Wittgenstenian Philosophy and the Mirror of the Divine

It is something of an event in this doctoral candidate’s work to advance a theme in Wittgenstein’s philosophy, relate it to the professional arguments being advanced in spirituality and the sciences, and reflect upon it as follows the contributions of the invitees to the Oxford Seminar hosted by Dr. Kevin Sharpe. My sincere thanks go to him. For Wittgenstein, philosophy was the ability to provide a clear and forceful statement in a debate, to distinguish the central threads from the side-issues. If Wittgenstein were alive today, I believe he would find the tangled arguments in the field of science and spirituality worthy of philosophy’s mission.

The books by Arthur Peacocke, Kevin Sharpe, and Ian Barbour comprise the required readings for this seminar. To relate this literature to Wittgenstein I have selected two books. They are: Frederick Sontag’s Wittgenstein and the Mystical: Philosophy as an Ascetic Practice (1995), and Ray Monk’s outstanding biography, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (1990). Wittgenstein is one of the players in the dramatis personae of my PDE.

Before looking at the assigned readings, I offer a few remarks about Ludwig Wittgenstein. To a notable Viennese family, Wittgenstein was born on April 26, 1889. He was the youngest of eight children, all of whom were generously endowed with artistic and intellectual talent. His paternal grandfather was a convert from Judaism to Protestantism, and his mother was a Roman Catholic; he was baptized in the Catholic Church. He died April 28, 1951, and was given a Catholic burial at St. Giles’s Church, Cambridge. Wittgenstein possessed one of the most acute philosophical minds of the twentieth century. He is known internationally as a founder of analytical philosophy. What is less well known is his spiritual disposition. Mr. Sontag’s book studies this dimension of Wittgenstein. Mr. Monk’s richly textured biography shows us that although Wittgenstein was unable to believe in God, the “hound of heaven” invaded his life and work. What he held to was this notion.

We feel that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched. […] There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 6.52, 6.522.

“The mystical” greatly disturbed his conviction that philosophical language could be made clear and unambiguous, yet for all of the difficulty, it could not be dismissed. The nature of language—its epistemological and ontological structures—was to be his burden. Wittgenstein held that language is neither the whole nor the sole approach to knowledge. Some things may come to be known without the mediation of language; they can only be grasped by the mind directly. God was of such immensity that any language about God was “nonsensical”. Paving this way was Augustine who wrote, “For you grant that the cognition of things in superior to the sign of things” (qtd. in Sontag, 102). The significance of the mystical lies in the assertion that it draws us, but language can only mirror it. In other words, it is itself beyond words. Thus, language may be the necessary, but it certainly is not the sufficient condition for knowledge of the mystical; it remains on all accounts beyond the human reach of language. I use this theme as a way to read and reflect on some of the issues raised by our authors.

I’ll begin with Arthur Peacocke. In his book Paths From Science Towards God (2001), Mr. Peacocke advances and promotes a frame of mind that he calls critical realism. He points out that scientists are critical realists; their axiom is that the natural world is real. All of their efforts lead to “a progressive and continuous discovery of hidden structures” of the natural world (23). Thus, the “gales of postmodernism” (23) cannot blow the edifice of science down. Mr. Peacocke wants critical realism to pervade religious dialogue. He writes, “The religious quest must have intellectual integrity and take into account the realities unveiled by twentieth-century science” (9). IBE, the model of science, which uncovers the “embedded rationality” (48) of the natural world, should be, on Mr. Peacocke’s advocacy, applied to theological studies (27). Since IBE is good enough for science, it is good enough for religion. Indeed, he tells us that IBE is “congenial to my scientific presuppositions” (161). Since IBE underwrites “intellectual integrity” for the sciences, Mr. Peacocke “urges” that its authorization be applied to religious studies (30). He uses this method to balance the age-old dualism between immanence and transcendence, and his book is a sustained presentation for the notion of panentheism.

Citing the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, Mr. Peacocke quotes the definition of panentheism. It is “‘The belief that the Being of God includes and penetrates the whole universe, so that every part of it exist in Him, but (as against Pantheism) that His Being is more than, and is not exhausted by, the universe’” (187). On his view panentheism “provides a coherent model of God’s agency in the world—God’s instrumental relation to it” (146). It is the “very warp and woof of the universe…integrat[ing]…the divine, the human and the (non-human) natural” (159). “God is located simply everywhere in space and time, [so] God could affect holistically the state of the world-System (Peacocke’s emphasis). […Panentheism] provides a flexible route for the transmission of divinely influenced information from the world-System as a whole down to particular systems with that whole” (110). This viewpoint provides Mr. Peacocke with a path on which science and religion are fellow explorers. Concerning epistemological warrant, then, science and theology are coeval (30).

Panentheism appears to be a neat way to dissolve the “conviction that the world-System is causally closed” (111), by asserting that God’s interaction with the world occurs from the inside. It “seems to be a fruitful way of combining God’s ultimate otherness with God’s ability to interface holistically with the world-System” (111). Nevertheless, dualism remains. While Mr. Peacocke advocates panentheism, he tells us that, “But one has to recognize that there will always be a distinction, and so a gulf, between the nature of God and that of all created entities, structures and processes—the notorious ‘ontological gap at the causal joint’”(111). In other words, “our side of the boundary” remains (111).

This notion of boundary presents a lacuna, which I believe Wittgenstein would exploit. This lacuna puts attention on the nature of language, and not on outcomes where Mr. Peacocke would have it (160). Wittgenstein held that “We cannot speak or form any conception of God…God surpasses the apprehension of thought, and beyond utterance it surpasses the reach of words. Just as Wittgenstein warns his readers in the Tractatus, so too does Dionysius who says, “do not seek with impotent presumption the Mystery’” (qtd in Sontag, 92). John Keat’s phrase of “negative capability” and the anonymous author, who penned the Cloud of Unknowing, can also, I believe, be drawn upon to express Wittgenstein’s thinking about the mystical. In our reach for knowledge of this phenomenon, we encounter an inability of, a limitation, to language. Wittgenstein said, “What is eternal and important is often hidden from a man by an impenetrable veil” (qtd in Sontag, 26). Thus, “What is mirrored in language I cannot use language to express” (qtd. in Sontag, 34).

Even if the “mirror of the mind” were “clear and polished” as Bonaventura impelled us to do (Sontag, 100), we still confront a problem of how knowledge of the divine, once contained in the mind, and gained by means of language, is related to it. Wittgenstein struggled with this; indeed, a struggle lasting his whole life. Only when language, when driven to its purest form, can it reflect the fundamental spiritual nature of the world. Wittgenstein’s serious philosophical pursuit had an affinity to mysticism, which of necessity was coeval with the search for purity and forgiveness. Ray Monk’s biography painfully shows how philosophy for Wittgenstein was an ascetic practice.

The paradox we confront in our reach for knowledge of the Transcendent is that lies outside of what can be spoken. To this point, Mr. Peacocke quotes with approval T.S. Eliot who said that “words ‘strain, crack, and sometimes break, under the burden’ of striving to express and refer to such a Transcendent” (40). […] [T]his Ultimate Reality, is bound to be inexpressible…” (40). In fact Mr. Peacocke admits that to say that God has “joy and delight in creation” fully points to “our limited resources of personal language” (85). I suggest that Einstein’s popular aphorism be turned on its head to become: The eternal mystery of the world is its inexpressibility. [A note in passing. Einstein believed that the mystical is the breeder reactor, so to write, of science. How his notion of the mystical differs from Wittgenstein remains for investigation.]

“Because of our limitations,” Kevin Sharpe writes in his book Sleuthing the Divine: The Nexus of Science and Spirit (2000), we can’t know everything about the Divine.” Continuing he writes,

A lot about divinity will elude us forever. The Divine possesses infinite depth. Our understandings merely glimpse [could I say mirror] the unknown that forms both reality and the Divine, and they both slip through our concepts. Some of our understanding of the Divine may fit perfectly and some may miss the mark, but we’ll never find out either way. And we can’t know whether what we do know of the Divine is completely true. This realization allows for both mystery and knowledge. (78)

Two additional passages bear quoting in full.

To search with honesty requires the wisdom of our experience and an awareness of limits. We need to be wary, but persist in our struggle for sense. (30) […] Language breaks down when talking about a supposed something that happened outside of time and space. […] Should we give up in despair and cease all talk of objects or beings or events outside space and time? No. Though we fumble in our language, we nonetheless should humbly assume we can understand this talk, that it makes sense. But we should proceed with caution. (34)

It seems to me that these passages could touch a cognitive nerve in Wittgenstein’s thought. “What belongs to the essence of the world cannot be expressed by language” (qtd. in Sontag, 28). In thinking along with Wittgenstein, I find myself believing that our concerns are always wider than our language competency.

From his World War years where, behind enemy lines he wrote the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus wherein he defended the rigor and clarity of logic to his final years of apocalyptic anxiety, Wittgenstein’s life was a continuous struggle of torment, loneliness, and exhaustion. Through it all, Ray Monk tells us that Wittgenstein “had lived a devoutly religious life” (580). Was he a philosopher or a monk? Neither could he believe in God as the world’s creator nor have faith in mankind. Both God and man burdened him. Monk’s incisive portrait of Wittgenstein’s life tells us that he firmly believed that “mankind was headed for disaster” which was a “consequence of replacing the spirit with the machine, of turning away from God and placing our trust in scientific ‘progress’” (Monk, 489). To use Mr. Sharpe’s words, but certainly not his conviction, “Science and the Divine [for Wittgenstein] sit incommunicado on different shelves” (50).

If Wittgenstein could have vanquished all of the perplexities of language and have ceased his brooding over the scientific Weltanschauung of his time, the fact “that the world exists” is what he saw as essential. As Mr. Sontag profoundly points out if knowledge should disappear “things of the world would still exist…while neither language nor knowledge could exist alone, if the objects to which language refers should cease to exist” (96). The existence of the world is, for Wittgenstein, mystical. The mystical made human life meaningful. In his life the “mystical played an immense part…” (Sontag 86). And to feel all that was mystical about existence, Wittgenstein went out to the wilderness to live an ascetic life. He was a penitent in search for forgiveness and salvation. Wittgenstein’s biography painfully shows this.

The purpose of Mr. Sharpe’s book is “to join science and spirituality at their deepest levels” (142). This nexus draws upon the field of sociobiology. He urges the development of ethics based on sociobiology. Besides language or because of it, ethics loomed large for Wittgenstein. Mr. Sharpe and Wittgenstein want their thinking to accomplish great things for the human condition. The words of Epictetus, quoted by Mr. Sontag, I believe are equally relevant to them. “Vain are the words of the philosopher…if they heal no suffering of man” (Sontag, 6). While the strides they take to discover ethical comportment are very different indeed—one through science and the other through asceticism—it seems to me that in the end their search has some common ground.

The signposts for Mr. Sharpe point to, of course, the nexus of science and religion. This partnership gives vitality to the field of sociobiology. “We can and should use sociobiology to help in moral decision making” (134), he writes. As “evidence for sociobiology continues to mount” (118) “biology and culture are inseparable. They evolve together” (120). This evolution gives us “altruism as a moral guideline” (152). With resounding conviction he tell us: “Altruism will win, biological altruism will win, and humanity will survive” (159). To heal our suffering and to sustain our “social and cosmic environment” (158) altruism is the needed tonic. It will “limit our self-centered qualities” for if care is not taken to know these limitations our survival is threatened (158). Mr. Sharpe correctly points out that self-centeredness drives human nature; however, balance is essential and biological altruism “can achieve this balance” (158).

As Mr. Monk puts it, Wittgenstein’s “life might be said to have been dominated by a moral struggle—the struggle to be anständig (decent), which for him meant, above all, overcoming the temptations presented by his pride and vanity to be dishonest” (Monk, 278). Wittgenstein was a man who was intently bound up in the ethical life. Mr. Monk’s biography shows that harsh self-judgment, the striving for the pure and the ascetic life characterized many of Wittgenstein’s days. In the end, he damaged himself. The balance that Mr. Sharpe properly advocates was absent in Wittgenstein’s life.

The self-same principle that provides common ground for Mr. Sharpe and Wittgenstein is that given that the Divine is amoral (Sharpe, 129) and that the divine for Wittgenstein is nonsensical, “the good”, of necessity, “is a human ideal” (Sharpe, 153). In drawing attention to altruism, Mr. Sharpe illuminates what for Wittgenstein was fundamental about an ethical life, namely, to be mindful of human egoism.

Ian Barbour’s book, When Science Meets Religion (2000), Chapter 6 “God and Nature” builds upon the perspective of self-limitation that I want to add to this paper. His fourfold typology masterfully arranges the extensive literature in science and religion; I look forward to examining it in our seminar. At present, an idea in the last chapter “God and Nature” occupies my interest.

Human self-limitation for which Wittgenstein was a proponent appears to me to find its kin in the “ancient theme of kenosis (divine self-limitation) (Barbour, 168). Mr. Barbour brings to our attention six writers who explore kenosis, three of whom I should read. Intrigued by this idea, further reading awaits for it appears to me that it can illuminate an understanding of Wittgenstein. Thus, I can only touch upon this here.

First is W.H. Vanstone Love’s Endeavor, Love’s Expense (1977). He quotes an early Christian hymn found in a letter of Paul to the church at Philippi. From Mr. Vanstone, Mr. Barbour cites Ph. 2:7-8, but in reading this Pauline letter, I prefer to cite Ph. 2:6-8.

His state was divine,

yet he did not cling

to his equality with God

but emptied himself

to assume the condition of a slave,

and became as men are;

and being as all men are,

he was humbler yet,

even to accepting death,

death on a cross.

As I understand it, the verbs “emptied” and “humbled” galvanize the idea of kenosis. If this is true, the importance is significant for Wittgenstein. In giving away his share of his vast inheritance, and living at times the life of a monk in his Norwegian hut, Wittgenstein certainly emptied and humbled himself.

Nancey Murphy, a philosophical theologian, and Geroge Ellis, a theoretical physicist are two additional writers who explore this theme in On the Moral Nature of the Universe: Theology, Cosmology, and Ethics (1996). Mr. Barbour says that they defend

a theology of kenosis that accepts both divine and human self-limitation. They maintain that self-sacrificial love in the life and death of Christ is a revelation of the nature of God and also provides an ethical norm of nonviolence for the Christian today. “The proper response to a kenotic God is a kenotic relation to God and to all God’s creation.” (169)

* * *

The fecundity of ideas raised by Misters Peacocke, Sharpe, and Barbour far exceeds this summation. I focused my effort on a few ideas from their works that intersect, quite fruitfully Wittgensteinian thought. As I deepen my study of him, I will return to these points of intersection. I am sympathetic to the idea of God’s self-limited omniscience. It would be interesting to search the literature about Wittgenstein and divine self-limitation. Furthermore, a perspective forged on nonlocality, the subuniverse, and quantum uncertainty, aptly explored by Mr. Sharpe, provides another intellectual field for studying Wittgenstein, albeit an innovative one. As I garner more knowledge about Wittgenstein and while it would be a hefty effort, I would be intrigued to place him in Mr. Barbor’s conflict—independence—dialogue—integration model. My final thought returns me to Mr. Peacocke whose last remark in his study is momentous: “For the God we seek is seeking us” (174). If Wittgenstein could have believed this, perhaps he would have found the love that he so desperately needed.