch's
celebrated essay: "On Understanding a Primitive Society."4 The key to
appreciating how the Azande can combine rituals with the use of fertilizer lies in
recognizing how our penchant for regarding everything as a mode of production
unduly truncates the practice of agri culture. If we go on to acknowledge how that
same penchant has fostered our unconscionable blindness to obvious factors of
ecological balance, we are in a position to receive the force of Winch's reflective analysis.

The essay of Peter Winch on understanding a primitive society offers an accessible

example of the quality of reflection required to develop a studied sense of one's own
ignorance and to factor that sense into an accustomed mode of inquiry. The recent
work of Alasdair MacIntyre offers a more extensive range of examples. The difficulties attending
this literature itself reflect the effort it takes to summon so reflective an analysis. We
are being asked to scrutinize the instruments we are accustomed to using, and to do so in an
attempt to under stand those issues which these same instruments have helped us
to dissect. We are being taught how to question our normal mode of inquiry and so
test its adequacy. The image of craft and of instruments reminds us, of course, that skilled
craftsmen are always testing the limits of their tools, sometimes even develop ing
new ones. Yet when discourse represents one's primary instrument, reflexive
analysis taxes an inquirer's syntactical powers.
Yet it is not simply the difficulty of composition that impedes us from learning how to
incorporate our ignorance into our inquiry; an uncongenial picture of inquiry blocks us as
well. We have only to recall how Carnap taught us to denominate those questions which
inquired into the framework we are using: external questions. When it comes to
understanding human affairs, however, these questions become the most interior of all.
For they inquire how our customary practices of inquiry embody specific
normative positions on humankind. To be more precise, the normal modes of
inquiry taken together with those issues we deem worthwhile exploring determine
the boundaries of acceptable human life and work. What Carnap called
"external” questions because of their meta-theoretical character turn out to
be asking what makes us what we are when we are trying to understand human
practices. For the point of such cuestions is to elicit an awareness of the way the
frameworks de customarily use themselves affect our understanding of the
practices at hand. Perhaps we would better call such questions "self-
involving."'? That description would at least suggest to us that our posture
towards alien human practices inevitably dis fiat's the amplitude or the
restrictedness of our own humanity.

How then do we acquire a capacity for understanding what we cannot

understand? Once we have seen that our inability may well reflect a lacuna
in our own self-understanding, the stens seem to lead in a very practical direction.
We can better appreciate the role those lacunae play if we are willing to follow up their
recognition by deliberately adopting compensatory fractices. Deliberately to adopt
compensatory practices as a way of developing our capacity to understand what we
cannot understand gives practical recognition to the force of Berger and Luckmann's
observations about the social construction of reality. Our characteristic
ambience incorporates and reinforces a set horizon through its practices. To find
ways of acting otherwise means identifying those movements which one needs to
engage in at this time in an effort to "pass over" to under stand what has been
foreign, and thereby gain a fresh per spective on one's own situation 9.

The scale of the practice adopted seems irrelevant. A studied shift in any
one significant feature of one's ordinary routine will qualify as an alternative
practice. One person might find it indicated to take up yoga, another may begin
recycling bottles or introducing a meatless day into the family regime. Some may
"voluntarily displace" themselves, and for a period of time work in a different
environment. 10 None of these practices need be aimed expressly at "solving a
problem," though they may weil be motivated by features of our normal routines
which we find problematic. They are rather undertaken in an effort to equip
oneself to learn how to view the "problems" in a larger cortext.

This last point is a capital one, for it reminds us that ways of understanding are
themselves practices-indeed complex practices relying on many "subroutines."
To alter one or more of these is to put ourselves in a position whence we must
consider new factors. Recycling bottles introduces us to a new set of people,
maybe even a different part of town. I have spoken of these eventualities
so far in largely visual terms: offering a fresh perspective or enlarging one's
horizons; and one can instructively speak of attaining a new vision in these
matters. 11 Yet it will prove more to the point to identify understanding as a
capacity, and to remind ourselves that capacities are best enlarged through
suffering 12 The effect of compensatory practices is to let a different set of realities
affect us, and to do so in a way that should enhance our capacity to take those realities
into account as factors. That is why we need to adopt such practices deliberately,
for too much suffering can incapacitate us as well. Yet if we allow ourselves to be
guided by the restriction we have come to feel in our own horizons, and adopt
practices expressly compensatory, we stand a good chance of enhancing our
capacity to understand what we have found ourselves unable to understand. Critical
awareness followed by a studied change in practice promises an epistemological
gain quite beyond our expectations. Or is that too simple a proposal to take
seriously?
T

NOTES
1 For an exemplary instance, see Washington Matthews, “'The Night
Chant: A Navaho Ceremony," in Memoirs of the American Museum of Natural History 6 (May,
1902).
2 See Franc Johnson Newcomb, Hosteen Klah: Navaho Medicine Man
and Sand Painter (Norman, Okla., 1964).

3 Carlos Castaneda's works (in order): The Teachings of Don Juan

(New York, 1969), A Separate Reality (New York, 1971), Joumey to Ixtlan (New York, 1972),
Tales of Power (New York, 1974).
4 Originally published in American Philosophical Quarterly 1 (1964),
this essay has been reprinted in D. Z. Phillips (ed) Religion and Understanding (Oxford, 1967);
Bryan Wilson (ed), Rationality (Oxford, 1970); and F. Dallmayr and T. McCarthy (eds), Under
standing and Social Inquiry (Notre Dame, 1977).
5 Much of Alasdair MacIntyre's work has been collected in his book,
Against the Self-Images of the Age (New York, 1971), but also see his essays in K. Sayre (ed),
Values in the Electrical Power Industry (Notre Dame, 1977) and in T. Englehardt and D. Callhan
(ed), Knowledge, Value and Belief (Hastings, N.Y., 1977).

6 Rudolph Carnap's celebrated essay "Empiricism, Semantics, and

Ontology" appears in the enlarged edition of Meaning and Necessity (Chicago, 1956).

7
This expression is suggested by Donald Evans' now standard work: The Logic of Self-Inolvement
(London, 1963). For a lucid account of Evans' subsequent development, see his "Philosophical
Analysis and Religious Faith: Some Retrospective Reflections," in F. Duchesneau (ed), Faith
and Contemporary Epistemologies (Ottawa, 1977).

8
P. Berger and T. Luckmann, Social Construction of Reality (New York, 1966). For a critical
appraisal, see my essay, “Ritual and Con ceptual Systems," in J. D. Shaughnessy, Roots of
Ritual (Grand Rapids, 1973).

9
John S. Dunne has given this expression currency, notably in Way of all the Earth (New York,
1972).

10 Henri Nouwen has carefully explored this practice in Occasional

Papers of the Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research (#2, March 1977).

11 Stanley Hauerwas relies on Iris Murdock to show the usefulness of

vision in ethics, in his Vision and Virtue (Notre Dame, 1974), but does so specifically to counter
current preoccupation with decision.

12
Bernard Lonergan shows how central passivity is for classical medieval theories of knowing in
his Verbum: Word and Idea in
Aquinas (Notre Dame, 1967).

Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein:

A Shared Enmity
A. Dewey Jensen

The secret is out: Kierkegaard had a lot to do with a lot of books: This has led, or misled
as the case may be, to many reviews, articles, monographs, and books which
"explain" Kierkegaard's thought and life, which "explain" the relationships
between his life and his thought, which "explain" his books, which “explain" the
relationships between the various pseudonyms, and so forth and so on. Although
Wittgenstein wrote somewhat less and published during his lifetime a great deal
less, some thing of the same sort has happened with him as well. I must admit that I am
as inquisitive as anyone, and so I read many of these books, articles, reviews, and
monographs--but somehow very little of them stays with me. If I knew
anything new or even knew how to find out anything new, I would certainly write it
down so that it could be added to the pile and not stay with others. But the
truth is I have nothing new to add by way of explanation. And this is fortunate, I
think, for it has always seemed to me that explanation is out of place with these
two. I

No one would deny that they are both extremely difficult philosophers. And their
hardness is as much a function of their depth as of their originality. It is claimed
about both of them that they wrote for the intelligentsia: Wittgenstein has even
been characterized as a "philosopher's philosopher." Neither one can be
popularized without doing violence to his thought. In short, since they appear so
exclusive it seems that the only thing left is for philosophers to argue about how to explain them.
But I repeat that this seems to me to be misdirection. Of necessity all I can do is suggest this,
for if I were to argue for it, irony of ironies, I would have to do so on the basis of my own
explanation 1 And thus on the basis of my explanation I would be arguing that explanations are
out of place. And think how convoluted that would become in this psychologizing age when
most explanations take the form that A is really Z, if not, indeed, 13 or 108. The most that I can
do then is to make the suggestion as clear as possible. It will perhaps help if we keep in mind
that the questismarkind_oLquestion_thaLwe.ack will to a certain extent shape what wezt. The
question I am suggesting is 'What tartan individual learn-from-titice-men?2 And the principle
which will guide me for the present occasion is this: one _carLdemn much by understanding
tiSiesisLa. philos2pher's enmity. -For enmarirablding, it is not the moment's excitement. 3
Let me, at last, begin then by remarking their common enmity for. what I will call the journalistic
mentality. I must acid-Nit as tpreceed I will betaking about how this mentality affects "us" and
how "we" participate in it, but it should be clearly understood that this is only loud and furious
rhetoric. All of us are full-fledged individuals—of course—and thus do not require the hard
"corrective" which these men present. There may somewhere actually be two or three poor
fellows in need of what Kierkegaard's and Wittgenstein's enmity can teach. I would not like to
speculate on that. In these times, however, when for many years we have pretty much accepted
government by the press as a fact of life, this enmity may seem to be merely quaint. We all
know that we cannot turn back the hands of time, and so we think we must keep up with The
New York Times, Time, and Newsweek. Also numbered among the things that'everyone knows"
is that a “free press is The cornerstone of a free government.” Of course "government" must be
understood here in the broadest terms: not merely the institutions which collect taxes and build
roads and "provide for the common defense," but literally that which furnishes all with which we
occupy our hearts and minds and lives as well as our hands and wallets. And so, for example,
we have Jack Anderson "reporting" everything from classified documents to his claim that a
congressman's wife twice left him after a former secretary claimed to have been his mistress—
and this latter was "reported" while the wife was with her comatose husband in a hospital.
Anderson also "reported" that the husband had dis-cussed suicide with him the week before.4
The wife denied this. Anderson "reported" that there may have been a "misunderstanding."5 At
any rate, accuracy is not the issue here, what we consider news is: for this has to do with how
we fill our lives and spend our hearts and minds. We are governed by our concerns and these
are the concerns which fill newspapers. AntadreXample is the team of Bernstein and
Woodward. They write books at fourth and fifth hand claiming to tell the inside story of not only
the decision making during the last days of the Nixon White House, but also the secret workings
of the inmost hearts and minds of all the principal characters. One wonders why Rona Barrett
does not move east, so well would she fit in. It does not matter, though, for this team has
spiritually moved west. As I understand it, their books are to be made into motion pictures.
Where one's treasure is—and so on.
But we need to notice that these “pen-pushers who belong to the gossip carriers,” 6 as
Kierkegaard in a moment of charity described them, at least sign their names. This is quite
exceptional. The 'news" usually comes from something called UPI or AP. Television news, of
course, is slightly different—but only slightly. There we have news readers and "stories" from
reporter-personalities on the scene. So against the background of burning tanks and scurrying
soldiers, buildings in Washington or Moscow, or occasionally in a change of pace the mourners
at a funeral we get the thirty-second-inside-scoop. As Kierkegaard said so well, "the journalist
must be in on everything.”7 And so it seems must we. This and anonymity are, I believe,
defining features of the journalistic mentality.
That Kierkegaard early set his face against this mentality is well known. It has perhaps been
less well noticed that Wittgenstein shared this enmity, but he did. In June of 1932, for example,
Wittgenstein invited Karl Britton to tea. Here is part of Britton's recollection of that occasion.
During the discussion I ventured the suggestion that I might become a journalist, and at this
[Wittgenstein] was both angry and alarmed. I must at all costs do a real job and not a
secondhand one: he would much rather have heard that I intended to become a thief. 8
I believe, and I hope to illustrate, that this was a matter of genuine enmity for Wittgenstein and
not simply a momentary concern. But first let me rehearse an entry from Kierkegaard's journal,
which entry also includes alternatives preferable to journalism.
Many fine men are to he found among butchers, but a certain brutality is inseparable from being
a butcher; it goes with the pro-It'SSiOrt. It is worse to be a journalist. A certain degree of
dishonesty is inseparable from even the most honest journalist. 9 The race's deepest separation
from God is epitomized by "the journalist." It is a wicked attempt to make an abstraction into an
abslute power, and anonymity is the consummation of the triumph of the lie. If I were a father
and had a daughter who was seduced, I would not despair of her. I would hope for (her)
salvation. But if I had a son who became a journalist and remained one for five years, him I
should give up. 10
What is "the lie"? It is that "an abstraction" presented by the journalistic mentality is an "absolute
power." What is the abstraction? It is the idea of "public opinion." When this lie "triumph[s]" there
is no longer any foundation upon which the individual may build his life—for public opinion is
never com-plete, and thus the individual has no place to stand. Only a person, and in the last
analysis only the person of God, Kierkegaard seems to me to be saying, can be "an absolute
power" in the life of the individual. At any rate—Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein becoming a thief
or being seduced is preferible to journalism as a profession. It is not that Wittgenstein urged
Britton to become a thief. It is not that Kierkegaard would have told his daughter to go out and
be seduced. Rather, something such as this seems to me to be the case. If either of these
lamentable conditions should have come about, Wittgenstein no less than Kierkegaard would
have taken solace in the thought: At least he (she) did not become a journalist. When we
consider that journalism as a profession is by nature commercial, and thus there is a buying
side no less than a selling, their concern would seem to extend to us as well. For if it is
"secondhand" to be a journalist, what is it to be a consumer of the journalist's product? If the
"news" writer is the servant of abstraction, what is it to be a "news" reader? And what of "the lie"
and of "anonymity"? If they are faults of a profession, surely they are compounded faults—in we
who devour the fruits of that profession.
Let me see if I can sort this out, as it might apply today. For remember, my question has to do
with what the individual can learn from these men.
It is clear enough that we are fascinated with the lives of celebrities, whether in show business
or politics or sports or the circles of the idle rich (and who can tell the difference between them
any more?). All one needs to do is notice the so-called exposé sheets on sale at the check-out
counters of any super-market. I say "so-called expose" because we all know they are a joke.
Everything is exposed everywhere these days. And so the expose papers differ from the regular
newspaper only in that the former must consciously and unconscionably be as tasteless as
possible in covering or—hurray for investigative reporting and Playboy! —uncovering pretty
much the same material and people. These concerns are not less vicarious than vulgar. But
Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein are not concerned with mere tastelessness. They may well
address the vicarious phase of this mentality, however; but this can be done only "indirectly,"
lest at the very moment that they correct this in the individual's thought they themselves become
a substitute for his thought. They will not do the individual's thinking for him. In any event,
Kierkegaard remarked in his journal that, "tiff it would pay, I am sure we would get someone to
publish a daily designed to be read only in latrinesin and both he and Wittgenstein were
possessed of vivid and powerful imagina-tions, but I doubt that either of them could have
conceived of the lengths or depths to which we have gone in that direction. No, tastelessness is
the result of the incredible competition in pub-lication; it is not the cause of publication. That
rests with us. For someone has to buy all those papers. And it is here that anonymity enters on
the buyer's side. Buying a newspaper is a little like buying a ticket to a baseball game; the
purchaser at one and the same time becomes an instant expert who can say any-thing up to
and including, "Kill the umpire!" and is lost in the crowd so it makes no difference what he says
or does or is. Everything is reduced to the same level, noise and numbers, and in order for this
to happen, Kierkegaard pointed out,
...it is first of all necessary to procure a phantom, its spirit, a monstrous abstraction, an all-
embracing something which is nothing, a mirage—and that phantom is the public. It is only in an
age which is without passion, yet reflective, that such a phantom can develop itself with the help
of the Press which itself becomes an abstraction. 12
The word "procure" would seem to be aptly chosen here. For just as a procurer obtains girls for
prostitution, sexual congress without love, so "the Press" helps to create as well as cater to
Public Opinion, that is, the having of an opinion without responsibility. We are indeed "reflective"
in that we like to think .ve are "in on everything." But what passes for "passion" these days
seems to be nothing more than getting in the middle of sore "public," for example, shouting for a
few hours with the crowd of two or three hundred thousand in Washington, D.C., or becoming
unionized and striking at the drop of a few luxuries which we regard as "rights," or rabidly
palavering about politics, or copulating in the midst of a mob at a music festival. So Ions: as
"everyone else does it," that is just what we are to do. We define ourselves by one or another
"public" and grant to it the determining power of personality. We know little anthropology, less of
anything worth calling psychology, and no history at all, but the five-or-ten installment series in
the dailies and the articles in the Sunday supplements plus a few "specials" on television give
us the illusion of knowing what the latest findings in these areas are. The question of whether
these are matters that should be described and understood in terms of "findings" in the first
place is quite beyond us. We are too busy with all that we think we "know." We think we know,
that is, pretty much what man has been and can be. It is just a matter of information. This is
presented cheek by jowl with all of the latest news, more information. And since there will be
more latest news "tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow," and these "fastbreaking" stories do
not so much creep in as rush headlong over us, attention is fixed upon the moment. Man has
been and done almost anything; it surpasses the greatest imagination. The point is, what are we
going to be and do right now? It appears that there is an enormously wide spectrum from which
to choose—and who knows what will be in the news tomorrow? However, as an old judge once
wrote to an unsettled young man, "He who would define his life task ethically [rather than
journalistically- aesthetically) has ordinarily not so con-siderable a selection to choose from; on
the other hand, the act of choice has far more importance for him."" But in the journalistic
mentality either one becomes incapable of choosing at all, or "choice" becomes a matter of
snatching at something to fill the moment. Again from Kierkegaard's journal:
On the whole the evil in the daily press consists in its being cal-culated to make, if possible, the
moment a thousand or ten thousand times more inflated and important than it already is. But all
moral upbringing consists first and foremost in being weaned away from the momentary." 14
The contrast here is not between "the momentary" and (say) "the long haul." If one must be
"weaned away from the momentary" it is so that one can be nourished by the eternal. Even
when he did not understand very much else, as he himself was the first to say, Wittgenstein saw
this clearly.
The sense of the world must lie outside the world. (...) If there is any value that does have value,
it must lie outside the whole sphere of what happens and is the cast!' The solution of the riddle
of life in space and time lies outside space and time. (It is certainly not the solution of any
problems of natural science that is required.)16
How much less "required" is anything that the journalistic mentality can furnish! In any event,
notice that Kierkegaard does not say that the moment is not important and the press makes it
seem so. If that were all there were to it, the matter could be corrected easily enough. No, the
moment has its importance, but the press inflates this and thereby distorts and perverts the
individual's perspective of the moment and of himself.
Perhaps it was partly this distortion and perversion which Wittgenstein had in mind when in
1948 he wrote the following to Norman Malcolm's wife.
I think it's a very good idea to make Ray (the Malcoms' son) read to you. To practice reading
aloud well, i.e., carefully, teaches one a lot! E.G. how rotten and slapdash most people, and the
news-papers write; and they write as they think. 17
It seems to me that we can add that as one thinks and writes one also lives. A life lived within
the journalistic mentality then is "rotten and slapdash." One has opinions about everything and
responsibility for nothing. One is safely anonymous in that "monstrous abstraction," that "all-
embracing something which is nothing," that "mirage," the public. One's life becomes some-
thing similar to what used to be a joke. You know the joke I mean, it concerns the man—I
always think of him as sitting there in his undershirt, drinking beer from a can, and con-tinually
missing the ashtray as he flips ashes from his cigar; if you choose, you may think of him as
clothed in a leisure suit, politely and impeccably sipping a cocktail at a party for that purpose;
both are equally slovenly of soul—at any rate, the man is busy explaining that he makes all the
important decisions in his family and relegates the unimportant ones to his wife. The important
decisions are whether or not the country should con-tinue to support the United Nations, pursue
detente, recognize The People's Republic of Viet Nam, increase aid to Africa and South
America, legalize abortion and marijuana and pornography, retain the Panama Canal, continue
genetic research and space exploration, and so forth and so on. The unimportant decisions
which the wife makes concern where the family will live (and how they will live there), the father
work (and how he will understand his working), the children go to school; where they will go to
church; whether they will buy a new washing machine or a color television (or whether they will
watch television at all); and what they will have for supper. How did that man become a joke?
Kierkegaard's journal once again provides an answer.
Gradually, as more and more men are torn out of the state of innocence in which they are not in
the least obliged to have an opinion, and [become] 'obliged' (it is every man's duty, the
journalists say) to have an opinion—what are the poor men to do? An opinion becomes a
necessary article for the whole great public—and so the journalist offers his services in hiring
out opinions. He works in two ways: first, he impresses upon us with all his power that it is
necessary for every man to have an opinion, and second, he recommends his own assortment
to us. The journalist makes men ridiculous in two ways. First, by making them believe that it is
necessary to have an opinion—and this is perhaps the most ridiculous side of the matter: some,
unfortunate decent citizen, who could have such a good time, is now taught to think that he
must have an opinion. And second, by hiring them out an opinion which in spite of its airy quality
is put on and worn as—a necessary article." 18
By becoming a jack-of-all-trades in the realm of opinion, the man—a member of the public who
is no doubt shoulder to shoulder with the journalist in defending "the public's right to know"—the
man has failed to master his own self, because he has not developed a self to master. He is one
of those whose con-sciousness, in the words of Screwtape (who is fiendishly happy about it),
"hardly exists apart from the social atmosphere that surrounds them."19 He has become an
abstraction. The Romans had circus performers who could ride four horses at once. They
galloped abreast and the rider stood on the middle two and only the reins in his hands united
the horses and made of them a team. What a picture of human strength and grace! As
Kierkegaard might have put it, we pretend to have gone further: we ride four horses galloping in
opposite directions. The only difference is that we must splay ourselves out in a most ungainly
fashion in order to have a hand or a foot on every mount—and no amount of human strength or
grace can save the rider from being utterly destroyed as an individual.
Kierkegaard's devotion to "the individual" is legendary.20 I believe Wittgenstein shared this
devotion; in any event, someone who knows far more about this than I has characterized
Wittgenstein's work as an art.
The point is that the object [of the art] is not a science of mis-leading expressions from which
one can now figure out what is misleading some stranger. The object is to assist some
individual, always an individual, to help him discover what misleads and has misled him. When
he says: "Now, I see" and breathes a sigh of relief, even though it may be a bit sheepishly, that
is the moment to which the art is directed.21
But how is the individual to be helped? Socrates, following the oracular injunction to "Know
thyself," held that "The unexamined life is not worth living." It seems to me that these two can
help us learn 22 to know ourselves, to examine our lives by examining how we think. And there
is nothing exclusive about this, for each individual can and must only do this for himself. It may
well be that there is something "queer" about the question (or the very form of the question)
"What is thinking?" But Wittgenstein described it as "a natural question." And he went on to say
that
anyone who is free from the temptation to ask this question is lucky or a monster or a stone.23
How much more "natural" are the "eternal questions" (as Ivan Karamazov called them) about
God, freedom, and immortality. Insofar as Wittgenstein's "outlook was grim,"24 we can assume
that he did not consider very many people to be "lucky." This leaves us monsters or stones 25 if
we are not tempted to raise these questions—even though there may be something quite
confused in the way we raise them. But in the journalistic mentality these questions, questions
as to how the individual is to understand himself and his life, can not arise at all. It is as though
they had been answered for all time: the individual is part of the public and thus his primary task
is to discover what the public thinks—then he will know what to think. Monsters and stones
indeed! The human course would seem to be for the individual to learn to think his way with and
through these questions for himself. He becomes his own philosopher. And remains so, for
surely one never finishes with loving wisdom. I believe this is what Johannes Climacus had in
mind when he said that"...the ideal of a persistent striving is the only view of life that does not
carry with it an inevitable disillusionment."26
Perhaps the first and most crucial step in becoming one's own philosopher is to learn what
really are one's concerns. And in order to do this one must be "weaned away from the
momentary." This is doubly difficult, of course, because one can not learn this independently of
learning how to think. As Wittgenstein continually emphasized, one must learn to construe
distinctions. But if one "must be in on everything" distinctions are simply lost in the shuffle.
Having opposed the mentality that sees every question as a question of information and thereby
blurs distinctions, Wittgenstein could say that he was "...destroying...nothing but houses of cards
[in opposing this mentality] and [was] clearing up the ground of language on which they
stand."27
The results of philosophy (that is, "the love of wisdom") are the uncovering of one or another
piece of plain nonsense and of bumps that the understanding has got by running its head up
against the limits of language. These bumps make us see the value of the discovery.28
I take it that part of the value is that the individual is now able to stop talking and thinking and
living "nonsense"—at least in one instance. This evening and tomorrow he will have to con-tinue
to think, and thinking well takes time—as well as how much else? But thinking in a "rotten and
slapdash" manner about "abstractions"—in many cases what Kierkegaard also described as the
"fantastic" creations of the professors—this can be done pretty quickly. From item to item to
item, one, two, three, we "think" about everything, have an "opinion" about everything. As the
poet Johannes de Silentio expressed it, "...people do not know what they ought to say but only
that they must say something."29
Of course I am not suggesting that if one did have "but world enough, and time" one could think
well about everything. That would be tantamount to admitting that one really should "be in on
everything," and thus the journalistic mentality's con-descending condensation would once
again be a "necessary article." As if a journalistic overview and inside peek were the next best
thing to getting all the details, which we can not do because of the lack of time. It might just be
that "...time itself is the task..., "as Johannes Climacus once said; if so, "...it becomes a fault to
finish before the time has transpired."30 But some people are able to read two or three
newspapers before breakfast. So by a strange kind of distortion the journalistic mentality would
seem at once to "be in on everything" and to finish far too quickly with any particular thing.
In any event, though time may be "the task," it is the individual's time which is the concern of
Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein. And the challenge which these two offer to the individual is more
than a caution against wasting time. They force us to consider whether, even if we should be
successful beyond our wildest dreams, the undertaking has any worth, whether it is our
concern. Taking account of time and recognizing distinctions are important elements in this, but
finally the challenge is as much a matter of character as of intellect. Having thought and fought
his way into the relation-ships between time and thinking and character, Climacus with-drew
from the journalistic mentality.
Believe me, [he said] I, too, am a man of power even if I do say it myself, while people in
general may perhaps be disposed to put me in a class with theologues and village
schoolmasters. I am a man of power; but my power is not that of a ruler or a conqueror, for the
only power I have is the power to hold in check. Nor is my power of wide extent, for I have
power only over myself, and I do not even have this power unless I exercise it every moment. I
have not the time directly to hold my contemporaries in check, and besides I think that trying to
restrain an entire contemporary age is like a passenger in a carriage holding on to the seat in
front of him in order to stop the carriage: he determines himself in continuity with the age, and
yet he wishes to hold it in check. No, the only thing to do is to get out of the carriage, ¿and so
hold oneself in check. 31
The challenge, then, is, I believe, a matter of whether the individual has the character to "get out
of the carriage" of the journalistic mentality. In general this would mean giving up the pleasant
power of having an opinion without responsibility, seeing through the illusion that one must be in
on everything, and recognizing for oneself "the lie" of abstraction. At this poinr one may begin to
learn from Kierkegaard and Wittgen-stein—not what to think, but—how to think for oneself. In
more, particular terms this would probably amount to answering "Ii don't know" to many
questions asked over coffee and donuts, and drinks during the ten o'clock break and at cocktail
parties. As Wittgenstein said in a different context, "The difficulty in [the love of widsom] is to say
no more than we know." 32
I will conclude or at any rate stop talking soon after I have recounted one more instance of
enmity for the journalistic mentality. The following is an episode which took place between
Wittgenstein and Norman Malcolm and was recorded by the latter.
One time when we were walking along the river we saw a news-vendor's sign which announced
that the German govern-ment accused the British government of instigating a recent attempt to
assassinate Hitler with a bomb. This was in the autumn of 1939. Wittgenstein said of the
German claim: it would not sur-prise me at all if it were true.' I retorted that I could not believe
that the top people in the British government would do such a thing. I meant that the British
were too civilized and decent to attempt anything so underhand; and I added that such an act
was incom-patible with the British 'national character.' My remark made Wittgenstein extremely
angry. He considered it to be a great stupidity and also an indication that I was not learning
anything from the philosophical training that he was trying to give me. He said these things very
vehemently, and when I refused to admit that my remark was stupid he would not talk to me any
more… 33
I can not help thinking that Wittgenstein was as angry with himself for opining of the headlines;'
as he was with Malcolm for thinking in terms of vacuous abstractions. In any event, the episode
and expression stayed with him, for fully five years later he wrote to Malcolm about it.
I thought you had almost forgotten me, or perhaps wished to forget me. I had a particular reason
for thinking this. Whenever I thought of you I couldn't help thinking of a particular incident which
seemed to me very important. You and I were walking along the river towards the railway bridge
and we had a heated discussion in which you made a remark about 'national character that
shocked me by its primitiveness. I then thought: what is the use of studying philosophy if all that
it does for you is to enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of
logic, etc., and if it does not improve your thinking about the important questions of everyday
life, if it does not make you more conscientious than any...journalist in the use of the dangerous
phrases such people use for their own ends. You see, I know that it's difficult to think well about
“certainty,"probability,"perception,' etc. But it is, if possible, still more difficult to think, or try to
think, really honestly about your life and other peoples lives.35
This does not seem to me to be exclusive in a fashion which calls for explanation by experts. It
is, certainly, exclusive in the way that every either/or is exclusive: either the individual learns to
think well, that is, honestly for himself; or he does not. But that either/or confronts every
individual. And it leads to a second either/or concerning the nature of philosophy: either
philosophy is a matter of "abstruse questions of logic" in which few will be interested and fewer
still expert; or it is literally the love of wisdom—the love of the capacity to think correctly in "the
important questions of everyday life"—which is presumably possible for any person. One might
take the words of Socrates to describe this either/or:
Those who are agreed and those who are not agreed upon this point have no common ground,
and can only despise one another when they see how widely they differ. 36
Notes
1 No doubt there are philosophers, more sophisticated than I, who will find an "implied
explanation" in what I say. In a similar manner, there are philosophers who find a "theory" under
every utterance and action. But this has always seemed to me to tell us more about the finder
than about that which is presumed to have been found.
2 As contrasted with, for example, What truths did they discover? or, What doctrines did they
hold? or, What were their systems? or, Were they right about this or that?
3 They both regarded professional philosophy with enmity, of course, but that hits far too dose
to home to pursue. 4 One can not help but wonder what took place in that discussion. For
example, do you suppose Anderson called him up and asked, "Are you going to kill yourself
now?" Or perhaps he was more direct and merely said, "I suppose you will have to kill yourself."
The response might well have been along the lines, "God yes! I will kill myself before I'll talk to
you." But would this really constitute a "discussion"? This question, although perhaps more
significant than the questions which generally are raised by newspapers intentionally or not,
should itself never have arisen. For if there is something wrong with gossip, the article should
never have been read, should never have been written, the "discussion," whatever it was like,
should never have taken place. The important question concerns what the individual has control
over.
5 The Lincoln Star, Lincoln, Nebraska, Saturday, June 12, 1976, p. 2.
6 Soren Kierkegaard's Journals and Papers, edited and translated by Howard V. Hong and
Edna H. Hong, assisted by Gregor Malantschuk, Indiana University Press, Bloomington and
London, 1970, vol. 2, p. 476 (1838).
7 Ibid (1845-47).
8 From "Portrait of a Philosopher," by Karl Britton, in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s: The Man and His
Philosophy, edited by K. T. Fann, Dell Pubbs"^g Co., Inc., New York, 1967, p. 59.
9 Having been a butcher for seven years in my youth, this passage is particularly striking to me.
When I began, the butcher in many instances was responsible for every step of the process
which (magically, it seems these days) resulted in a tray of sausage or a package of round
steak in the display case: slaughtering, dressing out, ikinning, halving, quartering, and so on. No
doubt it is the first two or three steps which seemed brutal to Kierkegaard. Nonetheless, I think
the word is ill-chosen, though the contrast is right enough. It is difficult if not impossible to
entertain pretensions to multi- if not outright omni-science when one has gore and viscera up to
one's elbows. This posture can be maintained easily enough, however, when one is surrounded
by memos, telegrams, typewriters, deadlines, "action," tape to be edited, important people,
camera crews, a salivating and apparently omnivorous public, and so forth and so on.
10 Hong and Hong (ed.), op. cit., p. 485 (1849).
11 Hong and Hong (ed.), op. cit., p. 478 (1846).
12 The Present Age, Soren Kierkegaard, translated by Alexander Dru, Harper and Row, New
York, 1962, pp. 59-60.
13 Either/Or, Soren Kierkegaard, translated by Walter Lowrie, with revisions and a foreword by
Howard A. Johnson, Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 1971, vol. 2, p. 171.
14 Hong and Hong (ed.), op. cit., p. 483 (1848).
15 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Ludwig Wittgenstein, translated by D. F. Pears and B. F.
McGuinness, Routledge and Kegan Paul. London, 1961, p. 145 (6.41).
16 Wittgenstein, op. cit., p. 149 (6.4312).
17 Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir, Norman Malcolm. Oxford Uni-versity Press, London, 1962,
p. 74. Verba cunt indices animi.
18 The Last Years: Journals 1853-1855, edited and translated by Ronald Gregor Smith, Harper
and Row, New York and Evanston, 1965, pp. 218-219.
19 From "Screwtape Proposes a Toast" in The World's Last Night, C. S. Lewis, Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, Inc., New York, 1973. p. 54.
20 Which is perhaps unfortunate. Anything of these pro-portions—especially in a "reflective"
age—is easily misunder-stood or simply ignored as an obvious exaggeration. But this is a little
as if Pygmies regarded Watusis as exaggerations.
21 From "The Blue Book" in Philosophical Essays, 0. K. Bouwsma, Uni-versity of Nebraska
Press, Lincoln, 1965, p. 190.
22 No one can teach this ("directly"), but, as I said, perhaps it can be learned from Wittgenstein
and Kierkegaard. They may serve as our midwives.
23 "Philosophical Psychology," Ludwig Wittgenstein, mimeograph of 1946-47 lectures, p. 1.
24 From "A Symposium: Assessments of the Man and the Philosopher," III, by Norman
Malcolm, in Fann (ed.), op. cit., p. 74.
25 Or perhaps saints; although some saints have certainly addressed these questions.
26 Kierkegaard's Concluding Unscientific Postscript, translated by David F. Swenson and
Walter Lowrie, Princeton University Press, 1941, p. 110. In somewhat more earthy terms,
"Wittgenstein used to say to [Rush Rheesi, 'Go the bloody hard way’.” (Without Answers, Rush
Rhees, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1969, p. 169).
27 Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein, translated by G.E.M. Anscombe, The
Macmillan Company, New York, 1953, p. 48 (#118).
28 Ludwig Wittgenstein, op. cit., p. 48 (#119).
29 Fear and Trembling, Soren Kierkegaard, translated by Walter Lowrie, Princeton University
Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 1954, p. 66.
30 Postscript, p. 147.
31 Ibid.
32 The Blue and Brown Books, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Harper and Brothers, New York, 1960, p.
45.
33 Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir, p. 32
34 Someone might be inclined to ask, "Aren't you saying in all this that we should give up
reading newspapers? But how then are we to be responsible citizens?" 1 reply that, 1.1 do not
think 1 said that. 2. Both Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein were geniuses, and yet they refused to
think for others, though they labored to show what it is to think. Being possessed of far humbler
powers, 1 am content to direct attention to them. 3. Perhaps the issue is not whether
newspapers should be read, but rather whether the individual will bring thought and character to
that reading or will allow the reading to define and determine his personality.
35 Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir, p. 39.
36 Crito (Jowett translation), 49c.