How Things Are in the World: Metaphysics and Theology in Wittgenstein and Rahner

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How Things Are in the World

Marquette Studies in Theology Andrew Tallon, editor Frederick M. Bliss. Understanding Reception Martin Albl, Paul Eddy, and Rene Mirkes, OSF, editors. Directions in New Testament Methods Robert M. Doran. Subject and Psyche Kenneth Hagen, editor. The Bible in the Churches. How Various Christians Interpret the Scriptures Jamie T. Phelps, O.P., editor. Black and Catholic: The Challenge and Gift of Black Folk. Contributions of African American Experience and Thought to Catholic Theology Karl Rahner. Spirit in the World. CD Karl Rahner. Hearer of the Word. CD Robert M. Doran. Theological Foundations. Vol. 1 Intentionality and Psyche Robert M. Doran. Theological Foundations. Vol. 2 Theology and Culture. Patrick W. Carey. Orestes A. Brownson: A Bibliography, 1826-1876 Patrick W. Carey, editor. The Early Works of Orestes A. Brownson. Volume I: The Universalist Years, 1826-29 Patrick W. Carey, editor. The Early Works of Orestes A. Brownson. Volume II: The Free and Unitarian Years, 1830-35 Patrick W. Carey, editor. The Early Works of Orestes A. Brownson. Volume III: The Transcendentalist Years, 1836-38 John Martinetti, S.J. Reason to Believe Today George H. Tavard. Trina Deitas: The Controversy between Hincmar and Gottschalk Jeanne Cover, IBVM. Love: The Driving Force. Mary Ward’s Spirituality. Its Significance for Moral Theology David A. Boileau, editor. Principles of Catholic Social Teaching Michael Purcell. Mystery and Method: The Other in Rahner and Levinas W.W. Meissner, S.J., M.D. To the Greater Glory: A Psychological Study of Ignatian Spirituality Virginia M. Shaddy, editor. Catholic Theology in the University: Source of Wholeness Thomas M. Bredohl. Class and Religious Identity: The Rhenish Center Party in Wilhelmine Germany William M. Thompson and David L. Morse, editors. Voegelin’s Israel and Revelation: An Interdisciplinary Debate and Anthology

Donald L. Gelpi, S.J. The Firstborn of Many: A Christology for Converting Christians. Volume 1: To Hope in Jesus Christ Donald L. Gelpi, S.J. The Firstborn of Many: A Christology for Converting Christians. Volume 2: Synoptic Narrative Christology Donald L. Gelpi, S.J. The Firstborn of Many: A Christology for Converting Christians. Volume 3: Doctrinal and Practical Christology Stephen A. Werner. Prophet of the Christian Social Manifesto. Joseph Husslein, S.J.: His Life, Work, & Social Thought Gregory Sobolewski. Martin Luther: Roman Catholic Prophet Matthew C. Ogilvie. Faith Seeking Understanding: The Functional Specialty, “Systematics” in Bernard Lonergan’s Method in Theology Timothy Maschke, Franz Posset, and Joan Skocir, editors. Ad fontes Lutheri: Toward the Recovery of the Real Luther: Essays in Honor of Kenneth Hagen’s Sixty-Fifth Birthday William Thorn, Phillip Runkel, and Susan Mountin, editors. Dorothy Day and The Catholic Worker Movement: Centenary Essays Michele Saracino. On Being Human: A Conversation with Lonergan and Levinas Ian Christopher Levy. John Wyclif: Scriptural Logic, Real Presence, and the Parameters of Orthodoxy Michael Horace Barnes & William P. Roberts, editors. A Sacramental Life: A Festschrift Honoring Bernard Cooke

How Things Are in the World Metaphysics and Theology in Wittgenstein and Rahner

Terrance W. Klein

Marquette University Press

Marquette Studies in Theology No. 39 Series Editor, Andrew Tallon Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data Klein, Terrance W., 1958How things are in the world : metaphysics and theology in Wittgenstein and Rahner / by Terrance W. Klein. p. cm. — (Marquette studies in theology ; no. 39) Includes bibliographical references and indexes. ISBN 0-87462-691-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1889-1951. 2. Rahner, Karl, 19043.Language and languages—Philosophy. 4. Transcendence (Philosophy) I. Title. II. Marquette studies in theology ; #39. B3376.W564K54 2003 192—dc22 2003020848

© Marquette University Press 2003 All rights reserved.

Marquette University Press Member, American Association of University Presses Association of Jesuit University Presses

Table of Contents

1. The World as a Cipher of Transcendence 1.1 Why Wittgenstein? .............................................................. 9 1.2 The self, the world, and God ............................................. 14 1.3 Fides et Ratio ...................................................................... 17 2. Wittgenstein’s World 2.1 The world and God of the Tractatus ................................... 21 2.2 Whereof we cannot speak .................................................. 32 3. A World Thaws 3.1 A World of Worlds ............................................................ 47 3.2 Language Games ................................................................ 57 3.3 Forms of Life ..................................................................... 63 4. The Grammar of Knowledge 4.1 On the grammar of knowing others ................................... 75 4.2 The grammar of knowing God in the Investigations ........... 84 4.3 Criteria and certainty ......................................................... 90 4.4 Knowing within and beyond the world ........................... 102 5. Questioning the World 5.1 The metaphysical impulse ................................................ 111 5.2 Wittgenstein and analogical language .............................. 123 5.3 Humanity as a potentia obedientialis ................................. 126 5.4 What must be the case in order to know? ........................ 133 5.5 The whither of human knowledge ................................... 137

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Terrance W. Klein: How Things Are in the World

6. A Human Way of Knowing 6.1 Rahner’s questioning as dynamism .................................. 150 6.2 The historical turn ........................................................... 158 6.3 Space as S achspiel .......................................................... 163 6.4 Spirit in the world ........................................................... 171 7. Revelation as Sprachspiel 7.1 Natural and supernatural ................................................. 175 7.2 Oportet philosophari in theologia ....................................... 179 7.3 Language and experience ................................................. 183 7.4 Fides quaerens vocem ......................................................... 197 8. Word of the Father 8.1 The experience making expression possible ...................... 213 8.2 The forge of language ...................................................... 223 8.3 Meaning Incarnate ........................................................... 233 9. Conclusion ........................................................................... 243 Works Cited ............................................................................. 255 Author Index ............................................................................ 261 Subject Index ............................................................................ 263

1~The World as a Cipher of Transcendence

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Chapter 1 The World as a Cipher of Transcendence

1.1 Why Wittgenstein?

“T

he Word was made flesh” is the foundational Christian assertion. Some two thousand years later, Christians are still reflecting upon its meaning. What is the relationship of words, or language, to our experience of God? Is God beyond words? Christianity has, in one venue or another, asserted just that, all the while maintaining the necessity of an explicitly religious life, one formed and focused upon words and that which might be called the “language of ritual.” The very word “revelation” seems to evoke the question of language: words, concepts, assertions, judgements, etc. It’s true that Christianity asserts that what God ultimately reveals in Jesus Christ is a person, not a message, or rather, that the person is the message, but words like “message,” “communication,” and even “communion” raise the question of language. If, on the one hand, God lies beyond all telling, and if, on the other, human life in the age of communication seems to be nothing more than a telling, a spinning, and the creation of realities formed by language, where do God and humanity meet? What does it mean to assert that the Word became flesh? The first half of this book is a theological examination of the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein who, with a small brace of others, stands as a progenitor of twentieth century thought. Whoever else might have contributed to the “linguistic turn” in modern philosophy, and life (!), the critical curvature is to be found in the arc connecting Wittgenstein’s

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Tractatus Logico Philosophicus, first published in 1921, and his Philosophical Investigations, first published in 1953. Why yet another look at Wittgenstein’s impact upon theology? When the initial treatments of the subject were done, Wittgenstein’s extensive Nachlass, the collection of notes made by him, some for later publication, some undoubtably not so, had yet to be published. These offer an immeasurable clarification to both the Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus and the Investigations, both of whose terse aphorisms, when standing alone, have suffered from an excessively wide frequency of variant interpretations. Even Wittgenstein’s mentor, Bertrand Russell, once complained that Wittgenstein could be “obscure through brevity (Wittgenstein 1995, 121).” With the gradual publication of this material over the years, and the issuance of G.P. Baker’s and P.M.S. Hacker’s truly definitive, four-volume analytical commentary on the Investigations, critical access to the thought of Wittgenstein has never been more available. Two other writers, and both theologians, have brought renewed interest to the question of Wittgenstein’s contribution to theology. In 1986 the Dominican Friar Fergus Kerr published Theology after Wittgenstein, the finest and most-influential study of Wittgenstein’s relationship to theology in English. The Lutheran theologian George Lindbeck’s The Nature of Doctrine. Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (1984), while published just before Kerr’s work, took the discussion a step further in offering what Lindbeck called a “postmodernist” critique of the very core of post-conciliar theology, namely the work of Karl Rahner and Bernard Lonergan. Lindbeck’s very influential book suggests that “modern” theology has been premised upon an inner experience / outer expression dichotomy that can no longer be sustained given the radical advances in the philosophy of language, advances easily traced back to Wittgenstein’s work. The work of Karl Rahner clearly stands at the center of postconciliar Roman Catholic theology, and of contemporary Christian theology in general. Rahner wrote voluminously and well. Although his own style of writing is dense and heavily weighted with continental philosophy, his treatments of so many basic theological questions have been popularized by innumerable secondary authors. It would be


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no exaggeration to say that Rahner’s work has been a theological pivot for the second half of the 20th century. All human projects have their limitations, and, even during his life, Rahner’s were frequently discussed, a process only accelerated by his death. Both Kerr and Lindbeck have suggested that Rahner’s work suffers from an ignorance of the advances made by Wittgenstein. Lindbeck’s was noted above, and it will be examined in some detail later. Kerr had suggested in Theology after Wittgenstein that Rahner’s approach to the human person remains Cartesian, placing a divide between mind and world that simply cannot be sustained, given the revolution in thought after Wittgenstein.1 The time seems right, then, to take another look at Rahner and his Wittgensteinian critics. What is immediately apparent is that both men were intentionally seeking to respond to the Copernican revolution in philosophy inaugurated by Descartes’ turn to the subject. Both viewed Kant’s assault upon the presuppositions of traditional epistemology as having forever changed the course of Western philosophy. Each, in his own way, consciously, and sometimes perhaps unconsciously, molded his thought as a response to the Kantian critique. Here one might recall the objection which that eminent Thomist, Etienne Gilson (1990, 19-23), posed to all post-Cartesian philosophy. If one begins the philosophical project with the knowing mind, rather than with being itself, how does one ever exit the mind? Rahner and his fellow Transcendentalists did not consider themselves as acceding to the Kantian starting point, the knowing mind, but they did argue that, even if one presumes upon the reality of the knowing 1

F. Kerr 1986, 3-27. For example: “Rahner’s natural assumption — that communication comes after language, and language comes after having concepts — is precisely what the Cartesian tradition has reinforced (11).” “His preoccupation with the cognitive subject is clear: other people remain marginal to his epistemology. The emphasis on the subject’s capacity for self-consciousness and selfreflexiveness, and his openness for absolute being, is equally conspicuous. By our insatiable question we are, perhaps unwittingly, the products of a dynamic movement of ceaseless self-transcendence toward the steadily receding horizon which is the absolute: in effect, anonymously, the deity. To feel chafed by sense experience is already to be the subject with this capacity for the absolute (12-13).” It should be noted that Kerr’s evaluation of Rahner vis-a-vis an inadequate Cartesian starting point has been considerable altered in his more recent work: Immortal Longings. Versions of Transcending Humanity (1997).

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object, it is still possible to ask what makes this knowledge possible. One could accept Kant’s challenge to explore and identify the a priori, or transcendental conditions, of human knowledge without calling into question fundamental realism. If one can do this, they maintained, then one has answered both Kant’s denial of objective knowledge of the Ding-an-sich and of the possibility of a natural knowledge of God, and only by answering Kant could fundamental theology regain the ground it had ceded. If the affirmation of God’s existence can find no support in human reason, then faith itself becomes irrational. Wittgenstein can also be read as responding to Kant, simply because he felt that Kant’s entire approach to philosophy, treating it as a branch of science without a proper, which is to say empirical, object of study, was an unmitigated disaster for Western thought. According to Wittgenstein, Kant’s fundamental error was to impose upon philosophy a methodology imported from the nascent empirical sciences. So both Wittgenstein and Rahner rebelled against a common progenitor. Kant’s critique was so penetrating, however, and his edifice of thought so well constructed, that no one engaged in the modern world can do philosophy without responding to him. If ancient and medieval philosophy found its ultimate foundation in the existence of God, and if Kant made the rational affirmation of that existence an impossibility, upon what does human thought rest as ultimate ground? This question, in one form or another, was a principal concern of both Wittgenstein and Rahner. In the first third of this book, the theological implications of Wittgenstein’s work are reviewed. Chapter 2, “Wittgenstein’s World,” examines the projected goal of the Tractatus, a work intended as an epistemological foundation for a philosophy of science, and its repercussions for thought on God. Chapter 3 “A World Thaws” introduces the enormous shift that the Investigations represent in the thought of Wittgenstein about language. Chapter 4 “The Grammar of Knowledge” takes up central questions in the thought of the latter Wittgenstein: upon what foundation does knowledge rest? What offers certainty? What is the certainty of faith?


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Chapters 5 and 6 serve as “bridge” chapters. Chapter 5 suggests that Wittgenstein and Rahner share a common philosophical anthropology, one which might serve in the construction of a post-linguistic metaphysics. First, of course, it must raise the question of just what “the doing of metaphysics” might mean after Wittgenstein. If Wittgenstein makes all conceptual knowledge rather more analogical than “essentialistic,” is it possible to pursue metaphysics? This chapter suggests that, for the Transcendental Thomism out of which Rahner worked, the answer is yes, because this Thomism places its emphasis upon the dynamic direction of human knowledge, not upon the construction of immutable concepts. Chapter 6, “A Human Way,” continues the discussion of a possible post-Wittgenstein “metaphysics of knowledge.” It begins with an examination of the dynamic nature of knowledge in Rahner’s thought and then juxtaposes this to the historical, or evolutionary, nature of knowledge in Wittgenstein’s work. Finally, it examines “space” itself as a fundamental metaphor of human transcendence. Why do humans speak of transcending the world? Chapter 7, “Revelation as Sprachspiele,” applies Wittgenstein’s insights to sustained questions about Rahner’s theology, namely the necessity of categorical (explicitly historical) revelation in a theologian who so strenuously argued for a “transcendental” openness to God on the part of every human person. If the natural is already supernatural, what do we say of Christ? Can Wittgenstein help us to understand what theologians have meant when they have spoken of the natural and the supernatural? What is the relationship between God and language? Is God an experience that stands beyond language, or one which makes language itself possible? What role does a post-linguistic theology play in the act of faith? “Word of the Father,” Chapter 8, takes up Rahner’s work on “anonymous Christianity,” examining Lindbeck’s charge that this renders flaccid the proclamation of the Gospel itself. The contention raises a more fundamental linguistic question, that of the role of concepts in the search for God. Finally the role of revelation itself is examined. Why must a world, one might say, composed of words, await a saving word from beyond itself? How is revelation essentially bound up with the historicity of the human person as a wielder of

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language? Wittgenstein insisted that meaning lies within language, not beyond. Rahner taught that all of reality is symbolic, that it exists for the possibility of communion. How stark then, the Christian assertion that Jesus, as the word of the Father, is the very meaning of the Father. The conclusion, Chapter 9, sums up the fundamental insights presented here, especially in the light of what it means to do theology after the linguistic turn. I argue that the queen of the sciences needs to revel among the humanities, not ape the empirical sciences whose presuppositions are foreign to the theological enterprise and whose exertions “contribute only to setting the problem, not to its solution (Wittgenstein 1961, 73 n. 6.4321).” One reviewer of an earlier version of this work insisted that I have, or should have, written three books: a theological introduction to Wittgenstein; a work in fundamental theology on the nature of metaphysics after the linguistic turn, and its relationship to theology; and a critical application of Wittgenstein’s insights to questions raised about Rahner’s theological contributions. Why not three snappy books, rather than this tome? As a fundamental theologian, I am trying to straddle two worlds, both of whose denizens often see the other camp as muddled and irrelevant. Many philosophers of language think Catholicism as dated as scholasticism. Many Catholic theologians think the questions raised in linguistic philosophy are simply irrelevant. I don’t think the questions are irrelevant any more than I think Catholicism to be dated! But a repairer of the breach must take the time to teach both sides something of the other. I could have produced a nice book on Wittgenstein, or made some helpful clarifications in Rahnerian studies. I might have eliminated the bridge chapters, 5 and 6, especially since an aversion to metaphysics is perhaps the only common ground that contemporary Catholic and linguistic thought share, but, in the end, the metaphysical question is the “meaning” question. How, and even more importantly, why, do we construct a world for the purpose of questioning the world?


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1.2 The self, the world, and God Great philosophical thinkers have always returned, in one way or another, to three great themes: the self, the world, and God. They certainly draw together the work of Wittgenstein and Rahner, and it is from this perspective that their work is examined here. There would be no properly theological purpose in simply juxtaposing their labors, unless it would be, as Kerr and Lindbeck have already done, to provide a critique of Rahner’s theology. And, in like manner, Rahner’s corpus, imbued as it is with the philosophy of Hegel and Heidegger, would be a useful counterpoint in a critique of Wittgenstein’s work, especially for those who continue to see Wittgenstein as repudiating any search beyond what can be called the scientific. However, it is only incidentally that this work takes up a comparison of the two thinkers for the purpose of completing or expounding the thought of one by means of the other. Its fundamental purpose is to show that both thinkers provide essential foundations in the on-going task of both justifying the role of fundamental theology and delineating its scope. Can fundamental theology provide a rational way of accessing the graced mystery which is faith? Reason cannot produce faith, but can it still provide support for the opening of the human person to faith? Can it offer the believer intellectual insight into the experience of faith? Are God and human reason antithetical? Is fideism the only access to faith? This work suggests that a heuristic feature common to the thought of both Wittgenstein and Rahner indicates a fundamental convergence in philosophical anthropology. Human beings must utilize collective and singular worldview as fundamental heuristic devices, but, if these worldview are not to end in an ultimate incoherence and teleological nullity, they must be open to a foundation which lies outside themselves. Perhaps the age of comprehensive theological and philosophical systems is over, but the human person still exhibits a need to synthesize the myriad of thought which life presents. The “world” must stand over and against the human person, the “I,” in order for the person to act as a free agent within it. Kant recognized this need but insisted that it was only a heuristic necessity of human thought, not an ontological

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structure of reality. The great contribution Wittgenstein makes to theology is to show that the Kantian dichotomy, forbidding access to the hyper-empirical (Kant’s noumenon), is not more fundamental than language itself, and hence, than thought, but is rather dependent upon language. After Wittgenstein, words like “forbid,” “access,” and “hyperempirical” cannot be understood as relating to “realities” standing beyond thought, but rather as one way, among many, in which reality and language, or, as the scholastics would say, being and knowing, coalesce. In short, one cannot pose the Kantian dichotomy without a faculty that already contains and surpasses it. A world is an interconnective web of intellectually ratified and existentially affirmed beliefs out of which the human person operates, or better, in which the human person lives. I use the word “belief” rather than “object,” because I believe Wittgenstein showed the former to be more foundational than the latter. Also, the word “belief” is used here to designate a noetic function higher than intellectual affirmation, since, as will be shown, the latter presupposes the former. The Transcendental Thomists who wrote at the beginning of this century recognized, and gave expression to, a fundamental, transcendental characteristic of human knowledge: it either completes itself in that which lies beyond it, or it stultifies in an absolute negation of its own faculty of knowledge. Our world must be open to something other than itself in order to be itself. Reexamining the legacy of Transcendental Thomism in a different context, that of the philosophy of language, may well offer new answers to the questions which the concepts of self, the world, and God pose for today. The notion of world as a heuristic device which must transcend its own self in order to arrive at an openness to God seems common ground for both Wittgenstein and the Transcendental Thomists, and it is not limited to either. The Transcendental Thomists argued that when a heuristic structure reveals itself as truly foundational to human noesis, it must be considered transcendental in the Kantian sense, in other words, it must be considered constitutive of what it means to be human. The notion of the world as a transcendental heuristic does not prove the existence of God, or make access to God through faith superfluous. What it does do is to show the inner and absolute coherence between humanity’s fundamental dynamism and the act of


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faith as a response to a possible revelation of God. In this way, the act of faith can be viewed as a supernatural fruition of reason itself rather than its stultification.

1.3 Fides et Ratio Fides et Ratio (1998), the encyclical of Pope John Paul II on the relationship between faith and reason, directed the attention of the entire Church to these very issues, affirming in a new way the teaching of the Catholic Church that “faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth.” The encyclical was conceived out of the irony of contemporary life. Whereas Dei Filius, the document of the First Vatican Council on faith and reason, addressed a philosophical climate profoundly convinced of the absolute validity of human reason, to the point of reducing all of existence to its measure, Fides et Ratio addressed a “crisis of rationalism,” a culture profoundly disenchanted with reason (n. 46). “Surveying the situation today, we see that the problems of others times have returned, but in a new key[...]An example of this is the deep seated distrust of reason which has surfaced in the most recent developments of much of philosophical research, to the point where there is talk at times of “the end of metaphysics (n. 55).” Obvious the century now ended, the bloodiest yet in humanity’s history, has undermined human confidence in rationality. “Such a dramatic experience has ensured the collapse of rationalistic optimism, which viewed history as the triumphant progress of reason, the source of all happiness and freedom; and now, at the end of this century, one of our greatest threats is the temptation to despair (n. 91).” The encyclical insists that in the face of a “crisis of meaning” the questions of meaning and truth must remain fundamental concerns for the Christian thinker (n. 81). “This prompts a second requirement: that philosophy verify the human capacity to know the truth, to come to a knowledge which can reach objective truth by means of that adequatio rei et intellectus to which the Scholastic doctors referred (n. 82).” The encyclical recognizes that this latter task cannot be per-

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formed without an engagement in the contemporary question of language. “An initial problem is that of the relationship between meaning and truth (n. 94).” The declared intention of Fides et Ratio is to recall philosophy to its origins in wisdom and wonder. “To be consonant with the word of God, philosophy needs first of all to recover its sapiential dimension as a search for the ultimate and overarching meaning of life (n. 81).” The third task Fides et Ratio sets for philosophy converges with the theme of this work: “the need for a philosophy of genuinely metaphysical range, capable, that is, of transcending empirical data in order to attain something absolute, ultimate and foundational in its search for truth (n. 83).” As the encyclical affirms, fundamental theology must concern itself with philosophy (n. 5). It must consider again how it is that the human person comes to transcends the empirical in a way that both affirms it, and leads beyond it. Whatever schools of metaphysical thought there may be, the metaphysical impulse, the desire to see a transcendent unity in the diversity that surrounds the human person, is a fundamental human need. The challenge for fundamental theology today is that, whatever its ongoing permutations, modern thought is thoroughly inductive rather than deductive. As Fides et Ratio notes, it begins with the factual and the empirical. It prefers analysis to synthesis, although obviously inductive thought itself cannot come to fruition without the latter. If fundamental theology it is to make faith comprehensible to the world, then it must understand how the world comprehends itself. Or, as Rahner put the matter in Hearers of the Word (1994, 19), a work he considered his own introduction to fundamental theology, “It will be our task to show how there belongs to our essential makeup a positive openness for an eventual revelation from God, therefore for theology, without admitting that the content of this revelation is only the objective correlate of this openness and may be determined by it.” In 1961 Ninian Smart wrote of what he called natural theology, the term then used in Anglo-American discourse for fundamental theology, “Natural theology is the Sick Man of Europe. In view of the subtle and exhaustive objections adduced by Hume, Kant and modern empiricists against the traditional arguments for God’s existence, it is


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no longer reasonable to rely on these particular supports for theistic belief (80).” Even if one would challenge, or nuance, his conclusion, his diagnosis was not overstated. Fides et Ratio finds this situation unacceptable. Believers must be lead “to a stronger conviction that faith grows deeper and more authentic when it is wedded to thought and does not reject it (n.79).” Should theology conform to canons of rationality determined by those outside the faith? The solution to theology’s woes may well be a return to its own roots, a reorientation of theological thought away from an Enlightenment rationality alien to it, a return to a form of knowing more human, and yet none the less critical because of it. Going beyond the Enlightenment by going beneath it is not a concern of theology alone. In two very different ways, it was the great labor of both Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Rahner.

Chapter 2 Wittgenstein’s World

2.1 The world and God of the Tractatus

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n what has now become a classic introduction to the thought of Wittgenstein, Robert Fogelin (1976, 3) noted a curious feature about Wittgenstein’s first work, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. “The central concern of the Tractatus is the status of propositions, yet the work begins with a discussion of the character of the world.” Why investigate propositions? Because propositions, which we annunciate, obviously stand in some relationship to facts, which stand outside ourselves, but that relationship requires clarification. Why facts? Because facts are the way things are; they are even more fundamental than objects, because the latter are contingent. Like all metaphysical works in the Western tradition, the task is to move behind the transitory to the permanent. As Fogelin noted (1976, 3), “The world cannot be identified with a totality of things, since the totality of things can constitute a variety of possible worlds depending upon their arrangement.” Wittgenstein’s first “linguistic” search was as old as philosophy itself. What permanence underlies the transitory? What is the fundamental relationship between the two? The “world” presented in the vision of the Tractatus is not a world of sensible objects. Nor is it the world of science, of empirical data and sensations; these are, after all, only rarified objects. It is rather the world viewed as it funnels through the dynamism of the human mind. It is a world of facts. Human beings grasp facts about the world, and they relate them to one another by means of logic.

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Wittgenstein begins his work with the following aphorisms which are intended as much to rule out what cannot be the case as with what must be. “The world is all that is the case (n. 1). The world is the totality of facts, not of things (n. 1.1). The world is determined by the facts, and by their being all the facts (n. 1.11). For the totality of facts determines what is the case, and also whatever is not the case (n. 1.12). The facts in logical space are the world (n. 1.13). The world divides into facts (n. 1.2). Each item can be the case or not the case while everything else remains the same (1961, 5 n. 1.21).” A heuristic movement is clear in the opening pages of the Tractatus, one which would be repeated again and again in the work of the philosopher. The “one” will be understood in relationship to the “many,” by its position upon the skein of affirmed realities, and the “many” will eventually come to be seen as “one,” as a nexus of interrelated affirmations. Here, to comprehend facts, one must comprehend situations (Sachlage), and the latter become fully comprehensible only in the larger synthesis we call the world. “The interplay between a structure of necessary connections (logical space) and a purely contingent set of items embedded in it (the totality of facts) is fundamental to the Tractarian world view (Fogelin 1976, 4-5; cf. 83).” As a world, it will be all-inclusive, as worlds, by definition, must be. “The world is all that is the case.” A world must possess two characteristics. It must have a reference point around which it forms. Secondly, the elements that make up what we call a world must be interconnected, which is to say that they must stand in an internal relationship to each other and to the world’s focus. Like almost all of his work to follow, published and unpublished, the Tractatus is a series of aphorisms, usually numbered.1 Only the Tractatus would be published during Wittgenstein’s lifetime. Given the nature of the obsessed philosopher who wrote the tract, it is not surprising that this was the only work published before his death. Wittgenstein revised each segment of the work, and reworked the phrases within each segment. Writing for Wittgenstein was some1

Since most of Wittgenstein’s published notes, and his two published books, contain paragraph numbers which remain constant in every edition, I have included these in the text itself.

2~Wittgenstein’s World

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thing akin to the assembly of a mosaic. Each stone had first to be discovered, then cut and polished, then fit, refitted, and fit again into the composite which was the whole. Some, of course, would be discarded. The “whole,” however, had to be painstakingly assembled, because the world Wittgenstein sought to mirror was itself a perfect complex. Notice the point of embarkation in the thought of Wittgenstein. He is singularly impressed with the world, with the vital synthesis reality represents. He comes down to history as a principal founder of modern linguistic analysis, a school of thought dedicated to dismantling the edifices of human language through analysis, but his first impetus in philosophy is wonderment at the whole, at the synthetic unity of “the world.” Miss the wonder which undergirds the taunt aphorisms, and you miss what connects the young Wittgenstein to the great tradition of Western thought! At the time of its eventual publication, Wittgenstein considered the Tractatus to be not only a perfect example of philosophy, but also the last example. In it the author felt that he had expressed, adequately and definitively, the relationship of the human mind to the world around it. In its preface he wrote, “The truth of the thoughts that are here communicated seems to me unassailable and definitive. I therefore believe myself to have found, on all essential points, the final solution to the problems (4).” “The decimal numbers assigned to the individual propositions indicate the logical importance of the propositions, the stress laid on them in my exposition (ibid. 5).” The work presents only seven major propositions. Number one is reproduced above. “The world is all that is the case.” Like the course of Christian revelation itself, Wittgenstein would offer two testaments, the Tractatus and the Philosophical Investigations. His first begins with all the grandeur of Genesis. Someone once wrote a novel about Wittgenstein whose title perfectly mirrors the philosopher’s conception of his project. “The World As I Found It (Duffy 1988).” Like Bertrand Russell, his philosophical mentor, Wittgenstein is attempting in the Tractatus to establish the foundations of ontology and epistemology. What is the relationship between the world as it exists, and the world we know through the language that we use?

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Here the adequatio rei et intellectus of Aquinas has been recast into a post-Kantian question of language (De veritate, q.1 a.1). If Kant had shown that the world outside the structures of the human mind can never be known in itself, then the task of epistemology, if it is still to suppose an adequation, or at least a contact between the mind and reality, must be to examine reality as it is perceived by the mind. Hence the question, what is the relationship between language and reality? Granted that posing the question in this way allows no exit from the mind itself, the task for epistemology is to try and determine the logical structure of language. This has been described as the modern movement from the question of truth to that of meaning, truth being a function of the relationship between the mind and external reality, meaning being an intrasystemic question of coherence. But the Tractatus is a bit more old fashioned than this. Fogelin writes that, “the Tractatus, although it keeps truth and meaning separate, does not simply set them adrift. There is an important systematic connection between meaning and truth which can be stated roughly in the following way: to know the meaning of a proposition is to know just those conditions that must obtain in order for it to be true (1976, 25).” Wittgenstein is often remembered as the one who moved contemporary philosophy from the question of truth to that of meaning. Still, I think it fair to say that he began his philosophical work in the Tractatus with the most traditional of intentions. He wanted to know what conditions were necessary for the determination of the truth or falsity of an affirmation. The Investigations certainly can be understood as a sustained treatment of the question of meaning, but, as will follow, Wittgenstein seemed to have returned to the question of truth itself in his final writings On Certainty. Here is how Wittgenstein (1979, 17e) raised the question of correspondence in his own notes previous to the Tractatus: “There must be something in the proposition that is identical with its reference, but the proposition cannot be identical with its reference, and so there must be something in it that is not identical with its reference.” In his introduction to the Tractatus, written at Wittgenstein’s request, Russell (1961, ix) viewed the work as taking up the central task of Western epistemology, the relationship between


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words and reality. “The central business of language is to assert or deny facts.” “What relation must one fact (such as a sentence) have to another in order to be capable of being a symbol for that other? This last is a logical question, and is the one with which Mr. Wittgenstein is concerned.” Although they would later poignantly diverge, Russell had noted a key element in the Tractatus’ approach to the “relationship between words and reality.” The relationship between elements within language, the nexus that they create, would be a fundamental criterion in trying to determine the relationship between an individual word and reality. The question of relationship is not merely bipolar. It is not between an individual word and reality, but rather between a given point in a net of words and its projection onto reality. Both Russell and Wittgenstein believed originally that propositions could mirror reality, but not as they exist in ordinary speech. Russell’s work had shown that the grammatical form of a proposition, the form presented in ordinary speech, often hides the logical form. For example, he wrote: “The is of ‘Socrates is human’ expresses the relation of subject and predicate; the is of ‘Socrates is a man’ expresses identity. It is a disgrace to the human race that it has chosen to employ the same word ‘is’ for these two entirely different ideas — which a symbolic logical language of course remedies (Russell 1965a, 19).” Clarifying language held out the promise of clarifying thought. Russell rather blithely wrote (1965b, 26), “I think that practically all traditional metaphysics is filled with mistakes due to bad grammar, and that almost all the traditional problems of metaphysics and traditional results — supposed results — of metaphysics are due to a failure to make the kind of distinctions in what we may call philosophical grammar with which we have been concerned in these previous lectures.” A sweeping generalization, but neither Lord Russell nor the early Wittgenstein were reluctant to spell out the implications of “the world as I found it.” Both philosophers sought to discover the proper role of atomic propositions in language. Granted that most of our propositions are so general that a one-to-one correspondence between the elements of the propositions and reality itself is impossible, both Russell and Wittgenstein believed that, when analyzed correctly, our general

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propositions would break down into constituent elements that did display a one-to-one correspondence with reality. Unum nomen, unum nominatum (Baker and Hacker 1980, 396). “But it also seems certain that we do not infer the existence of simple objects from the existence of particular simple objects, but rather know them — by description, as it were — as the end product of analysis, by means of a process that leads to them (Wittgenstein 1979, 50e).” Neither Wittgenstein or Russell ever identified an atomic element, and their successors in logical positivism were hard pressed to supply this want. Irreducible simples, and the atomic propositions which contain only them, were demanded by linguistic theory if a correspondence between language and reality could be said to exist at all. Hence they were not discovered; they were deduced. The project was the grandest yet undertaken by philosophy. Had it succeeded, the great epistemological and ontological work of the discipline would have come to rest. Norman Malcolm explains (1993, 32-33): “According to the Tractatus there is a hierarchy of ordered structures. A state of affairs in the world is a structure of simple objects. A thought is a structure of mental elements. A proposition of language is a structure of signs. If a particular proposition is true there are three structures which, in a sense, are equivalent. There is a configuration of simple objects which constitutes a state of affairs. There is a configuration of mental objects which depicts that state of affairs. There is a configuration of signs, which also depicts that state of affairs. These are three parallel structures in the three different domains of reality, thought and language. Two of these structures are pictures of the other one.” In theory, atomic propositions were the building blocks of complex ones. Understand their referents, and the edifice of language rests upon a real relationship to reality itself, since complex propositions would only be concatenations of simple ones, manipulated by logical constants such as conjunction, disjunction, and negation. The referents of atomic propositions were names, and names are fundamentally tied to brute reality. “Objects can only be named. Signs are their representations. I can only speak about them: I cannot put them into words. Propositions can only say how things are, not what they are (Wittgenstein 1961, 13 n. 3.221).” As Fogelin writes (1976, 30),


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objects stand at the bottom of the analyzed pyramid. “Objects can have features in virtue of entering into combination with other objects, but in themselves, although they have a determinate form, they have no structure capable of description.” Once the linguistic analysis envisioned by the Tractatus has been performed, an adequation has been achieved. Thought has been linked, directly and immediately, to reality, and truth as adequation becomes possible. As Wittgenstein put it in a 1919 letter to Russell (1995, 125), “I don’t know what the constituents of a thought are but I know that it must have such constituents which correspond to the words of Language.” Of course the actual heuristic movement employed was the reverse of the above. After all, we possess complex propositions, not atomic ones, and it is through correct analysis, the sort accomplished through the notation of symbolic logic, that we deduce the latter. It was the logic of the Tractatus that demanded the existence of simple signs correlated to simple objects. “The requirement that simple signs be possible is the requirement that sense be determinate (Wittgenstein 1961, 13 n. 3.23).” Yet given the fact that no correlation between atomic signs and sense data is ever offered by the Tractatus, William Bartley is quite correct in calling it a work of metaphysics (1973, 72-73). “Readers of the Tractatus— including, conspicuously, most of the logical positivists — have often supposed that elementary propositions report sense experiences. It is probably safe to assume that Wittgenstein did have, and must have had, some such idea in mind. But the Tractatus makes no declaration on this point.” Bartley rejects the Tractatus as a work of epistemology, because it does not seek to correlate empirical data with concepts, but rather to redefine the act of conceptual structuring. Wittgenstein never defines, or gives an example of an elementary proposition or object. “The Tractatus is, then, a work in logic and ontology, not in the theory of knowledge. Ironically, Bertrand Russell is often blamed for having furthered the notion that the Tractatus is an epistemological work, although Russell himself, in his famous Introduction to it, wrote: ‘It is not contended by Wittgenstein that we can actually isolate the simple or have empirical knowledge of it. It is a logical necessity demanded by theory.’” This is why Erich Heller

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(1969, 12-13) could characterize the Tractatus as preKantian, because it still believes in a simple correspondence between thought and reality, even if that correspondence is stridently limited to empirical propositions alone. Note also that the analysis of Russell and Wittgenstein does not represent a rejection of the Thomistic adequatio rei et intellectus, but rather its refinement. Without linguistic analysis, the wrong intellectus, a word which only appears to be a “simple” would be compared to the wrong res. The author of the Tractatus may well have felt that his work so completely reordered philosophical investigation as to call for its end, but the aim of the work is well within that of Western philosophy as a whole: the relationship between thought and reality. The Cambridge school of philosophy was not rejecting the notion of adequation. Far from it, since it arose in rejection to British and continental idealism, particularly the work of F.H. Bradley. The coming century of scientific splendor needed to be built upon a solid foundation, and the task of the Tractatus was to provide that foundation. “The totality of true propositions is the whole of natural science (or the whole corpus of the natural sciences) (Wittgenstein 1961, 25 n. 4.11).” Reject adequation between thought and reality, and no foundation would be possible! Wittgenstein inherited from Russell the task of linguistic analysis, one he performed so brilliantly that the school which followed him used the very word “analysis” as a defining characteristic. The complex is to be made simple; through analysis the many are reduced to the one. But this process, reducing the complex to the simple, occurs not only in analysis, but also in the act of synthesis, when the many are brought together in the unity of the one. Perhaps Wittgenstein’s greatest accomplishment in the Tractatus is not analysis, but rather synthesis, the sort of synthesis that goes into the creation of a world. Many have felt that Wittgenstein, the analyst, eliminated the very possibility of doing natural theology. I would suggest that Wittgenstein, the synthesizer, provides an obvious foundation for it. By logical necessity, the acts of analysis and synthesis are interrelated. One can naively presume that any given act of analysis is just that, a dismantling in search of foundations, but the act of analysis is never indeterminate, proceeding without goal or agenda. It is always


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performed against a synthetic backdrop. We must have some sense of the whole that guides the analytic process in order for this process to be determinate.2 As a primary school teacher in Austria, Wittgenstein once repaired a locomotive’s engine. He had never seen one. He surely discovered in that process what each of us knows about any act of dismantling. It is done with the idea of seeing how things go together, but one must have some notion of the synthetic whole before one begins. To dismantle an engine, or any other device, one must pay close attention to the state in which the device is first encountered. The “perceived whole” will guide the process of analysis. This is why one person cannot dismantle the engine that another will then reassemble, not if that act of reassembling represents a first encounter with the device! In the same way linguistic analysis cannot escape its own foundations, however unexamined. One must analyze against a horizon of how, at least initially, one intuits the world to exist. Analysis is a thought process, and thought always proceeds by positing. Positing entails placement in a heuristic horizon. Of course analysis refines synthesis, but an initial synthesis guides analysis. The two noetic acts are mutually conditioning, just as deassembling a device produces a clearer conception of how it really functions when reassembled. Unlike so many of the logical positivists who followed him, Wittgenstein could grasp that his own act of analysis was guided by a previously unexamined synthesis (1979, 60e). “The question might however also be represented like this: It seems that the idea of the SIMPLE is already to be found contained in that of the complex and in the idea of analysis, and in such a way that we come to this idea quite apart from any examples of simple objects, or of propositions which mention them, and we realize the existence of the simple object — a priori — as a logical necessity. So it looks as if the existence of the simple objects were related to that of the complex ones as the sense of ~p is to the sense of p: the simple object is prejudged in the complex.” A heuristic world is an interlocking web that revolves around a focal point. It makes possible the acquisition of further knowledge. Visually, one can summon up the image of a circle. Every point lying 2

See Wittgenstein 1974, 211-212 for an example of Wittgenstein making the same point with regard to his previous analysis in the Tractatus.

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within the radius of the circle stands in a determinate relationship to the center of the circle, and ultimately is defined by this relationship. Through the center, it can be interrelated to every other point in the circle. As Wittgenstein attempts to explicate the relationship of language to reality, he continually returns to both of these characteristics of a world, an interconnecting field which revolves around a common focus. The word “world” functions in the thought of Wittgenstein as a symbol for synthetic unity, one both encountered in reality and reproduced in language. This usage of the word remains constant in the thought of both the early and the latter Wittgenstein. “What am I after? The fact that the description of the use of a word is the description of a system, or of systems. — But I don’t have a definition for what a system is (Wittgenstein 1982, 2:41e n. 294).” Throughout Wittgenstein’s writings, a synthesis is presupposed as existing in the world and in language; through the latter we have access to the former. This is why Wittgenstein is repeatedly compelled to use the metaphor of space when speaking of the logical structure of the world. Space is a visual representation of synthetic unity, since in space elements always stand in relationship to one another. In both the Tractatus and its preliminary notes, Wittgenstein uses spatial terms such as “world,” “border,” “arrangement,” “outside / inside,” and “limit.” He reaffirms the Kantian notion of space as an a priori intuition. In the Tractatus he is struck by this constraint of human thought. The later Wittgenstein will see it as a necessarily structure of human language, rooted as it is in physical Lebensformen, life forms. Here is how these “constraints” are first encountered in the Tractatus (1961, 6): If all objects are given, then at the same time all possible states of affairs are also given (n. 2.0124). Each thing is, as it were, in a space of possible states of affairs. This space I can imagine empty, but I cannot imagine the thing without the space (n. 2.013). A spatial object must be situated in infinite space (A spatial point is an argument-place.) (n. 2.0131). A speck in the visual field, though it need not be red, must have some colour: it is, so to speak, surrounded by colour-space. Notes must have some pitch, objects of the sense of touch some degree of hardness, and so on.”


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Fogelin notes that Wittgenstein’s use of space is distinct from classical atomism. Space here is not an undifferentiated backdrop but a synthetic unity. It is not a void in which an object appears, unattached. Rather each object inhabits a position in space like a piece in a jigsaw puzzle. The object and the space around it are thus mutually determined. “For the classical atomists, space is an independent and neutral medium through which things move. Atoms demand space, but not conversely. By establishing a systematic parity between the two fundamental principles of atomism (matter and the void or being and non-being), Wittgenstein gives this position it most coherent articulation (Fogelin 1976, 9).” In other words, space in the thought of Wittgenstein is ultimately a concept of synthesis. Wittgenstein never more clearly, or more brilliantly, confronts this spatial feature of language than in his discussion of negation. If p is a proposition which actually makes an assertion about reality, then it “marks off,” as it were, a portion of logical space. The portion defined is delineated by “not p” (~p). The two together, make up the whole of logical space. A black speck in a field of white is a black speck in a field of white, or it is a field of white surrounding a black speck. The key here is to see that everything which can be posited, is posited against a presumed and imminent background. G.E.M. Anscombe noted this spatial feature of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus in her introduction to the English translation of the work (1963, 78), and she viewed it as annihilating any role for natural theology. Why? Because traditionally in the metaphysics of natural theology, one proceeded deductively through a series of propositions, moving from the complex to the simple. Very quickly the propositions moved from the empirical to the superempirical. In the view of the Tractatus, however, a proposition only has sense if its negation would also possess a sense. This is seen as a demand of the logical structure of the world. If neither an affirmation nor its negation could be the case, then whatever is being discussed lacks a referent in the world. Whatever the proposition is asserting must have a “place” in logical space. “The Tractatus theory would be death to natural theology; not because of any jejune positivism or any ‘verificationism,’ but simply because of the picture theory of the ‘significant proposition.’ For it is essential to this that the picturing proposition has two

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poles, and in each sense it represents what may perfectly well be true. Which of them is true is just what happens to be the case.” But, as Anscombe explains, the metaphysical propositions of natural theology are supposed to be self-evident. Their negations cannot even be conceived, and this contradicts the logical structure of the world as Wittgenstein laid it out in the Tractatus. “In natural theology this is an impermissible notion; its propositions are not supposed to be the ones that happen to be true out of pairs of possibilities; nor are they supposed to be logical or mathematical propositions either.” Anscombe’s insight is poignant. Did the Tractatus represent a death sentence for natural theology, natural theology being understood as that branch of fundamental theology which attempts to provide a rational foundation for the act of faith? Can one create a rational support for the notion of God if whatever assertion one might posit, must itself be capable of being untrue as well as true?

2.2 Whereof we cannot speak In Roman Catholic theology, the act of faith is viewed as the result of a supernatural gift of grace (Dei Filius 1995, 3010). It is a human response to God’s revelation of himself, a real entrance of the divine into the world of humanity (ibid. 3008). It is therefore essentially distinct from natural assent, since the act of faith cannot be reduced to merely an intellectual decision, one of many which occur in human life (Qui pluribus 1995, 2779). It is an act that involves the total person, including the capacity for intellectual assent.3 On the other hand, Catholic theology has always viewed this act of faith as being supported by reason. While faith in God is not merely the end-result of a purely human act of reasoning, the act of faith need not be a repudiation of rationality. Faith is supported by the human 3

Fides et Ratio 1998, n. 13. “This is why the Church has always considered the act of entrusting oneself to God to be a moment of fundamental decision which engages the whole person. In that act, the intellect and the will display their spiritual nature, enabling the subject to act in a way which realizes personal freedom to the full.”


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person’s rational comprehension of his world (Catechesi tradendae 1996, 163a). If the Tractatus were to make God literally inconceivable, its theological result would be fideism, the belief that an act of faith is unsupported by reason. It would then represent Kierkegaard’s leap into darkness, an irrational assent that defies comprehension. Is Wittgenstein’s Tractarian thought fideistic? Two questions can be distinguished here. Did Wittgenstein think of faith as a fideist does, and is the Tractatus as a work fideistic? I grant the former and deny the latter. And, as will be seen subsequently, even the former depends upon the way in which “reason” is conceived. If one considers a list of Wittgenstein’s favorite writers, Tolstoy, Kierkegaard, and the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore, their single common approach to the question of faith is fideism. At least as Wittgenstein read them, faith remains unsupported by reason.4 Wittgenstein was powerfully impressed by Tolstoy’s The Gospel in Brief, which he read as a young soldier during the First World War. In it, as in his other writings on religion, Tolstoy presents a version of Christianity which repudiates both rational support from outside of Christianity for the act of faith and an inner-Christian, rational appropriation of its intellectual content. He thus rejects any role for dogma, which he views as fundamentally distorting the pure message of Jesus Christ. Christ, as Tolstoy saw him, was primarily a social activist. Anything approaching the realm of theory, and thus all speculative thought about Christ, represents not only a perversion of Christ’s original message of action but an actual hindrance to its realization. In short, Tolstoy’s Christ is an activist free of dogma. This view of the Christian faith became Wittgenstein’s own. He embraced both its positive and negative aspects. He literally disposed of his own personal fortune in order to live the gospel values Tolstoy had preached to him. He tried his hand at social activism in the form of primary school teaching. At one time he wanted to immigrate to 4

There are again two issues. To what extent fideism is present in the writings of a given author, and whether or not Wittgenstein read the author in that manner. Ray Monk, 1990 offers the most complete discussion of Wittgenstein’s attitude toward religion, at least in view of his influences. 283 notes a conversation Wittgenstein had with Waismann and Schlick in which he repeated a line he often quoted from Kierkegaard about “this unknown something with which the Reason collides when inspired by its paradoxical passions.”

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Soviet Russia, no doubt inspired by his reading in Tolstoy about the authentic life of Russian peasants. During the Second World War, he insisted upon serving as a stretcher bearer, and he urged his proteges in philosophy to eschew academia and take up lives of simple service. Like Tolstoy, whatever conceptual errors he made in the approach to faith, his personal integrity and commitment stand forth in heroic measure. Wittgenstein never made a profession of faith. His very understanding of faith precluded this. Faith in Tolstoy is not profession but action. “Words are deeds (Wittgenstein 1980a, 46e).” Tolstoy could have written this sentence or the following: “I believe that one of the things Christianity says is that sound doctrines are all useless. That you have to change your life (Or the direction of your life.) (ibid. 53e).” Wittgenstein did. Wittgenstein thus held a very contemporary view of Christian doctrine, namely, that it represents obtuse speculation that can arrive at no useful end. It has no practical significance. “Christianity is not a doctrine, not, I mean, a theory about what has happened and will happen to the human soul, but a description of something that actually takes place in human life. For ‘consciousness of sin’ is a real event and so are despair and salvation through faith.” Reason has no role to play in an approach to faith, and it cannot help to illumine the practice of faith. “Those who speak of such things (Bunyan for instance) are simply describing what has happened to them, whatever gloss anyone may want to put on it (ibid. 28e).” Wittgenstein’s nascent faith was thoroughly fideistic, but that is not the same thing as saying that the work he produced, the Tractatus, can be approach only as a fideistic work. “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence (Wittgenstein 1961, 74 n. 7),” may well be the most quoted words of the Tractatus. They are certainly well known, and Wittgenstein intended for them to bear an enormous weight. These few words represent the total exposition of Proposition 7; none of the others finds such a meager presentation. And they solemnly close the Tractatus. Wittgenstein clearly intended for Proposition 7 to be selfevident and decisive. It is generally taken to be his strong injunction against any metaphysical or religious speculation that might pass itself off as truly philosophical or scientific discourse. This view of its


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meaning is certainly comprehensible, given the propositions which immediately precede it: The correct method in philosophy would really be the following: to say nothing except what can be said, i.e. propositions of natural science — i.e. something that has nothing to do with philosophy — and then, whenever someone else wanted to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had failed to give a meaning to certain signs in his propositions. Although it would not be satisfying to the other person — he would not have the feeling that we were teaching him philosophy — this method would be the only strictly correct one (n. 6.53). My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them — as steps — to climb up beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.) He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world aright (Wittgenstein 1961, 73-74 n. 6.54).

It is very important to notice the line drawn here by Wittgenstein. Natural science stands clearly on the side being affirmed. It possesses a legitimate function. It “catalogues” the world which is. Notice that philosophy stands alongside metaphysics on the other side of his divide. Wittgenstein is suggesting that there is something as misleading about doing philosophy in a preTractarian way as there is in doing metaphysics in that way. Metaphysics, in and of itself, is no more, or less, condemned than philosophy. There was thus a certain disingenuousness in the hasty view of the early logical positivists who argued that Wittgenstein had banned metaphysics, but legitimized their own positivist agenda for philosophy. Obviously Wittgenstein himself did not cease philosophizing. That would suggests that what he did do was to repudiate a certain naive form of philosophy, rather than the activity itself. He never presented the Investigations as an absolute repudiation of the Tractatus, but rather as a correction of its errors. The later redefined the former; it did not abolish every insight in it. In fact, Wittgenstein had wanted the Tractatus and the Investigations to be published in a single volume

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with the epigraph, “It’s generally the way with progress that it looks much greater than it really is.” The result would have been to emphasize the two works’ continuity.5 In his “Notes on Logic,” a 1913 treatise directed to Russell with the purpose of explaining his thought in the Tractatus, Wittgenstein (1979, 106) again paired philosophy and metaphysics. This time in a positive light, “Philosophy consists of logic and metaphysics: logic is its basis.” Nor did Wittgenstein cease discussing religion, a subject that continued to fascinate him throughout his life. Clearly a way of speaking is being censured here, not a subject matter. Everything turns upon the nature of philosophy and metaphysics. What is to be understood by these words? Redefining metaphysics is the sustaining project of this work, but a start needs to be made with the question of God and the Tractatus. In the Tractatus Wittgenstein’s thoughts on God are basically set in place and do not fundamentally alter in the later writings. It is commonly presumed that he posits a divide between rational and religious thought, which is not to say that there is not a place in human life for the thought which cannot be rationally thought. Comparing the God of Wittgenstein to that of Kant is helpful in elucidating an absolutely defining characteristic of the former. Two very different agenda are in place, and a failure to recognize this results in a fundamental misreading of Wittgenstein. Bewitched by Newtonian physics, Kant divided human knowing into that which is subject to natural laws of causality and that which is not. God in the Critique cannot be empirically posited, because God stands outside the Newtonian-inspired schema of the comprehen5

Toynton 1997, 40. I am not alone in emphasizing the continuity of the two works, although one has to delineate clearly where the continuity or discontinuity lie. Baker and Hacker (1980, 457) argue that Wittgenstein’s fundamental conception of the philosophical task remained largely unchanged throughout his career. Wuchterl and Hübner (1979, 82-82) make a pertinent observation here as to the amount of continuity or discontinuity various interpreters see in the two works. “The judgement sharply depends upon the understanding of what Wittgenstein wanted. Whoever places logic and linguistic philosophy in the foreground, will posit great differences; the person, on the contrary, who values the general philosophical insights more highly, sees a great deal of similarity.” My translation.


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sible. God cannot be explained, and any attempt to do so results in the ludicrous. A metaphysical speculation about the nature of God would be nonsensical. At the same time, the notion of God must be posited in the realm of morals if they are to receive an unassailable, universal foundation. “I have therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge, in order to make room for faith (Kant 1929, 29).” As the eminent Kantian commentator Ernst Cassirer noted (1981, 382), religion for Kant becomes only an evocative, aesthetic symbol, one which might motivate those unable to arrive at a rational appropriation of Kant’s moral imperative. Religion engages in metaphysical flights of fancy, disastrous if one were to consider them as rationally based, but useful in the moral formation of society as a whole. Their emotive appeal is a motivational force for the advancement of morality in society. This is the dominate, contemporary view of religion in Western society. It would not be surprising then, for Wittgenstein to have held it. But neither would it be surprising for him to be have been misread as holding it, given that it is the dominate view. There is nothing in any of the later Wittgenstein which suggests he repudiates the understanding of God and the world laid out in the Tractatus. Contrary to so many contemporary approaches, one cannot argue that the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus has no place for God in the world, but that the later Wittgenstein simply allows us to say whatever we want about God, so far as we realize that we are confining ourselves to “linguistic communities” based upon unique forms of life. This approach truly would be fideistic from the point of view of faith, and hopelessly individualistic from that of culture. It would offer no approach to God worthy of the word “rational.” The “leap of faith” would merely be communal rather than individual. Unfortunately far too many commentators have naively made this very presumption. In the approach of many theologians, theology after Wittgenstein has become anemic and fideistic. Faith is an intellectual ghetto, and one presumes that no cohesive interrelation exists among the various forms of life human beings experience, the very sort of correlation that metaphysics is supposed to offer. A scientist talks one way, a believer another. Pity the person who would want to be both!

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For example, Robert Coburn (1969, 218-219) would characterize religious speech as “linguistic behavior which simply expresses and which constitutes a criterion for the presence of some state or condition of the soul, so to speak.” Not much is salvaged in such an approach, especially when one considers that the word “soul” has been used without the requisite referent! Not only dogmatic statements, but the complete, intellectually comprehensible world of faith is viewed as a “linguistic utterance,” one whose referent is merely a state of the self rather than of the world outside the self. In this view the individual does not come to understand his own self in the horizon of a worldview. Rather, the worldview he espouses acts only as a manifestation of his interiority. This common approach is not post-Wittgensteinian. It is unWittgensteinian, because it fails to recognize that the Tractatus insists that certain features characterize all language. The Investigations do not allow one to dispense with these features, retreating into linguistic ghettos happily labeled linguistic communities. Only an absolute misreading of Wittgenstein’s Lebensformen would maintain that within them, or because of them, the characteristic features of language, among them logic and the relationship of God to language, stand on their heads! The key to understanding the relationship of God to language in Wittgenstein’s thought is be found in understanding the relationship of logic to language in the Tractatus. That is, after all, the principal insight and inspiration for the work, one that called itself a treatise on logic. It was precisely over the role of logic in language that Wittgenstein’s thought diverged from that of Russell and Frege. To understand the advance Wittgenstein made in logic is to understand the role of God in his thought. One of the difficulties in the system of symbolic logic as first developed by Frege, and then by Russell and Whitehead, was that it viewed the propositions of logic as simple constituent elements of the world, on the same level as empirical elements. Just as empirical propositions pointed to empirical objects, so logical propositions pointed to “logical objects.” A notational system based upon this view would then consider signs indicating logical constants to represent objects rather than functions.


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While it might seem reasonable for theologians to prescind from this conversation, leaving it to those attempting to construct an ideal symbolic notation, the underlying conception of the world which it invokes is not without its metaphysical significance. This is shown in the “paradox of types,” the problem confronted by Russell and brilliantly solved by Wittgenstein. Objects in the world enter symbolic notation as classes, not as individual objects. In symbolic logic x does not represent a single object but a class of objects, namely, all of the objects that fit the perimeters established for x. Now suppose I wish to speak of the class of all such classes. This would be the class of all classes which might be represented by variables such as x, y, z. How does this concept of class find expression? Is the class that contains all classes a member of itself? It must be, since it meets the criterion set for class membership, but if it is a member of the class itself, how can it represent the totality which is the class? Wittgenstein’s great contribution was to show that logical concepts cannot be treated as objects. They cannot be assigned signs with a view of cataloging their existence as objects. On the contrary, logic must show itself. It is a fundamental constituent of the world. It allows us to create a system of depiction, but itself cannot be depicted within that system. “Thought can never be anything illogical, since, if it were, we should have to think illogically (Wittgenstein 1961, 11 n. 3.03).” The world before us exhibits logical characteristics (such as identity, negation, conjunction), and these features show themselves in the languages we use to speak of that world. “It is as impossible to represent anything that ‘contradicts logic’ as it is in geometry to represent by its co-ordinates a figure that contradicts the laws of space, or to give the co-ordinates of a point that does not exist (ibid. 11 n. 3.032).” Logic, like geometry, is based upon a fundamental human intuition of the world that is. It precedes rationalization and language formation since the latter must presuppose its existence. It defies incorporation into a language system because it is always a presupposition of any such system. Wittgenstein offered a system of logical notation in which logic was designated by a sign for function, not an object sign (ibid. 17). We do not, strictly speaking, denote logic. Wittgenstein’s famous distinction

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between showing and saying is built upon this premise: That two propositions share the same logical form is to be shown, not stated, and it does show itself immediately upon examination. “In a proposition there must be exactly as many distinguishing parts as in the situation that it represents. The two must possess the same logical (mathematical) multiplicity (Compare Hertz’s Mechanics on dynamic models.) (ibid. 22 n. 4.04). A proposition shows its logical form. If it stated it, the statement itself would be a part of that form, and would itself then require representation, leaving no exit from an infinite regress. What does logic in the Tractatus have to do with God? I would suggest that the two concepts are analogically parallel. Logic is fundamental to the world that is. We cannot think of an illogical world, because our thought presupposes logic. While we are sometimes forced to speak of logic as an element lying within the world, strictly speaking, this never can be true. The world presupposes logic. Since the ability to list the constituent elements of any possible world employs logic, logic itself cannot be such an element. “The possibility of propositions is based on the principle that objects have signs as their representatives. My fundamental idea is that the ‘logical constants’ are not representatives; that there can be no representation of the logic of facts (ibid. 22 n. 4.0312).” Wittgenstein’s system of symbolic notation simply eliminated signs for logical relations. After all, a perfected language should mirror reality, and reality shows, but does not speak, its logical structure. All this being said, no one, and certainly not Wittgenstein, is denying the existence of logic, although logic will never become an object about which one can make an affirmation of existence. Such an affirmation only makes sense within a world, and thus can only be made about objects within the world. To employ a middle school metaphor, the Venn diagram is logic. You cannot find a position for it within the diagram. This is precisely Wittgenstein’s thought on God in the Tractatus. God is not an object to be encountered in the world. He is not an element in any would-be description of the world. Like logic, God is a constituent feature of the world, but not an object to be encountered in the world. “How things are in the world is a matter of complete


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indifference for what is higher. God does not reveal himself in the world (n. 6.432). The facts all contribute only to setting the problem, not to its solution (n. 6.4321). It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists (n. 6.44). To view the world sub specie aeterni is to view it as a whole — a limited whole. Feeling the world as a limited whole — it is this that is mystical (ibid. 73 n. 6.45). Note the apparent compulsion with which Wittgenstein makes use of spatial metaphors to explain the relationship of God to the world. The world is to be viewed, like an object before one, as a whole, but a limited whole. The spatial comparison of “higher” is used to refer to God. One can speak of God as being “within” a world and “without” it. The Tractatus exists to explain the relationship between language and reality, which the natural sciences must presuppose. By necessity it creates a world in which each sign will have a clearly designated reference to an atomic element, whether object or proposition. Wittgenstein created the world that science had to presuppose, only to declare that, indeed, a very limited world had come into being. “We feel that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched. Of course there are then no questions left, and this itself is the answer (ibid. 73 n. 6.52).” It is ridiculous to give this assertion a positivistic reading. Clearly Wittgenstein is not saying that science has given, or soon will give, every answer we might need, and that anyone who might want more than this simply is being ungrateful. He is not dismissing by fiat all questions about the meaning of life. On the contrary, he is saying that to look for such meaning within the world created by science is a prospect doomed to failure. Existential meaning never lay within the purview of science. It is crucial to realize that even in the Tractatus Wittgenstein has come up against a fundamental characteristic of human thought. We create “worlds,” integrated heuristic horizons having a single focus, in order to interact with “the world” that contains us. A mistake is made whenever we forget that our worlds are as limited as our language. “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world (ibid. 56 n. 5.6).” Worlds always exist within a horizon, while they themselves are not that horizon.

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Another way of putting it is to say that the concept of a world is itself a logical construct. It is a logical construct, because our thought compels us to posit one element in relationship to others. It is a heuristic device so fundamental to human thought as to be incapable of becoming an object of thought. “The world and life are one (n. 5.621).” “I am my world (The microcosm.) (ibid. 57 n. 5.63).” God, in Wittgenstein, lies beyond the world. Ironically, Wittgenstein’s most fundamental assertion about God is therefore the same affirmation made by Dei Filius (1995, 3015 n. 4), the conciliar text of the First Vatican Council on the relationship between faith and reason. The Council taught that there are two orders of knowledge, natural and supernatural. God cannot be reduced to the natural order, and only revelation, which truly represents a supernatural intrusion into human discourse, allows us to assert confidently that God is known in himself. Here is how the supernatural end of the act of faith could be expressed in the thought of Wittgenstein: God cannot be reduced to an element within the world. He cannot be regarded as an object among objects, about which we can posit assertions which remain upon a purely natural level of intellectual activity. The notion of God underlies the very ability to speak of a world. “It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists (Wittgenstein 1961, 73 n. 6.44).” God himself must be regarded as a super-natural phenomenon, one which exists beyond nature and therefore cannot rightly be labeled a phenomenon at all. What Wittgenstein is doing in the Tractatus is not Kantian. It is post-Kantian. He is not excluding God from rational discourse because he has found the notion of God to be irrational; he is excluding God from discourse because the notion of discourse itself becomes a cipher to the existence of God. The notion of God is not irrational because it has been tried before the bar of Newtonian causality and found wanting; the notion of God is prerational, or suprarational, because without the idea that every act of positing falls somewhere in a horizon which is truly infinite, no act of positing can occur. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus is not essentially fideistic. A movement toward God does not represent a leap into the irrational. It represents an embrace of the suprarational. Most importantly, how-


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ever, the work can be viewed as affirming a real distinction between a natural and a supernatural order, a distinction so often ignored both by liberal Protestant thought and by 19th century Catholic thought before the advent of Neo-Thomism (McCool 1977, 88-128). This reading of Wittgenstein’s project is supported by the parallel discussion of ethics which occurs in the Tractatus. It obviously makes no sense to suggest that Wittgenstein either denied the existence of an ethical sphere of human life or that he repudiated attempts rationally to appropriate this sphere. He himself is already doing just this in the Tractatus (1961, 71 n. 6.41): “The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is, and everything happens as it does happen: in it no value exists — and if it did exist, it would have no value. If there is any value that does have value, it must lie outside the whole sphere of what happens and is the case. For all that happens and is the case is accidental. What makes it non-accidental cannot lie within the world, since if it did it would be itself accidental. It must lie outside the world.” The realm of ethics exists, but the microcosm, or world, of science has nothing to say about it. Whatever it might have to say which is salient to ethical discourse serves only as preamble to that discourse proper. So too it is impossible for there to be propositions of ethics: “Propositions can express nothing that is higher (n. 6.42). It is clear that ethics cannot be put into words. Ethics is transcendental. (Ethics and aesthetics are one and the same) (ibid. 71 n. 6.421).” An ethical dimension, like a theistic one, exists in life. Of course it would be more aptly put to say that life exists within both ethical and theistic dimensions. But ethics is not to be found within science, and attempts that fail to distinguish between the methodologies and presuppositions of these two fundamental arena of human life are doomed to frustration. Statements of fact have a role to play in the formation of statements of value, but one must recognize the fundamental distinction of these two spheres. Wittgenstein’s thought on ethics is akin to that of G.E. Moore, analyzing the concept of good and concluding that the value which the good represents cannot be derived from any empirically-based datum. Moore assailed the Aristotelian foundations of Western ethics by insisting that ethical propositions could not be reduced to empiri-

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cal ones. In Wittgenstein’s view, ethical discourse, like aesthetical discourse, begins after the world has been received as it is. “If the good or bad exercise of the will does alter the world, it can alter only the limits of the world, not the facts — not what can be expressed by means of language. In short, the effect must be that it becomes an altogether different world. It must, so to speak, wax and wane as a whole (ibid. 72 n. 6.43).” It initially appears as though Wittgenstein were denying that the exercise of human freedom has any effect in the world, an assertion superficially ludicrous. Wittgenstein’s point, however, is that whatever human beings do in history enters history simply as one of many contingent facts. As a fact, it simply is, and its opposite, whatever it might be, or might have been, is also conceivable. Ethical discourse proper, as Wittgenstein conceives it, however, prescinds from a given fact as an element in the world to an evaluation of the entire world in which such fact exists. This becomes clearer if one brings into discussion the other fundamental feature of a world, a focal point. God and logic are prelinguistic constants in language. So too is the notion of the self, the center around which a world collates. Just as every circle has a focus, so too does every world. That focus is the self. “The subject does not belong to the world: rather, it is a limit of the world (n. 5.632). Where in the world is a metaphysical subject to be found? You will say that this is exactly like the case of the eye and the visual field. But really you do not see the eye. And nothing in the visual field allows you to infer that it is seen by an eye (ibid. 57 n. 5.633).” Like God, the self can never become an element in the world, because the world revolves around the self as around a pivot. “Thus there really is a sense in which philosophy can talk about the self in a nonpsychological way. What brings the self into philosophy is the fact that ‘the world is my world.’ The philosophical self is not the human being, not the human body, or the human soul, with which psychology deals, but rather the metaphysical subject, the limit of the world — not a part of it (ibid. 58 n. 5.641). Ethical discourse begins outside of the world. Again, a spatial metaphor imposes itself. It is a discourse that relates God and the self, but it must prescind from the contingency that characterizes the


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world. Neither the self nor God are contingent. Hence they must stand above or beyond the world that is. Taking leave of the Tractatus, what should be imminently clear is that Wittgenstein produced a fundamental guide to metaphysics as Kant originally envisioned the reformed discipline. Metaphysics here is not an investigation into occult entities that lie beyond the empirical world. Nor is it an irrational affirmation of objects lying beyond our empirical powers of investigation. On the contrary, it is an examination of the very presuppositions of those powers: what must be the case with human beings in order for them to speak of worlds, in order for them to create intellectual frames of reference, interrelated heuristic horizons? In the Tractatus Wittgenstein made language coextensive with the world by showing that the very concept of a world is a linguistic one. At the same time he showed that our ability to create and to use worlds depends upon logic just as it depends upon God as the unlimited horizon of each world’s limited horizon. Heuristic worlds close-in upon themselves, even when the human person realizes that knowledge has not been exhausted. Yet somehow the limitless direction and dynamism of human striving must be named. Regardless of whether or not one is comfortable with the word “God,” the reality recognized by Wittgenstein in the Tractatus is that language paradoxically is both self-contained and in need of a foundation. “Language must speak for itself (Wittgenstein 1974, 63).” It says all that can, or needs to be, said within language. No metalanguage stands beyond it, because it represents the limits of thought. On the other hand, the limits of thought are not the limits of being. If language presupposes the self, logic, and God then it must rest upon something outside itself. It must be posited. By posited, I do not mean a human act of ratiocination, but that which precedes the act and renders it possible. In this regard, one might even speak theistically of a “positing” in which human beings find themselves, rather than one of their own initiative. The Wittgenstein of the Tractatus is a realist who eventually arrives at that place where Aristotle and Aquinas stood before him. His goals were not unlike their own. He wanted to affirm a fundamentally realist position. The world is real; it is not an idealist construction of

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the mind. He wanted to affirm an adequation between the mind and reality. Our words are capable of possessing both sense and meaning. They can exist in logical space and truly represent the world beyond them. If we have failed to see this, our philosophy is inept, not the world around us. Language for Wittgenstein is all we possess, but it acts like a cipher, pointing beyond itself. There cannot be language without a self who speaks, without a logical frame of reference in which to speak, without a positing of what is said, and not said, against a background that anything at all can be said. Wittgenstein ended the Tractatus with the words, “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.” But this is not the silence of contempt for fantasy. It is the silence that accompanies wonder. If only Wittgenstein the theologian could have paraphrased this earlier comment of his, “It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists,” and added the following conclusion to the Tractatus: It is not how language works that is mystical, but that it exists.


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Chapter 3 A World Thaws: The Philosophical Investigations

3.1 A World of Worlds

I

f a fundamental insight of the Tractatus is the recognition that human beings dwell in a single heuristic world, an interconnected epistemological system focused upon the knowing self, then the development that the Philosophical Investigations represents is the realization of the utter complexity of that world. Indeed, it is a “world of worlds.” The Investigations carries an optimistic tone, however, because, for all its complexity, the linguistic frames of reference that we employ in ordinary language not only work, but work exceedingly well. The epistemological passage from the Tractatus to the Investigations is well illustrated in the following example, taken from Wittgenstein’s unpublished notes, which were subsequently collected under the title Philosophical Grammar (1974, 213-14).1 Now I would like to ask “How can the blueprint be used as a representation, unless there is already an agreement with what is to be made? — But what does that mean? Well, perhaps this: how could I play the notes in the score on the piano if they didn’t already have a relationship to particular types of movements of the hand? 1

They date from the period 1932-1934, just before the lectures collated by his students into the Blue and Brown Notebooks (1960). Hence, they are part of the bridge between the two works.

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Terrance W. Klein: How Things Are in the World Of course such a relationship sometimes consists in a certain agreement, but sometimes not in any agreement, but merely in our having learnt to apply the signs in a particular way. What the comparison between the method of projection and the projection lines connecting the picture with the object does is to make all these cases alike — because that is what attracts us. You may say: I count the projection lines as part of the picture — but not the method of projection. You may of course also say: I count a description of a method of projection as part of the picture. So I am imagining the difference between proposition and reality is ironed out by the lines of projection belonging to the picture, the thought, and that no further room is left for a method of application, but only for agreement and disagreement.

Here the themes of the Tractatus, along with its terms and framework, are juxtaposed to that of the Investigations. If one still wants to speak of the relationship between a proposition and reality, then the question Wittgenstein would now pose is “Given that we know the lines of projection, what is the method of projection?” Should we presume, without examination, that we know it to be the same in every usage? Again, to use bridge-language between the two works, one can ask, “Between the reality which is imaged and the proposition which does the imagining, what type of image is being employed? Can’t there be more than one?” We presume that musical notes image the sounds that are to be produced from them by the piano. But is that the only thing the musician can do with them? Could he hum them, tap to them, or feed them into a computer program for synthesization? Or even, “Piano playing, a dance of human fingers (Wittgenstein 1980a, 36e).” Wittgenstein’s point is that we conclude that these notes represent this activity, have this meaning, because of the context in which we encounter them. Shift the context, however, and the meaning shifts with it. One of the first notions from the Tractatus jettisoned in the Investigations is the univocity of logic. Logic certainly seems to be the sort of thing that should be all-embracing, standing above everything that human beings might conceive or express, which was its position in the Tractatus, but do the words “same” (identity), “different”

3~A World Thaws: The Philosophical Investigations

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(exclusion) and “all” (universal) really mean the same in distinct contexts? “I am the same person I was yesterday.” “This pain reliever is the same as that.” Is the same word being used in the same sense in both sentences? Or is there, to use Wittgenstein’s term, a different method of projection being employed? Or take the words simple and composite. “We use the word “composite” (and therefore the word “simple”) in an enormous number of different and differently related ways (Wittgenstein 1967b, 22e n. 47).” In the Investigations proper, the term “method of projection” will give way to “grammar.” Grammar is the context in which a word is being employed. Grammar can be understood as logical form, but one must constantly remember that logical form is site, or use, specific. It is no longer the all-embracing “glue” of perceived reality. The context, or system, in which a word is used, and to what end, determines its grammar and hence its context-dependent logical form. Whenever human beings follow rules, they engage in what Wittgenstein would call grammar. In the Tractatus logic stands outside of language and makes it possible. In the Investigations it stands within language, in such a way that one can say that language makes logic possible! As Stanley Cavell, the preeminent American interpreter of Wittgenstein, put it (1969, 56), “In the Tractatus Wittgenstein, if I understand, was asking: ‘Why is the logical form of a proposition its real form?’ But in the later philosophy he answers, in effect: ‘It is not.’ And he goes on to ask: ‘Why do we (did I) think it was?’ And ‘What does tell us the real form (=grammar) of a proposition?’” The logical form was conceived in the Tractatus on the model of a scientific proposition. In the Investigations the propositional model is viewed as only one possible use of the more comprehensive grammatical form. “Think of the tools in a tool-box: there is a hammer, pliers, a saw, a screw-driver, a rule, a glue-pot, glue, nails and screws. — The function of words are as diverse as the function of these objects. (And in both cases there are similarities.)” Likewise, the search for the atomized meaning of individual words is abandoned in the latter thought of Wittgenstein. Words do not derive their meaning from extralinguistic referents, but from their use, their place in the grammar of language. “Of course, what confuses us is the uniform appearance

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of words when we hear them spoken or meet them in script and print. For their application is not presented to us so clearly. Especially when we are doing philosophy (Wittgenstein 1967b, 6e n. 11)!” The Investigations open with a passage of confused philosophy from St. Augustine (1967b, 2e n. 1). It contains all of the principle themes with which the work deals, especially the rejection of atomized word meaning: “When they (my elders) named some object, and accordingly moved towards something, I saw this and I grasped that the thing was called by the sound they uttered when they meant to point it out. Their intention was shown by their bodily movements, as it were the natural language of all peoples: the expression of the face, the play of the eyes, the movement of other parts of the body, and the tone of voice which expresses our state of mind in seeking, having, rejecting, or avoiding something. Thus, as I heard words repeatedly used in their proper places in various sentences, I gradually learnt to understand what objects they signified; and after I had trained my mouth to form these signs, I used them to express my own desires.”2 In this autobiographical passage Augustine describes learning language as a process of learning the meaning of each word by ostensive definition, while he mentally correlates his own (infant) mentalese with adult languages. “Augustine describes the learning of human language as if the child came into a strange country and did not understand the language of the country; that is, as if it already had a language, only not this one. Or again: as if the child could already think, only not yet speak. And ‘think’ would here mean something like ‘talk to itself (ibid.. 15-6e n. 32).’” Wittgenstein saw Augustine’s approach as an exemplary summation of Western philosophy’s view of language, one suggesting that the meaning of a word is a distinct object standing apart from the word in reality, and hence, that one can point to the word’s meaning by ostension. “Every ostensive definition forges a link between language and the world (Baker and Hacker 1980, 36).” It also suggests that meaning is something ethereal, located neither in language nor in reality but in some middle realm between the two. “Since they flow from the essential nature of the thing correlated with the word, meaning-rules express the essential features of the world. This guar2

The passage is from the Confessions I. 8.


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antees a metaphysical harmony between language and the world. The essence of language is the essence of the world (ibid. 39).” This is, of course, precisely where that last great metaphysical opus, the Tractatus, located meaning. Meaning was the act of correspondence between the proposition and the reality it asserted. “Understanding consists in a mental association of a word with an object...Understanding is, as it were, a form of mental pointing at an object, a way of projecting language onto the world (ibid. 39).” If the Tractatus represented the last flowering of Western metaphysical thought, the Investigations could be called “apocalyptic and beyond.” It systematically dismantles this conception of language and hence of correspondence. Traditional epistemology and ontology self-destructed in the thought of Wittgenstein while the last century stood at its apogee. Systematically, through a series of aphorisms and aperçus, the Investigations demolish the notion that the meaning of a word is an object standing over-against that word in reality. For example, does Napoleon no longer have a meaning because the bearer of the name is dead? “But if ‘Excalibur’ is the name of an object, this object no longer exists when Excalibur is broken in pieces; and as no object would then correspond to the name it would have no meaning. But then the sentence ‘Excalibur has a sharp blade’ would contain a word that had no meaning, and hence the sentence would be nonsense. But it does make sense; so there must always be something corresponding to the words of which it consists. So the word ‘Excalibur’ must disappear when the sense is analysed and its place taken by words which name simples. It will be reasonable to call these words the real names (Wittgenstein 1967b, 19-20e n. 39).” Russell had traversed this territory previously, and the last two sentences facetiously rebuke his final solution. Emerging from an idealist tradition, Russell first believed that words always corresponded to objects, even if that meant that unicorns must exist in some third, Platonic realm. Subsequently both he and the analytic tradition that followed him suggested that correspondence was still possible, but a bit more complicated. One simply had to be careful in identifying the relationship of correspondence. The sentence “The King of France is bald” can be rewritten in a logical notation which

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never really asserts the existence of a king a France. Theoretically, all logically perspicuous sentences would contain only logically simple names, and these would correspond to reality (Russell 1965a, 15-24). This was Wittgenstein’s Tractarian view, one he summarizes in the Investigations: “A name signifies only what is an element of reality. What cannot be destroyed; what remains the same in all changes” (1967b, 29e n. 59). But the Wittgenstein of the Investigations will have none of this. Logical simples, whatever they might be, do not correspond to objects outside of language. Even simples draw their meaning from the linguistic context in which they are used, and the only way to know that meaning is to examine grammatically the language used. We use the word “simple,” just as we use the word “complex,” in an innumerable variety of ways, none of which stand free from context. “But isn’t a chessboard, for instance, obviously, and absolutely composite? — You are probably thinking of the composition out of thirty-two black squares. But could we not also say, for instance, that it was composed of the colours black and white and the schema of squares? And if there are quite different ways of looking at it, do you still want to say that the chessboard is absolutely ‘composite?’ — Asking ‘Is this object composite?’ outside a particular languagegame is like what a boy once did, who had to say whether the verbs in a certain sentence were in the active or passive voice, and who racked his brains over the question whether the verb ‘to sleep’ meant something active or passive (Wittgenstein 1967b 22e n. 47).” Color ought to be the most simple of simples, but if I ask the shopkeeper for five red apples, does he pull out three charts, one for fruit, one for numbers, and one for colors in order to fill my order? Red is not a Platonic essence, but rather a cog in the system that is language. It does not stand outside of language; it’s a reference point within language. “Philosophical misunderstandings arise when we misinterpret a role assigned to an object and treat it as a remarkable feature of the object itself. When we describe something, certain things are set up (perhaps tacitly) as elements of the description. These items are used in the description and are not themselves further described — they are assigned a particular role in the language-game of describing (Fogelin 1976, 128).”


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“Something red can be destroyed, but red cannot be destroyed, and that is why the meaning of the word “red” is independent of the existence of a red thing.” — Certainly it makes no sense to say that the colour red is torn up or pounded to bits. But don’t we say “the red is vanishing?” And don’t clutch at the idea of our always being able to bring red before our mind’s eye even when there is nothing red any more. That is just as if you chose to say that there would still always be a chemical reaction producing a red flame. — For suppose you cannot remember the colour any more? — When we forget which colour this is the name of, it loses its meaning for us; that is, we are no longer able to play a particular language-game with it. And the situation then is comparable with that in which we have lost a paradigm which was an instrument of our language (Wittgenstein 1967b, 28e n. 57).

Wittgenstein is ultimately assailing the notion that language is born in individual experience and only subsequently finds itself used as a vehicle of communication. This is why he poses the question of what happens if you no longer remember the meaning of the word red. “Red” was never something the individual possessed and then correlated to a language system others utilized. It was always a concept he learned to wield when he learned a language. It is an intralinguistic referent, a language tool. “It is a fact: ‘Red’ does not get explained to anyone by means of words without reference to a sample of the colour. Shouldn’t that be important (Wittgenstein 1980b, 1:113e n. 109)?” If the meaning of words were tied to subjective, interior experiences, how would I ever assure myself that the experiences of today are the same as those of yesterday? What criterion would serve the purpose of identity if language were intrasubjective? Although the substance of Wittgenstein’s critique of previous language theory has barely been introduced, its impact should already be clear. If it is impossible to speak of an extralinguistic correspondence to reality that establishes the possibility of language, if language, on the contrary, “establishes” what we conceive of as reality, then what becomes of ontology, the branch of human knowledge which studies the most basic constituents of reality? P.M.S. Hacker explains the significance of locating meaning within language rather than outside

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of it in Wittgenstein’s Place in Twentieth Century Analytic Philosophy (1996, 121-22). Ontology was considered to be a branch of metaphysics. The metaphysician, like the scientist, was thought to be investigating what really exists, what the universe really consists of, whether one kind of entity or substance can be reduced to another, what the basic particulars in the cosmos are, and so on. Wittgenstein repudiated ontology. The determination of what there is belongs to the province of experience and science. Realists argue that universals exist. After all, if the colour red did not exist, how could we talk about it (Investigations 58)? If the colour brown did not exist, then to have an idea of brown would be to have an idea of nothing (Philosophical Grammar 137)! Nominalists deny that universals exist, insisting that number-words, quality-words and abstract nouns do not stand for anything — only particulars really exist. But this is a grammatical confusion, rooted in the misconception that all words are names, which either name something or nothing. The realist is right to insist that numbers are not numerals, that abstract nouns or adjectives of quality are not empty words. The nominalists are right to insist that there are no objects corresponding to numerals, abstract nouns and adjectives of quality. The moot question is what is meant by saying that universals exist or do not exist, that numbers do or do not exist. To say that red exists is not to say that numbers are just like concrete objects, only abstract; but someone who insists that there are so-and-so many primes between m and n may well have said something true, and what he has said does not mean the same as saying that there are soand-so many numerals of a certain kind between “m” and “n.” There is no such thing as ontology as conceived by traditional metaphysicians, but there is such a thing as clarifying, from case to case, what (if anything) is meant by saying “There are X’s” or “X exists.”

Hacker brings Wittgenstein’s critique into apparently devastating focus. What then is the relationship between metaphysics and theology? Does theology demand a metaphysical substructure, and, if so, along what lines is this to be envisioned? “When philosophers use a word — ‘knowledge,’ ‘being,’ ‘object,’ ‘I,’ ‘propositions,’ ‘name’ —


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and try to grasp the essence of the thing, one must always ask oneself: is the word ever actually used in this way in the language-game which is its original home? — What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use (Wittgenstein 1967b, 48e n. 116).” Given such an approach, is metaphysics even conceivable? Setting aside these questions until the fourth chapter, a question of immediate theological significance poses itself. If logic no longer stands outside of language as a transcendental which makes it possible, what of that other transcendental of the Tractatus, God? In the earlier work, God stands as the ultimate, heuristic horizon upon which all distinction in language is to be posited; what happens when language itself comes to be viewed as the real ground of all possible distinction? In the Tractatus God cannot be said to exist within language. God stands beyond language, along with other “unutterable” realities like logic and ethics. But if, after the Investigations, everything we know, we know within language, what then of God? Certainly Wittgenstein’s interest in the question of God did not cease. He still addressed it even after he formulated the approach to philosophy represented in the Investigations. The latter did not mean that God has been reduced to a linguistic formulation. Wittgenstein did note that when people disagree over the question of God, they rarely speak of the same referent, or, to be true to the insight of the Investigations, they rarely invoke the same picture. There is some cogency in noting that for the latter Wittgenstein “referent” is the worst possible of words to use, since it again suggests an individual object standing over-against language. The idea that God should be an object of human apperception is still untenable, just as it was in the Tractatus. He certainly cannot be identified through ostensive definition, even if this were possible with ordinary objects. In the following passage (1967b, 63), Wittgenstein associates God and the idea of picturing, lampooning the notion of a possible ostensive definition of the deity. However he rejects more than this. He also repudiates the Tractarian view of a picture, a symbol possessing the same logical form as the object in reality it represents, as being applicable to God.

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Terrance W. Klein: How Things Are in the World Take “God created man.” Pictures of Michelangelo showing the creation of the world. In general, there is nothing which explains the meaning of words as well as a picture, and I take it that Michelangelo was as good as anyone can be and did his best, and here is the picture of the Deity creating Adam. If we ever saw this, we certainly wouldn’t think this the Deity. The picture has to be used in an entirely different way if we are to call the man in that queer blanket “God,” and so on. You could imagine that religion was taught by means of these pictures. “Of course, we can only express ourselves by means of pictures.” This is rather queer...I could show Moore the pictures of a tropical plant. If I showed him the picture of Michelangelo and said: “Of course, I can’t show you the real thing, only the picture.”...The absurdity is, I’ve never taught him the technique of using the picture.

What is clearly not happening here is a return to the picture theory of the Tractatus. If a picture can represents a portion of reality, as Wittgenstein once believed, where do we find a picture of God? Even Michelangelo’s will not do. What would share the logical form of that which stands beyond logical form? Here another sense of picturing is being obliquely invoked and juxtaposed to the first. Its meaning is something akin to “global outlook.” A picture of God would have to be a picture of all possible pictures, one incorporating them into a cohesive whole. It would involve a grammar which summarizes, juxtaposes, and makes relative all other grammars. Such a metagrammar would still not be ours to command as humans (not that we “command” the grammars that we do use!). Further, Wittgenstein’s hypothetical picture of God would have to contain not only cognitive but also emotive and ethical associations. This is what makes it fundamentally different from the picture of a tropical plant. The latter stands within the field of the cognitively apprehended, and it could be appropriated on a purely rational basis. The former would stand beyond the field, and the approach to it would involve an emotive and ethical relationship as well. Wittgenstein is suggesting that when people invoke the notion of God, or utilize God as a way of ultimately picturing reality, they are grammatically signaling the end of grammar, its frontier. They are using grammar itself as a cipher to what lies beyond it, suggesting that


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grammar, language, is transcendent. It does not exhaust its own potentiality. This thesis, of course, needs elaboration and substantiation, such as can only be accomplished by a more detailed examination of Wittgenstein’s latter work, the task now remaining before that work is juxtaposed with the thought of Karl Rahner on the transcendentally heuristic nature of human knowledge. One could say that the task remaining is to explicate this apparently isolated note from the Zettel (Wittgenstein 1967c, 26e n144): “How words are understood is not told by words alone (Theology).”

3.2 Language games There is perhaps no more evocative concept in Wittgenstein’s work than that of language games (Sprachspiele). The very term has entered common parlance, bloating in the process, often to the point of distortion. A language game is not a field of intellectual activity that can be considered epistemologically independent of other fields. Theology, biology, and psychology are not “language games” that can be evaluated intellectually only within their own domain, without any reference to, or interrelational coherence with, other fields of human endeavor. Wittgenstein’s concept of a language game is meant to tie the meaning of a word to the use it has in human life (Baker and Hacker 1980, 359). Language games are not intellectual fields of interest, but forms of language emerging out of basic forms of human activity: commands, questions, prayer, reports, lists, etc. Here is how Wittgenstein introduced the concept (1967b, 11e n. 23): “But how many kinds of sentence are there? Say assertion, question, and command? — There are countless kinds: countless different kinds of use of what we call ‘symbols,’ ‘words,’ ‘sentences.’ And this multiplicity is not something fixed, given once for all; but new types of language, new language-games, as we may say, come into existence, and others become obsolete and get forgotten. (We can get a rough picture of this from the changes in mathematics.) Here the term

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‘language-game’ is meant to bring into prominence the fact that the speaking of language is part of an activity, or of a form of life.” Wittgenstein opens the Investigations with two examples of language games. Both are linked to the human activity of construction; the second is a variant on the first, as the activity itself becomes more involved. This produces a more complex language game. “The processes of naming the stones and of repeating words after someone might also be called language-games[...]I shall also call the whole, consisting of language and the actions into which it is woven, the ‘language game (ibid. 5e n.7).’” Why language games? That language should be linked to human activity seems obvious enough. But what unique characteristic of language is being emphasized through the concept? In his anthropological masterpiece, Homo Ludens (1950), Johann Huizinga presented the game as a self-contained world, one possessing its own boundaries, its own internal coherence, its own internal purposefulness. One could say that a game has a life, and a logic, of its own. Wittgenstein’s “stress on the multiplicity of language-games is a fundamental part of his attempt to rid us of the assumption that logic is prior to all experience and that it constitutes the a priori order of the world. Logic is found within the various language-games themselves. That is, we learn to distinguish between sense and nonsense in different ways using language in the varied circumstances of social life (Keightley 1976, 38).” Of course, it’s essential to note that we normally do not identify ourselves as participating in language games. They are too basic to our way of life, to our process of understanding. Quite often the task of the philosopher is to assist in making language games perspicuous. “The understanding of language, as of a game, seems like a background against which a particular sentence acquires meaning. — But this understanding, the knowledge of the language, isn’t a conscious state that accompanies the sentences of the language. Not even if one of its consequences is such a state. It’s much more like the understanding or mastery of a calculus, something like the ability to multiply (Wittgenstein 1974, 50).” Virtually every collection of notes bearing Wittgenstein’s name contains reflections upon the nature of color. One could call his reflections on color the “litmus test” of his philosophical work. Color


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would appear to be a given, something so simple that it requires no analysis. Couldn’t one call color a sensatum, present immediately with experience? For Wittgenstein it is indeed a given (datum), but one given through language games, not through a reality standing outside of language. Nevertheless, we wield color concepts quite successfully, showing just how rooted they are in the language games we use. I paint the view from my window; one particular spot, determined by its position in the architecture of a house, I paint ochre. I say “I see this spot in this colour.” That does not mean that I see the colour ochre at this spot, for the pigment may appear much lighter or darker or more reddish (etc,) than ochre, in these surroundings. I can perhaps say “I see this spot the way I have painted it here (with ochre); but it has a strongly reddish look to me.” But what if someone asked me to give the exact shade of colour that appears to me here? How should I describe it and how should I determine it? Someone could ask me, for example, to produce a colour sample, a rectangular piece of paper of this colour. I don’t say that such a comparison is utterly uninteresting, but it shows that is isn’t from the outset clear how shades of colour are to be compared, and therefore, what “sameness of colour” means here (Wittgenstein 1977, 51e s. III n. 265). If the word “blond” itself can sound blond, then it’s even easier for photographed hair to look blond (ibid. 53e s. III n. 275)!

On the level of strict empiricism, there is nothing “blond” about the blond hair that appears in a black and white photograph. Yet no one has trouble distinguishing blond hair in such a photograph from darker versions. We identify and label such hair to be blond without any reference to the empirical, but rather entirely on the strength of the language game being employed. And of course, before the introduction of photography this particular language game did not exist. In the Investigations Wittgenstein discusses concepts like “simple,” “composite,” and “exact.” These are formulations that ordinary language takes for granted, but many philosophers have gone to great effort to give them a precise meaning. Yet these concepts, and others like them, are entirely language game dependent, which is why they

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function so well in ordinary discourse and seem to defy any philosophical speculation which would seek to generalize their meaning permanently. Leave them in a language game, and we wield them quite successfully. Remove them from one, and watch the intellectual confusion. “If I tell someone ‘Stand roughly here’ — may not this explanation work perfectly? And cannot every other one fail too? But isn’t it an inexact explanation? — Yes; why shouldn’t we call it ‘inexact?’ Only let us understand what ‘inexact’ means. For it does not mean ‘unusable.’ And let us consider what we call an ‘exact’ explanation in contrast with this one. Perhaps something like drawing a chalk line round an area? Here it strikes us at once that the line has breadth. So a colour-edge would be more exact. But has this exactness still got a function here: isn’t the engine idling? And remember too that we have not yet defined what is to count as overstepping this exact boundary; how, with what instruments, it is to be established. And so on (Wittgenstein 1967b 41e n. 88).” Hacker (1996, 108) has suggested that the deductive, or depth analysis, of the Tractatus has been replaced by what he calls a synoptic, comparative account. A horizontal analysis has supplanted a vertical one. Whereas in the first work Wittgenstein saw the task of philosophy as reducing the complex to the elementary, here the task is preventing what truly is a complex reality from being perceived too facilely. “When words in our ordinary language have prima facie analogous grammars we are inclined to interpret them analogously; i.e. we try to make the analogy hold throughout (Wittgenstein 1960, 7).” So analysis in the Investigations is not so much strict deduction from invariable rules as it is descriptive deduction, as one language game is juxtaposed to another. Alan Keightley compared the two works from the point of view of logic by noting that “in Wittgenstein’s early period, the limits of language is a technical idea. The limit of language is a single sweeping line enclosing all factual language and dividing sense from nonsense. It is located a priori. One could know when the dividing line had been reached and stop before straying into nonsense.” Language remains the core issue, but the notion of a limit has shifted. “In the Investigations Wittgenstein is less interested in the far-out boundary enclosing all discourse and concentrates on the boundaries between areas of


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discourse. The later Wittgenstein radically re-drew his map of language. Factual discourse is deprived of its preeminence and placed on the same level as all other modes (Keightley 1976, 56).” Too often, however, commentators stop short when considering the insights that Wittgenstein had concerning the role of logic and analysis in language. Just as logic remains a fundamental concern in both works, so too does analysis. Both become much more philosophically complex in our attempt to understand the functional simplicity of ordinary language. In the Investigations analysis is both deductive and synoptic. Within the consideration of an individual language game, a deductive analysis occurs. How is a term being used in this situation? What is its relationship to other terms at play here? How does understanding the use of one term lead to that of another? This deductive analysis, however, gives way to synopsis when one attempts to reconnect the now-examined language game to the larger context of language. The failure to do this would leave the individual language game truly unexamined, because it is unexplained. It is not yet synthetically connected to the lived experience that is language in its totality. We move effortlessly from one language game to another in ordinary speech, and analysis has not completely mirrored our linguistic reality until it too moves with equal ease between games. Unlike real games, language games are not completely independent. That is to say they do not separate themselves from reality as do the games which humans actually play. Huizinga (1950,12) pointed out that the single common element of play is its suspension of reality. Wittgenstein pointedly denied that games have any single element. Yet Huizinga’s definition of “play” would seem to stand. Unlike simple feats of dexterity, which are often done only for the purpose of developing that dexterity, all games would seem to involve a suspension of reality. Real games could thus be called “reality-defying” because they suspend the world’s normal operation; language games, however, are “reality-affirming.” They are our way of existing in reality, which is why comprehension of them is always contextualization, even if this means linking them to countless other language games rather than to independent, logical elements. Real games defy any notion of totality, but language games are a constitu-

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ent element of that “totality” which is the living world of human beings. It is precisely at this point that Wittgenstein’s metaphor breaks down. Ask any child if he wants to play a game. He will, because games are fun (ibid. 2-3). They are fun because they defy reality. Children learn language games, however, because they are necessary, not because they are fun. Wittgenstein used the metaphor of a language game to suggest that games create their own reality. They do so, however, in the service, so to speak, of reality as a whole, not in counter distinction to it. Only by giving ourselves over to them have we any hope of adequately exploiting that reality. A child knows that a game involves a choice. One need not play. But who can choose not to play Wittgenstein’s language games? It is only when the philosophical task is conceived narrowly as “only analytic” that one can content one’s self with mere analysis of individual language games. Language games cumulatively effect an essential, necessary synthesis, and unfortunately Wittgenstein’s own metaphor tends to obstruct this feature, one he himself understood. For all of the analysis that takes place in linguistic philosophy, the goal remains a synthetic, synoptic view of the reality we experience through language. The difficulty with so much of the philosophy of language that followed Wittgenstein is that it contented itself with the notion that to do philosophy was to analyze, as though this occurred in a synthetic vacuum, one not guided by a world-view, however unexamined. If Wittgenstein showed that analysis rarely incorporates the actual, elegant complexity of a simple language game, but rather ignores this stratum because of a misguided emphasis upon the general and the all-encompassing, the charge could equally be laid that philosophers also rarely examine their own latent, synoptic overviews. Wittgenstein’s point was that our desire for a quick synthesis leads us to skip an adequate analysis, but analysis always exists to serve the purpose of a more complete synthesis. Analysis is never an end in itself. Human beings can no more not synthesize than they can fail to live in worlds, interconnected heuristic horizons focused upon the individual. Dario Antiseri notes (1967, 235), however, that the sort of firm analysis upon which synthesis is thought to depend is consciously


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lacking in the Investigations. “In fact Wittgenstein is of the opinion that many concepts of our language are not definable by the schema per genus proximum et differentiam specificam: for example, the concepts of ‘game’ or ‘number’ (My translation).” But if, after such an analysis, the basic elements of reality defy “definition,” what becomes of synthesis? If the complex cannot be reduced to the simple, then how are many “simples” to be brought into the unity of the one? How does conceptual thought retrace the ground covered effortlessly by ordinary language? Wittgenstein takes up the question of a synoptic, or synthetic, apperception of reality, in the metaphor of the thread in which no single strands runs its entire length, and yet a functioning thread exists because of it contiguous elements (1967b, 32e n.67). “And we extend our concept of number as in spinning a thread we twist fibre on fibre. And the strength of the thread does not reside in the fact that some one fibre runs through its whole length, but in the overlapping of many fibres.” Atomized concepts may not be given, but “family resemblances” do exist. Our working concepts, which in this view are always somewhat provisional, depend upon them (Baker and Hacker 1980, 337). With the concept of “family resemblance” the latter Wittgenstein suggests that analogy is not a secondary operation performed upon already-known constituents of reality, but a necessary, intrinsic method of human noesis. By its nature, every “definition” involves an operation of analogy. Obviously, this has profound significance for natural theology, where the legitimacy of analogous language has always been a contested point. Wittgenstein seems to close the debate, or at the very least reconfigure it, with the simplest of questions, “What language is not analagous?”

3.3 Forms of Life “God grant the philosopher insight into what lies in front of everyone’s eyes (Wittgenstein 1980a, 63e).” It is sometimes naively assumed that the epistemological effect of the concept of a ‘language game’ is to

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make language itself indeterminate, to dispossess it of any fixed poles. If, by indeterminate, one means that language lacks an extralinguistic referent, a portion of reality unaffected in human consciousness by its relationship to language, this is true. If, however, the suggestion is that in Wittgenstein’s work language becomes capricious, that language games make meaning arbitrary, something never successfully fixed for the purpose of communication with another, nothing could be more inimical to Wittgenstein’s genius. He reminds us frequently that language does work, and works quite well, because it is rooted in reality. Ordinary language effectively, which is to say fecundly, engages reality. “It is wrong to say that in philosophy we consider an ideal language as opposed to our ordinary one. For this makes it appear as though we thought we could improve on ordinary language. But ordinary language is all right (Wittgenstein 1960, 28).” In Wittgenstein’s thought language is both a human reality and a “given.” On one hand he could write, “But let’s not forget that a word hasn’t got a meaning given to it, as it were, by a power independent of us, so that there could be a kind of scientific investigation into what the word really means. A word has the meaning someone has given to it (ibid. 28),” all the while insisting that this process is the most natural of all human processes, that it functions continually in language, and functions superbly, so well, in fact, that we can depend upon it. “Here I would like to make a general observation concerning the nature of philosophical problems. Lack of clarity in philosophy is tormenting. It is felt as shameful. We feel: we do not know our way about where we should know our way about. And nevertheless it isn’t so. We can get along well without these distinctions and without knowing our way about (Wittgenstein 1977, 21e).” This is because language games are rooted in Lebensformen, forms of human life. Richard Bell has suggested that forms of life replace the philosophical search for essences in Wittgenstein’s thought (1969, 17-18): “One of the biggest clues to the correlation between ‘essence’ and ‘grammar’ lies in Wittgenstein’s strong conviction that the conventions of learning a language and natural use of language are the ‘bedrock’ of our understanding of the world itself. Grammatical forms are life forms which have conventional origins. ‘Language...is founded on convention.’ When Wittgenstein talks about ‘essences’ he is referring


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to the ‘bedrock of our grammatical behavior,’ the place where reason comes to an end; to the ‘given’ shown in the grammar of our natural languages. ‘What has to be accepted, the given, is — so one could say — forms of life.’ It is simply what men say and do that forms their grammar, and that in turn shapes their forms of life and directs the course of their natural history.” This concept has broad ramifications in Wittgenstein’s thought. Much of what we think of as “essentialist” thought is actually a process of calculation, based not upon perception of Platonic essences, but upon forms of life. “A child uses such primitive forms of language when it learns to talk. Here the teaching of language is not explanation, but training (Wittgenstein 1967b,4e n. 5).” Wittgenstein’s sharply contested view of mathematics is that it is based upon an arbitrary calculus which is usefully imposed upon reality. Mathematics is not founded upon “essential” constituents of reality. To learn mathematics is not to discover a latent portion of reality, but rather to be trained in following rules. At the root of every language game is a form of life, and an introduction into this form of life is a process of training, of learning to follow rules. When he first learns the names of colours — what is taught him? Well, he learns e.g. to call out “red” on seeing something red. — But is that the right description; or ought it to have gone: “He learns to call ‘red’ what we too call ‘red’?” — Both descriptions are right. What differentiates this from the language-game “How does it strike you?” But someone might be taught colour-vocabulary by being made to look at white objects through coloured spectacles. What I teach him however must be a capacity. So he can now bring something red at an order; or arrange objects according to colour. But then what is something red (Wittgenstein 1967c, 75e n. 421)? Colour-words are explained like this: “That’s red” e.g. — Our language game only works, of course, when a certain agreement prevails, but the concept of agreement does not enter into the language-game. If agreement were universal, we should be quite unacquainted with the concept of it (ibid. 76e n. 430).

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It would not be a distortion of Wittgenstein’s thought to say that “training” represents a synthesizing rooted in human life. It is the way human beings share the world with each other, impart to others a way of synthesizing disparate elements of reality that transcend, or remain constant for, human cognition. Through training, which is normally preconceptual, human beings share both the foundational and the conventual world.3 Of course one can later conceptually clarify rules, but it is the rule, not its conceptual clarity or justification which is initially offered to the one learning. Note the elliptical comment, “If agreement were universal, we should be quite unacquainted with it.” It contains an important Tractarian insight into the “world-wielding” nature of Wittgenstein’s thought. If human beings actually shared the philosophically longedfor essentialist frame of reference, they would fail to recognize this fact, since it would form the preconscious background to all their acts of positing. There is a categorical distinction between an act of positing which occurs within a world, a frame of reference, and one which literally reveals the boundary of that world. “Does everything that I want to say here come down to the fact that the utterance, ‘I see a red circle’ and ‘I see, I’m not blind’ are logically different? How do we test a person to find out if the first statement is true? And to find out if the second is true? Psychology teaches us how to determine colour-blindness, and thereby normal vision too. But who can learn this (Wittgenstein 1977, 54e n. 283)?” Synthesis is the ever-present human reality, one so basic to our lives as humans that we fail to recognize it. Since the world is not given to us in the form of deductive essences, human beings must construct, or posit through multitudinous, preconceptual acts of synthesis, the world in which we dwell. A linguistic philosopher analyzes, but in doing so he or she is only reversing the operation of that other, basic heuristic movement, synthesis. Just as in the Tractatus Wittgenstein posited the existence of simples, not because he knew them, but because deduction demanded them, here he suggests that philosophi3

As Baker and Hacker (1985, 229-30) explain, one cannot establish a one-to-one correspondence between language and reality because reality is not perspicuously present within language, it forms rather the thematic background to it, “the frame.”


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cal analysis occurs because it operates upon a preanalytic linguistic synthesis. “In order to describe the phenomenon of red-green colourblindness, I need only say what someone who is red-green colourblind cannot learn; but now in order to describe the ‘phenomena of normal vision’ I would have to enumerate the things we can do (ibid. 39e n.164).” That act is, of course, impossible, but the reality which it represents is the prethematic background present in all human thought. “Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination (Wittgenstein 1967b, 4e n. 6).” If this is true, then every language game, rooted as it is in a form of life, is only one of an infinite number of possible combinations of notes, all of which issue from the same keyboard, language. Philosophers spend their days, and ink, deassembling what ordinary human language continually, preconsciously assembles. The activity has its usefulness, without a doubt, but a philosopher who fails to contextualize his own activity cannot see the synthetic background out of which this activity occurs. Analysis, as it were, backtracks upon linguistic acts of synthesis, sometimes correcting errors, sometimes clarifying concepts, but most often simply revealing the myriad combinations of language. The Investigations may well have removed the world of essences which the Tractatus once placed before us, but they implicitly present a world in which synthesis becomes the most basic of heuristic activities. “We judge an action according to its background within human life, and this background is not monochrome, but we might picture it as a very complicated filigree pattern, which, to be sure, we can’t copy, but which we can recognize from the general impression it makes (Wittgenstein 1980 2:107e n. 624).” The filigree pattern presents a world in which essences, to the extent that one can speak of them, do not lie beyond the world in some other realm, but within the world. “Essence is expressed by grammar (Wittgenstein 1967b, 116e n. 371).” “Grammar tells what kind of object anything is (ibid. n. 373).” Essences are the product of humanity’s shared life, a fact which does not make them either arbitrary or merely conventional. Rule following, which is what occurs in any language game, and which usually determines that which we call an essence, is not simply a matter of human decision. Baker and Hacker (1985, 247-48) offer an important correction to

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those who think the post-Wittgenstein world is capricious. Rules carry their applications with them; they are not determined by consensus. This does not mean that logic boils down into human habits or consensus. (a) What is correct, in accord with a rule, cannot be defined as what it is customary to do. That would be inconsistent with acknowledging that there is an internal relation between a rule and acting in accord with it. (b) An interpretation of a rule does not make an act a correct application of a particular rule; it is not the foundation for what accords with the rule, and what conflicts with it. That too would represent an interpretation as abrogating the internal connection between a rule and acting in accord with it. Rather, an interpretation makes clear what is, as it were, already in accord with a particular rule (in circumstances in which misunderstandings occur or are known to be likely). Hence reaching the end of a chain of interpretations makes no essential difference. The applications of the original rule do not rest on the first interpretation or any subsequent ones, and therefore the petering out of interpretations at some point does not strike away props that must be replaced by invoking agreement. Agreement no more mediates between a rule and its extension than does an interpretation. On the contrary, there is no such thing as rule which does not, by itself, constitute a standard of correctness. It is platitude, for example, that the rule +2 determines that writing “1002” after “1000” is correct. Why is it right to write “1002” here? — ““Well, because we all do it like that;” that will not be the reason.” (Zettel n. 319; cf. Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology nn. 403ff.) Agreement in action is not a surrogate for the concept of correctness because absence of interpretations generates no conceptual vacuum to be filled.4

That fact that we are so readily speak of essences shows that rules normally function without support from either convention or inter4

They add: “If there were no common agreement in action, there would be no “logic of our language” since there would be no shared language at all. The grammatical relations that constitute logic are constructed with the framework of common agreement, but that consensus in action is not the cement that binds together those grammatical relations.”


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pretative justification. They are so basic to our way of life, that no act of individual or collective fiat could alter them. To the extent that they change at all, they change with an evolutionary, or even a geological, speed (Strawson 1959, 10). Wittgenstein’s thought should not be facilely linked to the current peculiarly Western debate of whether or not universal norms or truths exist. He certainly never suggested that reality becomes subject to human perception and volition, as though an individual, or even a society, could, by changing its language, change its reality (Wittgenstein 1956, 323). Part of what it means to understand the Investigations is an adequate grounding in the Tractatus. In the first work, language is a tool, one needing ever greater logical refinement and perspicuity in order to adequately mirror the reality which stands beyond it. In the latter work, it is not unfair or glib, to suggest that Wittgenstein makes language itself metaphysical, in the sense that he sees language as the ultimate ground of coherence and stability, a fact that shows just how inaccurate a superficial reading of Wittgenstein is when it presents language as something recently discovered to be arbitrary. Juxtaposing the two works, one could say that language moves from being a tool to being the workroom. “Measuring with a yardstick can be described; how can it be given a foundation? Is the concept ‘pain’ an instrument made by man; and what purpose does it serve (Wittgenstein 1980b, 1:123e n. 667)?” The idea here is that our conceptual grasp of what we do with a yardstick is as much a tool of language as the yardstick is a physical took of measurement. Whether the concept in question is measurement or pain, both exist as a functional, linguistic way of dealing with reality. The fascinating thing about those two adjectives, functional and linguistic, is that if one understands Wittgenstein, either could be used in place of the other. They need not both be included. When they are, a certain redundancy is present. Ultimately one must accept the apparent paradox that language can be both functional and foundational. While the word functional would seem to suggest something less than foundational, something ordered beyond itself, Wittgenstein’s point is that the deepest foundation available to the human person is language as it effectively functions in human life.

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To suggest that in post-Wittgenstein thought language is arbitrary is to continue to make the same Augustinian mistake Wittgenstein castigates in the opening of the Investigations. A child does not translate language into mentalese, his own private world of meaning. Meaning comes to him with the acquisition of language. Ut puer sic homo. It is always truer to say that language imposes meaning than that meaning imposes language. “We are struggling with language. We are engaged in a struggle with language (Wittgenstein 1980a, 11e).” Notice in the following passage, from the collection of notes now known as Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology (1980b, 2:17-18e n. 92), Wittgenstein’s juxtaposition of visual impressions (stimuli coming directing from an exterior source) and images (subject to volition). But what if visual impressions could be controlled directly? Should I say, “Then there wouldn’t be any impressions, but only images?” And what would that be like? How would I find out, for instance, that another person has a certain image? He would tell me. — But how would he learn the necessary words, let us say “red” and “round?” For surely I couldn’t teach them to him by pointing to something red and round. I could only evoke within myself the image of my pointing to something of the sort. And furthermore I couldn’t test whether he was understanding me. Why, I could of course not even see him; no, I could only form an image of him. Isn’t this hypothesis really like the one that there is only fiction in the world and no truth.

The key to the passage is to recognize that Wittgenstein is not reducing language to the merely arbitrary. Without any links to external reality, that is, if all impressions really were self-created images, then language would be impossible, because no link would exist between the two fields represented by any two possible speakers. Impressions link us, collectively, to reality, and everything depends upon that adverb being emphasized. Two putative speakers, before any word is uttered, are already joined by a vast collective, communal experience of “external reality.” The experience is so collective, however, as to challenge the appropriateness of the adjective “external.”


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When Wittgenstein is charged with relativism, the problem often is that an Augustinian view of language is still operative. Reality is conceived as standing outside of language, and if the speech of each individual is not linked to reality by a one-to-one correspondence between words and objects, then no common ground would exist to make the communion of language possible. Everything would become relative. Wittgenstein insists that we exit this circle. We never approached reality as the Cartesian ego, separated from it and from others. We have always existed in active communion with both. Is humanity really living in communion? Or do we not want to insist, for example, that the world of the technological West is fundamentally different from all others? Wittgenstein disapproved of James Frazier’s classic work of anthropology The Golden Bough because Frazier “did not recognize the basic kinship between the activities and language of primitive man and those of our own culture (Keightley 1976, 47-48).” Frazier described primitive peoples and their world-view in a way which suggested that their concerns were not also our own, as though we had somehow superceded them. The same error occurred in much of the positivistic writing that followed Wittgenstein. To content oneself with asking only how the words “soul” or “guilt” are to be verified, suggests that the questioner himself has no use for the realities to which these words refer, as though he stood outside the communion of life that makes such concerns pressing. “In former times people went into monasteries. Were they stupid or insensitive people? — Well, if people like that found they needed to take such measures in order to be able to go on living, the problem cannot be an easy one (Wittgenstein 1980a, 49e)!” Far from lacking a sufficient ground, Wittgenstein’s point is that language is already rooted more in reality than the philosophical abstractions that depart from ordinary language in an attempt to provide some sort of highly abstract, “conceptual” foundation to human thought. This is why, for Wittgenstein, the philosophical agenda is more therapy than cognitive system building. Philosophical problems dissolve when we put ourselves back into our bodies, when we reincarnate what speculative thought had made disincarnate. “Philosophers use a language that is already deformed as though by shoes that are too tight (ibid. 41e).” Cavell writes (1969, 84-85), “It is true

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that for him, in the Investigations at any rate, this happens when we have gone through a process of bringing ourselves back into our natural forms of life, putting our souls back into our bodies[...]That a resolution of this sort is described as the solution of a philosophical problem, and as the goal of its particular mode of criticism, represents for me the most original contribution Wittgenstein offers philosophy.” “Don’t take the example of others as your guide, but nature (Wittgenstein 1980a, 41e)!” Here a warning should be sounded regarding the many current theological reevaluations of the body, and even “theologies of the body.” They may still suffer from the conceptual abstraction Wittgenstein rejects, treating the body as an object at hand, now one to be valued rather than disdained. It is possible to argue strenuously for a reformulation of Christianity’s evaluation of the body, all the while remaining entrenched within the Cartesian dichotomy. Needless to say, such a position would be fundamentally flawed in origin. Wittgenstein’s point is that positing the existence of a soul as distinct from a body is already to have severed a preconceptual, prephilosophical unity. “The human being is the best picture of the human soul (ibid. 49e).” A much less elegant statement would be to say that it is fruitless to abstract the human being from the Lebensformen in which, and through which, he comes to expression. All too often, however, we do abstract from our human forms of life, creating a distortion that only exists in the minds of philosophers and theologians. It is, of course, essential to note that Lebensformen come into, and pass out of, existence. Contemporary ones are no less human realities than ancient ones. How many theological texts begin with the suggestion that the problems of contemporary people can be understood adequately only by the (forthcoming) consideration of timeless truths? Wittgenstein’s therapy? “It is very remarkable that we should be inclined to think of civilization — houses, trees, cars, etc. — as separating man from his origins, from what is lofty and eternal, etc. Our civilized environment, along with its trees and plants, strikes us as though it were cheaply wrapped in cellophane and isolated from everything great, from God, as it were. That is a remarkable picture that intrudes on us (ibid. 50e).”


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Some of the earliest responses to Wittgenstein’s work read him as a behaviorist, because he continually reinserts the human person into a corporeal context. Yet behaviorism represents the sort of abstraction and reductionism which he rejected. Fergus Kerr writes (1986, 92): “We want to say that our actions, not to mention our utterances, spring from thought — as if they would otherwise not be worthy of the rational creatures that we are. Wittgenstein combats this rationalism with expressions such as ‘reaction,’ ‘instinctive relationship,’ ‘primitive behavior,’ ‘forms of life,’ and the like. Such phrases give rise to suspicions of behaviorism — but that makes his point. We are so dominated by the soul/body dichotomy that it becomes difficult to acknowledge a whole range of characteristically human activities which are neither the result of ratiocination nor the effect of mechanical conditioning.” Wittgenstein repeatedly attempts to return words to their usage, rather than allow them to be abstracted from it, producing essentialist “mutants.” Situated in living contexts, words possess meaning. Deprived of such a context, they yield awkwardly to definition, even for the person wielding them. “Imagine someone saying: ‘Man hopes.’ How should this general phenomenon of natural history be described? — One might observe a child and wait until one day he manifests hope; and then one could say ‘Today he hoped for the first time.’ But surely that sounds queer! Although it would be quite natural to say ‘Today he said “I hope” for the first time.’ And why queer? — One does not say that a suckling hopes that....nor yet that he has no hope that....and one does say it of a grown man — Well, bit by bit daily life becomes such that there is a place for hope in it. But now it is said: We can’t be certain when a child really begins to hope, for hope is an inner process. What nonsense! For then how do we know what we are talking about at all (Wittgenstein 1967c, 83 n. 469).” In short, the universalist foundation for language is human life itself, not occult realities lying beyond it, or obtuse abstractions from it. To make this assertion, is not, however, to abandon a universal norm of truth. It is simply to redirect the direction of the search.

Chapter 4 The Grammar of Knowledge

4.1 On the grammar of knowing others

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singular irony of modern Western thought is that Descartes intended to reorient it upon what he considered to be the firmest of foundations, the self-conscious ego. The difficulty with beginning there, however, is that not much can be founded. How does one ever get beyond the thinking subject to the world in which we live? In the Cartesian world, everyone else becomes a shadow, someone standing in need of an adequate foundation. Wittgenstein begins in a different place. The term “border” is a spatial-temporal metaphor applied to language. Like all metaphors, its meaning can be exhausted. “Border” is not meant to designate a passable barrier, as though one could import into language that which stands beyond it. It suggests rather that meaning and language are coterminous. The meaning of a linguistic expression lies neither in the reality to which it refers nor in the mind which produces it. Meaning is not external to language, nor does it produce language. Meaning is a function of language that can be explicated only through language. This means that one explicates the meaning of an expression not by reference to an exterior object or event in reality, nor by reference to an interior mental event, such as a thought finding expression in language. “We don’t get free of the idea that the sense of a sentence accompanies the sentence; is there alongside it (Wittgenstein 1967c, 25e n. 139).” Note that Wittgenstein is denying neither the existence of a reality which is independent of the knowing mind, nor that there

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is a reality that can properly be described as mental. He is asserting that one cannot use either of these realities as a way of determining the meaning of a linguistic expression. Its meaning does not lie in its correspondence to these realities, but rather in its relationship to other linguistic elements. Meaning is a function of place in a linguistic skein. It is not an interior mental event or action. For example: “It would also be wrong to say that ‘alluding’ stands for a family of mental and other processes. — For one can well ask ‘Which was your allusion to N.?’ ‘How did you give others to understand that you meant N.?’; but not: ‘How did you mean this utterance as an allusion to N.?’ ‘I alluded to him in my talk.’ — ‘When you said what?’ — ‘I was alluding to him when I spoke of a man who....’ ‘I was alluding to him’ means roughly: ‘I wanted someone to think of him at these words.’ But ‘I wanted’ is not the description of a state of mind. Neither is ‘understanding that N was meant’ such a description (ibid. 6e n. 26).” This conception of language, as a mutually shared web of significance, reaches its clearest specification in Wittgenstein’s rejection of a “private language,” a language constructed by an individual for the purpose of referencing his own interior events. Language is communal de natura. It is the medium by which human beings share perceptions, intuitions, and memories, in short, everything we normally call “thought.” Thinking is not a mental event which is then translated into language; it is rather the mastery of language itself. In the following passage, Wittgenstein tries to introduce the reader to a view of language in which it is unnecessary to posit a world of mental phenomena standing behind language (1967b, 59-60e n. 151). But there is also this use of the word “to know”: we say “Now I know!” — and similarly “Now I can do it!” And “Now I understand!” Let us imagine the following example: A writes a series of numbers down; B watches him and tries to find a law for the sequence of numbers. If he succeeds he exclaims: “Now I can go on!” — So this capacity, this understanding, is something that makes its appearance in a moment. So let us try and see what it is that makes its appearance here. — A has written down the numbers 1, 5, 11, 19, 29; at this point B says he knows how to go on. What

4~The Grammar of Knowledge

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happened here? Various things may have happened; for example, while A was slowly putting one number after another, B was occupied with trying various algebraic formulae on the numbers which had been written down. After A had written the number 19 B tried the formula a = n + n - 1; and the next number confirmed his hypothesis. Or again, B does not think of formulae. He watches A writing his numbers down with a certain feeling of tension, and all sorts of vague thoughts go through his head. Finally he asks himself: “What is the series of differences?” He finds the series 4, 6, 8, 10 and says: Now I can go on. Or he watches and says “Yes, I know that series” — and continues it, just as he would have done if A had written down the series 1, 3, 5, 7, 9. — Or he says nothing at all and simply continues the series. Perhaps he has what may be called the sensation “that’s easy!” (Such a sensation is, for example, that of a light quick intake of breath, as when one is slightly started.)

“Understanding” is not an mental event; it is a mastery of language, something akin to an ability. In Wittgenstein, learning to think is an introduction to language. It comes to exist within language, as a “function” of it, rather than standing behind or beyond it. This is the case whether the system in question is mathematics or ordinary language. “It could also be said that a man thinks when he learns in a particular way (Wittgenstein 1967c, 20e n. 105).” Wittgenstein’s point in the above illustration might well be made with the example of a child learning the use of the word “ball.” At a certain point, in determinate circumstances, he learns to wield the word. Not every round object is a ball. Not everything that can be thrown is a ball. “If there has to be anything ‘behind the utterance of the formula’ it is particular circumstances, which justify me in saying I can go on — when the formula occurs to me (Wittgenstein 1967b, 60e n. 154).” If one fails to see meaning as a function of language, one will continually posit mental realities in order to explain the use of language. The mind of the other becomes a “foreign territory,” and language, the connecting bridge between it and my own. Wittgenstein rejects this conception of language entirely. He repudiates the very dichotomy of internal/external. My thoughts exist in language, just as yours do, and this is true whether they are referring to directly

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observable events, or to “interior states.” “But we cannot get away from forming the picture of a mental process. And not because we are acquainted with it in our own case (Wittgenstein 1967c, 99e n. 565)!” As Cavell notes (1979, 96-97), Wittgenstein is not positing the obvious thesis that we do not know what is going on in the mind of another by direct intuition. That would be returning the debate to its Cartesian arena. “The question Wittgenstein wishes us to raise, is rather, something like this: When you have thrown out your signals and I have had the opportunity to be appraised of your inner world, then do I really know it (know it) or do the signals come from a source I can never check, hence signify something I can never know? (Another’s mind as God).” Cavell’s point is that another human mind is not “the great unknown” although it is obviously true to say that I do not possess knowledge of it as I do my own. However, the same medium, language, is being used in both. The other person comes to understand his interior state by means of language, so that to use language to describe his state is not fundamentally to alter or distort the mental reality. Wittgenstein writes (1980b, 1:29e): “I can never know what is going on in him; he always knows”: When one thinks philosophically, one would like to say that. But what situation does this statement correspond to? Every day we hear one man saying of another that he is in pain, is sad, is merry, etc. without a trace of doubt, and we relatively seldom hear that he does not know what is going on in the other. In this way, then, the uncertainty is not so bad. And it also happens that one says, “I know that you felt like this then, even if you won’t admit it now” (n. 138). The picture “He knows — I don’t know” is one that makes our lack of knowledge appear in an especially irritating light. It is like when one looks for an object in various drawers, and tells oneself that God know the whole time where it actually is, and that we are searching this drawer quite futilely (n. 139).”

Here it is the philosophical concept, or image being employed, that is distorting. As individuals, we are not in separate “drawers” of reality. This is the force behind Wittgenstein’s rejection of a private language. Even to explain the self, we are forced to use expressions forged in community.


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Let us imagine the following case. I want to keep a diary about the recurrence of a certain sensation. To this end I associate it with the sign “S” and write this sign in a calender for every day on which I have the sensation. — I will remark first of all that a definition of the sign cannot be formulated. — But still I can give myself a kind of ostensive definition. — How? Can I point to the sensation? Not in the ordinary sense. But I speak, or write the sign down, and at the same time I concentrate my attention on the sensation — and so, as it were, point to it inwardly. — But what is this ceremony for? For that is all it seems to be! A definition surely serves to establish the meaning of a sign. — Well, that is done precisely by the concentration of my attention; for in this way I impress on myself the connection between the sign and the sensation. — But “I impress it on myself” can only mean: this process brings it about that I remember the connection right in the future. But in the present case I have no criterion of correctness. One would like to say: whatever is going to seem right to me is right. And that only means that here we can’t talk about “right” (Wittgenstein 1967b, 92e n. 258).

It makes no sense to speak of language as an “intra-personal” act of communion. If I am not sure that I am experiencing the same sensation today that I experienced last week, noting that I am calling them both by the same name will not produce certainty. I have no possible criterion for this designation of identity. Speaking of two identical acts of recognition, or of memory, merely extends the regress. How do I determine their synonymy? What entity stands beyond them, acting as a criterion or measurement? Language ceases to be a system in this example. It does not connect; it doesn’t provide a tool with which a given stimulus can be incorporated and communally contrasted with another. “What reason have we for calling ‘S’ the sign for a sensation? For ‘sensation’ is a word of our common language, not of one intelligible to me alone. So the use of this word stands in need of a justification which everybody understands. — And it would not help either to say that it need not be a sensation; that when he writes ‘S,’ he has something — and that is all that can be said. ‘Has’ and ‘something’ also belong to our common language. — So in the end when one is doing philosophy one gets to

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the point where one would like just to emit an inarticulate sound. — But such a sound is an expression only as it occurs in a particular language-game, which should now be described (Wittgenstein 1967b, 93e n. 261). The problem is that we still struggle with a positivistic epistemology of causes which depicts “thought” as an entity standing behind language and “causing” it1. “We don’t get free of the idea that the sense of a sentence accompanies the sentence; is there alongside it (Wittgenstein 1967c, 25e n. 139).” As Hacker explains, Wittgenstein’s primary contribution to the discussion is a grammatical clarity, not an epistemological discovery, the point being that when one has a perspicuous view of the grammar involved, one realizes that this isn’t properly a question of epistemology at all. “Why is this so? Because the negation of an a priori proposition is not a description of a possible state of affairs; nor is it a description of an impossible state of affairs. For it is not a description at all, but a senseless form of words. Hence too, the a priori proposition itself (e.g. ‘Sensations are private’) is not a description, but a misleading expression of a grammatical rule (Hacker 1990, 77).” What else would sensations be? Wittgenstein continually castigates the idea that what is hidden from view is the interior life of the other person. This well may be hidden, but not because of language. I can choose to deceive another, or opt simply to veil my true feelings or intentions from him, but in either case, I will still do so by means of a common medium, language. In the following paragraphs, Wittgenstein (1990b, 2:99e) lampoons the idea that it is our need to “fall back upon” language that keeps another’s interior life from us. 1

Hacker (1996, 270-71) notes that it is Wittgenstein’s view which is currently in retreat, since Chomsky’s theories of language, transposed to philosophy, have resurrected the notion that “language acquisition demands not merely innate knowledge of principles of universal grammar, but also an innate language of thought.” In contrast to Wittgenstein’s view, where understanding is dehypostatized from the status of a psychological state, and can only be shown by subsequent behavior, Chomsky’s work is predicated on the notion of understanding as a mental mechanism, albeit one not yet sufficiently understood by science. For further discussion see Baker and Hacker (1980, 595-620) and Peukert (1984, 92-97).


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The principal uncertainty: I don’t know what he is thinking if he doesn’t express it. Now suppose he does express it, but in a language you don’t understand. He could tap it out with the finger of one hand on the back of his other hand in morse code, or some such thing. Then too, after all, it is secret, and isn’t it just as secret as if it had never been expressed? The language could also be such that I could never learn it, e.g. its rules might be extraordinarily complicated (n. 563). So someone can hide his thoughts from me by expressing them in a language I don’t know. But where is the mental thing which is hidden (n. 564)? I may choose the language in which I think. But not as if I think, and then choose the language into which I want to translate my non-verbal thoughts (n. 565).

The other person’s thoughts already exist in language and my reception of them, or its failure, will exist in language. I can confuse another by speaking in a language he doesn’t understand, or I can confuse him by speaking in one that he does. Language is not the cause of the blockage, although I may use it as a ready instrument to create an impediment if that is my desire. Antiseri (1967, 272) summarizes Wittgenstein’s rejection of a private language by noting that such a conception would be akin to thinking of a “private market.” “Language is communication. And the world of experience, the world of my life and of the others who use language becomes eo ipso communicating and communicable. A private language, which is to say an incommunicable language contains a contradiction in its adjective. It would be like a private market for a single person (my translation).” Wittgenstein also sums up his rejection of private language (1967b 94e n. 268), using the image of a commercium, asking frankly, “What of it?” “Why can’t my right hand give my left hand money? — My right hand can put it into my left hand. My right hand can write a deed or gift and my left hand a receipt. — But the further practical consequences would not be those of a gift. When the left hand has taken the money from the right, etc., we shall ask: ‘Well, and what of it?’ And the same could be asked if a person had given himself a private definition of a word; I mean, if he has said the word to himself and at the same time has directed his attention to a sensation.”

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Apropos the same discussion Thomas McPherson raises the question (1969, 210-11): Could we call someone a great artist who only thinks great thoughts? If thought were a rider that simply accompanies meaning, this would be plausible. “Of course we cannot separate his ‘thinking’ from his activity. For the thinking is not an accompaniment of the work, any more than of thoughtful speech (Wittgenstein 1967c, 20e n. 110).” The idea of thinking existing in some “other,” ethereal realm beyond language leads philosophers to the most absurd contradictions. Wittgenstein suggests that physical models of the various persons of speech hold us captive. “I” does not function in speech the same way as “he” does, and Descartes’ grammatical mistake was to treat the “I” as a secret “he.” Wittgenstein does not deny selfknowledge, nor knowledge of others, but he does ask that we recognize the grammar at work in our ascriptions of knowledge. The words which we ascribe to the first person pronoun are different from those used for the third person. It usually makes no sense to say, “I know that I am in pain,” since there normally is no reason to doubt this. We only use the verb “to know” when there is also the possibility of “not knowing.” It makes sense to say, “I know that she is in pain” but not “I know that I am in pain.” One has to construct a particular circumstance for the latter to make sense, as, for example, if someone were to doubt my protestations. “The concept of pain is characterized by its particular function in our life (n. 532). Pain has this position in our life; has these connections; (That is to say: we only call ‘pain’ what has ‘this’ position, these connections) (n. 533). Only surrounded by certain normal manifestations of life, is there such a thing as an expression of pain. Only surrounded by an even more far-reaching particular manifestation of life, such a thing as the expression of sorrow or affection. And so on (ibid. 94-95e n. 534).” The salient point is that pain, if it is going to be recognized by “us” collectively, must express itself in language. The skeptic who questions the existence of pain in others is already trading upon a mutually dependent context for the recognition of pain. He only learned to call his own experience pain from observing the Lebensformen which he has shared with others. “Ugh” gave way to, “Ouch, that hurts!” by a process of training. To question the existence of pain in others is to


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deny them access to a world of mutual meaning which they have first shared with us2. Wittgenstein’s point is not that there is nothing beyond the shared skein of language. Pain is not a purely linguistic event. A mystical experience or the feeling of depression are not human fabrications, nor can they be called “mental events” in the sense of being unreal. But each of these becomes linguistically conditioned because it exists in the nexus which is our language; we never know any such entity before its entrance. It is only by entering that nexus that communion with others, and self-comprehension itself, become possibilities. Wittgenstein rejects the notion that we respond to others in pain by a process of analogical deduction. We do not use analogy to bridge two separate worlds. The world of one sufferer is already conjoined to that of another by language, and by the corporeality out of which language emerges, not despite these two. “You say you attend to a man who groans because experience has taught you that you yourself groan when you feel such-and-such. But as you don’t in fact make any such inference, we can abandon the justification by analogy (Wittgenstein 1967c, 95e n. 537).” Science fiction is fascinated with the notion of the automaton, the “body” which shares our form of living, to an extent, but lacks its deepest manifestations. It would have to lack these manifestations in order to be recognized as an “automaton.” If none were lacking, we would be en face another person, regardless of whether or not that person would be called a member of the human species. This is also an endless source of fascination for our collective imagination. It is because other bodies live in the world as we do that we recognize them as more than bodies, that we grant them personhood.

2

Strawson makes virtually the same argument (1959, 110).

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4.2 The grammar of knowing God in the Investigations The concept of the “metaphysical I,” the self that stands at the border of language, is carried over from the Tractatus into the work of the latter Wittgenstein. The “I,” as the border, or limit, of a world, grants access through language into the skein which comes to be the world. To recognize another as a person is to recognize that he also possesses a world, that he too is a pivot of meaning and value, both of which can be shared with me. To recognize another as a person is to recognize that my heuristic world, which within itself is complete, also stands incomplete. It does not exhaust reality. Is it fair to speak of the “prelinguistic” in the context of Wittgenstein’s work? I would contend that the human experience of hope is tied to this concept. We continue to strive as human beings, either in the sciences or the humanities, because we believe that our “linguistic communion” does not yet possess, or perhaps better, does not yet manifest, all which is there in potential. Each human being in this sense is a pathfinder, one who brings into language that which yet stands beyond it. Who writes a novel believing that he is only resaying what has already been said? Didn’t Thomas Mann speak for all novelists when he wrote (1903, 191), “I am looking into a world unborn and formless, that needs to be ordered and shaped; I see into a whirl of shadows of human figures who beckon me to weave spells to redeem them: tragic and laughable figures and some that are both together — and to these I am drawn.” When one takes into account the deeply humanistic thrust of Wittgenstein’s work, he too can evince the same wonder as Heidegger at that which stands beyond us, beyond our language. To reference the above discussion to the concept of God is to explicate the meaning of the word “border.” Language is the limit of our world, which is not to say that reality and language are coterminous. To say the latter would be to assert that humans know, or at least have the possibility of knowing, all there is to know, an assertion which Wittgenstein would affirm, if one is using the verb “to know” in anything like its ordinary usage. After all, what would it mean to speak of the “knowable” which cannot, at least de potentia, be known?


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Wittgenstein, however, never suggests that knowledge and reality are coterminous (for human beings). That would be to establish a border, only after already having traversed the limit for one’s self. Language and comprehension, however, are coterminous. Language is our means of insertion into reality, our way of dwelling within it. I may feel a pain. Feeling a pain is not reducible to a linguistic event, although the faculty of language determines how we feel pain. It fundamentally transforms the pain of animals into human pain. Wittgenstein does not reduce reality to language. However, explicating or comprehending, say, pain, either to myself or to others, must find its expression in language. The word “God” has a function in language. As believers employ the word, it represents more than a putative object lying beyond language. Here the Tractarian objection would still hold force. As an foundational category of existence, God cannot be made an object of knowledge. However, the word functions in our language as more than a defective or “unripened” ostensive definition. (Defective for the nonbeliever; not yet “ready-at-hand” for the believer). Cavell (1979, 172-173) notes that learning to use the word “God” is Lebensformen-dependent, like any other word. In speaking of a child’s “world” he writes: But although I didn’t tell her, and she didn’t learn, either what the word “kitty” means or what a kitty is, if she keeps leaping and I keep looking and smiling, she will learn both. I have wanted to say: Kittens — what we call “kittens” — do not exist in her world yet, she has not acquired the forms of life which contain them. They do not exist in something like the way cities and mayors will not exist in her world until long after pumpkins and kittens do; or like the way God or love or responsibility or beauty do not exist in our world; we have not mastered, or we have forgotten, or we have distorted, or learned through fragmented models, the forms of life which could make utterances like “God exists” or “God is dead” or “I love you” or “I cannot do otherwise” or “Beauty is but the beginning of terror” bear all the weight they could carry, express all they could take from us. We do not know the meaning of the words. We look away and leap around.

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We employ the word God as an ultimate ground of reference. Like the word “cosmos,” it is meant to express a totality. Unlike “cosmos” it also evokes the world as ungrounded, as incapable of ultimately resolving the tensions which it, or the human person within it, poses. The very phrase “the human person within it” acts as a cipher to this attitude. If the cosmos is “all there is,” then it makes no sense to speak of “the human person within it.” The preposition implies its opposite. One cannot posit a “within” without positing a “without.” The word “God” has a schematic or categorical use. For the believer, it represents the ultimate term of synthesis, one that exceeds the empirical, coinvolving the emotive and the ethical. And this certainly need not be done through a process of erudite abstraction. Norman Malcolm (1993, 2) offers a glimpse of this use of the word in ordinary language. “In religious thinking there is an end to explanation. To parents grieving over the death of a child, these words may be spoken: ‘The Lord hath given; the Lord has taken away. Blessed is the name of the Lord.’ Not everyone will find consolation in those words. But persons of strong religious inclination may find help there: or in the words, ‘It is God’s will.’ This can quiet the cry from the heart — ‘Why did it happen?’ When the search for an explanation, a reason, a justification, is brought to an end in the acknowledgment that it was God’s will — that is a religious response. There is a religious attitude which would regard as meaningless, or ignorant, or presumptuous, any demand for God’s reason or justification, or any attempt to explain why He willed, or permitted, this disaster to occur.” Malcolm raises two important issues. First, he well illustrates the synthetic or “binding” character of religious belief, the latter concept already embedded in the word’s root, “to bind.” Religious faith undoubtably does function as a greater-than-intellectual, holistic synthesis, which is to say that it offers meaning to life. Wittgenstein insists that (1980a, 72e), “Religious faith and superstition are quite different. One of them results from fear and is a sort of false science. The other is a trusting.” Secondly, note that Malcolm makes no reference to the task of theology, the fides quaerens intellectum, which works to see that an inadequate synthesis not be posited, either from the point of view of


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human reason or regarding the data of revelation. Obviously believers can be too quick to synthesize, too eager to move that which properly belongs to an intramundane discussion into the supramundane. Analysis has a constant role in human life; it prevents inadequate synthesis. Theological analysis protects both the domain of reason and that of revelation from inadequate synthesis. Already in the Book of Job, one finds an Old Testament theologian rejecting an inadequate religious synthesis. God need not bless and curse as though human virtue and the divine response were a simple commercium (Gilbert 1998). A poem of Emily Dickinson (1930, 4-5) illustrates the natural repugnance of the nonbeliever, or the unsettled believer, in the face of a hasty religious synthesis: Glee! The great storm is over! Four have recovered the land; Forty gone down together Into the boiling sand. Ring, for the scant salvation! Toll, for the bonnie souls, — Neighbor and friend and bridegroom, Spinning upon the shoals! How they will tell the shipwreck When winter shakes the door, Till the children ask, “But the forty? Did they come back no more?” Then a silence suffuses the story, And a softness the teller’s eye; And the children no further question, And only the waves reply.

Faith itself represents an acceptance of the impossibility of a complete synthesis on the part of humanity. One of the tasks of theology is therefore a keeping of (the) faith true to its own impetus, the exodus from self to the Other (the trusting of which Wittgenstein spoke). Without theology, faith can always degenerate into supersti-

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tion, a situation in which God is evoked only to justify a previous rationalization. Growth in knowledge ought to augment intellectual humility, not arrogance. This injunction, against a hasty and inadequate theological synthesis, is very similar in spirit to that of Wittgenstein, who warned philosophers about being seduced by the general, leading to an ignorance of the particular. Still, the first task of religion is existential synthesis, and Wittgenstein himself was clearly aware of the synthetic role of belief (1967a, 59), viewing it as the principle function of religious belief. “The word ‘God’ is amongst the earliest learnt — pictures and catechisms, etc. But not the same consequences as with pictures of aunts. I wasn’t shown (that which the picture pictured).” “God” is not a word for ostensive definition. Its function in language is conceptual. It is a radical copulative word. It designates (at the very least) a belief that reality itself can be meaningfully designated and engaged. “One said, had to say, that one believed in the existence, and if one did not believe, this was regarded as something very bad. Normally if I did not believe in the existence of something no one would think there was anything wrong in this (ibid. 59).” For the believer, “meaningfully designated and engaged,” expresses a confidence that the question which the human person is, that is, the unrealized hope and expectation for the future, is not one doomed to be answered by the extinction of the question-questioner. In a conversation recorded by Bouwsma (1986,33)Wittgenstein put it this way: “What is the difference between the feeling and attitude toward the world as between that of an atheist and the believer?[...]Atmosphere! Hope! Promise! More! Glory! And now, it’s all given, you see what there is, that’s all, nothing wonderful, nothing terrible! Just so-so.” For the believer, the world has been given the most radical affirmation, an affirmation that can only come to it from beyond the world. What inclines me to believe in Christ’s Resurrection? It is as though I play with the thought. — If he did not rise from the dead, then he decomposed in the grave like any other man. He is dead and decomposed. In that case he is a teacher like any other and can no longer help; and once more we are orphaned and alone. So we have to content ourselves with wisdom and speculation. We are in a sort


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of hell where we can do nothing but dream, roofed in, as it were, and cut off from heaven. But if I am to be REALLY saved, — what I need is certainty — not wisdom, dreams or speculation — and this certainty is faith. And faith is faith in what is needed by my heart, my soul, not my speculative intelligence. For it is my soul with its passions, as it were with its flesh and blood, that has to be saved, not my abstract mind. Perhaps we can say: Only love can believe the Resurrection. Or: It is love that believes the Resurrection. We might say: Redeeming love believes even in the Resurrection; holds fast even to the resurrection. What combats doubt is, as it were, redemption. Holding fast to this must be holding fast to that belief. So what that means is: first you must be redeemed and hold on to your redemption (keep hold of your redemption) — then you will see that you are holding fast to this belief. So this can come about only if you no longer rest your weight on the earth but suspend yourself from heaven. Then everything will be different and it will be “no wonder” if you can do things that you cannot do now. (A man who is suspended looks the same as one who is standing, but the interplay of forces within him is nevertheless quite different, so that he can act quite differently than can a standing man.) (Wittgenstein 1980a, 33e)

I find this passage to be one of the most moving Wittgenstein ever wrote. In it his own philosophical project, to bring clarity to our use of language and thus to thought itself, finally arrives at that question which must still be posed by each individual, “To what end?” Malcolm believes that Wittgenstein certainly asked this question in his own life. Genius that he was, it would be difficult to believe that he could represent so movingly the questioning of believers without himself having shared this most basic communion of life. True to his roots in Tolstoy and Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein viewed faith as a movement away from reason, at least a reasoning standing apart from faith. “And faith is faith in what is needed by my heart, my soul, not my speculative intelligence.” A Catholic would wish to emphasize a certain readiness on the part of reason for the act of faith, all the while maintaining the character of faith as a work of grace and thus more than a purely natural result of reasoning. But is “speculative intelligence” so irredeemably lost? As part of the human person, can it also be graced, patterned by God in such a way

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as to make of it a ready receptacle for his indwelling? Can’t a trace of God be found even in the fallen workings of the human mind? What exactly do the humanities “know” when they employ that word? What if one were to take up that word Wittgenstein himself put in italics for emphasis, “certainty.” The concept occupied his final labors. What does it mean to say that someone or something is certain? What role does the concept play in our language?

4.3 Criteria and certainty P.M.S. Hacker (1996, 207) insists that Wittgenstein’s thought in the Investigations was not, at least explicitly, epistemological. This certainly can be defended on the grounds that epistemology per naturam is a philosophical theory of truth, and that Wittgenstein, at least initially, saw his work as disposing of the need for such a theory. He had made the “transition from the question of truth to the question of meaning.” However, toward the end of his life, Wittgenstein began a series of notes published under the title On Certainty. Hacker (ibid. 279; cf 299) suggests that this closing labor “stands to the rest of the corpus as the Rondanini Pietà stands to the rest of Michelangelo’s sculpture — an unfinished fragment, unlike all that precedes it. It is not, perhaps, ‘inaccessible to all,’ but it is the beginning of a foray into epistemology which promises to revolutionize the philosophy of logic, of language, of mathematics and philosophical psychology.” What is the relationship of language to truth? If language does not derive its meaning either from external realities, or from mental states or processes, if meaning is a function of language, then how do we know that our words mean anything outside themselves? What does it mean to speak of truth or falsity? This is a post-analytic question of the correspondence between reality and language. Even if one grants the major premise of linguistic analysis, that meaning is a function of language, the questions then posed by an examination of meaning eventually return one to the question of correspondence. If language has no link to that which is nonlinguistic, how does an examination


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of meaning not involve itself in an infinite regress? If everything is defined “within language” by linguistic communities, how do two speakers ever know that their presumed mutual definitions are not indeterminate?3 In 1939 G.E. Moore (1965, 81) published his now famous essay “Proof of An External World.” In it he suggested that traditional skepticism can be refuted by the recognition that there are nonanalytic facts known to each of us; that it makes absolutely no sense to challenge these facts; and that the existence of a world external to ourselves is one of them. How do we know an external world exists? Moore’s very serious discussion began with a fey gesture. “It seems to me that, so far from its being true, as Kant declares to be his opinion, that there is only one possible proof of the existence of things outside of us, namely the one which he has given, I can now give a large number of different proofs, each of which is a perfectly rigorous proof; and that at many other times I have been in a position to give many others. I can prove now, for instance, that two human hands exist. How? By holding up my two hands and saying, as I make a certain gesture with the right, ‘Here is one hand,’ and adding, as I make a certain gesture with the left, ‘and here is another.’ And if, by doing this, I have proved ipso facto the existence of external things, you will all see that I can do it now in numbers of other ways: there is no need to multiply examples.” The traditional philosophical question which Moore reopened fascinated Wittgenstein, and spurred him to a deep consideration of what epistemological certitude would mean. “Now, can one enumerate what one knows (like Moore)? Straight off like that, I believe not. — For otherwise the expression ‘I know’ gets misused. And through this misuse a queer and extremely important mental state seems to be revealed (Wittgenstein 1969, 2e, n. 6).” 3

It should be noted, however, that the very question of correspondence to reality is rejected by many modern theorists. For example, W.V. Quine’s (1969, 26-28) theory of radical translation suggests that we always impose our own ontological commitments, derived from our own linguistic structures, onto the semiological data of a foreign speaker. We thus can never be sure that we have not fundamentally distorted the foreign speaker’s field of references. Neither speaker can exit his own linguistic schemas, and therefore reality itself as a shared tertium is unavailable. Communion through language becomes impossible.

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In taking up epistemology proper, Wittgenstein could draw on already established elements of his thought. In On Certainty, two usages of the expression “I know,” one categorical and the other transcendental, to use Kantian terms, would be explored. Both usages can be found in the earlier works of Wittgenstein, but here they take on the clarity of a fundamental distinction. Within any given system, an element can be known and defined by its internal relationship to other elements of the system. What is said, is always said against a backdrop. Mastering the elements of a system is an action simultaneous to mastering the system itself. Master a system, and you have mastered “meaning.” Take color as an intrasystem example: “If you are not clear about the role of logic in color concepts, begin with the simple case of, e.g. a yellowish red. This exists, no one doubts that. How do I learn the use of the word ‘yellowish?’ Through language-games in which, for example, things are put in a certain order. Thus I learn, in agreement with other people, to recognize yellowish and still more yellowish red, green, brown and white. In the course of this I learn to proceed independently just as I do in arithmetic. One person may react to the order to find a yellowish blue by producing a blue-green, another may not understand the order. What does this depend upon (Wittgenstein 1977, 30e, n. 110)?” What it depends upon is one’s ability to master the system. Further, since conceptual systems arise out of Lebensformen, their basic simplicity or complexity is going to be a function of their use in life. When we have a purpose for doing so, we may well add new colors to those of which we already speak. The purpose depends upon the way we live. For example, scientific discoveries, or theories, will introduce new words into a system or remove others from it. Wittgenstein saw, however, that the relationship of an element within a system to reality itself is difficult to ascertain, because a statement may function either as a “criterion” statement or a “symptom” statement. It may also move between the two. “And don’t I have to admit that sentences are often used on the borderline between logic and the empirical, so that their meaning shifts back and forth and they are now expressions of norms, now treated as expressions of experience? For it is not the ‘thought’ (an accompanying mental phenom-


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enon) but its use (something that surrounds it), that distinguishes the logical proposition from the empirical one (ibid. 18-19e n. 19).” A criterion statement expresses a rule of language. It is conceptual. “This is what we will call an acid, anything meeting these criteria.” A symptom statement describes reality as we know it. It is empirical. “The substance in the test tube has these characteristics.” Characteristics become symptoms when we compare them to criteria and realize that they fit. “If it has these symptoms, then it’s an acid.” However, the interplay between theory and empirical knowledge can change a symptom statement into a criterial one. “‘Acids turn litmus paper red’ was once used to define acids — that is, as a grammatical proposition — but is no longer so used.[...]It was an empirical discovery that acids are proton donors, but this proposition was transformed into a rule: a scientist no longer calls something ‘an acid’ unless it is a proton donor, and if it is a proton donor, then it is to be called ‘an acid’ even if it has no effect on litmus paper. The proposition that acids are proton donors (like ‘25 x 25 = 625’) has been ‘withdrawn from being checked by experience, but now serves as paradigm for judging experience (Hacker 1996, 214-15).’” The dictum that “essence is expressed by grammar” makes its difficult to conceive of reality as a brute object lying at hand, off of which we form our concepts (Wittgenstein 1967b, 116e n. 371). Even if one wants to predicate meaning upon correspondence to reality, Wittgenstein (and Kant before him) had shown that correspondence is too thoroughly laced with questions of meaning to be taken as a solid. It never stands over against us as brute fact. It is not simply a question of asking whether an object meets the essential definition of our concept, because the “essential” definition itself is subject to fiat (Baker and Hacker 1985, 2:104-105). “Grammar is not reflecting the nature of things, but determining it — by laying down what is to count as such-and-such a thing. Essences are reflections of forms of representations, marks of concepts, made and not found, stipulated and not discovered (Hacker 1996, 119).” So how can an adequate epistemological theory, a theory explicating the relationship between thought and reality be proposed, when the line between the two keeps shifting? Wittgenstein’s solution, at least as he began to sketch it in On Certainty, was to return the question to the lived situation from which

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it springs. That we have names for anything is dependent upon our way of life, our need for these names. “It is important that in our language — our natural language — ‘all’ is a fundamental concept and ‘all but one’ less fundamental; i.e. there is not a single word for it, nor yet a characteristic gesture (Wittgenstein 1978, 43 n. I.15).” Names act as “abbreviations” for a collection of characteristics which together express the “essence” of a thing. Wittgenstein’s contribution to this fundamental tenet of Western thought is to show that we do not simply name reality, assign essences willy-nilly, as though we had been given the task of allotting a name to all of God’s creation. On the contrary, we “name” because our Lebensformen have presented us with a purpose for naming. Why don’t we have a name for the northernmost point of a cylindrical cone? We would, if it served a purpose. A name and the conception of an essence which we attach to it are both a function of lived context. “Seeing life as a weave, this pattern (pretense, say) is not always complete and is varied in a multiplicity of ways. But we, in our conceptual world, keep on seeing the same, recurring with variations. That is how our concepts take it. For concepts are not for use on a single occasion (Wittgenstein 1967c, 99e n. 368).” At first sight, Wittgenstein’s approach may appear Kantian. After all, the mental seems to be determining the physical, but remember that Wittgenstein rejects the notion of language as a “mental” phenomenon. It is not the creation of an individual mind, nor it does not come into existence by a process of ratiocination. It always arises out of a lived, which is to say, experiential context. “Instinct comes first, reasoning second. Not until there is a language-game are there reasons (Wittgenstein 1980b, 2:116e n. 689).” It is communal experience which creates communal concepts, and lack of it which results in their diversity. “Concepts with fixed limits would demand a uniformity of behavior. But where I am certain, someone else is uncertain. And that is a fact of nature (Wittgenstein 1967c, 68e n. 374).” For Wittgenstein, to raise the “bridge” question, between the mind and “external” reality, which is common and even imperative in postKantian philosophy, is already to have yielded to an otiose abstraction. “Some will say that my talk about the concept of knowledge is


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irrelevant, since this concept as understood by philosophers, while indeed it does not agree with the concept as it is used in everyday speech, still is an important and interesting one, created by a kind of sublimation from the ordinary, rather uninteresting one. But the philosophical concept was derived from the ordinary one through all sorts of misunderstandings, and it strengthens these misunderstandings. It is in no way interesting, except as a warning (Wittgenstein 1980b 2:55e n. 289).” How are we certain of anything? How do we assign a truth value to that of which we speak? Wittgenstein suggests that each language game has its own certainty built into it. “The kind of certainty is the kind of language-game (Wittgenstein 1967b, 224e II, xi).” It is a function of the game itself to assign a final designation of what it means to be certain. Take mathematics for example: “Perhaps I shall do a multiplication twice to make sure, or perhaps get someone else to work it over. But shall I work it over again twenty times, or get twenty people to go over it? And is that some sort of negligence? Would the certainty really be greater for being checked twenty times (n. 77)? What counts as an adequate test of a statement belongs to logic? It belongs to the description of the language-game (Wittgenstein 1969, 12e n. 82).” Just as a game must contain within itself a notion of what it would mean to win the game, so too, each language game contains its own expression of what counts for certainty. It is vitally important, in understanding Wittgenstein, to see that the certainty is, as it were, written into the rules of the game and is not dependent upon collective consensus. Baker and Hacker explain (1985, 243): “The relation between a given rule and an act that accords with it (‘agrees’ with it) is internal or grammatical. Nothing mediates between a rule and its ‘extension,’ for internal relations are not cemented by any ‘third thing.’ A fortiori, it would be absurd to hold that a condition of this act (e.g. writing ‘1002, 1004, 1006,...’) being in accord with this rule (viz. the rule for the series of even integers) is that people in general agree on the application of rules or that people agree that writing this accords with this rule. Of course, if there were no agreement, there would be no common concept of addition, of adding 2, of the series of integers. But it is an error to insert a community agreement between

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a rule and what accords with it. For if the rule is given, then so is its ‘extension.’” Uncertainty, of the philosophical sort, comes when one refuses to recognize rules as game-dependent and seeks, without acknowledgment, to import illicitly the concept of certainty from one game to that of another. Kant’s mistake was to demand a conceptual certainty that didn’t belong to the concept in question in the first place. For example, it makes sense, if the question is certitude of empirical observation, to perform the act of observation a number of times, preferably by a different individual, each time operating under the same conditions. However, to move this concept of certainty into mathematics would mean that the nature of the game has been inadequately understood. Kant’s question about the “thing-in-itself” is simply not a question we actually pose. Cavell (1969, 65-66) insists that “for Wittgenstein it would be an illusion not only that we do know things-in-themselves, but equally an illusion that we do not (crudely, because the concept of ‘knowing something as it really is’ is being used without a clear sense, apart from its ordinary language game)?” Understand the language game in question, and one understands how to look for certainty within it. Knowledge is governed by criteria, by what counts as criteria at any moment in the nexus of the language game. Questions about certainty must be posed in their lived context. Otherwise no one can establish what would count as criteria for the answers. Of course the facts are related to value judgements, since both are intrinsic to human cognition. The Tractarian notion that facts line up on one side of a divide and values on the other represents a conceptual distillation, which, if not recognized, acts as a distortion. In the preconceptual, actually lived, context of life, values and facts cannot be viewed as interwoven, since this still suggests conceptual distinctiveness. In Lebensformen they haven’t yet emerged as distinct elements in the dynamism that is the human being. One has to understand how fundamentally Wittgenstein rejects post-Kantian thought. “Whether a proposition can turn out false after all depends on what I make count as determinants for that proposition (Wittgenstein 1969, 2e n. 5).”


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I know that a sick man is lying here? Nonsense! I am sitting at his bedside, I am looking attentively into his face. — So I don’t know, then, that there is a sick man lying here? Neither the question nor the assertion makes sense. Any more than the assertion “I am here,” which I might yet use at any moment, if suitable occasion presented itself. — Then is “2 X 2 = 4” nonsense in the same way, and not a proposition of arithmetic, apart from particular occasions? “2 X 2 = 4” is a true proposition of arithmetic — not “on particular occasions” nor “always” — but the spoken or written sentence “2 X 2 = 4” in Chinese might have a different meaning or be out and out nonsense, and from this is seen that it is only in use that the proposition has its sense. And “I know that there’s a sick man lying here,” used in an unsuitable situation, seems not to be nonsense but rather seems matter-of-course, only because one can fairly easily imagine a situation to fit it, and one thinks that the words “I know that...” are always in place where there is no doubt, and hence even where the expression of doubt would be unintelligible (ibid. 3e n. 10).

In the notes On Certainty a truth value for an individual assertion is determined by its relationship to the web of elements in which it is known. How do I know my name? Granted that under certain conditions, I might be mistaken about this, normally to pose this question would be to call all personal knowledge into question. How do I know that the earth didn’t come into existence a few minutes ago? Because accepting this assertion would involve the complete turnover of my entire system of thought. My “picture of the world” would need to be completely rejected for this to be true. “But I did not get my picture of the world by satisfying myself of its correctness; nor do I have it because I am satisfied of its correctness. No: it is the inherited background against which I distinguish between true and false (ibid. 15e n. 94).” Perhaps at first sight, this statement seems to rebuke the notion of any possible epistemology. It sounds like an antiphilosophical rejection of the need for justification. It is not, however, antiphilosophical, though it might well be called prephilosophical, because, like so much of Wittgenstein’s work, it illumines the unexamined presuppositions of the philosophical enterprise.

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Even if one wants to assert that the credibility of human knowledge is premised upon a language game, there is simply no way to remove the “language game of knowing” from human life. Augustine (1963, 45:10) had made a similar assertion: “On the other hand who would doubt that he lives, remembers, understands, wills, thinks, knows, and judges? For even if he doubts, he lives; if he doubts, he remembers why he doubts; if he doubts, he understands that he doubts; if he doubts, he wishes to be certain; if he doubts; he thinks; if he doubts, he knows that he does not know; if he doubts, he judges that he ought not to consent rashly. Whoever then doubts about anything else ought never to doubt about all of these; for if they were not, he would be unable to doubt about anything at all.” The passage is an early example of what Thomism would come to call retorsion, allowing doubt to run its natural course all the way to incoherence. If all other starting points are self-contradictory, then the one remaining must be considered foundationally valid. Truth is a question of coherence both within individual language games and in respect to language as a whole. One might object that humanity’s confidence in the act of knowing is the result of confusing conceptual knowledge with ontological reality, such as supposedly occurs in the ontological proof for the existence of God. However the logical, or grammatical, features of the word “knowledge” do make its absolute negation impossible. One can’t affirm that no act of affirmation is possible without being selfcontradictory. As Wittgenstein sees it, our beliefs, our fundamental assertions about the world, form a system, and the system determines what it means to question, and what might count for an answer. “All testing, all confirmation and dis-confirmation of a hypothesis takes place already within a system. And this system is not a more or less arbitrary and doubtful point of departure for all our arguments: no, it belongs to the essence of what we call an argument. The system is not so much the point of departure, as the element in which arguments have their life (Wittgenstein 1969, 16e n. 105).” It initially appears as though Wittgenstein is simply affirming a coherence theory of truth, but the coherence is not primarily among individually affirmed elements of a possible system, although this is certainty the case, but rather upon something still more foundational.


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Our system of beliefs is predicated upon our way of acting, the Lebensformen with which we interact with the world. “What counts as its test? — ‘But is this an adequate test? And, if so, must it not be recognizable as such in logic?’ — As if giving grounds did not come to an end sometime. But the end is not an ungrounded presupposition: it is an ungrounded way of acting (ibid. 17e, n. 110).” A system must not be only coherent within itself, it must be integrally related to our way of living. “Can we imagine that something unprovable to us could be proved to other beings? Or would that change its nature to the point of its being unrecognizable (n. 698)? What is essential for us is, after all, spontaneous agreement, spontaneous sympathy (1980b 2:117e n. 699).” While the instinct of the philosopher is to begin with a refined form of Cartesian-like skepticism, Wittgenstein shows that this is the very opposite of our normal mode of behavior. We don’t approach knowledge through skepticism. The reverse is true. “When someone is trying to teach us mathematics, he will not begin by assuring us that he knows that a + b = b + a (Wittgenstein 1969, 17e n. 113).” Children are taught arithmetic without a digression into the nature of mathematical realities. “To understand sums in the elementary school the children would have to be important philosophers; failing that, they need practice (Wittgenstein 1967c, 122e n. 703).” We don’t ask children to analytically understand math. We ask that they verse themselves in the calculus, the form of life, it represents. Learning is first training, not analysis. “How does it come about that doubt is not subject to arbitrary choice? — And that being so — might not a child doubt everything because it was so remarkably talented (n. 409)? A person can doubt only if he has learnt certain things; as he can miscalculate only if he has learnt to calculate. In that case it is indeed involuntary (ibid. 73e n. 410).” Our cultural bias, based upon the frothy advance of scientific analysis, is to think of the act of genius as consisting in an incredible, innate ability to call into question the presuppositions of any system of knowledge: the genius as an avatar of rampant analysis who questions everything. However, “if you tried to doubt everything you would not get as far as doubting anything. The game of doubting itself presupposes certainty (Wittgenstein 1969, 18e n. 115).” An Einstein

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who refuses to learn math will not someday undermine Newtonian physics. He will never take part in the discussion! Wittgenstein recognized that analysis presupposes a synthesis, in this case, one that comes to us as a cultural inheritance. The synthesis is unexamined, usually even unconscious. It is built into the very grammar of our language. Certainly a philosopher has a right to bring this synthesis into a conscious, reflective light. The common mistake in philosophical analysis, however, is to posit distinctions and criteria apart from their lived context. Why is not possible for me to doubt that I have never been on the moon? And how could I try to doubt it? First and foremost, the supposition that perhaps I have been there would strike me as idle. Nothing would follow from it, nothing be explained by it. It would not tie in with anything in my life. When I say “Nothing speaks for, everything against it,” this presupposes a principle of speaking for and against. That is, I must be able to say what would speak for it (n. 117). But can it also be said: Everything speaks for, and nothing against the table’s still being there when no one sees it? For what does speak for it (n. 119)? But if anyone were to doubt it, how would his doubt come out in practice? And couldn’t we peacefully leave him to doubt it, since it makes no difference at all (n. 120)? Can one say: “Where there is no doubt there is no knowledge either (n. 121)?” Doesn’t one need grounds for doubt (n. 122)? I want to say: We use judgments as principles of judgement (n. 124). If a blind man were to ask me “Have you got two hands?” I should not make sure by looking. If I were to have any doubt about it, then I don’t know why I should trust my eyes. For why shouldn’t I test my eyes by looking to find out whether I see my two hands? What is to be tested by what? (Who decides what stands fast?) And what does it mean to say that such and such stands fast (n. 125). But isn’t it experience that teaches us to judge like this, that is to say, that it is correct to judge like this? But how does experience teach us, then? We may derive it from experience, but experience


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does not direct us to derive anything from experience. If it is the ground of our judging like this, and not just the cause, still we do not have a ground for seeing this in turn as a ground (ibid. 18-19e n. 130).

A philosopher naturally wants to posit first principles. A “place” where his, and presumably “our,” conceptual system of philosophy can begin. As Wittgenstein sees it, however, such a philosopher is something akin to the player who grabs the ball and runs off the field. He isn’t winning the game, because he’s no longer in the game. The communal character of knowledge, its source in collectively lived experience, comes to the forefront in Wittgenstein’s discussion of certainty. “We have a colour system as we have a number system. Do the systems reside in our nature or in the nature of things? How are we to put it? — Not in the nature of numbers or colours (Wittgenstein 1967c, 65e n. 357).” Doubt itself is a function of knowledge, which is to say that it is only possible against a backdrop of what we know. It can only function within a nexus of held beliefs, but beliefs held so communally that they lack any assertive quality. The difficulty would be to even think of asserting them. We don’t, for example, typically attempt to justify either our number or our color system, and not because we realize them to be merely conceptual tools which require no such justification. We don’t justify them, because we only rarely reflect upon them. They function as they should, silently and efficiently. To acquire language is to assimilate a world, as effortlessly as breathing one’s native air. “What a strange phenomenon that a child can actually learn human language! That a child who knows nothing can start out and learn by a sure path this enormously complicated technique. This thought occurred to me when on a certain occasion I became conscious of how a child starts with nothing and one day uses negations, just as we do (Wittgenstein 1980b, 2:24e n. 128)!” Every system of mutually supporting beliefs acts as a heuristic world. In this context it doesn’t matter whether one speaks of “beliefs,” “assertions,” “propositions,” or “facts.” The question here is not the variety of strengths for that which is posited. In some contexts, for example, a scientific discussion, one may speak of a “belief” as that which is less vigorously asserted than a “fact.” In a theological

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discussion, however, a “belief” expresses no such lack of certitude. It may even be considered as a stronger element than a fact. Wittgenstein’s point, however, is that both contexts are systems, worlds of discourse. Within a given world, elements are always mutually interdependent. Some may be asserted forcibly, others less so, but no individual element, regardless of its force of assertion, can be considered as “more posited” than the system itself. “All testing, all confirmation and disconfirmation of a hypothesis takes place already within a system.”

4.4 Knowing within and beyond the world All of the above serves to explicate what might be called the categorical, or intrasystemic, use of the words “I know” in Wittgenstein’s thought. But what of the transcendental usage of the same phrase? For Wittgenstein, it is crucially important to recognize when the words “I know” are being used categorically and when transcendentally. “We just do not see how very specialized the use of ‘I know’ is (Wittgenstein 1969, 3e n. 11).” Failure to distinguish creates philosophical confusion. For the fundamental theologian, the very existence of the transcendental usage acts as a cipher and a heuristic model. This is why this second usage requires further examination. Wittgenstein had already suggested that colors represent descriptive tags, or demonstrative elements, within a linguistic system. They are not brute realities standing outside of language. But what is the relationship of the system to the reality beyond it? Where is the “border” between the two? What happens when a person approaches that border? Would it be possible to discover a new colour? For a colour-blind man is in the same situation as we are; his colours form just as complete a system as ours do; he doesn’t see any gaps where the remaining colours belong (Comparison with mathematics.) (n. 257). Can you imagine absolute pitch, if you have not got it? – Can you imagine it if you have it? — Can a blind man imagine seeing? Can


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I imagine it? — Can I imagine spontaneously reacting thus and so, if I don’t do it? Can I imagine it any better, if I do do it ((Belongs to the question: can I imagine someone seeing ///////// as an articulated shape.)) (n. 266). Is it supposed to be an empirical fact that someone who has had an experience can imagine it, and that someone else can not? (How do I know that a blind man can imagine colours?) But: he cannot play a certain language game (cannot learn it). But is this empirical, or is it the case eo ipso? The latter (Wittgenstein 1967c, 48-49e n. 267).

In each of these examples Wittgenstein is contrasting two forms of knowledge. One is intra-systemic, the other extra. What the meaning might be of an element beyond the system is a question that the system itself cannot answer. Systems exhaust themselves. There is always a question that can be raised which brings the system to a close, not in the sense that it ceases to function successfully in its own contexts, but in the sense that its own internal resources have been exhausted in the light of the question. Notice that in the following remarks in On Colour Wittgenstein (1977, 13e) demarcates the line between elements within a system and that which stands beyond it, an act of semantic transcendence which must be made if one is to continue to speak intelligently. “The statement, ‘I see a red circle’ and the statement ‘I see (am not blind)’ are not logically of the same sort. How do we test the truth of the former, and how that of the latter (s. I n. 84)? But can I believe that I see and be blind, or believe that I’m blind and see (s. I n. 85)? Could a psychology textbook contain the sentence, “There are people who see?” Would this be wrong? But to whom will it be communicate anything (s. I n. 86)?” Normally we speak of seeing all sorts of things. We think of ourselves, to the extent that we reflect upon the process, of seeing different things. We normally, however, do not think of seeing as a process until something confronts us with the idea of not seeing at all. The blind person calls into question, or rather delimits, the act of sight. We constantly see individual objects, but we don’t think of sight as a integrated system until we are confronted with the person who doesn’t share that system. We don’t normally utter a blunt sentence

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like “I see” unless we are juxtaposing our ability to our own, or another’s, inability. Thus there are statements within a given world of discourse that make absolute sense, and there are other statements which function as lines of demarcation for that world of discourse. Thought becomes hopelessly muddled, however, when one fails to see the logical distinction between a system and that which stands beyond it. “If everything looked whitish in a particular light, we wouldn’t then conclude that the light source must look white (Wittgenstein 1977, 16e s. II n. 15).” Here it may be helpful to make a distinction of the way in which the word “world” can be used. It is a word which I have deliberately used in two very diverse ways until this discussion of On Certainty. I think the early Wittgenstein himself moved between the two usages without explicating the distinction. In the first place, we use the word “world” to refer to a heuristic system which stands at our disposal, which we recognize as being a system. We can speak of the worlds of biology, of literature, of politics. We devise terms and concepts appropriate to each of these “worlds” and, strangely enough, we move without too much intellectual trouble from one such world to another. Part of the task of philosophy is to adjudicate this conceptual movement from one sphere to another, for we sometimes do illegitimately import features from one world to another. Wittgenstein recognizes and discusses this “inter-world” exchange. There are times when we must “translate” from one sphere to another. Every act of interpretation is a moving from one level of discourse to another. “What happens is not that this symbol cannot be further interpreted, but: I do no interpreting. I do not interpret, because I feel at home in the present picture. When I interpret, I step from one level of thought to another (Wittgenstein 1967c, 43e n. 234).” We may well consider one such world to be more foundational than another. Chemistry explains biology (at least we hope). Wittgenstein’s point is that we move from one rung of knowledge to another, and see this heuristic movement as satisfying our very need to know. In the end, however, we declare the movement to be at an end, but never because our concepts are exhausted, only because our “need to know” has been satisfied. We have reached an answer which meets our need for an answer.


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This process is continually at work in our cultural experience. Is alcoholism an expression of a weak will, or is it a pathology? It was once thought to be a moral failure until the paradigm of pathology proved to possess a greater explanatory power. But this paradigm also leaves open questions, albeit ones not asked by the ordinary person. For example, “Why are programs directed at the ‘will’ of the individual more effective than those which are predicated upon treating the condition as a disease?” The situation is ripe for a “genius” to question the pathology paradigm. The genius is the one who broadens, replaces, or subverts the received paradigm. People think of the physician or the scientist as one who can always move the discussion to a more fundamental layer. “Please tell me, doctor, why does my daughter do the things that she does?” Sometimes it is only the advanced expert who can see that his own response still raises as many questions as the answers it offers. Everyone else is satisfied because, in the given context, a question has found an answer. This was essentially Wittgenstein’s view of Freud, whose work fascinated him. Wittgenstein felt that Freud’s contribution, like his own, was conceptual, not empirical, even though, as previously noted, these two fields are mutually related (Cf Wittgenstein 1980a, 36e). “Freud’s fanciful pseudo-explanations (precisely because they are brilliant) perform a disservice. (Now any ass has these pictures available to use in ‘explaining’ symptoms of illness.) (ibid. 55e).” There is, however, a second way in which we use the word “world.” It is that which contains us. A world may be both a microcosm that we spread out before ourselves, or we may ourselves be an element in the macrocosm that we call the world. Of course, even in the microcosmic use of the word, we presume that we are element in the world. To use various examples, a human being can be considered as a posited element in the worlds of biology, of politics, of physics, of criminology, etc... In each of these worlds the active presupposition is that we know how to define a “person” within the system, and so we speak of a person from the point of view of each system. Paradoxically, even though the people speaking of the system place themselves in theory within the system, they continue to speak and act as though they were not a part of it. B.F. Skinner never lived the conception of the human person he taught!

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On the other hand, we also use the word “world” to express our radical openness to that which lies beyond our “worlds.” When we speak of ourselves as being in the world, we indicate that something still transcends the heuristic worlds we employ. There is a “beyond” not encapsulated within them. Taken together, they create a horizon, which only presents itself as horizon rather than as terminus because of an inner drive of the human person toward transcendence. Thus the question, “What is my place in the world?” is understood by each of us to be a question not about our heuristic worlds but rather about the horizon (the border) that they corporately posit. If I ask, “Does the world make sense?” I have raised a properly theological or metaphysical question, and that sense is immediately understood whether I pose it in a chemistry lab or a court of law, even if I thus surprise my interlocutors with my abrupt metaphysical turn. Others understand that I have invoked the second use of the word, its “ultimate-meaning” usage. I am no longer asking about heuristic worlds which radiate out from the individual. I am asking about the foundation of the very universe of worlds in which we dwell. The fact that this language game exists and, as such, is immediately recognized by others shows that human transcendence is not deduced from abstract theory, but is rather so constituent of human life as to be incorporated into ordinary speech, even that of the designated “nonbeliever.” Wittgenstein had already realized this duo usage of the word “world” by the time he had finished the Tractatus. He had hoped to create what he thought would be a master world. By asking about the basic constituents of reality, he thought to illustrate the very structure of the world. By the end of his task, however, he had already seen that something eluded the world which he had depicted. Even if he had succeeded in creating an intellectual framework, with a niche for every question of “how,” the single question of “why” still stood beyond this edifice. The Tractatus concludes with Wittgenstein juxtaposing the “world” of science and all that which stands beyond it. “We feel that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched. Of course there are then no questions left, and this itself is the answer (Wittgenstein 1961, 73 n. 6.52).”


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Already in the Tractatus Wittgenstein presented a world as wielded by the human person, a seemingly endless fecundity of thought, imagination, and reason. “Objects contain the possibility of all situations (ibid. 6 n. 2.014).” Language in the Tractatus has the ability to mirror all of nature, to plumb its very depths, to explore regions not yet in existence because language has the ability to summon them into existence. “The possibility of its occurring in states of affairs is the form of an object (ibid. 6 n. 2.0141).” Homo loquens has something of the infinite about him. He can speak of everything, and yet at the same time something eludes his speech. “The subject does not belong to the world: rather, it is a limit of the world (ibid. 57 n. 5.632).” Already in the Tractatus there are two ways of viewing the world: sub specie rationis and sub specie aeterni.4 In the first, the human person has the world, the world his language offers, at his disposal. Everything has the potential to become an object of his knowledge. In the second, he views the world as a whole which stands over against his own self (the world as object) but which also includes his own self (the self as object). Yet, even when the self is included as known object, a knower still eludes the field of vision (Wittgenstein 1961, 57 n. 5.633). We cannot make objects of our own selves. “To view the world sub specie aeterni is to view it as a whole — a limited whole. Feeling the world as a limited whole — it is this that is mystical (ibid. 73, n. 6.45).” God enters the Tractatus for the same reason he entered the thought of Descartes: our spatial-temporal categories demand a common background against which both the self and the known world can be posited. The knowing self is not a sufficient positum, because the knowing self cannot be known. Every intellectual, to say nothing of spiritual, conversion represents a revolution in thought. If discontinuity were not present, no revolution could be posited. On the other hand, the same thinker is present 4

This distinction is fundamental to Wittgenstein’s thought and is the basis upon which his ethical stance is generated. In a 1913 letter to Russell, one sees the young Wittgenstein making a juxtaposition, which must at first sight, and without a complete explication of his thought, appear to be only a young man’s muddled whimsey. “Vielleicht glaubst Du daß es Zeitverschwendung ist über mich selbst zu denken; aber wie kann ich Logiker sein, wenn ich noch nicht Mensch bin! Vor allem muß ich mit mir selbst in’s Reine kommen.” Quoted in Wuchterl and Hübner (1979, 53.)

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before, and after, the designated revolution. To some extent, one can say that Paul received a new Lord at Damascus, but he remained the same man, at least in his thought processes. There is both discontinuity and continuity in the thought of Ludwig Wittgenstein as presented in the Tractatus and later in his subsequent work. Perhaps because he knew that the discontinuity would be most readily apparent in the two periods of work, he strove to remind readers of their continuity. With regard to the notion of God, a basic continuity certainly exists, if for no other reason than because both the earlier and the latter Wittgenstein saw God as essentially transcendent to all linguistic efforts. In the thought of Wittgenstein, to make this assertion is to say that he transcends reason itself. One can’t offer a more acceptable assertion in natural theology than that! With regard to natural knowledge of God, the work of the early Wittgenstein stands to that of the latter something in the way that Michelangelo’s Medici chapel of San Lorenzo in Florence stands to later rococo chapels. Like the Roman pantheon which inspired it, Michelangelo’s room is composed of the most simple, even austere, geometrical forms. A square, a circular dome resting upon it, the space adorned with stark, stuccoed circles and half circles. In a rococo chapel, all of these geometrical forms explode into a cascading cacophony, but the same simple forms remain. They have simply been multiplied and factored into a myriad. “These things are finer spun than crude hands have any inkling of (Wittgenstein 1978, 420).” The basic relationship of God to language remains the same in the two periods of Wittgenstein’s work. In both, God transcends the chapel of language, whether it be neoclassical or rococo. In both, however, language acts as a sort of cipher to the presence of God. The Wittgenstein of the Investigations was concerned primarily with the question of meaning, not truth. However, when Wittgenstein finally took up this properly epistemological question, he once again emphasized the lived, experiential context of all knowledge (Lebensformen) and its intrinsic inner cohesiveness (language games), a cohesiveness with is both intralinguistic and deeply rooted in life forms. He thus returned to the concept of a heuristic world, a nexus of meaning out of which all questioning is posited. One could say that in the progress of his thought the world moves from being a heuristic


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horizon to being a heuristic device, but the concept of a world remains the key to an understanding of his thought from beginning to end. In the Tractatus the word “world” acts as a heuristic horizon, demarcating meaning from nonsense. In the Investigations it acts as a heuristic device. We assign and assess meaning according to the world of discourse being employed. “Describing my state of mind (of fear, say) is something I do in a particular context. (Just as it takes a particular context to make a certain action into an experiment. Is it, then, so surprising that I use the same expression in different games? And sometimes as it were between games?” (Wittgenstein 1967b, 188e s. II n. 9) The task of the philosopher, according to Wittgenstein, is to recognize the preconceptual syntheses already built into language, to explore their significance, and to prevent the would-be analyst from illegitimately exploiting their usage, creating intellectual confusion as a result. When On Certainty finally brings Wittgenstein to the question of epistemology, the “world” again takes on something of its earlier significance. It is still the mechanism or medium of the very possibility of thought (heuristic device) but it is also the horizon upon which all thought is posited (heuristic horizon, or absolute). Like Kant before him, the “I” in all of Wittgenstein’s thought retains a certain illusiveness. Even when treated as object, an “I” still transcends the act of objectification. It is the metaphysical “I” that continues to wield language, an “I” which is not exhausted or contained even when it becomes the object of discourse. Two salient characteristics of philosophical anthropology were already visible in the unfinished sculpture that Wittgenstein’s epistemology represents. They are crucial to the construction of a theological anthropology. As a “wielder of language” the human person remains transcendent. Any given heuristic horizon is ultimately subject to transformation into heuristic device. Put paradoxically, that which is thought absolute always contains the potential of becoming relative. Through language, we continue to transcend every barrier. Language, understood in its broadest possible significance, is a faculty of virtually unlimited fecundity. The potential of human knowledge appears to be infinite. But Wittgenstein also posits a humanity which is radically, per essentiam, incomplete. The human person never manages to express

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his own self within language. The “I” who speaks always transcends that which is said, just as the “I” who thinks in Kant transcends any given act of ratiocination. Peter Winch (1993, 129-30) is surely correct when he suggests that a religious sensibility in the thought of Wittgenstein is linked to this insight: we cannot ultimately view ourselves as objects, nor can we view our fellow humans in this way. No science can exhaust the meaning of the human person, even if it succeeded in explaining everything there is to explain about the human person. In the end, Wittgenstein reminds us, the search for explanation exhausts itself and the human person remains, and he remains en face another human. “But isn’t it absurd to say of a body that it has pain? — And why does one feel an absurdity in that? In what sense is it true that my hand does not feel pain, but I in my hand? What sort of issue is: Is it the body that feels pain? — How is it to be decided? What makes it plausible to say that it is not the body? — Well, something like this: If someone has a pain in his hand, then the hand does not say so (unless it writes it) and one does not comfort the hand, but the sufferer: one looks into his face (Wittgenstein 1967b, 98e n. 286).” The human person cannot speak himself in the thought of Wittgenstein. The world that is wielded always stands illumined against the background of a world that cannot be wielded. The human person can speak about himself. He can offer his self in communion to others, but nothing he does exhausts or contains his own person. He remains radically, absolutely open to a transcendence which he himself cannot attain. He will always desire to know more than that which he does know, than he by nature can know. This note of philosophical anthropology is expressed theologically by saying that, for all his seemingly inexhaustible fecundity, a human remains creature, not creator. Incomplete, he remains one who must listen to a word not his own.


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Chapter 5 Questioning the World

5.1 The metaphysical impulse

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ome would argue that there can be no philosophical anthropology in Wittgenstein because, as he himself suggested, his work represented the end of philosophy. Granted that for Wittgenstein, philosophy consisted primarily in methodology and description, not system construction, he still operated out of an understanding of the human person, even if that understanding remained unschematized in his writings.1 Following the reading of Wittgenstein presented in the previous chapters, it seems clear that the sort of philosophy Wittgenstein primarily rejected is one modeling itself on the empiricism of science. In the Investigations he wrote (1967b, 47e, n. 109): It was true to say that our considerations could not be scientific ones. It was not of any possible interest to us to find out empirically “that, contrary to our preconceived ideas, it is possible to think such-and-such” — whatever that may mean. (The conception of thought as a gaseous medium.) And we may not advance any kind of theory. There must not be anything hypothetical in our considerations. We must do away with all explanation, and description alone must take its place. And this description gets its light, that is to say its purpose, from the philosophical problems. These are, of course, not empirical problems; they are solved, rather by looking 1

See Baker and Hacker (1980, 489) for a discussion of tendencies in Wittgenstein’s own writings that seem to violate his views on the nature of philosophy.

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Terrance W. Klein: How Things Are in the World into the workings of our language, and that in such a way as to make us recognize those workings: in despite of an urge to misunderstand them. The problems are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have always known. Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.

Read against his own historical background, the philosophy Wittgenstein rejected is the sort envisioned by Russell, in which the discipline literally serves as a sort of empirical avante garde, one going before empirical science in the discoveries of ontology. This is why Wittgenstein’s considerations “could not be scientific ones.” Philosophy, as an examination of language, is a conceptual investigation, although one must be very clear about what this means for Wittgenstein. It is not our conceptual investigations which will help to refashion language. Rather our understanding of how language works will help to purify the conceptual structures we posit; it will show them to be conditioned by the language we use and the way of life out of which that language emerges (Baker and Hacker 1985, 22). In his seminal essay “Wittgenstein on the Nature of Philosophy” Anthony Kenny (1982, 2; italics mine) noted that “Wittgenstein seems at first sight to have two rather different views of philosophy. On the one hand, he often compares philosophy to a medical technique, to a therapy, a method of healing. On the other, he seems to see philosophy as giving overall understanding, a clear view of the world.” This second view involves the notion that language already possesses a working synthesis; philosophy is an attempt to understand that synthesis. Philosophers have as much right, if one may speak that way, to propose a concept as anyone else. Either it will accurately and fruitfully reflect our common life, or it will not. If it does not, Wittgenstein would suggest, the chances are that the philosopher has superimposed a conceptual structure inherently less rich than the one language already possesses. And he may well have done this, because he has been lured into the “scientific” temptation of thinking his concepts to be constitutive rather than descriptive. “I could also have said: it is not the property of an object that is ever ‘essential’, but rather the mark of a concept (Wittgenstein 1978, 64 s. I n. 73).” Concepts

5~Questioning the World

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continue to play a critical role even after Wittgenstein. What they no longer do, however, is to play a suprahuman role. Kant wrote (1929, 30), “There has always existed in the world, and there will always continue to exist, some kind of metaphysics, and with it the dialectic that is natural to pure reason.” He recognized that humanity will continue to ask questions about the ultimate make-up and purpose of the world. The goal was to keep philosophically illicit procedures from obscuring that search. To say that Wittgenstein saw the task of philosophy as a “clearing of the ground” is not to say that he expected that ground to remain vacant. The human person cannot cease to question, nor can he cease to question his own self. To ask such is to demand too much! The question of metaphysics exhibits a fundamental kinship between Kant and Wittgenstein. Neither expected, or even hoped, to forbid humanity from asking questions of ultimate relevance. Certainly not Wittgenstein. Both wanted to redirect that questioning away from paths they thought to be blind. Both considered a metaphysics modeled upon science to be a dead end. Kant wrote (ibid. 24), “For we are brought to the conclusion that we can never transcend the limits of possible experience, though that is precisely what this science (metaphysics) is concerned, above all else, to achieve.” Wittgenstein offered a similar comment in Zettel (1967c, 82e n. 458) “Philosophical investigations: conceptual investigations. The essential thing about metaphysics: it obliterates the distinction between factual and conceptual investigations (458).”2 In other words, metaphysics forgets that it is a conceptual discipline, not an empirical one. Ray Monk (1990, 404), Wittgenstein’s principal English biographer, suggests that Wittgenstein increasingly came to see his own work as a struggle against the pretensions of the scientific method and its injurious influence upon philosophy. “His target was not merely, as he had put it in the Blue Book, the damage that is done when philosophers ‘see the method of science before their eyes and are irresistibly tempted to ask and answer questions in the way that science does;’ it was, more generally, the wretched effect that the worship of science and the scientific method has had upon our whole 2

Cf. this variant: Wittgenstein 1980b, 1:167e.

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culture. Aesthetics and religious belief are two examples — for Wittgenstein, of course, crucially important examples — of areas of thought and life in which the scientific method is not appropriate, and in which efforts to make it so lead to distortion, superficiality and confusion.” The blind alley perceived by Kant and Wittgenstein meant a mistaken turn, not the negation of the search. Even as eminent a personage in analytical philosophy as John Wisdom (1965, 294) recognized that “the big words of metaphysics have an appeal which is wide and deep and old and we cannot fully understand and resolve the riddles they present without understanding that appeal.” The understanding of how concepts can function in a manner so foundational as to be called metaphysical has changed drastically after Wittgenstein, but humanity’s need for ultimate foundations has not. Humanity will continue the search. Wittgenstein inveighed against the spirit of a positivistic philosophy which modeled itself after the procedures and goals of science.3 A metaphysics conceived as a science of the occult is equally to be spurned. That which lies ready at hand to be discovered, even if only potentially, belongs properly to the realm of science, not philosophy. “Philosophy is not a cognitive pursuit; there are no new facts to be discovered by philosophy, only new insights into old facts (Baker and Hacker 1980, 473).” In Wittgenstein’s thought, metaphysics, as a search for entities, is doomed to fail. Even if, and especially if, the “entity” one seeks is God. Already in the Tractatus he had shown that a misunderstanding of grammar can lead one to mistakenly posit entities where none exist. The latter Wittgenstein continued to insist that grammatical errors produced metaphysical speculation. “Like everything metaphysical the harmony between thought and reality is to be found in the grammar of the language (Wittgenstein 1967c, 12e n. 55).” Remember, however, that this fundamental philosophical error is far from being confined to theology. Politics, psychology, and science, in fact all realms of human thought, can succumb to the errant tendency. But is the metaphysical impulse only a grammatical mistake? Doesn’t a 3

Baker and Hacker (1980, 475-77) offer four useful distinctions between the methodologies of the two disciplines in the thought of Wittgenstein.


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distinction need to be drawn between doing metaphysics in a mistaken way and considering metaphysics itself to be a mistake? One result of Kant’s turn to the subject was that metaphysics came to be considered a conceptual enterprise, rather than an exploration of the real. The metaphysics Kant was determined to reform represented that moment when the conceptual and the empirical no longer met. It was “a groping among mere concepts” without the recognition that it was no longer linked to the empirical. “Metaphysics rests on concepts alone — not, like mathematics, on their application to intuition.[...]This shows, beyond all questioning, that the procedure of metaphysics has hitherto been a merely random groping, and, what is worst of all, a groping among mere concepts (Kant 1929, 21).” Notice the dichotomy that Kant posited between brute reality and our conceptual reception of it. Metaphysics, Kant said, has no connection to external reality itself. It is merely conceptual. As he conceived the reform of the science of metaphysics, it would confine itself to conceptual considerations and know itself thus confined. “We must therefore make trial whether we may not have more success in the tasks of metaphysics, if we suppose that objects must conform to our knowledge (ibid. 22).” As Kant set the terms of discussion, the noumena cannot be known in themselves, because all knowledge is conditioned by the a priori structures of the human mind. We must content ourselves with an examination of the phenomena, and metaphysics, in this enterprise, is simply an ordering of the concepts found necessary for the adequate possession of those phenomena. Even Kant’s truncated explication of knowledge, one limited to the phenomena, requires a heuristic schematization, and this is the function of metaphysics. If anything, the latter Wittgenstein’s approach to this question represents a return to what might be called a classical Western confidence in the givenness of reality. Wittgenstein’s work turns away from Kant, not because Kant has been found deficient on his own terms, but because those terms are viewed by Wittgenstein as artificially truncated, separated from reality itself by a otiose and obtuse spirit of abstraction, one which first captured the Western mind toward the close of the Middle Ages.

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Wittgenstein’s is not a naive realism. It does not presume that the human mind does not actively engage the reality that surrounds it, transforming it, molding it so as to render it accessible to the mind itself. Human thought is thoroughly linguistic, but language in Wittgenstein is seen as an instrument of perception, not of distortion. At its best, it creates the possibility of communion, and therefore it need not be viewed only as an instrument of disfiguring subjugation. Kant begins his exposition, one might say, within the human mind, a Cartesian abstract, and his critique of human knowledge suggests, one might also say, that humanity has duped itself in its naive confidence about the givenness of reality. Wittgenstein begins with reality, but not as this is juxtaposed to mental activity in modern Western thought. Wittgenstein begins with reality as activity. Human beings constantly engage reality, and do so quite effectively, through the language games which we utilize. It is only a process of abstraction that allows one to posit the Kantian system, and that system raises up skepticism on the foundation of unrecognized language games, naively presuming that these games represent the most rationally distilled conception of reality. After Wittgenstein, to say that reality is linguistic is not to call it into suspicion, but to recognize that it exists “for us,” and that through language we have the faculty to “dwell” in reality. Language, understood as a faculty of the human person for a transcendent engagement with the world, works. It has created our science, given birth to our culture, produced our technology. If something has deflated and enervated the Western spirit, the suspicion is not to be cast upon language. Its distortions may require insightful therapy, but this therapy will still need to be applied linguistically, which is only another way of saying that it will bear a human face. Rahner’s anthropology also begins with an understanding of the human person as the one who cannot not engage in metaphysics (2425). “We can never stop, in our thought or in our activity, at this or that reality taken in isolation. We want to know what reality is all about in its unity within which we get to know whatever we know. We inquire about the ultimate foundations, about the one ground of all reality. In so far as we know every reality as being, we inquire about the being of beings, and we practice metaphysics.”


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In Rahner human beings are those creatures who must, one might say, posit value. Since we possesses the freedom of self-disposal, we must question ourselves about the ultimate direction of that act (Rahner 1966a, 182). Human beings must continually ask “why” because we find ourselves ineluctably drawn outside ourselves. We must ask what deserves the attention of our collective faculties and energies, because we cannot do otherwise than to direct these beyond the self. We have this attention, this readiness, to take into ourselves that which is other than our own selves. Rahner could have penned the following, but Kant did : The mathematician, the sophisticated man, the natural philosopher: what do they accomplish when they make wanton mock of metaphysics? In their heart lies the call which bids them constantly to make trial of that selfsame field. If, as human beings, they do not seek their ultimate ends in the satisfaction of the goals of this life, they have no choice but to ask: From whence am I? What is the origin of all that is? The astronomer is even more compelled to these questions. He cannot avoid seeking something which will satisfy him on these matters. With the first judgement he makes on them, he is in the realm of metaphysics. Does he want simply to abandon himself, without any guidance, to the opinions which spring up in him if he has no map of the territory through which he wishes to roam? The critique of pure reason thrusts a torch into this gloom, but it illuminates the dark spaces of our own understanding, not the things unknown to us beyond the sense world (Cassirer 1981, 144-45).

The question of “why” is thus focused upon intentionality and leads to the question of value. Human beings move out of themselves de natura and must therefore ask whither. That “whither” is not a realm of “things unknown to us beyond the sense world” but rather “the dark spaces of our own understanding,” and the latter are more than a priori structures of cognition. They represent an absolute drive toward fulfillment. As Rahner noted, even when the human person “refuses to move” this is never an actual cessation of this fundamental human striving, only its cognitive denial. Granted then, that metaphysics, as the cognitive grasp which alone can collect the empirical

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and the ethical into the free response of an individual, must continue, where does it go after Wittgenstein? How do we comprehend the world in order to engage it? If one takes seriously the point that Rahner raises, that there can be no “positionless” position on the “metaphysical question,” or on any question that raises issues of ultimate significance, can one suggest that language will reveal the ultimate structures of reality and at the same time posit that these structure will have no existential significance for the human person? Can one assemble a model of the world and leave out the self who must act in that world? Rahner discusses the relationship between intellectual speculation and existential involvement by taking up the Kantian understanding of metaphysics as a conceptual system. In Hearers of the Word (1994, 2), he affirms the older Aristotelian notion of metaphysics as a “superscience,” one which provides the conceptual linkage between the presupposed starting points of the individual sciences (ibid. 2). But Rahner does not limit metaphysics to merely a conceptual charting of the phenomena. Whether one considers objects in themselves to be truly present to human cognition, or as merely posited, a progressively more inclusive conceptual framework must be fashioned by human cognition in order to regulate our very appropriation of conceptual data. “The problem of the relation between two sciences does not come up only after they have already been established: it is the problem of the bond that connects them in their common metaphysical ground (ibid. 3).” Linguistic philosophy itself recognized the need to create a sort of interdisciplinary guide. In “Two Criteria for an Ideal Language” (first published in 1949) Gustav Bergmann (1992, 134) wrote that “the ideal language, as I conceive it, is not a language actually to be spoken, but a blue print or schema, complete only in the sense that it must show, in principle, the structure and systematic arrangement of all major areas of our experience.” Rahner’s point is more than an affirmation of this need, which should be obvious enough. He asserts that the construction of this “intellectual framework” or heuristic world raises the question of the very nature of our intellectual activity as purposeful. “Insofar as an epistemological question is also always an inquiry into the nature of science as a human activity, it is necessarily an


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inquiry into human nature itself[...]A theory of the human person always implies a theory of the manner in which we ought to act existentially (Rahner 1994, 3). The theologian should note an essential characteristic of Rahner’s approach, the details of which will be laid out in the rest of this chapter as the Transcendental Thomism of his earlier work, Spirit in the World, is examined. Rahner asserts that an adequate epistemology necessarily imposes a metaphysics, since at a certain point in the construction of a noetically appropriated world, we must pose the question of ultimate, or metaphysical, significance: “to what end?” If metaphysics is thought of as a rational consideration of the deepest realities we know, deepest being understood as those structures in reality against which all other structures find reference, then Wittgenstein himself recognized that the human person cannot but continue the metaphysical enterprise. He must structure reality for the purpose of evaluating it, and he must evaluate it because he is compelled to give himself over to it. “It strikes me that a religious belief could only be something like a passionate commitment to a system of reference. Hence, although it’s belief, it’s really a way of living, or a way of assessing life. It’s passionately seizing hold of this interpretation. Instruction in a religious faith, therefore, would have to take the form of a portrayal, a description, of that system of reference, while at the same time being an appeal to conscience. And this combination would have to result in the pupil himself, of his own accord, passionately taking hold of the system of reference. It would be as though someone were first to let me see the hopelessness of my situation and then show me the means of rescue until, of my own accord, or not at any rate led to it by my instructor, I ran to it and grasped it (Wittgenstein 1980a, 64e).” The linkage of the “metaphysical” and the “meaningful” was evident, however, already in the Tractatus. The world as contingent cannot be the source of ethics, but the world as a whole, sub specie aeterni, compels one to ethical considerations because it stands over and against the subject. The subject, though not of the world, is nevertheless in the world, in terms of engagement. He must act in the world, must dispose of himself within in.

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As Wittgenstein continued to examine the notion of religious belief after the Tractatus, the question of significance became more coupled with that of action. In his reading of Tolstoy, belief that did not translate into action was simply not belief. To possess metaphysical or religious knowledge was a form of engagement with the world, not merely the accumulation of intellectual data. When someone who believes in God looks around him and asks, “Where did everything that I see come from?” “Where did everything come from?” He is not asking for a (causal) explanation; and the point of his question is that it is the expression of such a request. Thus, he is expressing an attitude toward all explanations. — But how is this shown in his life? It is the attitude that takes a particular matter seriously, but then at a particular point doesn’t take it seriously after all, and declares that something else is even more serious. In this way a person can say it is very serious that so-and-so died before he could finish a certain work; and in another sense it doesn’t matter at all. Here we use the word “in a profounder sense.” 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 them, but rather of the difference they make at various points in life. How do I know that two people mean the same when both say they believe in God? And one can say just the same thing about the Trinity. Theology, which insists on the use of certain words and phrases and bans others, makes nothing clearer (Karl Barth). It, so to speak, fumbles around with words, because it wants to say something and doesn’t know how to express it. Practice give words their meaning (Wittgenstein 1977, 58-59e s. III n. 317).

Clearly one commonality in the approach of both Rahner and Wittgenstein to questions of ultimate significance is to note the coinvolving nature of the questions. To raise metaphysical questions is not to make an act of faith, but, like an act of faith, the very act of questioning already makes a claim upon the questioner himself in his totality. Just as the act of faith is more than merely intellectual assent, so too, the person who raises the metaphysical question, queries not only the world but his place within it.


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Note the features common to the thought of Wittgenstein and Rahner. Human beings create “systems of reference.” These ultimately exist as a way of assessing value. They are much more than scientific cataloging. Evaluation is necessary because the human being is compelled to give himself over to that which stands beyond him. He must “passionately take hold of the system of reference.” What Wittgenstein calls a “system of reference” Rahner calls “metaphysics.” Neither of them make the mistake of thinking that the believer, whether designated as such or not, thinks that a portion of reality has been made accessible only to him or to other members of an elite. “We have metaphysics as science only where slowly and painstakingly that which is always already known is developed in a systematic and strictly conceptual way, where we try to put into concepts what we have always already anticipated in our being and in our activity (Rahner 1994, 24).” What lies beyond physics is not more physics, but rather its significance. As W. D. Hudson noted in his work on Wittgenstein (1968, 48), the “weight of empirical evidence for a prediction does not appear to be either a sufficient or a necessary condition of religious belief. A man may think the empirical grounds for predicting this event, the Last Judgment, overwhelming without being a religious believer.” Hudson’s point is not that religious belief or metaphysical thought stands unrelated to empirical justification, but rather that it cannot be reduced to it. Belief involves “passionately take hold of the system of reference.” It involves the total person, not merely intellectual assent. The latter may well be present without commitment of any kind. In both its origin and its conclusion, metaphysical thought is like religious belief. It raises the question of significance, and that question always coinvolves the one posing it. Alan Keightley (1976, 117) has noted correctly that if Wittgenstein sees religious belief as “world-organizing” then one can hardly expect this belief itself to be subject to verification, at least while it is actually functioning as belief. The fundamental character of a world is not subject to verification in the same way as an object in the world. “It seems to be part of the Wittgensteinian view that there must always be the appearance of arbitrariness about moral or religious beliefs where they are correctly understood as expressions of value. They only

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appear to be arbitrary to someone who assumes that they must have grounds and be subject to explanation.” There really is no such thing as “metaphysical neutrality,” certainly not if metaphysics represents a view of the most fundamental structures of reality. Christianity, like human discourse in general, must use words in a manner which others find comprehensible, and this need, for a shared heuristic horizon, produces a metaphysical impulse. When Aristotle (IV Metaphysics, 1.1), and Aquinas after him, taught that the object of metaphysics is being as being, ens in quantum ens, they surely meant to express more than a tautology. If the metaphysical enterprise is not a search for occult, hyperscientific entities, then it must consist of an examination of “all that is” from a nontautological perspective. Even a rudimentary act of linguistic analysis ought to show that when someone affirms “that which is, is” he clearly intends to do more than state a tautology. In Western thought, to raise the question of being is ultimately to raise the question of significance. Of course a Kantian would want to insist that whether we speak of language, or of a priori transcendent structures of human cognition, whether we see these as unhappy distortions, or fecund possibilities, the real issue either way, with regard to the question of metaphysics, is that we deal only with the phenomena and never with the noumena. This affirmation is ultimately the assertion that the deepest structures, or features, of reality are inaccessible to the human mind. At first sight, it seems odd that a Kantian would both posit the existence of such structures and their inaccessibility to human knowledge. This intellectual act immediately raises the question of how the initial positing took place. What does it mean to claim to know that there is a part of reality unknown to the human mind? An analytic philosopher immediately suspects that a language game has been inadequately recognized. Surely there is some ambiguity in the use of the word “know” which requires examination. In such a light, one might suggest that all of Thomistic philosophy could be viewed as an exploration into those ambiguities, or, as Thomistic philosophy itself would put it, the analogical usages of that verb, “to know.”


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5.2 Wittgenstein and analogical language One similarity between Rahner and Wittgenstein should be immediately apparent. Both thinkers are profoundly post-Kantian. Neither believes that one can return to a preKantian frame of reference, where God is considered as an immediate object of knowledge. Both also believe that they have understood Kant and made relative his critique of knowledge. In the Tractatus the knowing subject also cannot be made an object of knowledge. The Tractatus also affirms the impossibility of speaking about the relationship of the subject to the world, since any attempt to do so involves one in language, in a return to the world. The Wittgenstein of the Investigations does not repudiate this fundamental dichotomy of subject and world. However, he realizes that, even within the world, logic and language are not monolithic. “The basic evil of Russell’s logic, as also of mine in the Tractatus, is that what a proposition is, is illustrated by a few commonplace examples, and then pre-supposed as understood in full generality (Wittgenstein 1980b, 1:10e n. 38).” The latter Wittgenstein recognized that eddies of logic coalesce in divergent language games, and that the heuristic movement from one to another involves analogy. In other words, if one compares the set of significations of a word in one language game with that of the same word in yet another, there will be mutual and also exclusive members of each set. Language in the latter Wittgenstein is analogous de natura. Even in the latter Wittgenstein, God and the knowing subject transcend language, but language isn’t conceived as “trespassing” when it attempts to speak about them. Wittgenstein would simply remind the user that he is engaging in a language game, one whose words have meaning but also a defined limitation. They capture a portion of reality through usage, not by essence. Of course this is the case whether one is speaking of God, the human person, or a dog. In n. 91 of the Investigations Wittgenstein (1967b, 43e) characterizes the view of language he rejects, one which presumes that language can be analyzed into absolute simples which would then disclose the essences constituting reality. “But now it may come to look as if there

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were something like a final analysis of our forms of language, and so a single completely resolved form of every expression. That is, as if our usual forms of expression were, essentially, unanalysed; as if there were something hidden in them that had to be brought to light. When this is done the expression is completely clarified and our problem solved. It can also be put like this: we eliminate misunderstandings by making our expressions more exact; but now it may look as if we were moving toward a particular state, a state of complete exactness; and as if this were the real goal of our investigation.” In n. 92 Wittgenstein accepts the notion that language is about a search for essences, but they are not occult objects to be sought through reductive analysis. They can be gleaned from usage itself. When one ignores an examination of grammar, the result is that entities, either external or mental, are hypostatized to explain how language functions. The underlying presupposition is the Augustinian picture of language, which presumes that words must stand proxy for objects of some sort.4 “This finds expression in questions as to the essence of language, of propositions, of thought. — For if we too in these investigations are trying to understand the essence of language — its function, its structure, — yet this is not what those questions have in view. For they see in the essence, not something that already lies open to view and that becomes surveyable by a rearrangement, but something that lies beneath the surface. Something that lies within, which we see when we look into the thing, and which an analysis digs out. “The essence is hidden from us”: this is the form our problem now assumes. We ask: “What is language?”, “What is a proposition?” And the answer to these questions is to be given once for all; and independently of any future experience (Wittgenstein 1967b n. 43e n. 92).” In Wittgenstein occult essence, in all realms of human endeavor, has given way to essential usage, which is to say, when translated back into preWittgenstein conceptual terms, brought back to analogy. The process by which every speaker of language learns to wield a tongue, learns its usage, is through analogy. I hear a word used in a sentence, in a context. To simply repeat that sentence again and again indicates 4

Baker and Hacker (1985, 124-125) are particularly helpful on this point.


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to those around me that I have not mastered anything, certainly not that I have mastered the tongue. It is when I have correctly used their word in my sentence, when I have moved it from one context to another, which is to say, when I have engaged in a fundamental act of analogy, that others will grant that I am mastering their language. There is nothing antithetical to Wittgenstein’s thought in speaking of the knowing self or of God. He certainly did. Nor, as will be shown, need Transcendental Thomism fear the movement from essence to analogy, since it does not conceive of essence as a static entity having greater than human significance, but always as a “preliminary” and tentative attempt of the human intellect to grasp that which the divine mind knows intuitively. Garth Hallett (1975, 20) has argued brilliantly that the latter Wittgenstein robbed logical positivism of one of its chief critiques of theology, that its assertions stand for concepts with no meaning, by showing that concepts are never tied in a one-on-one relationship with assertions. Meaning is not a rider to be sought above the proposition, which then ought to be subject to verification, in one form or another, but rather as that which lies intrinsically within the proposition. Although Wittgenstein is commonly considered, with reason, to be an opponent of transcendental theology, his later thought tends to eliminate two main sources of difficulty for the transcendental use of language. One is the traditional notion that the main function of communication with words is the transfer of thoughts, these thoughts being equated with the words’ meanings, and these in turn with concepts, and these in turn with mental representations or likenesses. The verbal signs express the conscious contents of the speaker’s mind and beget similar representations in the mind of the hearer. But whose representations can keep pace with the assertions of theology? Who can represent to himself the transcendental realities of which it speaks? Descartes, it is true claimed to possess a positive representation of the Infinite, so rich and wonderful that God alone could have caused it. But most theologians have been more modest in their claims. So the problem naturally arises: If theological expressions do not serve to excite adequate mental representations, corresponding to the things

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Terrance W. Klein: How Things Are in the World spoken of, what is their function? How justify a use of language which differs so radically from the ordinary?

The Wittgensteinian answer is that this supposed exception is not an exception. Language never does function in the way traditionally supposed. Mental representations do of course occur while we speak, and doubtless we could not get along without them. But the representations are not meanings, nor do they adequately represent the things spoken of, nor do they accompany every word, nor do those in the mind of the reader or hearer match those in the mind of the writer or speaker, nor is the excitation of mental representations the principal function of language. Far more important is the communication of knowledge, though here too we must beware of traditional misconceptions. Hallett raises a crucial aspect of Wittgenstein’s relationship to theology. The post-Wittgensteinian status of the question is this: if one can’t posit meaning beyond language, then one can’t suggest, as the logical positivists did, that theology is meaningless because it lacks an empirically verifiable, extralinguistic referent. The question still to be addressed, however, is upon what foundation are the meaning of theological assertions to be based?

5.3 Humanity as a potentia obedientialis Why is the “metaphysical impulse” so crucial to Rahner’s theological project? Answering that question requires an examination of Rahner’s theological concerns and the philosophical options which he, as a Transcendental Thomist, took in order to address those concerns. With regard to his initial theological project, Rahner’s goal was to show concrete, historical human nature as ordered toward a potentia obedientialis. Rahner (1966, 4:173) depicts a humanity that must transcend itself in openness to a word of revelation. “It is a matter of asking how Christocentric is the whole actual world and order of salvation; of proving that the supernatural character of grace does not mean that man is in fact a closed, self-contained and finished system,


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which he can work out in his ‘natural’ existence, which grace is a sort of pure superstructure imposed on it, but leaving the lower element unaltered in itself .” On the other hand, grace cannot be viewed as the purely natural result of humanity’s orientation toward God. “There can be no spirit without transcendence open to the supernatural; but spirit is meaningful without supernatural grace. Hence its fulfillment in grace cannot be demanded by its essence, though it is open for such a grace (ibid. 186).” How does one navigate between these shoals? One way of approaching the core of Rahner’s, literally voluminous, work is to situate his project in its historical context of Roman Catholic theology. Traditional Roman Catholic theology, as it was practiced before the advent of the modern era, sharply distinguished between the natural and supernatural orders. Like the Tractatus, Catholic theology saw a necessary and absolute distinction between our own human levels of thought and existence, and that of the divine. In both the Tractatus and Dei Filius this divide is posited because the human sphere cannot presume to contain the divine without a fundamental truncation of the divine reality itself. No finitude can contain infinity. Margins, which always exist in human realities, cannot contain that which is unlimited. In the 19th century, Catholic theology attempted to respond to the post-Cartesian and post-Kantian world of modern thought. The German idealism that grew up in response to Kant’s radical “turn to the subject” had failed to distinguish between the natural and supernatural orders. In the philosophical synthesis of Hegel, humanity took on attributes of the divine. It came to be seen as the expression of divinity itself in human history. The first efforts of Roman Catholic theology to respond to this philosophical climate were as deficient in distinguishing adequately between these two orders as their Protestant vanguard had been. Neo-Thomism was both a political and a theological rejection of this fundamentally flawed stance of Catholic thought vis-a-vis the modern world. Its proponents argued that only a return to the classical metaphysical structure of Aristotle and Aquinas could adequately guarantee the necessary separation of the natural and supernatural

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orders. Needless to say, the rebuff was justified, if simply on the grounds that unless God be seen as supernatural, as more than what is simply given in nature, he would be something less than God. He might be human aspirations writ large, as in Feuerbach, but he would not be the God of Judeo-Christian revelation. In fact the very necessity of Judeo-Christian revelation comes into question if God is reduced to the level of the human. There is no need to reveal, in the most absolute sense of that word, that which is essentially only a human reality. Once the existence of the supernatural is denied, once God is no longer radically other, then revelation itself becomes only an expression of human aspirations. When revelation is reduced to the level of the human, the act of faith has no supernatural terminus and hence no significance. It does not represent a “handing over” of the human person into the hands of God. In the same way grace also becomes a term without meaning. It is no longer a communion with the divine, if the divine order itself has not been seen as inherently other than the natural. It would be unfair to suggest that those who first attempted a Catholic theological response to modern thought sought to be unfaithful to what must be seen as the core of Judeo-Christian revelation, namely, the transcendence of God. However, the significance of the Neo-Thomist response to these early pioneers is contained in the question it posed: were the supernatural and natural orders sufficiently distinct in the new theological approaches of the 19th century? One cannot help but to ponder the irony that as the 20th century dawned, the absolute transcendence of God became an issue in two very diverse agenda. Neo-Thomism insisted upon it in order to remain faithful to the core of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus affirmed God’s transcendence because Wittgenstein saw nature by definition as contingent. God cannot be contingent, nor can he be the sum of contingencies. Thus both Dei Filius and Wittgenstein’s Tractatus insisted upon the radical transcendence of God. Rahner’s task was not to respond to Wittgenstein, but rather to Dei Filius. It was to find a way to speak of the natural order as at once natural and yet inherently ready to receive the supernatural. In this


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way, among other things, human progress is validated, and the divine is not reduced to an adjective which merely extols that progress. Grant Dei Filius and the Tractatus their due. God cannot be reduced to the level of the human. However, if human nature is seen as inherently complete in itself, if it is not intrinsically ordered toward a revelation of God, if it does not possess a potentia obedientialis, then revelation, and grace itself, can appear to have the character of an intrinsically foreign element vis-a-vis human nature. In theology the result is a theory in which God’s revelation appears as so totally alien to humanity that one can legitimately ask how the human person would be capable of its reception, a question Karl Barth’s approach has raised. If God is absolutely Other, what commonality with him allows humans even to identify, much less comprehend, divine revelation? As one commentator of Rahner, Joseph Donceel, writes (1969, 16), “Revelation looks like a foreign body, which has no relation with the human mind.” If revelation is approached as an absolute alienum, then fideism presents itself as an almost inevitable result. How can the act of faith be anything but a leap into darkness, if one admits of no analogical similarity between the natural and the supernatural? If God is conceived in the most absolute sense as totally other, then a turning toward God would be nothing but a turning away from the human. For the human person, it could not be a turning toward, an ad rem, since no terminus presents itself in any cognitive form. Faith then becomes not a radical openness to God as supernatural, but simply a rejection of the human. In this approach, God does not complete and fulfill a human nature he has created for the purpose of this fulfillment. His existence is posited only to deny the validity of human existence, a charge which the nonreligious often, and with some justification, lay against the proponents of religion. The concept of God as absolutely, completely other, collapses internally. A concept must have a content, and this concept declares that it has none. It says that no predicate can ever follow the affirmation of God’s existence. “God is” and no more. God cannot be known. But then to affirm an absolute unknowability of God would not be an act of confiding one’s self to another, it would

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merely be the radical denial of all that one is in his or her own humanity. It is all negation, since nothing is left to be affirmed. The task Rahner set for himself appears all the more crucial when it is juxtaposed to Wittgenstein’s thought on God. The God Wittgenstein affirmed in the Tractatus did no more than act as a barrier to the aspirations of human knowledge. Wittgenstein showed that science did not possess absolute knowledge of reality because the scientist could know nothing of God. But then, no one else could either, at least cognitively. “What is eternal and important is often hidden from a man by an impenetrable veil. He knows: there’s something under there, but he cannot see it. The veil reflects the daylight (Wittgenstein 1980e, 80e).” In the Tractatus one moves toward God because the world has been seen as complete and sufficient, but also as completely insufficient. When everything has been answered, no answer has been given. The human person has no choice but to throw himself at the mystery that is God. “Religion as madness is a madness springing from irreligiousness (Wittgenstein 1980a, 13e).” Unfortunately, at first glance, Wittgenstein’s God well represents the religious spirit of the age, a spirit responding to the presumption that science has answered, or soon will answer, the questions posed by humanity. The contemporary atheist presumes upon an equivocal relationship between the human person’s need to know and science’s ability to answer. Of course nothing in the scientific domain ultimately resolves the human person’s questions about his own self as subject, as one able to dispose of himself in freedom. All of Wittgenstein’s work, at second glance, from the opening of the Tractatus to the final closure of his personal notebooks, can be seen as, at the maximum, a repudiation of scientific pretensions, and, at the minimum, a severe circumscription of the scientific domain. This sentence, from the Preface to the Tractatus, was quoted previously: “The truth of the thoughts that are here communicated seems to me unassailable and definitive. I therefore believe myself to have found, on all essential points, the final solution to the problems.” Here the sentence that followed it should be noted: “And if I am not mistaken in this belief, then the second thing in which the value of this work


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consists is that it shows how little is achieved when these problems are solved (Wittgenstein 1961, 4).” Monk (1990, 484-86) devotes a number of pages to Wittgenstein’s repudiation of the scientific spirit of the age. They help to clarify why the Tractatus may have begun its life as a philosophical platform for scientific exploration, but already in its conclusion represented a “line in the sand” for scientific pretension. “What links this apocalyptic anxiety (of Wittgenstein) with his hostility to academic philosophy is his detestation of the power of science in our age, which on the one hand encouraged the philosopher’s ‘craving for generality,’ and on the other produced the atomic bomb.” Wittgenstein’s religious response is thoroughly fideistic, so fideistic that Wittgenstein himself never professed religious belief. He translated The King of the Dark Chamber, written by the Indian Poet Rabindranath Tagore. Monk has suggested that Tagore well expressed Wittgenstein’s religious ideal. He “did not wish to see God or to find reasons for his existence. He thought that if he could overcome himself — if a day would come when his whole nature ‘bowed down in humble resignation in the dust’ — then God would, as it were, come to him; he would then be saved (ibid. 410).” As Wittgenstein viewed God, the deity acts as a fundamental organizing principle for the believer, but the gap that stands between belief and unbelief can only be crossed by an irrational leap. Revelation in Wittgenstein’s thought appears as a denial, as a circumscription of human aspirations. Only the human being who has grown exhausted with human pretensions chooses to confide himself to religion. This is a depiction of religion very dominant today in Western life. Religion acts as a limitation to human aspiration, as a refuge from human hubris, as a tonic for the weariness and the incapacitation that can beset the human being as an individual. This is why religion in Western society has been relegated to the domain of the individual. Humanity continues to progress; only individuals grow weary. Humanity as a collective has moved beyond a religious moment, but individuals may occasionally still find solace there. Wittgenstein’s work, viewed as an embodiment of the religious Zeitgeist, shows both the urgency of Rahner’s theological task and the delicate balance required of it. Rahner had to present revelation as

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truly a word which transcends humanity, as properly supernatural. At the same time, he had to show, through a consideration of the fundamental, or “existential” structures of the human being, that revelation need not be received as an extrinsic addendum to human nature, as a foreign element, but rather that humanity itself has a potential openness to this word of revelation for its own completion. Revelation cannot be considered as something intrinsic to human nature, otherwise it becomes reduced to it. It also cannot be so foreign as to be unrecognizable. But what must the human person be like for both of these affirmations to be correct? Rahner’s approach is grounded in the philosophical anthropology of Joseph Maréchal, a Neo-Thomist who sought to respond to postKantian philosophy by directing the attention of Thomistic thought to a domain obviously not fully developed by Thomas himself, the knowing subject. It also draws heavily upon the contribution of Martin Heidegger who suggested that the human person must always raise, as the most fundamental of all questions, that of the significance of being. Rahner’s own contribution to the subject appears first as his doctoral study in Thomistic epistemology, Spirit in the World, and subsequently in a work of philosophical anthropology which would be fundamental to all his subsequent theological reflections, Hearers of the Word (Coreth 1995, 33-34). That Ludwig Wittgenstein represents the sort of person whom Rahner addressed in his writings is hardly a contestable point. Rahner wanted to speak to 20th century people, and Wittgenstein was certainly an avatar of that century. But what other commonality does the great progenitor of modern analytic thought have to Rahner the Transcendental Thomists? Could any two thinkers be more antithetical than the man who, in the minds of many, banished the word “being” to the scrap pile of misused grammar, and a theologian convinced that his former teacher, Heidegger, had correctly recalled Western thought not only to its origins in a consideration of being qua being, but also to its ineluctable destiny? If Wittgenstein refashioned philosophy, moving it from a domain of study to a method of procedure, can this purified method assist the Rahnerian agenda? Is Rahner’s agenda, his field of study, still the most fruitful place of endeavor for the human person, the one asking how to dispose of his


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own self in the history that is an individual life? Does it take up the questions posed by Wittgenstein’s own project, when one considers this project as more than the presentation of a new method, but also the perennial resurgence of a human striving?

5.4 What must be the case in order to know? In Rahner’s thought, God, as formal object, as the ultimate mystery, is no mere object of knowledge, but rather something implicit and prethematic (Columbo 1992, 71-96). As in the Tractatus, God is not to be located as an object within the world. Rahner’s approach to the question is post-Kantian. God is not an object directly apprehended by human intelligence. Using and adapting Maréchal, Rahner attempts to show that God is the necessary background, or horizon, of every act of human cognition. Like Heidegger, Rahner defines the human person as the one who must ask about being. For the purpose of comparison, recall how the Tractatus depicts a “world” in which everything knowable, can be known with scientific, if not necessarily empirical, clarity. Rahner (1968, 58) also presumes upon this, as yet unrealized, possibility, but notes that even if it were to be realized, something would still elude the cognitive act. “The metaphysical question is that question which in a final and radical sharpening of man’s questioning turns upon itself as such and thereby turns upon the presuppositions which are operative in itself.[...]In actually asking the metaphysical question man becomes aware of what he is in the ground of his essence: he who must ask about being.” The perimeters in which the metaphysical thought of Rahner moves are clearly determined in this initial work. It is post-Kantian. If one wants to juxtapose Transcendental Thomism to the Tractatus, the former is never within the “world” of the latter. It wants to examine the relationship Wittgenstein articulated but did not explore, that of the knowing subject who stands beyond the world known (Wittgenstein 1961, 57 n. 5.632). As a Transcendental Thomist, Rahner begins his metaphysics with an epistemology of the knowing subject. “Rahner’s

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concern” Otto Muck writes (1968, 187), “is not with a critique of knowledge as a presupposition for metaphysics, but with the metaphysics of knowledge internal to metaphysics itself.” The starting point is not an objective knowledge of entities but an examination of the a priori ground of every act of knowledge. Rahner’s epistemological question can be put thus: How is it possible that we know anything? What is the relationship between the knowing subject and the object of knowledge which makes possible the act of knowledge? What must be affirmed about the subject in order to consider him as one capable of knowledge? In Transcendental Thomism the epistemological question precedes the metaphysical, the result being that metaphysics is shown to be necessary in order to comprehend the epistemological. Rahner’s intention is to respond to the Kantian critique, which had insisted that metaphysics consists, at least in intention, of entirely a priori synthetic propositions (Kant 1929, 54). Kantian metaphysics is not only the conceptual structuring of analytic concepts, nor the cataloguing of a posteriori synthetic statements. It ought to be an actual extension of a priori synthetic concepts. The latter would be experiential concepts which are absolutely, but not analytically, conjoined. Progress in metaphysics, according to Kant, will occur when we can show how it is that we arrive at these a priori intuitions. The metaphysician’s task is not to analyze concepts, but rather to show from where they come. “[T]he analysis of concepts is useless, since it merely shows what is contained in these concepts, not how we arrive at them a priori. A solution of this latter problem is required, that we may be able to determine the valid employment of such concepts in regard to the objects of all knowledge in general (ibid. 57).” He continues, “I entitle transcendental all knowledge which is occupied not so much with objects as with the mode of our knowledge of objects in so far as this mode of knowledge is possible a priori (ibid. 59).” This is exactly what Rahner, and the Transcendental Thomists in general, aim to do. They want to show that a prethematic apprehension of being is necessary in order for the object itself to be known by the human agent. This would mean that a metaphysics could be constructed on synthetic a priori grounds, the claim being that a


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preconceptual knowledge of being is a truly transcendental characteristic, one necessary for every act of knowledge. Transcendental Thomism does not view itself as having abandoned traditional metaphysics, which certainly must be more than an examination of the a priori characteristics of the knowing subject. To do metaphysics is to reach into the very foundations of all that which is. The turn to the subject in Transcendental Thomism does not represent a jettisoning of objective knowledge, a repudiation of knowledge outside the subject, or of its ultimate foundation in reality. If everything begins and ends within the knowing subject, idealism is the result. Maréchal (1970, 3-4) rejected the analogy that he and his confreres were attempting to “bridge” the gap between subject and object. “[I]f our direct knowledge does not at once reach the ‘object in itself,’ we remain strictly confined within the subject as such, we are walled in within the ‘relative,’ and no artifice of demonstration will enable us to ‘throw a bridge’ toward the outside and the absolute.” Transcendental Thomism thus presents itself as a form of classical metaphysics. It presumes upon the objectivity of knowledge while insisting that this objectivity is only possible because of a transcendental orientation toward absolute being. Like the Tractatus, or, for that matter, On Certainty, it begins with the question, “What must be the case for us adequately to know reality?” It is Kantian, because, unlike classical metaphysics, it does not begin with a naive affirmation of objective reality and then precede to construct a metaphysical system based upon causality. True, it begins its consideration within the subject, but with the presupposition that the subject knows reality, followed by the question of how this is possible. According to Transcendental Thomism, classical metaphysics naively, but not incorrectly, presumed upon an objective knowledge of reality. Kant, of course, limited synthetic knowledge of objective reality to the phenomena. Transcendental Thomism argues that if knowledge of objective reality is possible at all, then it must extend beyond the phenomena to the noumena, and that Kant himself would have realized this had his critique of knowledge examined the human intellect as a dynamic agent rather than a static construct. Note the following initial similarities between Transcendental Thomism and Wittgenstein: Both reject any form of idealism follow-

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ing upon Kant’s critique. Both affirm the existence of an objective reality, and both affirm our ability to know that reality. Both speak of a dynamism that is inadequately accounted for in Kantian thought. In the thought of the latter Wittgenstein we already approach the question of knowledge in media res. Language games are already efficaciously at work, allowing us fruitfully to appropriate reality. It is only when one has inadequately understood these that one raises the question of skepticism about knowledge. Only then does the word “reality” signify that which stands forever beyond human cognition. For its part, Transcendental Thomism argues that our knowledge of reality is not confined to the phenomena, and that Kant himself would have realized this had he examined human knowledge as a dynamic faculty rather than a static property. In Zettel Wittgenstein wrote (1967, 117e): “Attention is dynamic, not static — one would like to say. I begin by comparing attention to gazing but that is not what I call attention; and now I want to say that I find it is impossible that one should attend statically (n. 512). If in a particular case I say: attention consists in preparedness to follow each smallest movement that may appear — that is enough to shew you that attention is not a fixed gaze: no, this is a concept of a different kind (n. 674).” It is obviously not enough simply to find the word “dynamic” in Wittgenstein’s notes and then juxtapose it to the “static” quality of Kant’s work. After all, when these two adjectives are used together, the former is used almost always in a positive sense while the latter’s is negative. What Wittgenstein is repudiating is the notion of human receptivity being conceived as a state of receptiveness, and this does seem to be how Kant viewed the issue. The human mind imposes its own categorical limitations upon reality, but this is rather like the image of a mold receiving wet sand. Exterior reality will be conformed to the mind’s categorical frame. But attentiveness is not a gaze, not a passive receptivity, or even a conditioned one. Wittgenstein is, surprising to say, more Thomistic than that. The mind actively fashions and perceives the reality it experiences according to the frame of reference provided by the language game in use. This is why Wittgenstein was fascinated with the question of “aspect.” We do find that impressions shift as our game-based expectations shift. “Our eye


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seems each time to be drawing a different shape in these lines (on the paper) (Wittgenstein 1980b, 2:94e n. 532).” In Kantian thought there is still the notion that the ultimate relationship between language, or the mind, and reality could be fixed, however daunting such a task might be conceptually. In Wittgenstein there is the recognition that the “agent intellect” to use a foreign phrase, really is endlessly, creatively active in a variegated pattern of truly endless language games. “Different pictures appear to me. But how different are they? In what do they differ? That I can explain only by referring to their origin (Wittgenstein 1980b, 2:94e n. 533).” Transposing the Kantian critique into Wittgenstein’s theater of operation, the question then becomes: is knowledge of reality limited to the world of science? In the Tractatus the world of science doesn’t limit the “world,” but it certainly does limit knowledge. “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence (Wittgenstein 1961, 74 n. 7).” But before the work of the latter Wittgenstein can adequately be compared to Transcendental Thomism, that approach to the question of knowledge, as it finds expression in the fundamental metaphysics of Karl Rahner, must first be examined.

5.5 The whither of human knowledge The only adequate entrance into Transcendental Thomism is to accept it as Thomism, which is to recognize that its first affirmation is the Thomistic identification of knowledge and being. Thomism contextualizes the question of human knowledge by an exemplary reference to divine knowledge. Human beings juxtapose being and knowledge because of an inherent, human limitation. They must come to know reality not by an act of immediate intuition, but through the construction of conceptual knowledge. This limitation does not exist for God. Here is how Pierre Rousselot (1935, 222-23), the brilliant young scholar who first recognized the dynamic nature of intelligence in the

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thought of St. Thomas, framed the question in a manner that would be decisive for Transcendental Thomism. It is only when we are in the presence of that Intelligence “which is identically its own act,” however, that we possess the measure and ideal of all knowledge. The whole critique of knowledge finds its ultimate explanation in the theory of the divine knowledge. The decreasing perfections we discover in intuition, concept, judgment and reasoning must be computed in terms of the disparity that is seen to exist between them and the unique simplicity of knowledge to be found in God. A being is endowed with greater or less intellectual force according as its consciousness is more embracive in its unity or more dependent on a multiplicity of perceptions. The human soul comes last in the order of intellects because its power of knowledge is proportionate to the universe in which it lives, and because this present world is of a sensitive order whereas God cannot be sensed. This is a world of what is only mediately intelligible, roughly conceivable, and the truth of which is subject to variation, regio dissimilitudinis. Undoubtedly, the power of the human mind to judge and to generalize, though it ranks man lowest in the order of intelligences, endows him with the capacity for creating certain collections of notions such as the sciences, systems and symbolic poems which bring him in the direction of the pure idea without ever allowing him fully to reach its light or vehement unity.5

To the divine intellect, knowledge and being are one, because that intellect is pure act. If all of reality can be divided into that which is in act and that which has the potential to be in act (actus and potentia), then the Deity can be defined as complete actus. God is the fullness of Being. In Thomistic thought, it can be said that God’s essence is his existence, or, that his existence is in no way limited by any essence. It knows no limiting form, which is the Thomistic definition of essence. It has no potentiality which has not been actualized. Aquinas wrote, “From the fact that God is intelligent it follows that His act of understanding is His essence (Summa contra Gentiles I, 45, 1, trans. 5

Maréchal (1970, 194): “The ultimate end of the universe is identically the end of the intellect. Thomistic voluntarism is an intellectualism.”


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Anton C. Pegis).” The Divine mind intuits all of reality because it contains reality in itself. Note that at this level, the Verum is thus a transcendental quality of Esse. There can be no separation between the two. To be true is to be. Like Aristotelian metaphysics, the first principle of noncontradiction is seen to possess not only logical but ontic significance. That which is posited, necessarily is. Angelic beings, who come next in a hierarchy of beings, are substantial forms unlimited by matter. As pure forms, they are made to exist by the finite acts of existence which they limit. The act is limited only by spiritual form, not by insertion into matter. Like God, they also know reality intuitively, but, unlike God, they must pass from potency to act in knowing. Their essences define or limit their existences. Unlike God, we cannot say of them that their essence is their existence. They are still characterized by potency. They must speak the content of their knowledge in a mental word; it must “come” to expression, rather than simply “be” in expression. Finally human beings are defined as spirit in matter. All knowledge which we possess of reality must come to us from outside ourselves, from an active engagement with material reality. Thomas, like Aristotle, denied the existence in human beings of innate forms, immediate intuitions of reality (Summa Theologica I, 84, 3). Whatever we know of reality must be abstracted by our intellects from contact with the material world. Propositions arise through this contact, and the human intellect judges their adequacy vis-a-vis that which is already known of reality. This occurs, not through a sort of naive examination of correspondence, but ultimately through a congruence, or progressive coherence of judgements. Ultimately it can be said that in the act of judgment the human person conjoins the spheres of ontos and logos, the latter being the human appropriation of the former. In Thomistic epistemology the sensing faculties of the human person cooperate with the active intellect to produce the “phantasm” or sense image. The mind’s first act of knowledge is to create an intentional form of the object known through sense experience, which Thomas calls the verbum mentale. From this, the intellect then produces the concept through a process of abstraction. The concept is a “direct universal” in which the general features shared by any class of objects have been synthesized. A judgment occurs when the mind

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links together one or more universals, affirming that they coexist in a given object. The universal concept is a species expressa, the intentional form of the object known through abstraction. It is the intellect’s conscious “mental word.” Even this mental word, however, is not “read off” of brute reality. By itself, it remains provisional; it lacks that which would integrate it into a reliable whole. As Gerald McCool noted (1989, 53), in Rousselot’s writing the dominant themes of Transcendental Thomism are already present. Human knowledge is constructed upon the sensory, from which it abstracts conceptual knowledge, knowledge which remains essentialistic rather than intuitively absolute.6 Metaphysical knowledge is built upon an examination of the a priori structures of human cognition, not an a priori negative abstraction of absolutes which prescind from temporal-spatial conditions. If Thomas’ intellectualism guarantees the status of the human intellect as a faculty of the real, it radically relativizes the validity of conceptual knowledge. As a form immersed in matter, the human soul has no immediate awareness of its own essence. Except for its immediate awareness of its own activity, the human intellect is dependent for the content of its knowledge on the senses and on the concepts abstracted from the phantasm. Unlike the species of the angelic intellect, human concepts are not intuitions of the intelligible forms that structure beings. They are constructs of the active intellect dependent upon the data of the imagination for their content. The intelligible singularity that distinguishes one individual from another within the unity of their species eludes the abstract concept. Their universality, the ground of human scientific knowledge, is the mark of their imperfect penetration of the real. Concepts are no more then the imperfect human substitute for the angelic intuition.

The thrust of Rousselot’s work was to take this well known, although here scantily sketched, outline of Thomistic epistemology and to show that a dynamism characterizes all knowledge at every level of being. To be is to know, and if this does not come immediately with the possession of being, then it must come through an active striving, 6

Fides et Ratio, n. 22 takes up this same basic outline.


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an implementation of whatever actus a given being possesses. Being which is not complete in itself will always reach outside of the self for completion. Knowledge is the form of this striving. This is the core of what Transcendental Thomism means by a dynamic conception of human knowledge. It is potency, not yet fully in act, striving toward completion in it. For the human being, this striving can only occur through the intellectual faculties proper to a “material spirit.” This fundamental insight of Transcendental Thomism must be kept in view when considering Rahner’s, or any other Transcendental Thomist’s, explanation of our prethematic awareness of God. Whatever else we might say of reality, it must be divided into that which is and that which is still in process, between act and potency. This is why Transcendental Thomism insists that it represents a living branch of traditional metaphysics. It begins with an insight fundamental to Western thought: the paradox between the one and the many, between that which remains and that which is in flux. This is explicated through a structure built upon the dichotomy and mutual interrelatedness of act and potency. It also considers itself to be faithful to the principle insight of Thomas, that being is existence, albeit in diverse forms or layers. This conception of the human intellect as a potency striving toward completion in act becomes the core insight in Joseph Maréchal’s attempt to ground a post-Kantian metaphysics. Maréchal explicitly takes up the Kantian challenge to establish a metaphysics based upon the a priori structures made evident in an examination of the act of human cognition. His work was a fundamental influence upon Rahner’s own approach to the subject. It would not be an exaggeration to say that Maréchal set the terms of debate between Kant and the Transcendental Thomists. For that reason, a brief examination of his contribution will be very helpful in approaching Rahner. By metaphysics Maréchal meant an objective, noumenal science. It necessarily excludes the contingent and the particular. He saw this understanding of the discipline as common to both Aquinas and Kant. This was, however, a different approach than that taken by the first Neo-Thomistic philosophers. McCool contrasts (1989, 90), for example, Maréchal’s approach to that of Liberatore who “explained the necessity of metaphysics through ‘negative’ necessity of abstract

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essences. In other words, the necessity of the metaphysical essence can be justified completely through its ‘precision’ from concrete time and place.” In traditional metaphysics, one posits of God that which reason rejects as belonging to the contingent. Hence God must be immutable, immaterial, and indivisible. The shift away from this form of metaphysics is important to note. Previously to Maréchal, Neo-Thomist thought looked upon abstract essences as capable of complete definition. Essences are what thought produces when it abstracts from the contingent. Together these build an edifice of affirmed realities, even if they do so by why of negation rather than affirmation. Needless to say, Liberatore’s approach would have little appeal for an analytic philosopher, who would be unwilling to accept a notion of essence as capable of clear and absolute, rather than “provisional,” or “usage-oriented,” definition. This is one reason why Maréchal’s shift is so significant. Maréchal brilliantly recalled the fundamental Thomistic identification of absolute being and truth in God alone. God, as being fully in act, is fully known to himself. Truth and being stand in absolute reciprocal relationship in God alone. Outside of God, every essence, as a limiting form, stands, speaking in a spatial metaphor, at the border between act and potency. But essences, in the absolute sense, are known only to God and the angels. Human beings must construct them through a process of abstraction upon the material reality present to them. This makes our human acquisition of them bear something of a provisional character. “According to St. Thomas,” Maréchal writes (1970, 139), “abstraction supposes no physical transferring of ‘forms,’ but only a purely precisive ‘conformation’ of the intellect to some of the phantasm’s features. The abstraction in question is nothing but the very setting up, within possible intellect, of dynamic relations (species) according to the qualitative diversity of the phantasm.” If forms, as forms, were transferrable, our knowledge of reality at any given moment would be absolute. There would be more than simple adequation between the subject’s knowledge of the object and the object in itself. The object would be immediately given to the subject. By speaking of “precisive” conformation, Maréchal does not disparage human knowledge, but he does distinguish it from the


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divine and the angelic. “Thomistic ideology is based upon this strange condition: an intelligence whose internal dynamism is partially restricted to material limitations (ibid. 38).” Human knowledge has a dynamic character, which is to say that it is characterized by a continual movement toward a progressively more adequate knowledge of any given essence. The notion of essence as a dynamic and provisional appropriation of reality based upon abstraction would certainly be at home in Wittgenstein’s approach to the issue. Recall that he viewed essences as usage and context determined. They bear more of a “familiar resemblance” character than that of a precise definition. To assert that they can only adequately be approached through context and usage is likewise to assert the dynamic nature of human appropriation of them. If the concept were absolute rather than dynamic (which is another way of saying provisional) then a metaphysics based upon the positing of absolute concepts, such as Leibniz and Spinoza attempted, would be possible. Their metaphysical approach was exactly that of the Tractatus: find the exact correlation between human thought and reality and then use the atomic elements of human thought to build up the edifice of reality as it must exist. The fundamentally dynamic character of the human intellect outlined by Rousselot and Maréchal bears a similarity to Wittgenstein’s latter thought. In fact, it helps to illumine a fundamental distinction between the work of the Tractatus and the Investigations. Recall the anecdote that Wittgenstein’s Tractarian world crumbled when Piero Sraffa asked him to explain the “meaning” of a common Italian hand gesture. It was then that he realized that a one-to-one correspondence between the elements of language and reality was an impossible dream. One can say that in the Tractatus Wittgenstein hoped to create a “snap shot” which could show reality on one side and language on the other. It would act as a sort of translating chart between the two. The key, of course, is that it would be static, which is another way of saying invariably reliable. The latter Wittgenstein came to see this as a hopeless fantasy. Not because language and reality do not interact, but because the hope of conceiving of this process in a static representation could never be

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achieved. That language games cannot be eliminated from language shows that language must remain, even as we try reflectively to appropriate its structures, dynamic. Does this mean that postWittgensteinian metaphysics is necessarily provisional? How can the “provisional” ever be “metaphysical?” To speak of a “provisional” or “anticipatory” metaphysics is not to render the discipline meaningless as a pursuit of ultimate verities. Recall the bipolar nature of every act of affirmation. To “block off” one area of “logical space” and heuristically to turn toward another, an act which occurs in every affirmation, and which certainly occurs in metaphysical ones, is nonetheless a real, albeit not final, appropriation of truth. In the Tractarian world-view, metaphysical assertions possessed no initial meaning, and therefore could not be considered as true affirmations. Neither they nor their converses affirmed or negated anything. Yet, as Hallett noted, when their field of reference is shifted away from representationalism to that of evolving conceptual formulations, this particular charge no longer applies. Then it can be said that they heuristically advance noesis by the elimination of negative potentialities. In this sense, one can say that in the later Wittgenstein, metaphysics can again assume something of its old noetic character, that of a conceptual positing based upon a previous act of negation. Of course, it must be kept in mind that this is now occurring apart from the presuppositions of naive representational thought. Our knowledge of the world may well be provisional, but our stance over and against the world cannot be, if only because we cannot suspend that stance. Even its suspension would be a stance. Unlike God, the human person is radically in-the-world, and so the dynamism which characterizes the human intellect also characterizes the ethical will. Dynamism was both Maréchal’s point of entry into Thomistic thought and his radical critique of the Kantian analysis of knowledge. He argued that Kant himself operated from a static conception of human knowledge, one that failed to take into account the dynamism of the human intellect. Both Kant and Maréchal speak of the human intellect constructing a synthesis with the content of concepts abstracted from material aperception. As Kant explained the act of


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knowledge, the human mind uses the a priori transcendentals of space and time to posit each affirmed concept within a spatial-temporal field. Material perceptions come to us without form, and hence, without intellectual content. It is only when the human mind places perceptions within a spatial-temporal field of relationships that they become concepts properly speaking. Phenomena wouldn’t even be phenomena without the mind actively engaging them, imposing upon them its on transcendental categories of space and time. To impose the categories of space and time upon a given perception, and thus to create a concept, is only possible however, because space and time are intrinsically “relational” attributes. This is why Kant could affirm that every concept stands to another in an interdefining skein that we have previously called a world. Maréchal and Kant, and, of course, Wittgenstein, would be agreed that “theoretically, an object comes under the general objective affirmation only to the extent that it can be integrated into a structured system of concepts (ibid. 68).” Kant wrote of the world, the self, and the existence of God as practical postulates for the subject’s construction of a meaningful whole. He saw this “whole,” however, as merely a psychological postulate. It is a heuristic device required by the mind, but that fact does not prove its objective existence. Vis-a-vis metaphysics, Kant insisted that what the mind posits can only be phenomena. We are restricted in affirming only the existence of that which falls within the transcendentals of space and time. Thus only reality as contingent, and never as necessary, can be confirmed by the mind. The noumena remain beyond our grasp. What may ultimately be at question here is the concept of contingency, and the question of contingency raises a fundamental similarity between Kant and the Tractatus. The world of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and of the Tractatus are both limited to the spatial-temporal, to that which is contingent. Both thinkers, in their own way, affirmed at least the theoretical possibility and practical necessity of that which must stand beyond the contingent. Or, one can say, they denied the possibility of theoretical appropriation of this beyond, while admitting that human beings, on the level of intellectual praxis, must strive toward it as a heuristic necessity. This is why the Ding-an-sich, and that which lies beyond language, must be affirmed, although neither

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can, strictly speaking, be conceived. What lies beyond is a direction, not an object. Of course even the word “direction” is a spatialtemporally derived metaphor, one used to express the ever expanding nature of human cognition. Maréchal, if he had a wry way with words, might well have pointed out that Kant found himself continually talking about das Ding-ansich and Wittgenstein about the “all” which must silently lie beyond language, because the very term “contingent” implies that which is not contingent. What he did say is that “the whole logical order is itself ontological (ibid. 12).” Elements enter the logical order because we posit them, and together they build up an edifice of thought. Only a static conception of this order would view it as being able to be circumscribed. Maréchal wrote (ibid. 163-64): “As long as any condition whatsoever will look to us as ‘limiting,’ we shall be certain that the absolutely last end of our intelligence lies beyond it, or, which amounts to the same, that the formal object of our intelligence extends beyond this limitation. For the awareness of a limit as limit contains logically, within the very order where the limit occurs the knowledge of a further possibility.” Human knowledge continues to push out, to posit itself against something, and Maréchal argues that this background can hardly be called, or thought of, as nothing, as nonbeing. This would create an inherent distortion in the human faculty of relating word to being. “The idea of nothingness is a mere pseudo-concept, a contrived and inconsistent notion, which destroys itself. It amounts to asserting that non-being is being. Since only being, and not mere non-being, can become a content of consciousness, it follows that the necessity of thought is identical with the necessity of affirming being (ibid. 95).” Rahner (1994, 100) follows Maréchal in insisting that we do grasp the “whither” in a prethematic way. “[E]very question has a ‘whence,’ a principle from which may derive an answer.” How else do we explain our intentional, rather than arbitrary, movement into it? “A question that does not want any answer at all does away with itself. If it wants an answer, it necessarily implies already a certain basis, a well-defined ground, upon which it may and must be asked, whence the answer will have to come. Otherwise any answer would be right, even the most arbitrary one. A question to which any answer at all may be given, is


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no longer a question. If the answer does not matter, the question too no longer matters, and no answer is expected.” Note how similar the above passage is to n. 6.5 of the Tractatus. “When the answer cannot be put into words, neither can the question be put into words. The riddle does not exist. If a question can be framed at all, it is also possible to answer it (Wittgenstein 1961, 73).” The similarity is more than superficial. Both Rahner and Wittgenstein presume that human knowledge is an interconnected skein. No possible element of human knowledge would stand as a monad vis-avis other affirmed elements. “[E]very question has a ‘whence,’ a principle from which may derive an answer.” “What one can know, one can be convinced of — and can also conjecture (Grammatical remark.) (Wittgenstein 1980b, 1:138e n. 775).” The clue for interpreting this last remark of Wittgenstein’s lies within his parenthesis, since he often uses the word “grammar” to show the interconnectedness of the logical frames of reference we employ. The issue here is that any affirmation must stand in some relationship to other such entities. Recall that for Wittgenstein even doubt depends upon a nexus of affirmations. The crucial consideration of a world in the thought of Wittgenstein, one already dawning upon him at the conclusion of the Tractatus, is that even the borders of that world are “world-dependent.” The world is, as it were, a language game played out on a large scale. “‘But how can the human spirit fly ahead of reality, and even think the unverifiable?’ — Why should we not speak the unverifiable? For we ourselves made it unverifiable. A false appearance is produced? And how can it be so much as appear like that? For don’t you want to say that this like that too isn’t even a description? Well then, in that case it is, not a false appearance, but one that robs us of our orientation. So that we just ask: How is it possible [Cf. Zettel n. 259] (Wittgenstein 1980b, 1:147e n. 827)?” The onto-logical question this discussion raises, the question of how we frame the relationship between ontos and logos is this: If the direction of human knowledge is perceived as significant, as meaningful, then it makes no sense to withhold from this direction an appellation. In justifying the linkage of word and concept here, Maréchal wrote (1970, 213), “That whose evidence the sophist rejects

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is neither this nor that; it is reason itself, considered in the primordial law of affirmation, which binds it to its logos, to its internal or external ‘word’.” Maréchal’s fundamental critique of the Kantian explanation of human synthesis was that it failed to consider the voluntaristic characteristic of all human knowledge. Muck writes (1968, 41), “Thus while for Kant absolute unity is nothing but an external condition for the classification of previously constituted objects of consciousness, nothing but a regulative ‘idea’, for Maréchal it becomes a constitutive function.” Human beings lack the fullness of being, and for that reason they continually strive for its appropriation through intellectual knowledge. By a fundamental unity of the will and the intellect, one first posited by Aquinas, human beings already find themselves thrust into the real. The fundamental heuristic task is not to bridge the mind and external reality but to appropriate that reality through the intellectual processes of dividing, analyzing, and constructing essences, our appropriation of forms of beings. “The word ‘is’ therefore expresses both the intellectual reception to an object and the primal reaction of a striving toward what is given (ibid. 41-42).” Maréchal (1970, 240) argued that this appropriation of reality represented an Aristotelian end or telos for human nature. “But every agent acts for an end and primarily for its ultimate end. Finis est primum in ordine intentionis, the end is the first thing in the order of intention.” Ends, in Kant, are part of noumenal reality. If a transcendental appropriation of reality is not possible, then we have a human telos doomed from the outset to frustration. “We know the proper end of a faculty from the formal object of this faculty; and the total formal object of the intellect, being as being, extends beyond every conceivable limit. It follows that the ultimate end of the intellectual activity must likewise, as objective end, equal the intelligible fullness of being, whose possession would, in the strict sense, constitute the supreme perfection, the subjective last end of the intellect.” Maréchal thus felt that by uniting will and intellect, or better, by recognizing their intrinsic interrelatedness in the human subject, he had shown that an essential end of the human intellect was doomed to frustration if an ever expanding world of knowledge


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eventually did not open the human person to, at least, the possibility of divine communion.7 One can debate at some length where the issue now stands between Maréchal and Kant. What seems beyond question is that Transcendental Thomism has identified correctly a fundamental characteristic of human knowledge, namely, the innate dynamism of the human intellect and its link to volition. Maréchal and Rousselot were convinced that their contact with Bergson had rescued them from an excessive concentration upon the purely rational character of human knowledge. To separate mind from will is to produce something that resembles the human intellect, but only in a thoroughly lifeless manner. Like Wittgenstein, they became convinced that metaphysical, or “ultimate” speculation, if modeled upon scientific objectivity, somehow produced that which was not truly human, because the essential element of desire or volition was missing. In the sober tradition of analytic philosophy one can raise the same issue in this manner. We always talk about “something,” which, if not empirically verifiable, is at least coherent with our corpus of affirmed realities. When we don’t, the analytic philosopher rightly upbraids us. But how do we talk about the limit of human knowledge when it is always expanding? To what, or whither, does it expand? What do we call the whither? To call, or to name, is to posit existence. It is to conjoin the spheres of ontos and logos in the act of judgement. We only bestow a name when a given realm of reality becomes significant to us. Can we refuse to call this whither by a name, to make this positing, even though the act of positing itself cannot be a conceptualization, since it is not derived from sensory knowledge? Grant without debate that “whither” is a spatial temporal metaphor. Human knowledge cannot be thought of as expanding into empty space, in a manner akin to an astrophysical theory. That approach returns us to metaphysics as “discovery of previously occult entities.” The salient point is that human cognition has, if not a direction, than a drive, one either doomed to frustration, or one which 7

Maréchal limited himself to the assertion that human beings were made for communion with the divine, or, in Thomistic terms, the beatific vision, without asserting that God necessarily bestows this upon them. The first he considered a philosophical affirmation, the second a properly theological affirmation, one possible only after the gift of faith.

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will reveal itself as ultimately fecund. To raise the question of God then is to suggest that either our presence in the world will turn out to be meaningful, or it will not. Note again the juxtapositioning of “presence” and “meaningful.” Ontos and logos are inseparable to the human mind, precisely because it is a mind, because it is a striving between that which is and that which must be affirmed, which must speak itself. Writing on Christian hope in an essay on death, Rahner (1975, 178) noted that Christian hope reaches beyond that which can be known to that which, by definition, exceeds our noetic capabilities. Only the latter would truly be eschatological hope, hope in the fullest sense of the word. “It cannot forbid itself to conceive the inconceivable, because that inconceivable is precisely and inescapably present in existence and Christian hope cannot see why it should not also be spoken of, seeing that in fact it is spoken of by the very ones who condemn such statements or obstinately persist in holding that such statements cannot have any meaning because we cannot represent the reality concerned to ourselves or have any comprehensive knowledge of it.” If such hope were comprehensible, capable of being posited within the world, it would be radically less than what Christianity claims. But if the act of hope, which Rahner views as inevitable for the human person, did not occur, language itself would lack its expression. The religious history of humanity shows, of course, that it does not.

6~A Human Way of Knowing

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Chapter 6 A Human Way of Knowing

6.1 Rahner’s questioning as dynamism

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n his presentation of Rahner’s contribution to the metaphysical epistemology of Transcendental Thomism, Otto Muck (1968, 184-204) noted that Rahner’s discussion of the a priori structures of human cognition begins not with the judgement, but rather with the question. Muck sees this distinction between Rahner and other Transcendental Thomists as interesting, but not fundamentally divergent, since, after all, a question presupposes a judgement, or, one can say, is only a judgment brought into question. Granting the above, Rahner’s use of the question rather than the judgement as a starting point helps to highlight the dynamism of the intellect as the contemporary human person experiences it, a dynamism felt more as restlessness than as ever-increasing satisfaction. Rahner (1966a, 183-84) characterizes it as “the experience of infinite longings, of radical optimism, of unquenchable discontent, of the torment of the insufficiency of everything attainable, of the radical protest against death, the experience of being confronted with an absolute love precisely where it is lethally incomprehensible and seems silent and aloof, the experience of a radical guilt and of a still abiding hope, etc.” We ought to experience a certain satisfaction with all we know about reality, and yet what we actually feel is a frustrating lack of knowledge. What we know doesn’t seem to be that which we need to know. The answers we have seem nothing in comparison to the questions we can’t help but pose. “The problems of life remain completely untouched.” Although this questioning character of the

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human person is most prominent in Hearers of the Word, it is already present in Spirt in the World, where Rahner explicitly retraces the Thomistic approach to knowledge in the light of German idealism (Muck 1968, 187). He begins by noting that the human person makes universal judgements. Absolute knowledge is a reality for us. We are in possession of immaterial, universal, and necessary knowledge according to Aquinas (Rahner 1968, 18). This knowledge should not be confused with metaphysical deduction based upon negation (Muck 1968, 184-85). Rahner is not simply affirming that traditional metaphysics is a viable option. His point is more foundational than that. The human person, despite spatial-temporal limitations, can affirm realities which transcend those limitations. Human beings make judgements, and judgements involve an awareness of universals in both subjects and predicates. By beginning with the judgement or question, rather than the concept itself, Rahner is also emphasizing the dynamic nature of human cognition, and firmly placing himself behind Maréchal and Rousselot. A concept, by itself, is always an abstraction. Only when combined with an affirmed substance, does a concept begin to make an assertion about reality. Only then does it open itself to dynamic interaction with reality. To make a judgement is to engage reality. Rahner grounds human cognition in the spatio-temporal. He notes that human beings do make judgements involving universals, but that universals are only grasped by us in relationship to a given object. The initial phantasm in the thought of St. Thomas, the species, is nothing more than sensory knowledge. Sensory knowledge, the species, has a dual character. It is present integrally to the intellect, while at the same time the intellect is not exhausted by its sensory appropriation. The intellect “remains free over against sensibility.” “If the species by itself, as a purely intellectual, ontological determination, provided an adequate ‘image’ of the object, then a permanent activity of the agent intellect which turns to and illuminates the phantasm would simply be superfluous (Rahner 1968, 312-13).” Gilson (1986, 189) provides a point of entry to this key point of Thomistic epistemology. The human person is that unique composite where sensibility and intelligibility meet. “To the intellectualization


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of the senses by the understanding there corresponds a ‘sensibilization’ of the understanding by means of the senses.” Without intelligibility the senses perceive the object, but they don’t perceive an “object.” They receive only a indiscriminate mass of impressions. We use the verb “perceive” when the intellect has abstracted an object, an enmeshed form, from these impressions. “Just as the object perceived is knowable but is ignored by the intellect, so also the sensible species is laden with an intelligibility which the senses cannot grasp.” The agent intellect continually combines the sensible and the intelligible. Rahner examines the process of abstraction which the intellect performs upon the object thus perceived. To abstract a universal from a concrete object is to discover that the quiddity, the “whatness” which is given in an individual object is “illimited,” in the sense that we grasp it as a possible determination of other objects as well as the one at hand. The human mind never grasps the individual, only the universal. If direct intellectual knowledge of the individual is impossible for the human mind, then the reason for that is the receptivity which is characteristic of our knowledge. Unlike spiritual beings, we do not intuit the ultimate forms of reality; we must abstract from it. Rousselot’s (1935, 117-18) work on Aquinas stands as background to this approach. “‘Human knowledge assimilation is brought about by the action of sensible things in the human cognitive powers, whereas contrariwise in God’s knowledge which arises from the action of the form of the divine intellect on things.’ If direct intellectual knowledge, then, of the individual is impossible for the human mind, the reason for that is the receptivity which is characteristic of our knowledge.” Here again human knowledge is deliberately contrasted with the divine to show the contingent nature of the human. “‘It follows that the divine intellect can know particular things whereas the human intellect cannot.’” The “individual,” as such, can only be known to a being who knows through intuition. Rahner wishes to know the transcendental conditions that enable the knowing subject to discover that the quiddity is essentially unlimited even though it is experienced as the quiddity of a single individual. Through the action of what Aquinas would call the agent intellect, we perceive a quiddity in a concrete object, yet realize that this quiddity is not limited to this particular object. It can be applied

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to others like it. To say of something that it is circular is to make the realization that to be circular is a trait which applies to this object and to other objects as well. The human intellect, so to speak, vacillates between that which has been abstracted from the concrete matter at hand, and that matter itself. This process reveals the sensate character of human knowledge. It can think an abstract, but only in the clothing of the concrete. Rahner writes that (1968, 197-98), “The concrete word, just as the abstract as such by itself, retains an intrinsic ordination to matter, to the plurality of the same, to quantity, to space and time.[...]In this phenomenon is revealed the origin of our knowledge from sensibility as its abiding foundation. Whence it comes that ‘with regard to its mode of signifying, every word (which is to be applied to metaphysical objects) is deficient.’” The awareness of the quiddity of the universal as illimited is possible only if one is aware that its limitation comes from the particular. When we grasp the universal, we can experience this limitation only because the activity which, as it grasps the particular sense object, reaches out, prior to this grasping, beyond the individual object. This heuristic grasping beyond the individual towards the background against which it is illumined is called the Vorgriff, the act of preapprehension. “We know already what esse means in Thomas: the one full ground of all possible objects of knowledge as the index of the absolutely unlimited scope of the preapprehension. Hence if every intellectually apprehended object (every concrete being) is apprehended as a limited esse, then it is apprehended in the preapprehension of the unlimited scope of all the possible objects of thought altogether (Rahner 1968, 208-09).” Note the appropriation of being that Rahner (ibid.) draws from Aquinas. “The word ‘being’ is derived from the existence of a thing.” The verb “derive” ought to signal that Rahner and Aquinas are doing more than simply making existence a predicate. Coming from an analytic tradition, there is simply no access to Thomistic thought, or to classical metaphysics for that matter, unless one recognizes that to speak of being is intrinsically to ask about its significance for us. That “it” is “there” is not the question. Why it is there, is the question. What is the significance (for us) of there being anything rather than nothing?


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Rahner’s metaphysics of knowledge is simply pointing out something which at first appear as too obvious to merit attention, but which he considers crucial if the unique hybrid, which the human person is, should be recognized. Human beings are animals. Although, like Aquinas, he will later affirm that everything we know, we know via the senses, here he simply notes that, unlike the animals, we transcend our environmental limitations. It is this fact which he suggests is universally affirmed by philosophers, but, by highlighting what is obvious, he paradoxically reminds us of that which philosophers usually want to forget. We are animals. As Rahner remembers him, the starting point for Aquinas may at first appear as that which we have in common with the angels, but upon closer inspection, our own animal nature ought to be our first consideration. Wittgenstein could add to this discussion (1967c, 105e n. 605). “One of the most dangerous ideas for a philosopher is, oddly enough, that we think with our head or in our heads.” Rahner, Aquinas, and Wittgenstein have this in common. Often, each is considered so erudite as to be considered inaccessible, while the real cause for their inaccessibility is frequently that they force us to rethink what thinking itself tends to catapult over. Here it is the basic animal nature of human life. Recall this key to approaching Wittgenstein: philosophical problems dissolve when we put ourselves back into our bodies, when we reincarnate what speculative thought has made disincarnate. It is applicable here, with Aquinas and Rahner. Commenting on Aquinas in the opening of Spirit in the World Rahner (1968, 33) insisted that “the vantage point is to be the real, concrete man, his being situated in the world of space and time, hence a situation he already knows of when he gives himself to understanding it.[...]Man sees no possibility of understanding himself from any other standpoint except that at which he has already found himself whenever he turned to himself: the world.” It is only when this “animal” background is highlighted, that the real peculiarity of human cognition receives its proper prominence. We make judgements, and a judgment involves the awareness of universals in the subject and predicate. Universals, as their names suggests, transcend space and time. Rahner wants the contemporary reader to ask himself the same question Aquinas once faced: what

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produces this transcendence in man? Rahner shows that Kant and Aquinas are in fundamental agreement that this faculty cannot be due to innate knowledge. There can be no purely intellectual intuition for humans. Here the four great thinkers stand on common ground. Human knowledge begins in the sensory. Kant (1929, 89-90) juxtaposed human and divine knowledge in order to show that space and time cannot be objective realities or they would limit God as well, which they clearly do not. “If we do not thus treat them as objective forms of all things, the only alternative is to view them as subjective forms of our inner and outer intuition, which is termed sensible, for the very reason that it is not original, that is, is not such as can itself give us the existence of its object — a mode of intuition which, so far as we can judge, can belong only to the primordial being.” Rahner (1968, 63) accepts Kant’s position, because, he argues, it is also that of Aquinas. “For Thomas there is only one knowing, in which man is himself: a knowing being-with-the-world (ein wissendes Beider-Welt-Sein). Only here is man called into the presence of being in its totality. It is here that he carries on the business of his metaphysics.” Kant limits human knowledge to the sensory, denying its ability to rise above this inherent limitation. Aquinas and Rahner maintain that sensory knowledge is the only truly “human” foundation for the metaphysical enterprise, since human beings, like the animals, are sensory. In his rejection of the abstract for the concrete, Rousselot (1935, 3637) stands aside both Rahner and Wittgenstein. “Laws and principles[...]are enuntiabilia, and the very word enuntiabilia with its reference to our vocal organ of expression suggests a time and a space element in our intellectual knowledge. The idolatry of the enuntiable is not fitting climax for a philosophy of intellectualism, but implies rather a very suicide of intellectualism.” Rousselot suggests that, if one takes seriously St. Thomas’ analogical and hierarchical structure of being and knowledge, then one need not attribute more epistemological weight to the “concept” than it can bear. It always will carry with it something of the “taint” of human cognition. Human cognition, grounded as it is in our unique nature as “spirit in the world,” to use Rahner’s phrase, should neither be deplored nor absolutized.


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Rahner (1975, 22) also deliberately contrasts Thomistic metaphysics, which he views as dynamically ordered by its reference to the judgement, to one which would be ordered upon the concept directly “intuited.” “To accept any kind of vision of ideas objectively subsisting in themselves (a theory with which Thomas is familiar from Plato and Augustine, but contests) must, therefore, as he sees it, logically lead to ontologism, to the doctrine of a direct vision of absolute being in itself, in other words to a conception which he rejects from the outset on theological grounds, as well as on grounds of the Aristotelian metaphysics of epistemology.”1 “Both Rousselot and Maréchal had grounded the invariance of metaphysical first principles on the judgment rather than on the concept. For Rousselot[...]the intellect is a faculty of being because its internal dynamism is ordered to the Beatific Vision. Maréchal had grounded the analogy of being and the first principle of metaphysics through the natural drive of the mind to Infinite Reality (McCool 1989, 214).” In Wittgenstein and Rahner, and, behind Rahner, in Rousselot and Maréchal, it is not the concept, or the intellectual systems built upon concepts, that chiefly characterize human knowledge (Rahner 1975, 23-24). Concepts remain secondary, derived elements. It is only when the human mind attempts to coherently synthesize these conceptual formulations through an act of judgement that the fundamentally metaphysical question arises. What must be the case for this synthesis to adequately represent reality? For what reason should the human person entrust himself to it, and to the ever-evolving synthesis that represents his operative worldview? Rahner (ibid. 26) brings this point home when he writes that “the ‘evidentness’ of the first principles, rather, is the objective recognition that in every judgment which man makes as an act of cognition within the material world, the metaphysical validity of these principles is asserted, and this assertion constitutes the a priori condition, implicitly posited, which makes every knowledge possible within the material world.” To affirm that the individual judgement has meaning is 1

This small essay, “Thomas Aquinas on Truth,” dates to 1938, the same period as Spirit in the World and Hearers of the Word, providing a nice capitulation of the former.

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also to affirm implicitly that reality itself is meaningful. The individual judgement is ordered towards reality in the form of action, an action performed by what Aquinas called the lumen intellectus, a light both cognitive and volitional, but always in motion as an active striving. “Hence we can say that in all cases truth is possible only in self-awareness. The discovery of truth is always the discovering of the self as well on the part of the intellect (ibid. 28).” And the lumen intellectus is far from static or passive. Rahner writes (ibid. 24), “To this extent, in this dynamic outward movement of the intellect as a “hunger” (for so it might be called with Hegel), the individual object as sensibly experienced is apprehended, recognized as that which is finite, and as failing, by reason of its limitations, to measure up to the capacity of the dynamic force in all its fulness and depth.” Ultimately, Rahner confirms what might be called a Thomistic circumincessio between knowing and being, or between the logos and ontos. What must be recognized is the absolute communion between ourselves and our reality, not because the logos has seized the ontos, but rather because it finds itself brought into being as its human expression.

6.2 The historical turn Wittgenstein certainly affirms the sensory or animal nature of human cognition, and the Tractatus follows the Kantian approach of limiting knowledge to that which is empirical, if not sensory. If there is a shift in the Investigations, it lies in the fact that in the latter, language no longer possesses a univocal character. Context changes the very meaning of words; the latent aims or agendas contained in the various language games show that one must first understand the method of projection being employed in any language game before adequately assessing its meaning, coherence, or utility. On Certainty shows Wittgenstein (1969, 59e) grappling with the question of epistemology. If truth doesn’t reside in a one-to-one correspondence between language and reality, is there no such thing as truth? “There are cases where doubt is unreasonable, but others


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where it seems logically impossible. And there seems to be no clear boundary between them (n. 454). Every language-game is based on words “and objects” being recognized again. We learn with the same inexorability that this is a chair as that 2 x 2 = 4 (n. 455). If, therefore, I doubt or am uncertain about this being my hand (in whatever sense), why not in that case about the meaning of these words as well (n. 456). Do I want to say, then, that certainty resides in the nature of the language-game (n. 457)?” Wittgenstein is not saying that truth is inner-language game dependent. At least he is not saying that truth changes every time the game changes. What he is asserting is that we cannot approach the question of truth without going through an examination of the language game, of the context, in which words are being employed. At the end of the examination, there will be a type of “correspondence” between words and reality. “Every language-game is based upon word ‘and objects’ being recognized again.” It is simply that the correspondence will defy attempts at univocity. Take a verb as basic as “to think.” “It is not expected of this word that it should have a unified employment; we should rather expect the opposite (Wittgenstein 1967c, 21e n. 116).” There is a old word for the shift in meaning that separates one language game from another: analogy. Once one grants human language its inherent complexity, one can say “that certainty resides in the nature of the language-game.” To the extent that the Investigations make the analogical character of language an absolute feature of all human discourse, it can be said that the latter Wittgenstein certainly has affinities to Transcendental Thomism. Both begin with a fundamentally realist position, but both also realize that realism cannot be reduced to univocity. Juxtaposing, Anthony Kenny noted (1982, 25), “Wittgenstein was against the search for essences, for a unique essence common to all uses of the word, but so, after all were the medieval scholastics who developed the theory of analogy.” To say that language is inherently analogous is to maintain that concepts are usage governed, drawing their very meaning from the sphere of discourse in which they move. Language for Wittgenstein and the Transcendental Thomists thus possesses an inherent dynamism.

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And it is a dynamism that can be called transcendental, in the sense that it allows us to move freely from one level of discourse to another. Each act of interpretation is just such a movement. “What happens is not that this symbol cannot be further interpreted, but: I do no interpreting. I do not interpret, because I feel at home in the present picture. When I interpret, I step from one level of thought to another (Wittgenstein 1867c, 43e n. 234).” Of course, the fundamental question, of whether or not the latter Wittgenstein’s approach is compatible with the metaphysical transcendence of Transcendental Thomism, remains at issue. Paradoxically Wittgenstein has human knowledge approaching truth through language games without reducing truth to them. One could say that truth “resides” in the inherent direction, or dynamism, which we experience at work in human cognition, one which works through the language games. “But you aren’t a pragmatist? No. For I am not saying that a proposition is true if it is useful. The usefulness, i.e. the use, gives the proposition its special sense, the language-game gives it. And in so far as a rule is often given in such a way that it proves useful, and mathematical propositions are essentially akin to rules, usefulness is reflected in mathematical truths (Wittgenstein 1980b 1:54e n. 266).” If the skeptic wants to challenge truth in human cognition, he can begin either with the words we use, or our contact with empirical reality. However, either approach represents a distortion of the dynamic interplay between the two as they are exercised in our most common language games. The salient point remains the fact that they do work! “If, therefore, I doubt or am uncertain about this being my hand (in whatever sense), why not in that case about the meaning of these words as well?” “What counts as its test? — ‘But is this an adequate test? And, if so, must it not be recognizable as such in logic?’ — As if giving grounds did not come to an end sometime. But the end is not an ungrounded presupposition: it is an ungrounded way of acting (Wittgenstein 1969, 17e n. 110).” The chief reason for characterizing Wittgenstein’s theory of knowledge as dynamic is simply the fact that it presumes upon an already efficacious communion between human cognition and reality. We act. We are already dynamically engaged with the world.


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It helps to be reminded just how impossible it would be, after Wittgenstein, to ground a metaphysics in the concept itself. The concept, because it arises from the noetic activity of the human person, and because this activity is essentially communal, always bears the mark of the provisional. Wittgenstein continually examined commonplace conceptual acts, showing that our formation of concepts is inherently tied to our forms of life. They carry no more, or less, epistemological value. If we can find a ground for the structure of concepts among the facts of nature (psychological and physical), then isn’t the description of the structure of our concepts really disguised natural science; ought we not in that case to concern ourselves not with grammar, but with what lies at the bottom of grammar in nature? Indeed the correspondence between our grammar and general (seldom mentioned) facts of nature does concern us. But our interest does not fall back on these possible causes. We are not pursuing a natural science; our aim is not to predict anything. Nor natural history either, for we invent facts of natural history for our own purposes (n. 46). It is interesting, for example, to observe that particular shapes are not tied to particular colours in our environment; that, for example, we do not always see green in connection with round, red in connection with square. If we imagined a world in which shapes and colours were always tied to one another in such ways, we’d find intelligible a system of concepts, in which the fundamental division — shape and colour — did not hold (Wittgenstein 1980b, 1:11e n. 47).

Wittgenstein’s point is not to disparage human cognition because it is language-dependent. After all, what would that be but to call it human? Nor is he disconcerted because the coherence to be found in human cognition derives from its communal nature. He simply wants to remind the would-be philosopher not to absolutize human cognition through a process of abstraction, one which would free it from what he considers to be its profoundly human moorings: dynamic, communal interaction with reality. “But I am not saying: if the facts of nature were different we should have different concepts. That is an hypothesis. I have no use for it and it does not interest me. I am only

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saying: if you believe that our concepts are the right ones, the ones suited to intelligent human beings; that anyone with different ones would not realize something that we realize, then imagine certain general facts of nature different from the way they are, and conceptual structures different from our own will appear natural to you (ibid. 12e n. 48).” To be provisional, in the vision of Rousselot as well, is not a negative evaluation. It merely highlights the dynamic movement of the human intellect. However simple or complex might be the process by which we abstracts concepts from reality, we still use them to form heuristic worlds, and these worlds, in their origins, existence, and dissolution only serve to bring into relief the active striving of the human intellect for what Rousselot would call its completion, Maréchal its teleological end. Thus when Rahner writes of Thomistic first principles, the ultimate principle is a certain coherence in thought which allows the human being to transcend noetic limitations, that allows him to act, despite the fact that the world in all its specificity is never made an object of his knowledge. Authentic Thomistic metaphysics is not essentially a deductive system, a charge so often facilely thrown at it in the Anglo-American analytic tradition. It intends to be profoundly realistic, constructing an inductive metaphysics on the basis of what is culled from other branches of human study. Unlike Cartesianism, it does not begin with a posited first postulate, like methodic doubt, according to which all subsequent scientific appropriation of reality must conform.2 In summary, it can only be said that Thomistic metaphysics evolves as any inductive science must. The implication, of course, is that our understanding of the very foundations of realty evolves; it moves through history. As noted at the beginning of this chapter, meaning after Wittgenstein has become a function of language and hence of history. If theology wishes to address the human person about questions of ultimate significance, its locus operandi will be that person in the ever-evolving arena of his own self-constitution. It would seem that Transcendental Thomism, in concentrating not upon the conceptual results of the 2

“First principle” is an unhappy English translation. Postulate is more to the point.


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human thought, but rather upon the essential dynamic orientation of that thought, is still uniquely qualified to address the concerns of contemporary society. It need not look with trepidation upon the revisionary nature of historical movement, since it sees movement, in the form of striving, as constitutive of what it means to be human. To see the world as a synthetic whole and to see the self as positively engaged with it is to view oneself as immersed in the purposeful progression which is human history. As previously noted, this engagement is the result of personal human integration. It cannot simply be given to one from the past. It requires instead that one see the future as meaningful, possessing a meaning descendent from the past and yet not confined to the limitations of the past. The synthesis of determinations stemming from the past and virtually limitless freedom of the future makes possible purposeful striving in the present. There is a difference between saying that human truth is forged in history and saying that human truth, being historical, is per naturam relative. If one defines the human person as per essentiam historical, then one must posit an explicit or implicit focus for historical striving. Thus the linguistic turn in philosophy leads to a historical turn in anthropology, which raises anew the Christological question of reality itself. The idea of making history Christological is rooted in Hegel. The linguistic emphasis added here is the notion that self-perception (knowledge) and self-acceptance (action) are bound up with the search for that meaning which does sunder knowledge of objective entities from subjective self-appropriation. As Rahner, under the influence of Hegel, reads Aquinas, all cognition represents a form of self-knowledge which is mediated through an outward movement into the other and a subsequent return to the self (reditio completa in seipsum).

6.3 Space as Sprachspiel It would seem then, that Rahner could explain quite adequately what the word “God” pictures, that he could delineate the border-situation which the term intends to evoke. This would resolve the earlier question posed by Wittgenstein in his discussion of Michelangelo’s

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drawing of God. What is the nature of this picture? What is being depicted? Rahner could explain “the technique of using the picture.” But Rahner himself notes that (1978, 44-45), of all the concepts which are not adequately explicated by the use of ostensive definition, that of God is surely the exemplary case. “For we do not have an experience of God as we have of a tree, another person and other external realities...” Like so many other theologians explicating the mystery of faith in the context created by the rise of linguistic philosophy, Rahner suggests that the word God evokes the border, or even better, the ground of language. “This word exists, it belongs in a special and unique way to our world of language and thus to our world.” To appreciate fully what this means, and to see it as more than a sophist evasion from the rigors of clarity, it helps to see how other “border” realities enter language and find expression within it. Wittgenstein revolutionized this discussion with his work on the grammar of knowing others, realigning how the concepts of self, others, and “internal” and “external,” stand in relationship to each other. That discussion is absolutely necessary for an adequate discussion of what the word “God” means. One should note here a certain heuristic parallel between Rahner and Wittgenstein. In the Tractatus Wittgenstein asserted that (1961, 6): If I know an object I also know all its possible occurrences in states of affairs. (Every one of these possibilities must be part of the nature of the object.) A new possibility cannot be discovered later (n. 2.0123). If I am to know an object, though I need not know its external properties, I must know all its internal properties (n. 2.01231). If all objects are given, then at the same time all possible states of affairs are also given (n. 2.0124). Each thing is, as it were, in a space of possible states of affairs. This space I can imagine empty, but I cannot imagine a thing without the space (n. 2.013). A spatial object must be situated in infinite space. (A spatial point is an argument-place.) A speck in the visual field, though it


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need not be red, must have some colour: it is, so to speak, surrounded by colour-space. Notes must have some pitch, objects of the sense of touch some degree of hardness, and so on (n. 2.0131). Objects contain the possibility of all situations (n. 2.014). The possibility of its occurring in states of affairs is the form of an object (n. 2.0141).

Both Rahner and Wittgenstein use space as a metaphor for the heuristic “placement” of facts. It is their way of noting that concepts form a nexus of mutually dependent assertions. “To know an object is to know all its possible occurrences in states of affairs.” In other words, to know the logical form (internal properties) of an object is to know precisely where it fits upon the grid, how it is logically interrelated to other affirmed objects on the same grid. This is why “objects contain the possibilities of all situations.” Remember that Wittgenstein was not speaking of empirically affirmed objects. He was speaking of logically affirmed entities, the subsistens which must lie behind them, atomic simples. Rahner and Wittgenstein both know that we use the world as a heuristic device. Kant knew it as well, but insisted that it be seen as no more than a device. The “world” cannot come before human knowledge as an object at hand. We use the notion of the world to order our concepts; we cannot conceptualize the world as an object. In Rahner’s thought as well (1978, 61-62), “being” never comes before us as an object. It remains the unthematized, preapprehended background of human thought. “The infinite horizon, which is the term of transcendence and which opens us to unlimited possibilities of encountering this or that particular thing, cannot itself be given a name. For this name would situate the term among the realities which are understood within the horizon of this term and this source.” Rahner identifies being with God, but, as in the Tractatus, God does not come before human cognition as an object of knowledge. If one looks upon the Tractatus as an integral work, seeing the closing affirmations on ethics as intrinsically related to those on logical form, then it is clear that from the very beginning Wittgenstein’s task was not the search for empirical objects in order to assert our knowledge of them. It was always a question of “metasemantics.” What is the significance of the world for us? We want to know the

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logical form of the world in order to comprehend the world, and we seek to comprehend it because we must find our place within it. The question of the “whole” becomes more salient in the thought of the latter Wittgenstein, since individual words are no longer anchored in an one-to-one correspondence to an external referent. Their place on the web, and the totality that this forms, becomes the heuristic key to their appropriation. “You can’t mean the words like this and still connect a sense with the whole(Wittgenstein 1980b, 50e n. 246).” “I should like to say: conversation, the application and further interpretation of words flows on and only in this current does a word have its meaning. ‘He has left.’ — ‘Why?’ What did you mean as you pronounced this word ‘Why’? What did you think of (ibid. 49e n. 240)?” Both Rahner and Wittgenstein see the “world” as a logically interrelated nexus. Both are compelled to use the metaphor of space for this act of expression. Rahner speaks of “unlimited breadth” and “movement towards esse.” Wittgenstein is even more explicit: “Each thing is, as it were, in a space of possible states of affairs.” In a sense both thinkers are, each in his own way, grappling with the question of the one and the many. To know the one (individual) fully is to know how it stands in relationship, on the grid, to the many, and to know the many is to recognize the one, the skein, or world. When Rahner (1968,186) characterized the act of cognition as a preapprehension of being, he used a phrase from Aquinas to assert that man is “quodammodo omnia.” He is “of the world,” a being in space and time, but a being able to transcend these limitations. He is spirit in the world, which is one way of saying that he a semantic pilgrim. “[M]an knows of infinity only insofar as he experiences himself surpassing all of his knowledge in the preapprehension and as open to being in its totality. Man is ‘quodammodo omnia’ (‘in a certain way everything’). What this quodammodo expresses has now been shown: he is everything ‘in excessu,’ in the preapprehension. He knows of absolute esse in that he experiences his movement towards esse. Therefore he is spirit. In the fact that he knows of absolute esse only in this way he experiences his finiteness.” Note the metaphorical use of space. Is it possible that space itself is not only a metaphor in Rahner and Wittgenstein’s thought, but the


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primal metaphor of human cognition? It may well be the first, root metaphor ever fashioned by the human person. That would mean, however, that Rahner is correct in suggesting that the human person truly transcends his spatial-temporal limitations. An object can only be drawn into the service of metaphor when its limitations are known, which is to say that only an object, something inherently limited, can be used as a metaphor. In metaphor we want the “known” to act as cipher to the “unknown.” One can’t choose the unfathomed as an adequate instrument to express the unfathomable. It is for this reason that Rahner may quite accurately be assessing a fundamental characteristic of the human person. We are spirits. We do treat the notion of the world as somehow already encompassed in our thought, as something we “transcend.” For example, if I call someone a Lion of Judah, the metaphor only works if I and my interlocutor know something of what a lion is. I can’t call someone the “X” of Judah, and expect any metaphorical transfer to occur. The metaphorical tool chest is empty. Note that the need to “know the object” in order to use it as a metaphor is different than the assertion that every property of the object is known to the user. Indeed, the inherent richness of any given metaphor reveals itself as our knowledge of the object expands. If I learn more of what it means to be a lion, the metaphorical comparison to the “Judah” person will either become richer, or collapse. But to know the metaphorical tool as an object, as something already encompassed in human thought, is what Wittgenstein means when he speaks of knowing the “internal” or logical properties of the object. Further external properties can always be discovered. To know the internal properties, however, is to have a logical way of placing the object in the world. This is why Rahner’s use of space as a metaphor for the relationship of the human and divine is significant. Only if we do preapprehend space, not external space, but heuristic space, as world, if we do take it in and move beyond it in thought, can space itself be used as a metaphor for knowledge. The fact that Rahner, Wittgenstein, and Kant himself, use space as such a metaphor may say something about our “noumenal” appropriation of space. If we can use space as a metaphor, then space is not a categorical limitation of human thought.

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Space itself has been transcended by the act of human cognition. Human beings are “spirit in the world.” Of course all of this is simply a point in epistemology. You can’t epistemologically declare space to be an absolute, one which human thought cannot transcend, one which limits our thought to the sphere of the phenomena and then use space as a metaphor. Kant (1929, 458) argued that “All beginning is in time and all limits of the extended are in space. But space and time belong only to the world of sense. Accordingly, while appearances in the world are conditionally limited, the world itself is neither conditionally nor unconditionally limited.” The latter world, the one not in space and time, is the heuristically constructed world. Kant admits we need the latter world, but only for coherence, which gives us no right to posit its existence. “Since, therefore, the absolutely necessary is only intended to serve as a principle for obtaining the greatest possible unity among appearances, as being their ultimate ground; and since inasmuch as the second rule commands us always to regard all empirical causes of unity as themselves derived — we can never reach this unity within the world, it follows that we must regard the absolutely necessary as being outside the world (ibid. 516).” Necessity and contingency are not objective, they are only principles of reason However, to use a concept as the functioning fulcrum of a metaphor is to recognize it as an object, which is to say that thought has encompassed it and made it part of its heuristic world. If thought encompasses space, if it treats its own world as a metaphor for that which it transcends, then it has reached what Kant would call the noumenal. By making space an object of thought, thought itself transcends the limitations of space. The question again seems to return to that posed by Maréchal. Has Kant conceived of human knowledge in terms too stagnant? Does he grant the existence of the “world” as heuristic backdrop, without recognizing that human thought itself tends to “objectify” this world as it continually supercedes it? Kant’s charge was that human thought tends to hypostatize the world; we treat a heuristic frame of reference as though it were an entity. Here, however, the discussion has shifted. Isn’t the issue really that we treat a heuristic frame of reference as an object to be known,


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encompassed and surpassed, and isn’t this movement so characteristic of human cognition that it can only be called “dynamic,” to use Maréchal’s term, or “spiritual,” to use Rahner’s? In Wittgenstein space acts as a metaphor, and it is recognized as a metaphor. It remains, however, on the level of a heuristic device. It is given epistemological significance, but no metaphysical significance. We need a concept of a world, of a field of space, in order to structure our very act of appropriation. Speaking strictly from an epistemological point of view, that is the end of the story. Kant knew it as well, which is why he admitted that God, the world, and the self are necessary heuristic affirmations. Human cognition requires that the manifold be brought into a unity. “For the mind could never think its identity in the manifoldness of its representations, and indeed think this identity a priori, if it did not have before its eyes the identity of its act, whereby it subordinates all synthesis of apprehension (which is empirical) to a transcendental unity, thereby rendering possible their interconnection according to a priori rules (ibid. 137).” Thought doesn’t work without the underpinnings necessary for coherence. Of course Wittgenstein himself (1961, 73e), and already in the Tractatus, realized that something was wrong with this picture. “The facts all contribute only to setting the problem, not to its solution (n. 6.4321).” “To view the world sub specie aeterni is to view it as a whole — a limited whole. Feeling the world as a limited whole — it is this that is mystical (n. 6.45).” Speaking strictly from the point of view of epistemology, of the manner in which the human person comes to posit knowledge, to know that we use the concept of the world as a heuristic device ought to conclude the discussion, but something then emerges as an inquietude. Something continues to irk, when epistemologically, a certain relaxation of tension ought to have been achieved. “We feel that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched (n. 6.52). If the world can this easily be made into an object, and we are still not satisfied, who are we? That Kant had some indication of the insufficiency of simply positing the construction of the world as an epistemological act is shown in the very creation of his second act, The Critique of Practical Reason where the human person is depicted as active, as having a focus

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to his striving. He must posit the existence of a morally-ordaining God in order to engage the world. If human thought, by the creation of countless individual “worlds of cognition” creates a “world” which thought itself then encompasses, how does one explain the ceaseless striving that characterizes human knowledge? How does one do justice to the dynamic character of human knowledge that Rousselot and Maréchal explicate? As Wittgenstein noted more than once, the human person and his use of language defy any attempt at a stable epistemological characterization. The point is not whether or not Rahner has sufficiently answered the Kantian critique. The issue is that the critique itself, as an abstraction, fails to explicate the human person as dynamically and consciously engaged with the world. From the point of view of Wittgenstein, the Kantian critique raises questions we don’t ask as human beings; it abstracts from our normal, fecund communion with the world. Both Rahner and Wittgenstein presume upon the givenness of the world around us. Rahner calls our knowledge of it “prethematic.” As an organizing principle, it cannot come before us as that which is itself organized. In his discussion on Wittgenstein’s use of criteria, Stanley Cavell (1979, 33-34) commented on that which is also prethematic in Wittgenstein’s thought. He quotes n. 128 of the Investigations. The German runs: “Wollte man Thesen in der Philosphie aufstellen, es könnte nie über sie zur Diskussion kommen, weil Alle mit ihnen einverstanden wären.” I get the following sense from those words: “Whatever knowledge philosophizing brings forth cannot be brought out by setting forth a claim; because such a claim could never come into question, i.e., it could never arrive at words: because it is something upon which we have an understanding, i.e., it goes without saying, and only without saying, because we could not understand anyone who claimed it and thereby held it as possibly open to question.” That will doubtless not express everyone’s view either of that German passage or of philosophizing. I think that one will especially not like the idea of “never arriving at words.” But I find that if I really want to say “The world does exist,” the impulse to those words is not expressed by those words. I want a gesture (perhaps poetry, or religion).


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This passage nicely summarizes a consideration of the work of Rahner and Wittgenstein on the notion of the world, especially as it is juxtaposed to that of Kant. Whether or not those given to the sort of abstraction which Kant undertook in order to respond to Hume’s skepticism feel that his challenges to metaphysical thought have been adequately answered, the reality remains that human beings do presume upon the existence of the world, and not only as a heuristic tool. That the world exists, that we are able to successfully engage it, that it stands before us a meaningful whole, and that therefore our ultimate relationship to it will not end in absurdity – all of these assertions stand as background to our active relationship to the world. Perhaps they are accurately called beliefs, not because of their tenuous epistemological support, but rather because they act in a manner akin to the way in which Aquinas saw Aristotelian first principles acting. They are so basic to our way of life, much less to our way of cognition, that to challenge them is literally to enter into a world of senseless discourse, which is to say a world of meaninglessness, one that is literally without meaning for human beings. Wittgenstein would argue that, in order even to pose a possible challenge to these beliefs, one has to create an entirely new language game, and, one would want to add, one we don’t play as humans, only as philosophers. But then the “game” itself, called Humean skepticism and its response in the Kantian critique, sits like a carbuncle on the surface of human life as it is actually lived. Space, as a heuristic field of activity moving ever outwards towards that which is other than the knower himself, may well be the fundamental language game in which human beings reference God. It may be the picture standing behind Michelangelo’s picture that Wittgenstein saw as so difficult to summarize.

6.4 Spirit in the world Several considerations must be held together when we consider the “world.” First, we cannot help but to speak conceptually of that which defies our acts of conceptualization. Secondly, as beings-of-the-world

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and engaged with it, which is to say, as beings who must ask about their own ultimate disposition in the world, we never speak of the world without, in that very act, speaking of ourselves in relationship to it. To speak of the world is to speak ethically, religiously, even if one’s apparent intention is to deny the value of these very categories. “The world of the happy man is different from that of the unhappy man (Wittgenstein 1961, 72 n. 6.43).” Kant and Rahner stand on a certain common ground, one Aquinas could also occupy. That which stands before us as world is not given to us as object. To speak of “knowing” here, Wittgenstein warns, has no meaning. The word has been drawn away from every context we normally use in order to be employed in an entirely different one. This is why the skeptic can deny knowledge of the world as an entity, which is usually how the term “being” is employed, while the metaphysician can insist upon our knowledge of it, and both of them be right, or at least “right-minded” in their intentions. The question is whether or not one can even analogously employ the word “to know” in this context. We clearly “know” the world, or being, or God himself in a manner that is distinct from other objects of our knowledge. There are language games in which we indicate the horizon of our ordinary worlds of speech, or suggest the threshold which encircles them. A person would have to deliberately withhold recognition of this factor of life in order to dispute the need for any sort of Godlanguage, or the use of any type of metaphysical discourse. “What must the man be called, who cannot understand the concept ‘God’, cannot see how a reasonable man may use this word seriously? Are we to say he suffers from some blindness (Wittgenstein 1980b, 1:44e n. 213)?” The point of convergence for all of the authors discussed is that knowledge of ultimate realities necessarily involves the person who knows. One cannot speak of the ultimate grounding of existence without, in one manner or another, engaging that reality, taking one’s stand in relationship to it. The self is intrinsically coinvolved. When Transcendental Thomism speaks of the dynamism of the human intellect, when Wittgenstein recalls any examination of language back to its usage, both identify a fundamental characteristic of human knowledge. It is a part of human life, tied to those motivations which


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we would call both ultimate and commonplace, intrinsically linked to the manner in which we live our lives, and bound up with the question of our destiny. Rahner’s “metaphysical” definition of the human person as “spirit in the world” is delicately balanced. From the point of view of epistemology, he asserts that the human person is truly corporeal. In the Thomist tradition, knowledge arises out of contact with sensate reality, not through intuition. On the other hand, drawing upon Thomas himself, Rahner presents the person as capable of transcending the limitations of space and time through the work of the intellect. The human person is a “spirit” in the world, because he is not limited to the spatial-temporal. Should the human person even attempt such a limitation, a fundamental denial of his own essence occurs. Because we exist in the world as free human beings, the world itself becomes a question of value, and hence of religion. Even before the human person is addressed by God, his situation in the world, prompts him to search for God, to search for ultimate meaning vis-a-vis his use of freedom. Religion is thus a “world question” even before it becomes a question of revelation. Theologically Rahner’s definition of the human person achieves the balance needed for a Catholic approach to the question of nature and the supernatural. We know ourselves to be finite, precisely because we experience ourselves as less than the infinite which we only preapprehend. The two orders, natural and supernatural, remain distinct. Rahner’s metaphysics allows him to meet the challenge previously discussed: how to show humanity as possessing a potentia obedientialis. By portraying the human person as “spirit in the world” Rahner balanced the affirmation that humanity is radically in need of a God who is other, and the parallel affirmation that it is also able to receive this God as the graced completion of human nature itself, not as something extrinsically added to that nature. A closing consideration of Rahner’s metaphysical epistemology in the light of Wittgenstein’s work must still be made in the final chapters. More than one critic has raised the following question in regard to Rahner’s view of human nature. If humanity is destined for communion with God, not, of course, by right of nature but rather as graced in the concrete order of salvation history, and, if God gives

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himself transcendentally to us in the order of creation itself and in human history considered as a whole, then what precisely is the need of categorical revelation? Why must the Father speak the Word which is the Son into human history? Why would the human person need to receive this word of self-revelation and self-donation, when it already has been adequately perceived? Rahner obviously felt this question sufficiently answered. His treatment of it now requires consideration, but particularly in the light of what “speaking a word” might mean after Wittgenstein. This, and other considerations for the future of theology after Wittgenstein occupy the concluding chapters.

7~Revelation as Sprachspiel

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Chapter 7 Revelation as Sprachspiel

7.1 Natural and supernatural Is the Incarnate Word the truth that stands at the center of human history? Is he the living Logos, the ultimate foundation of the metaphysical structure of the universe? Or is he one among many ways in which human beings express their desire for an interpretive key, an arch of ultimate significance? Finally, is Jesus Christ the revelation of God to humanity, or the expression of human longing for God? Chapters seven and eight examine the role of Jesus Christ in the thought of Karl Rahner, responding to critics who have suggested that Rahner’s transcendental existential, the orientation toward God present in every human being, would make the supernatural revelation of Jesus Christ superfluous. Others have suggested that a Cartesian-oriented Rahner would place a true and graced revelation of God within the interior of the human person, far removed from the rational and linguistic processes of ordinary human experience. This seventh chapter insists that Rahner’s approach to the questions of nature and grace, natural and supernatural revelation, is both internally coherent and consonant with the philosophy of language pioneered by Wittgenstein. If Rahner presents human nature as already graced, as already in possession of God’s self-donation, what then is the necessity of revelation, of the Incarnation itself? The importance of the question cannot be overemphasized. If the “natural,” as it concretely exists in human history, is already “supernatural,” if all of human nature as it actually exists has been taken up into God’s salvation history, so that

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there is no history that cannot, and should not, be called salvation history, what role does revelation play, revelation being considered in its broadest possible scope, as God’s Incarnation in human history? Behind this issue are two opposing values. The modern mind seeks to affirm a positive movement of humanity-toward-God, if not of God-toward-humanity, beyond the visible boundaries of the Christian faith. It strikes a contemporary mind as unmitigated hubris to claim absolute and sole possession of the truth, especially when one considers the many permutations that the very concept of truth has experienced in this century alone. On the other hand, no Christian wants to render the faith superfluous, which is what too strong of an emphasis upon the grace available to all of humanity, at all times, seems to do. How then does one do justice to the conviction of the saints and the martyrs that they knew the truth in Jesus Christ and had to offer testimony to it? What does evangelization mean, if the Gospel lies latent in all of humanity? George Vass (1985, 16) raises a similar question from the perspective of categorical and transcendental revelation. “Given a transcendental as well as an existential-historical experience of the God of Revelation, what is going to be the role of Rahner’s “categorical?” Is it a concrete encounter with the gospel preached, the very event of Jesus the Christ told to us? Or is it rather the concrete expression of what man deep down in his mysterious being already possesses and, at a given opportunity, has brought to the fore?” Does Christianity itself, as categorical revelation, become superfluous if God constantly bestows himself upon human beings entirely oriented to receive that transcendental revelation? And Vass is a sympathetic reader of Rahner! In The Moment of Christian Witness (1983, 106, 146-47), Hans Urs von Balthasar asked if Rahner weren’t too evolutionary minded, making the Incarnation of Christ simply the culminating point in humanity’s progressive ascension toward the divine. Is he too infected by German idealism, distorting Thomas in the light of Hegel and Fichte? Is he too Scotist in his understanding of the Incarnation, seeing it as the preordained plan of God for human history, and not as a redemptive response to humanity’s fall? This being so, von Balthasar insists, Rahner cannot adequately explain a theology of the cross. What does it mean for us to be redeemed? Why would the death


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of Christ be necessary to effect this redemption? As von Balthasar poses the question, by making the natural so supernatural, has Rahner reduced Christology to anthropology? Has he veered too close to Feuerbach’s view of religion, as an expression of human aspirations writ large? Does Christ in the thought of Rahner lose any sort of causative role in salvation history? Does he become merely the expression of a process of redemption, rather than its only real agent? Rahner would not be left without a response. He continually insists, and his critics would join him on this point, that revelation must be comprehensible to the human person. It cannot be so extrinsic as to be completely alien to human nature. If this were the case, how would human nature even be capable of apprehending the fact of revelation? “When we call the content of revelation a mystery in the strict sense of the word,[...] it is hard to understand how such a mystery can turn into the content of our own knowledge, something to which we are intrinsically related, for which we have some kind of finality, at least in the sense that we stand open for the reception of such a revelation (Rahner 1994, 13-14).” Rahner insists that grace, especially when we speak of it according to its cognitive aspect, as the full appropriation, intellectual and existential, of that which is revealed, must be ordered to the inner constitution of the human person. There cannot be an absolute, radical divergence between the answer God gives and the question which the human person asks, the question that person is. A comment of Wittgenstein’s is apt here (1980b, 1:91e n. 475). “The way you use the word “God” shews, not whom you mean, but what you mean.” Wittgenstein’s point, and it was echoed by Malcolm, is that when we speak of God, we are not really “speaking” so much of a person, but of an organizing, heuristic principle. “The way you use the word ‘God’ shows, not whom you mean, but what you mean (Cf. Wittgenstein, 1980a, 50).” One must know something of the world of the person speaking in order to comprehend how the word God is being used. So the question to be asked is: how is the word “God” being used to structure this world? Another way of putting it would be to say that the word God more frequently has a functional rather than an ontological status, even if one grants that these need not be considered as mutually exclusive.

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Applying Wittgenstein’s insight to the question at hand, one can note that whenever any theologian begins to explicate the way in which God is related to humanity, he or she always begins from an unthematized perception of what it means to be human. God as a foundational heuristic “structure” is already playing a role in the formation of that cognitive “world” out of which the theologian or philosopher speaks. The word God already has a function, even before the theologian or philosopher assigns it a designation. For example, start with the Cartesian world of the thinking intellect, which attempts to transcend its own isolation, and there should be little surprise that the definition of God produced will involve the task of guaranteeing the reality of that which lies beyond the mind. Or, if one is convinced that the world is ultimately history, a dynamic process, as Hegel was, one will sooner or later come to posit God as the ultimate agent of that historic dynamism. Newman (1845, 127-130) once distinguished between dogmas and principles, noting that the former come to be defined, while the latter, which are really more fundamental because we operate out of them rather than upon them, only rarely come to explicit recognition. They are too foundational, too much a backdrop to the very process of thought, to become explicitly recognized. For example, the Incarnation is both a doctrine of the Christian faith and an ever-active principle within it, especially in Catholicism. Its influence is felt in the way a Catholic approaches diverse questions dealing with the sacraments, the hierarchy of the Church, or the transmission of revelation. Because the Incarnation is both a principle and a doctrine, the Catholic is inclined to choose the path of imminence when a choice is being forged between it and the transcendent. The imminence of God, however, has never been the direct object of dogmatic definition. Like the resurrection, its influence upon Christian thought is too fundamental for explicit, systemic definition. None of the above dismisses the charge that Rahner’s theology has reduced the Christological to the anthropological, or made the supernatural merely a function of the natural, but it does contextualize the debate. Even theologies which stress the transcendence of God do so out of a heuristic structure. What they affirm about God – and what they categorically insist must not be affirmed about God – these


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propositions have the meaning which they possess only because of their place and function in the web of understanding by which the speaker comprehends what it means to be human. Recall the Tractarian insight that any real proposition must have a counterpart in is own negation, and apply it here, far beyond where Wittgenstein intended. To say that God is totally other has no cognitive meaning without some sense of just what it is that he is totally other than. The meaning of the word “supernatural” is a functional variant upon the word “natural.” The two words are inseparably linked in the same language game. To make use of the word “supernatural” requires some explication of what one means by “natural.” Otherwise the field of signification becomes too distended for effective communication. I cannot assert that Christ is a redeemer without in some way suggesting that something in the human situation requires redemption. When Rahner asserts that the Christological can always be read as a variant key of the anthropological, he is quite right. The words “God” and “human,” before any act of revelation occurs in history, already act as two poles of a single language game. We always define the one in terms of the other. In this light, the fact that Rahner explicitly acknowledges his Christology to be functionally related to his anthropology is a strength, not a weakness. Whether the two elements possess the right balance in the game at play, remains yet another question.

7.2 Oportet philosophari in theologia Once the function of the linguistic is no longer conceived as a simple act of correspondence to reality, but rather as the medium through which reality is experienced, then humanity’s own self-possession and cognisance must be recognized as linguistic. “Language not only expresses our relationship to the world; it is that relationship (Weltbezug) (Huber 1997, 223).” Even to speak of revelation as an alienum, which enters human discourse, is already to have posited that alienum within the field of that same discourse. The one act of positing is the converse

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of the other. We use the anthropological reality to affirm its own limits, to suggests that those limits are passable, if not by us, then by that which is not us. We create a game and then assign revelation a role within that game, one which affirms, challenges, suppresses, ennobles, etc. the field of discourse with which we begin. The issue is firmly where Rahner placed it (1994, 13-14), philosophical and anthropological before theological : “The usual fundamental theology illumines but dimly how man on the one hand by virtue of his intellectual nature is able to become capable of receiving such an “extension” of his knowledge — how, that is, a place for this possible knowledge in man could be found in his natural essential equipment; and how on the other hand this knowledge itself is not already a fundamental, necessary fulfillment of his essential constitution.” If knowledge in the human person occurs because of a linguistic appropriation of reality, if language is the “natural essential medium” which must be taken into account, then even the revelation of God, as totally other than the human person, would come to be appropriated in the only manner in which that person ever acquires knowledge, through the medium of language. We do not possess a metalanguage. We must use language itself to express that which we have come to consider as lying beyond language. Rahner (1994, 18-19) insists that two philosophical options underlie and channel theological approaches to revelation. God is conceived either as “the inner meaning and possibility of the world” or “the sheer contradiction of man and his world.” The philosophical world view, in either of these two cases, is the determining point of access in the explication of the theological approaches. Rahner’s critics charge that the supernatural has been reduced to the natural, that Christology has become only a function of anthropology, and that an affirmation of a transcendent revelation present to all human beings leaves little or no room for a proper understanding of the necessity of categorical revelation.1 While so many of Rahner’s 1

It should also be noted in asserting that, from the perspective of a language game, Rahner’s theology is anthropological is not to suggest that anthropology, rather than categorical revelation, is its foundational point of departure. For example, in “The Theology of the Symbol (Rahner 1966a),” he insists that his consideration of symbolism begins with the divine reality within the imminent Trinity and moves from there to a consideration of how symbolism functions for us.


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critics postdate his actual work, what he wrote does address their postmortem concerns. The nature of human knowledge itself must be understood correctly before properly theological assertions can be made about the relationship of revelation to the human person. What we know of human knowledge is that it is a thoroughly linguistic medium. It appropriates its objects through their insertion into a heuristic structure, a field of affirmed propositions. God-talk never enters human language as an absolute alienum. When we speak of God, the structure of human cognition forces what is not an element of our world to be treated as though it were. Once God becomes a “concept,” God becomes an interrelated concept, de facto. Concepts are always complex, comprehended only by placement in cognitive fields, and always related (albeit by one or more degrees of abstraction) to that which is sensible. Everything that we want to affirm as supernatural must be affirmed naturally, which is to say, humanly, which is to say linguistically. In this regard, even the most “descending” form of theology could still be read as anthropological, which is of course exactly how nonbelievers read it! Only a theologian who is philosophically naive could think to escape this human condition. All theological talk is anthropological, because the word “theological” can only be used by means of its relationship to the anthropological. The language game of theology requires its other pole, anthropology. Theological talk is not anthropological because it never arrives at the divine. It is anthropological because it has no other starting point, and no other medium, than the human. The salient issue is whether or not the theologian speaking recognizes the human limits of discourse.2 All of which is explicitly recognized by Transcendental Thomism and by Thomas himself. Rousselot began by noting that human

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Likewise in, “On the Theology of the Incarnation (ibid),” the key assertion is that the theology presented here reflects what has actually occurred in salvation history, not what should have happened given the philosophical presuppositions being employed. Of course, as the current discussion makes clear, even the option to begin with the “raw” data of revelation cannot be conceived in a manner noetically naive, as though the person encountering and responding to that revelation did so from an absolutely presuppositionless base. Useful on this point is Metz 1968, xvi.

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cognition is always piecemeal, conceptual, and inductive. It does not possess the intuitive knowledge which is characteristic of God and the angels. Marèchal insisted that it was humanity’s dynamic drive toward knowledge, and not its intuitive grasp, that acted as the great harbinger of its divine origin and of its ultimate completion. Rahner recognizes this condition, simply noting that human knowledge is ever-expanding and reforming itself into an ever more comprehensive synthesis. Ultimately human beings still must pose the question, “to what end?” Is humanity’s fundamental drive an exercise in cosmic frustration, an unreal teleology, or is it the great cipher to that which is not human, which is more than human, which is divine? To charge that Rahner has reduced the divine to the anthropological is a charge that makes little sense to one schooled in Wittgenstein. While it may seem commonplace, even banal, to suggest that, as human discourse, all theology is anthropological, the point deserves emphasis because so often the critique of Rahner’s theology is posed in just such bald terms, as though the phrase “theology reduced to anthropology” immediately placed Rahner alongside Feuerbach. Here to maintain that all theological discourse is anthropological discourse is not to reduce the divine to the level of the human, nor is it to deny the existence of a properly supernatural world, or of truly supernatural revelation. It is simply to affirm a constituent element of human speech, even speech about God: that it cannot transcend the limits of language itself. The post-Rahnerian question is more properly whether the web of propositions set in play by his theology can do justice to the tensions inherent in the Gospel itself. God dwells within all human beings, yet God has come to dwell among them in a unique and irrepeatable way in Jesus Christ. God calls all to salvation and that call, being God’s, cannot be frustrated, cannot fail to be heard. Yet even a glance at history suggests that the call has not gone out to the ends of the earth. Theology, like philosophy, involves a creative synthesis of propositions whose truth must be affirmed, even when they stand in apparent contradiction. The successful philosopher or theologian must create a system which makes these contradictions not only reconciliable but illuminating, which is to say, heuristically primed for further insight and discovery. So Rahner’s theology may still fail to offer an adequate


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treatment of the propositional expanse which is Christianity. Why is Jesus Christ the necessary revelation of God? How have the events of his life and death become constitutive of what it means to comprehend the human situation? Or as von Balthasar correctly queried of Rahner, why is Christ savior? Before a consideration of this key issue is possible, however, a second, and perhaps more interesting objection has been made to Rahner’s approach. It comes out of developments set in motion by Wittgenstein himself.

7.3 Language and experience In his very influential book, The Nature of Doctrine. Religion and Theology in a Post-Liberal Age, George Lindbeck (1984, 16) has suggested that it may be time to scuttle Rahner’s approach to revelation, not because it fails to adequately explain the singularity of Christian revelation, but rather because his philosophical anthropology does not do justice to the human person as a linguistic creature. He suggests that traditional approaches to the question of doctrine, and of propositional truth in theology, operate out of a philosophically naive correspondence theory of truth. In this approach, a one-toone correspondence exists between a theological affirmation and a supernatural reality. What replaced this classical or “cognitivist” approach in the writings of Rahner and of many others who have helped to form “modern” theology is a view which posits a divide between interior religious experience and its thematic or conceptual expression in organized religions. In this view, the “the experiential-expressive,” God remains a complete mystery. Human beings have experiences of God, but these are essentially the same inner experience for all human beings. These experiences then find diverse expressions which are dependent upon the cultural-historical context of those having the experiences. Propositions about God do not give human beings actual cognitive knowledge of God. They are merely human expressions pointing beyond themselves toward the mystery of God as experienced in human life.

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In the following passage, in which he discusses the accretions, or amalgams, that theological and doctrinal statements necessarily accrue as they pass through history, Rahner (1966a, 16) seems to express the very approach to doctrine that Lindbeck censures: “The religious statement in the last resort points not to what is drained of meaning, but to the ineffable mystery that we call God, and it is this reference alone which makes a statement a religious one. In other words, these processes of elimination are basically continually recurring events pointing to that mystery and must occur over and over again in the history of abiding religious truth, since this liberating and hopeful approach to the mystery of God must take place in the light of continually new historical situations of truth.” Both “traditional” and “modern” theologians could accept the notion that theological truths acquire amalgams as they pass through history. The traditional theologian might well regard these amalgams as obvious accretions, easily discerned and distilled out of that which is doctrinally significant. The pivotal notion in this passage is Rahner’s assertion that religious truths point beyond themselves in “pointing to that mystery.” He seems to suggest that the meaning of a theological assertion is not to be found in the assertion itself, but is rather a more ethereal entity, one independent of the actual linguistic expression. The traditional theologian thinks of his or her task as conceptually quite simple. Discard accretions while retaining true theological affirmations. Rahner correctly understands that concepts are always interrelated, a reality which makes the process of distilling a true assertion from ephemeral expressions much more difficult. Yet in passages such as the above, his solution would appear to be a line of demarcation between a truth and its linguistic expression. Of course, this would be a philosophically untenable position. To just what sort of nonlinguistic truth might a linguistic creature such as the human person attain? If truth is an adequatio rei et intellectus and the “intellectual” modus operandi of the human person is language, how does a human person acquire a supralinguistic truth? Would a category such as truth even be applicable to such a nonlinguistic reality? And why this approach, one separating inner reality from exterior expression? Lindbeck (1984, 21-22) offers an explanation. Because it


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conforms to contemporary societal expectations. “Fewer and fewer contemporary people are deeply embedded in particular religious traditions or thoroughly involved in particular religious communities. This makes it hard for them to perceive or experience religion in cognitivist fashion as the acceptance of sets of objectively and immutably true propositions.” Lindbeck’s analysis is trenchant. A truth no longer easily “read-off” from cognitivist statements of faith is, if nothing else, a personally less demanding one. It has been moved a step beyond normal human activity, becoming less sure, less regulatory for behavior and motivation. Quite simply, it is less intrusive. Clearly the motivation of Rahner, and other modern theologians is not, however, to remove religious truth from a place of influence in human behavior. If anything, the modern theologian is looking for a place of security in which to posit religious truth beyond the vicissitudes of conceptual unclarity, historical reformulation, and the philosophical insecurity which seem to besiege all linguistic formulations. If all propositional truth has been made relative, then it would seem that God, by definition, must reside beyond the proposition, perhaps beyond the sphere of language itself. Hence the appeal of that mystery to which religious statements only “point.” Lindbeck (ibid. 17-18), however, proposes a third way, what he calls a “cultural-linguistic” approach. “The function of church doctrines that becomes most prominent in this perspective is their use, not as expressive symbols or as truth claims, but as communally authoritative rules of discourse, attitude, and action. The first and obvious advantage of Lindbeck’s proposal is its appropriation of contemporary advances in linguistic thought. It avoids some of the naivté that can be associated with a cognitivist approach, for example, needlessly creating entities because of a failure to recognize the grammar at work in any act of affirmation. The cognitivist approach employs an inadequate epistemology, whereby theological discourse is patterned after the scientific, presumably investigating and affirming occult entities beyond the reach of science. It employs a view of language Wittgenstein vigorously rejected (1967b, 13e n. 27), that language consists in a concatenation of names standing for objects. Naming is a part of language usage, but only one element in a broad spectrum of such usages. Furthermore, the ability to name something

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is an intralinguistic act. It does not provide a “link” between language and reality, not even if one could point to the object named by ostensive definition (Baker and Hacker 1980, 183-84). Names, or nouns, have as much place in theological discourse as in any other, but their role, which is their reference, is determined by their usage. “Wittgenstein suggests a method for reorienting our thinking about language: viz. to remind ourselves that naming something is a preparation for using a word (or, more generally, that establishing the grammar of an expression is a preparation for applying it) (ibid. 161; cf. 228-257).” As conceptual discourse, theology in particular cannot conform to what Wittgenstein rejected as an “Augustinian” view of language. It obviously uses what have traditionally been called universals; it employs cognitive models for explanatory and heuristic purposes; it correlates and unifies data from divergent subfields. Ultimately it unites one’s view of the world with one’s action within the world. None of these common cognitive activities can be premised upon a one-to-one word/object correspondence. The issue here is not a sort of Bultmannian demythologization. Bultmann’s theology was thoroughly cognitivist; he simply presumed that very few external realities stood behind the words employed by traditional Christianity and therefore suggested that, as far as properly theological discourse is concerned, that which contradicted a rationalist interpretation of reality should be jettisoned as mythological excrescence. The criterion for retaining or abandoning a theological proposition was rationalism; but propositions were judged rational on the basis of whether or not an extralinguistic reality was thought to conform to them. Of course, as Lindbeck notes ( 1978, 269), “What is rational in one time (for example, the Enlightenment) is not in another.” Clearly a naive, cognitivist approach to religious epistemology, even one premised upon rationalism, offers an inadequate appropriation of advances made in the philosophy of language. But Lindbeck’s thesis also represents an advance over what he calls “experiential-expressive” approaches. These also posit meaning, not within a grammatical web of usage but rather with an entity standing in an “ontological” realm beyond that of the given assertion. Here, however, the entity is thought to be occult, eluding linguistic formu-


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lation. Meaning is again the “rider” of the assertion, a psychological entity separable from it. When meaning becomes separate from linguistic expression, two major difficulties arise, both of which eviscerate the theological enterprise. The first is the difficulty in assigning a truth value to any conceivable theological affirmation. If truth is not a function of language, an adequation between a form of expression and reality, if all theological affirmations are only “pointers” which stand proxy for a reality beyond language, beyond human cognition, how is their truth value to be assessed? If all theological language speaks of that which is essentially inexpressible, how does one judge the relative merits of one discourse over another? Of course one can look for internal coherency, but how are other traditional criteria of adequacy such as breadth of coverage and correspondence to reality to be employed if that reality is defined as inexpressible? As Yong Huang correctly argues (1995, 252), “It is one thing to say, with Wittgenstein, that different languages have different logics, and quite another to say, with a fideist, that they are private and can be understood by their respective users only.” Obviously it will not do to plead that one can treat the data of revelation as an objective fact in order for these criteria to become again applicable. First, because one task of fundamental theology is to show the reasonableness of revelation and to illumine the conceptual qualities which make it worthy of acceptance. It must make comprehensible to our contemporaries the very words being employed so that they can be recognized and received as revelation. Again the difficulty lies in jettisoning the wrong picture. Revelation is not a bundled object, handed from one person to another. Revelation is an act of communion between God and the human person, accomplished through language. This is why even a simple kerygmatic proclamation stands in need of a theological explication, and this always occurs as a preamble to the employment of the data of revelation. That which the herald of revelation asserts must find a place of entry into the recipient’s cognitive web of affirmed realities. Revelation cannot begin by defying everything that makes “sense” to a human being. It may well expand our conception of the reasonable, but revelation cannot be

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appropriated initially as that which would obliterate all cognitive fields. The word for such an assertion is literally “nonsense” not revelation. Either affirmed or unacknowledged, an act of theological evaluation and formulation accompanies the very proclamation of revelation. But what criteria besides coherency are applicable to this task in an experiential/expressive approach, one which presumes that the entity in question lies beyond cognition? All parties seem to agree that the data of revelation require explication and interpretation, and it is generally presumed that those failing to see this simply lack the ability to recognize their own acts of interpretation. But this again raises the question of what should be the basis for judging the adequacy of one interpretation over another, if revelation itself is treated as merely one among many forms of possible “categorical” expressions of a transcendent mystery.3 If spiritual experience is sundered from epistemology, then what links the mystery to anything within our affirmed web? Why should one place on the web enjoy a privileged status? Why is Jesus Christ more significant than a deeply moving, penetrating novel? An experiential-expressive approach to religious statements encounters a second difficulty in its conception of the act of human cognition. Briefly, if human beings know all that they know through language, and God’s interaction with human beings is posited in a mysterious realm, always beyond language, the question then arises of how human beings can come to know this interaction of God in human history. There must be some cognition of the mystery we call God. To suggest that our language points to a mystery wholly 3

See Lindbeck’s (1978, 266-280) useful article in which he notes that some theologians adopt structural-linguistic or literary theories of truth in which revelation (as it is presented in the Bible) is seen as one among many possible “worlds” of meaning, as potentially useful existentially as Tolstoy’s War and Peace, or the Greek mythologies. Both relieve any necessity of correspondence, or even coherence, with other extrinsic “worlds” of meaning beyond the text. Leaving aside philosophical questions, two theological difficulties are immediately apparent. The first is whether such an approach could ever do justice to the Christian compulsion to “spread the good news,” so apparent in the Church’s history. (But see also Lindbeck, 1984, 58 where this reading of Christian history is challenged.) The second is that both approaches seem heavily premised upon the written text, as though all that requires interpretation and explication for the modern person is the Bible itself. A Catholic would insist that revelation not be reduced to a text.


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untouched by language, which is to say, unknown to human cognition, raises the question of how an affirmation of this mystery would even be possible! Lindbeck (1994, 36-37) employs basic premisses from the philosophy of language to attack the weaknesses of an experiential-expressivist approach. One is the rejection of preconceptual knowledge: “We cannot identify, describe, or recognize experience qua experience without the use of signs and symbols. These are necessary even for what the depth psychologist speaks of as “unconscious” or “subconscious” experiences, or for what the phenomenologist describes as prereflective ones. In short, it is necessary to have the means for expressing an experience in order to have it, and the richer our expressive or linguistic system, the more subtle, varied, and differentiated can be our experience.” Lindbeck is simply noting that a linguistic, conceptual web must already be in place for the human person to experience anything, including God. The point here is not a denial of God as a reality that transcends human knowledge. God’s transcendence is not being assailed. What is being rejected is an inadequate understanding of the nature of human knowledge. Standing behind the experientialexpressive model is the long rejected idea that the meaning of a word or expression is the reality to which it points, a notion already wobbling under Frege and Russell and banished in the opening pages of the Investigations. “The meaning of an expression is not something deeper and more theoretical than what is patent in the accepted practice of explaining this expression; and this practice, like any other normative practice, must be familiar to its participants, open to inspection, and surveyable (Baker and Hacker 1980, 70).” As Wittgenstein left language, it is essentially communitarian. Meaning is usage, and usage is determined by a linguistic community. This means that when anything becomes an object of human knowledge, it does so by entering a web of affirmed realities. However, when meaning and truth are seen as realities standing beyond language, it appears natural enough to posit entities beyond it as well. In this lame view, God must be an “entity” beyond language, if we actually mean something when we use the word “God.” This first mistake is coupled with a pseudo and cryptic scientism in epistemology. There must be

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an object corresponding to the word God, and since this object is not empirically verifiable, it must be metaempirical. An inadequate understanding of language has once again led to the ontological affirmation of a conjectured entity. To deny that God is an entity standing beyond language is not to deny either the existence of God or the divine transcendence. On the contrary, as D.Z. Phillips insists (1971, 60), it is to clarify a grammatical confusion. By definition God would have to be that which transcends human knowledge and therefore cannot be fully encapsulated within language. God would be more akin to the light than to something seen within it. To apply the word “mystery” to God in this sense, as Rahner does, for example, in his famous essay “The Theology of the Symbol” is legitimate (1966a). What does not stand beyond language, however, is a possible experience of God, whether this be mystical, revelatory, or institutionally mediated through the normal practice of a religious tradition. Once it makes sense to speak of actual knowledge, or experience of God, one can no longer call this knowledge prelinguistic. To know any given object, even in the most provisional manner, is to know it as part of a given nexus. It is a logical and conceptual error to posit both a horizon of human knowledge and objects beyond it. Knowledge is not passive possession but activity. All of the members of the linguistic group reading this essay know the meaning of the word “red.” None of them, however, can define the word, speaking strictly. The meaning of “red” is only apparent in a field of related colors, within the category of color itself. The act of ostensive definition is not a link between reality and language, but rather the employment of a referential, symbolic tag in the acquisition and use of a language. “In an ostensive definition I do not state anything about the paradigm (sample); I only use it to make a statement. It belongs to the symbolism and is not only of the objects to which I apply the symbolism (Wittgenstein 1974, 346).” Colors exist in both nature and language, but they do so in both as cogs in an interrelated nexus. A simple one-to-one correspondence between word and object is both naive and unattainable. Furthermore, the two webs, language and reality, are not two parallel webs. Objects that we call red would continue to exist, even if, for whatever


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reason, we ceased using the word. Perhaps a future development would require a further specification, such as between blue-red and orange-red, one which became so fundamental to our society’s way of life that everyone ceased speaking of red alone. Nothing would have changed in “nature,” and a Platonic entity or universal would not have gone out of existence. Only a cog in language would have altered.4 “‘I couldn’t think that something is red if red didn’t exist.’ What that proposition really means is the image of something red, or the existence of a red sample as part of our language. But of course one can’t say that our language has to contain such a sample; if it didn’t contain it, would just be another, a different language. But one can say, and emphasize, that it does contain it (Wittgenstein 1974, 143 n. 91).” Both the cognitive and the experiential-expressive models are based upon a Tractarian error: that atomic propositions can be considered truly independent of each other. Both approaches posit the meaning of a theological affirmation beyond language. The cognitivist model naively presumes that objects stand in a one-to-one correspondence to all theological formulations. It recognizes that an atomic correspondence cannot be shown, but presumes this is because the relationship in question is between human affirmations and supraempirical realities. Though it cannot be shown, it can, however, be known, through a process of deduction. This belief in an atomic level correspondence is thought to be scientific, a basic presupposition of reason itself. It is a naive view of science which presumes that words stand for affirmable realities, even though these realities may not be immediately accessible to ordinary human perception. The presumption is that given the right scientific protocols, which may not be available currently, such a correspondence could be shown. Of course, even in contemporary scientific theories, words may have many other functions besides object representation. In almost all branches of scientific research, a word-object correspondence has long been jettisoned. For example, when hydrodynamic terms were transferred to the newly exploited field of electrodynamics, it was clear that electricity “flows” in “currents” only analogously to water. Words perform entirely too 4

Wittgenstein (1978, 43 s. I n. 15) offers another example. “It is important that in our language — our natural language — ‘all’ is a fundamental concept and ‘all but one’ less fundamental; i.e. there is not a single word for it, not yet a characteristic gesture.”

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many function in science to be characterized as simply standing proxy for individual objects. Indeed, even in scientific models, complex concatenations of words imaging a physical picture, are becoming rarer (Bochenski 1968, 39-40). What is clear in contemporary scientific theory is that words operate in complex and highly volatile fields. The expectation is that their meanings will shift as whole paradigms give way to newer, more accurate approximations. The same, of course, is true in theological discourse, simply given the fact that our “place” of discourse will be the divine as it reveals itself in human history. The most traditional of theologies recognizes that abstract words such as “grace,” “hypostasis,” and “transubstantiation” are subject to meaning-flux. However, even the most common of words such as “king,” “father,” and “person” experience similar shifts. The approach Lindbeck criticizes presumes that a simple act of “redefinition” suffices to update a word and make it ready for continued employment. Wittgenstein’s thrust is that words are always within contexts, and the idea of distilling meaning and then simply repackaging it for another age is theoretically ill-conceived and probably impossible in pastoral practice. Much of the aging inclusive language debate is predicated upon an experiential-expressive paradigm. Recall that when we use religious language within the Christian tradition, we are not giving expression to God’s own nature, or the immanent Trinity, on the basis of our own proper noetic activity, but rather on the basis of what has been revealed in the economy of salvation. If one makes the experiential-expressive assumption that God is a mystery standing beyond all language, then obviously the choice of male or female nouns, pronouns, and adjectives seems quite open to arbitration. And yet the very fact that Christians speak of a revealed God means that they are not speaking of God as God transcends language. Of course, if the nature of all revelation is conceived of as only a categorical and arbitrary expression of a linguistically transcendent reality, it would seem that even expressions drawn from the data of revelation are similarly open to reformulation. The salient question for Christian theology remains whether or not revelation itself, rescinding from its interpretation, is contingent. How can revelation be conceived as contingent if revelation is considered as a real incarnation of God in language?


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The traditional response has been, of course, that parts of revelation are conceptually contingent while others are not. This is the kernel and husk approach utilized above by Rahner, when he spoke of doctrines and their amalgams. However, the entire corpus of linguistic philosophy would seem to suggest that the ability to “separate” grain from shell is predicated upon a misunderstanding. Can one paraphrase Shakespeare, or a poem, and still be in possession of the original muse? On the other hand, in one manner or another, Christians always have approached revelation as open to transformation. The entire Old Testament received a complete reorientation in the light of the revelation of Jesus Christ. Obviously, to Christian minds at the time, this was no reorientation, but rather, as Augustine insisted, only a making patent of what had lain latent in the first corpus of revelation. However, the very fact that Jews and Christians differ over their interpretation of the Hebrew scriptures clearly shows that an act of reinterpretation took place. Even the most traditional theological formulations have made distinctions between a revelatory core and a culturally conditioned amalgam. The very fact that Christians have never insisted that their scriptures be preserved liturgically in the original language of revelation shows that they did not consider themselves bound to an absolute prohibition upon reformulation, given that any act of translation from one language to another produces a conceptual shift. In his essay, “Ideas for a Theology of Death” Rahner (1975, 172) notes that “a distinction has to be drawn between the form of language and that which is actually signified by it, a distinction such that the sense intended and the conceptual model used are neither identified nor yet fully distinguished from one another in the processes of conscious human thought, nor again can they be totally separated from one another.” What Rahner calls a “conceptual model” is very much akin to Wittgenstein’s notion of the picture. Both thinkers realize that human thought is virtually compelled to return repeatedly to a heuristic image. “For there is no such thing as an idea without perception, a concept (as Thomas Aquinas already recognized) without a conversio ad phantasma.” The key for both Rahner and Wittgenstein is to bring to consciousness our dependence upon the

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picture or concept. Only then can it be reinforced, reformed, or rejected. “The process of criticizing a perception at the conceptual level will always be undertaken by means of concepts which themselves in turn have to work with some other apprehension, even though they are not always simultaneously conscious that the perceptual and the conceptual element in the concept are not identical.” The notion that meaning can be distilled is the common shortcoming of both the cognitivist and the experiential-expressive approaches. Both presume that meaning stands beyond language. Both remove the real substance of what is affirmed from the field of theological language itself. In the latter, it is the “mystery” to which language points. This can, on appearance, look like a pious act of reverence, an acknowledgment of the via negativa in theology. In his notes on the philosophy of psychology, Wittgenstein warns (1982, 2:82e), however, that we are most often inclined to speak of inner experience as an almost lazy way of avoiding the difficulty of conceptually locating an affirmation in the complex field of human knowledge. “We would like to project everything into this inner. We would like to say that that’s what it’s all about. For in this way we evade the difficulty of describing the field of the sentence[...]But why do I say that I “project” everything into the inner? Doesn’t it reside in the inner? No. It doesn’t reside in the inner, it is the inner. And that is only a superficial logical classification and not the description we need.” The essential assertion of kataphatic theology is that what we know of God is always less than God. Here, however, we are not speaking of God’s own self but rather our experience of the divine. Like all human realities, to make this an interior reality, one inaccessible to language, is simply to ignore the fact that even those experiences we speak of as internal do not lie beyond the reach of language. The “internal” is as thoroughly linguistic as that which we call the external. Wittgenstein (ibid 2:26e) rejected the notions that thought is not linguistic, and is only subsequently subjected to language for the purpose of communication. “Why shouldn’t one say: ‘The evidence for the mental in someone else is the outer’? Well, there is no such thing as outer mediated and inner unmediated evidence for the inner. And to the extent that the evidence is uncertain, isn’t this because it is only outer.”


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Recall that Wittgenstein’s approach to the question of certainty involved the communal affirmation of a given “world picture.” This simply is the way in which we collectively understand our world. It represents our grasp of the field of interrelated affirmations. “We say ‘Undoubtedly it is so,’ and don’t know how very much this certainty determines our concepts. To the question ‘Did the earth really exist before your birth’ we would respond, half annoyed and half embarrassed, ‘Yes, of course!’ All the while we would be conscious that on the one hand we are not at all capable of giving reasons for this because seemingly there are too many, and on the other hand that no doubt is possible, and that one cannot answer the questioner by way of one particular piece of instruction, but only by gradually imparting to him a picture of our world (ibid. 2:53e).” Here the point is that certainty concerning inner experience is not going to be derived any differently than any other certainty. It will remain a question of locating an affirmation, whether about so-called inner or outer experience, within an affirmed field, and that field will, of course, be communally appropriated. Wittgenstein lampoons the notion that it would be different if science or some sort of paranormal phenomenon could somehow allow us a privileged access into the mind of another. Even then, the question of the field would confound us. “Even if I were now to hear everything that he is saying to himself, I would know as little what his words were referring to as if I read one sentence in the middle of a story. Even if I knew everything now going on within him, I still wouldn’t know, for example, to whom the names and images in his thoughts related (ibid. 2:29e).” Experience of God, like all cognitive experience, is linguistic, and there is nothing about the nature of our experience of God that curtails this fundamental fact of anthropology. Lindbeck (1984, 38) suggests that “there are several ways of arguing this. The most ambitious is Wittgenstein’s contention that private languages are logically impossible. If so, the same would have to be said regarding private religious experiences (such as the dynamic state of being unrestrictedly in love), which are purportedly independent of any particular language game.” Obviously, however, there are realities that stand beyond language, which is something akin to saying that there are realities standing beyond human cognition. In this sense, one can properly speak of

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mystery to designate that which stands beyond us, eluding human comprehension. In his essay on The Theology of the Symbol, Rahner (1966) distinguishes between realities which are beyond human cognition by their nature, and those which are capable of being known by humans but have not yet been known. The infinite reality of God would be an example of the first; a viral vaccine, of the second. However, when any reality standing beyond cognition enters our ken, it automatically does so by insertion into a field of reference. Both Rahner and Wittgenstein continually insist that the ability to question is already tied to knowledge, because the question can only arise out of a context which is known. According to Wittgenstein (1974, 377), “Where there is no method of looking for an answer, there the question too cannot have any sense. — Only where there is a method of solution is there a question (of course that doesn’t mean: ‘only where the solution has been found is there a question’). That is: where we can only expect the solution of the problem from some sort of revelation, there isn’t even a question. To a revelation no question corresponds.” His point is fascinating. He is not affirming the existence of a deity, nor asserting the existence of a revelation. He is simply noting that new knowledge always enters human cognition as a part of an affirmed and accepted nexus of affirmations. In Wittgenstein’s view, revelation would represent an absolute alienum, but its process of appropriation would be thoroughly linguistic. Here Wittgenstein is emphasizing the “otherness” of revelation. To be truly revelation, to be of God, it would, of necessity, have to come from that which lies beyond the human. In other words, to deserve the name of revelation, it would have to possess a transcendent quality in the fullest sense of the word. No possible question would correspond to that which lies beyond us. Rahner would add, however, that to be capable of being known by us, a potential revelation must carry with it an intrinsic ordination toward the field of human knowledge, and this would mean that human knowing itself would have to be endowed with the capacity to receive such a possible revelation. Only God could be seen as the source of that endowment. To the extent that we know an object, we know it linguistically. This is why Rahner and Transcendental Thomists must use the word


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“prethematic,” not to designate knowledge which we possess, albeit in an incoherent manner, but rather the “whither” of knowledge, the direction, to use the spatial metaphor again, of human striving. It is not the sort of knowledge that a person possesses of an unknown room, groping in the dark before it is illumined. It is the sort of knowledge that one possess when, in touching a wall, one affirms the existence of the other side of the wall. A wall only becomes a wall by its relationship to human movement. Otherwise, walls possess basically the same geometrical properties as floors. Here the law of noncontradiction is utilized, not at the level of affirmation but of teleology. That which we know is bounded by that which we do not know. We know the existence of the latter not by experientially acquired knowledge, but rather by logical necessity. To assert “p” is by necessity to assert the existence of “~p.” A Transcendental Thomist might add: and to preclude the possibility of ~p has no warrant.

7.4 Fides quaerens vocem Lindbeck (1984, 32) presents some of the advantages of shifting to a third approach to theological truth, which he calls “cultural linguistic.” Religions “structure human experience and understanding of self and world.” A religion is something akin to a world picture (Weltbilt). It provides a framework into which all subsequent affirmations can be posited. This is why it has the function of “organizing all of life, including behavior and belief.”5 For this reason,Wittgenstein could aptly call “religious belief” “the firmest of all beliefs (1967a, 54).” 5

Here it is useful to draw a distinction between what Wittgenstein would call a form of life and a language game. The former relates to the employment of a world picture; the latter to an activity-rooted paradigm of linguistic usage. The practice of a religion is sometimes mistakenly characterized as a Wittgensteinian language game, although it would more appropriately be labeled a form of life. Baker and Hacker (1980, 137) offer the following distinction: “The notion of a form of life is connected with that of a language-game, but is more general and elemental. A form of life is a given unjustified and unjustifiable pattern of human activity (part of human nature history (Investigations n. 25)). It rests upon, but is not identical with, very general pervasive facts of nature. It consists of shared natural and

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One of what might be called Wittgenstein’s “parables” makes this very point (ibid. 58-59): We come to an island and we find beliefs there, and certain beliefs we are inclined to call religious. What I’m driving at is, that religious beliefs will not...They have sentences, and there are also religious statements. These statements would not just differ in respect to what they are about. Entirely different connections would make them into religious beliefs, and there can easily be imagined transitions where we wouldn’t know for our life whether to call them religious beliefs or scientific beliefs. You may say they reason wrongly. In certain cases you would say they reason wrongly, meaning they contradict us. In other cases you would say they don’t reason at all, or “It is an entirely different kind of reasoning.” The first, you would say in the case in which they reason in a similar way to us, and make something corresponding to our blunders. Whether a thing is a blunder or not — it is a blunder in a particular system. Just as something is a blunder in a particular game and not in another.

Because it possesses the function of systematically organizing the disparate affirmations that make up human cognition, including those which are value-laden and emotionally affirmed, a religion itself, at least as it is lived, is not essentially the object of an affirmed act of cognition. Wittgenstein wrote (1980a, 86e): “Life can educate one to a belief in God. And experiences too are what bring this about; but I linguistic responses, of broad agreement in definitions and in judgements, and of corresponding behavior. A language perforce contains moves which are not justified by reference to anything, but are simply accepted as appropriate, as a common pattern of linguistic behavior by reference to which other moves are justified. Equally, any cognitive claims, as well as any doubts, occur within a framework of propositions that are not doubted, that belong to the frame of reference of the system of knowledge (propositions of the Weltbild). Training in what counts as justification, acceptance of undoubted truths of the world-picture, is acculturation in the form of life of a community.” Speaking strictly, as an anthropological category, religion itself is not a form of life, but rather contains them. As a rational construct, it does not lie beyond justification; its practice, however, does.


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don’t mean visions and other forms of sense experience which show us the ‘existence of this being,’ but, e.g., sufferings of various sorts. These neither show us God in the way a sense impression shows us an object nor do they give rise to conjectures about him. Experiences, thoughts — life can force this concept on us. So perhaps it is similar to the concept of ‘object.’” The following paragraphs from On Certainty depict the formation of what might be called a world’s “center of gravity.” Remember that the “belief” spoken of here is not religious belief. It is the belief that accompanies all cognitive activities. When we first begin to believe anything, what we believe is not a single proposition, it is a whole system of propositions (Light dawns gradually over the whole.) (n. 141). It is not single axioms that strike me as obvious, it is a system in which consequences and premises give one another mutual support (n. 142). The child learns to believe a host of things. I.e. it learns to act according to these beliefs. Bit by bit there forms a system of what is believed, and in that system some things stand unshakeably fast and some are more or less liable to shift. What stands fast does so, not because it is intrinsically obvious or convincing; it is rather held fast by what lies around it (n. 144). I do not explicitly learn the propositions that stand fast for me. I can discover them subsequently like the axis around which a body rotates. This axis is not fixed in the sense that anything holds it fast, but the movement around it determines its immobility (Wittgenstein 1969, 21-22e n. 152).

When Wittgenstein applied the above specifically to the question of religion he could write (1980a, 83e), “It is true that we can compare a picture that is firmly rooted in us to a superstition; but it is equally true that we always eventually have to reach some firm ground, either a picture or something else, so that a picture which is at the root of all our thinking is to be respected and not treated as a superstition.” The crucial point is to see that a religion functions as a world, and the world itself cannot be affirmed. It is the source of affirmation, the web into which affirmations are inserted so as to be comprehended, the preconceptual background of what is normally considered “rational”

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thought. Wittgenstein adds (1967a, 56), “That is partly why you don’t get in religious controversies, the form of controversy where one person is sure of the thing, and the other says: ‘Well, possibly’.” His point is that what is properly religious about religious discourse functions on a higher plane than that of intellectual affirmation or rejection. “Religion is, as it were, the calm bottom of the sea at its deepest point, which remains calm however high the waves on the surface may be (Wittgenstein 1980a, 53e).” As faith lived, religion is preconceptual; theology remains, however, a rational enterprise, because the act of positing an individual affirmation within a given cognitive field remains a rational activity, guided by all the faculties that normally comprise such an act. What must also be recognized is that faith, if Wittgenstein’s rejection of an interior/ exterior dichotomy is given its due, requires the presence of criteria available to others with whom one shares language. Put briefly, if there is no “interior” reality separate from linguistic expression, faith cannot be viewed as residing “within,” in a manner which precludes access by the self or others. The reconfiguration of faith in a post-Wittgenstein world deserves additional attention. Cavell (1979, 179-80) once perceptively wrote that expressions of intentions can be viewed as “outer-ances.” “An expression of intention is not a specific claim about the world, but an utterance (outer-ance of oneself; it is countered not by saying that a fact about the world is otherwise than you suppose, but by showing that your world is otherwise than you see. When you are wrong here, you are not in fact mistaken but in soul muddled.” What must be understood is that theology itself is an “outer-ance” of faith, an expression of it, and therefore one of many possible criteria for the presence of faith. “The truth made known to us by Revelation is neither the product nor the consummation of an argument devised by human reason. It appears instead as something gratuitous, which itself stirs thought and seeks acceptance as an expression of love (Fides et Ratio n. 15; my italics).” When one considers faith not only as intellectual appropriation but also as an existential reorientation, then it is clear that faith itself is a sort of “statement of intention,” what Cavell would call an outer-ance. Fides quaerens intellectum is necessary for the very presence of faith.


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Theology, whether as proclamation or catechesis, must be understood as the language of faith, the preeminent place where faith first finds expression. We must work hard to jettison a misleading picture. One doesn’t have faith and then express it. Expression is part of what it means to have faith. It would not be illegitimate to challenge whether faith could truly be present in a community that spurned the theological task. To reject theological reflection is to shun life lived in a historically dynamic movement. It is to refuse expression to today’s faith. A linguistic community forges its way, and, one could say, its very self, as it moves through history. To continue to teach yesterday’s theology without doing today’s, ultimately raises the question of sincerity, of whether one seriously considers one’s self to be a member of the faith, and of the world, of the community in via. And, if one takes seriously the historical nature of language, all communities are in via. Teaching St. Thomas verbatim today is not to do what St. Thomas did, which is to call a world to faith. Painstaking work may be involved in accurately reproducing and identifying his actual thought. This is certainly legitimate to the theological enterprise. How else could Thomas’ wisdom be brought to bear upon our questions? But to “speak” Thomas, as though Thomas’ audience stood before one, would be as rampantly silly as wearing Mozart’s wig. Neither Thomas nor Mozart are honored, or even fruitfully encountered, if one refuses to do what each did: to speak to a living communion. Cavell suggests that art itself (1969, 197-98), unlike the sciences, implies intention. It establishes a form of communion between the artist and the recipient. Theology, while fully cognitive and rational, is more akin to the arts than to science because it existentially “calls” to the “other.” “A work of art does not express some particular intention (as statements do), nor achieve particular goals (the way technological skill and moral action do), but, one may say, celebrates the fact that men can intend their lives at all (if you like, that they are free to choose), and that their actions are coherent and effective at all in the scene of indifferent nature and determined society. An application of Cavell’s insight to theology, about an inherent intentionality common to all humanistic studies, would suggest that

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theology matters to us, precisely because it not only impacts upon faith, but is an expression of faith. It is faith coming to expression and calling upon acceptance. Writing on the concept of a “witness” Rahner (1975, 153) suggested that it is a “term signifying not the imparting of some other thing, but rather that in which someone communicates himself, and, moreover, by the most intense use of his own freedom in so disposing of himself that thereby a corresponding decision is evoked in some other person too.” It should be impossible to read a work of theology and not come into contact with the theologian-author’s own faith, or the community in which that faith first came to expression. Of course the point of the Fides quaerens intellectum has always been to suggest that theology cannot be done outside the sphere of faith. Cavell offers fresh illumination on why the Church’s greatest theologians often have also been numbered among her saints. Fides et Ratio takes up the interpersonal and expressive nature of theological truth when the Holy Father writes that, “knowledge through belief, grounded as it is on trust between persons, is linked to truth: in the act of believing, men and women entrust themselves to the truth which others declare to them.” Faith, to be faith, must come to expression, must find itself “addressed” to others. “A number of examples could be found to demonstrate this; but I think immediately of the martyrs, who are the most authentic witnesses to the truth about existence. The martyrs know they have found the truth about life in the encounter with Jesus Christ, and nothing and no one could ever take this certainty from them (n. 32).” A further-evolving and more complete understanding of the “rationality” of the theological task has important implications for the question of fideism. Fideism is not about whether or not reason has any role to play in the religious life. It clearly does. Fideism is the rejection of an ancillary role for reason in the ascent to faith and the assent of faith. It is precisely a rejection of a fideistic approach to the act of faith that prompts the current discussion, one aimed at showing that religion has a “rational” character of the deepest sort. The possession of a religion is not an act of rational affirmation, but rather the ability to make such an act. Acts of affirmation only occur within heuristic worlds, and religion offers just such a world. A


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religion can, in this sense, be called prerational, not because it rejects a rational foundation or explication, but rather because it is so allencompassing as to be the foundation for any given rational act. Religion as a way of life is prerational, but the act of theological reflection within that way of life must always be rational. Given the implication of Wittgenstein’s work, and that which has followed it, religion can more properly be spoken of as a faculty or a priori of knowledge rather than an object of knowledge. Removing inadequate views of the relationship of religion to reason is, of course, to show the internal compatibility of the two, a constant Catholic affirmation. It also shows that fideism itself rests upon an insufficient understanding of human knowledge. Religion does not contradict reason. Strictly speaking, it cannot, since a religion offers reason a heuristic world in which to operate. This remains true, as Lindbeck asserts, even after a religion may have been consciously spurned by a given individual or a society. To the extent that religion is a heuristic world, and not an unrelated bundle of individual affirmations, it cannot be rejected. An individual person cannot take a stand over against a religion, once having been religious, once having truly entered the world of a religion. If a world is being discussed ab extra, as only one possible object of intellectual affirmation, it can be endlessly debated, but then it is not functioning as a world. When a religion truly acts as a world, which is to say, if a person truly has faith and believes, gives himself over to a that world, then that person dwells within that world. One can no more jettison a world than one can relocate in a parallel universe. The rise and fall of analogical and explanatory theories, paradigm shifts, and revolutions of thought may all occur, but they will happen within a world of faith, not beyond it. This dynamic between faith and reason, maintaining the traditional affirmation that faith alone, as an act of existential submission, yields access to the only reasoning that can be called theological, is fundamentally opposed to the view of theology enunciated by Gordon Kaufman, which would suggest (1981, 102-03): “that Christian faith is but one perspective, one world-view, among the many vying for our attention and loyalty today. This may appear to be an obvious point, but its full significance for theological work has not often been

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candidly faced. When we apply the concept of ‘world-views,’ we are both enabled and required to step back from unqualified commitment to it. Instead of simply presuming our tradition to be the sufficient source of ultimate saving truth for all humanity, we increasingly come to see that what we Christian theologians are essentially concerned with is the discernment and articulation of one particular perspective.” Succinctly put, if Kaufman, or any other Christian theologian, can stand outside of his world, then it is not his world. It is a bundle of conceptual affirmations, standing ready at hand for a reformulation based upon the emergent, perceived exigencies of the contemporary self, whether communally or individually conceived. What is completely absent in an approach like Kaufman’s is the notion of an existential bestowal of the self, which the Christian tradition asserts as necessary for the theological task by use of the oft-repeated maxim, Fides quaerens intellectum. The knowledge derived from the experience of faith is a form of existentially appropriated knowledge which, like that stemming from an interpersonal relationship, is not reducible to the merely conceptual. It is easy to see why Kaufman’s approach has great contemporary appeal. It allows for the evolutionary reformulation of any religious utterance, yet it reduces theology to only another form of ipse quaerens intellectum. This discussion provides one more avenue of access to the traditional Christian affirmation of the inevitability of the question of faith. Once a person truly has been offered the grace of faith, he or she cannot remain neutrally indifferent to that offer. To receive the grace of faith is to have an experience of God, and an experience of God is, by its nature, world-forming. Once the act of faith occurs, a world comes into existence, one subject neither to human affirmation or rejection. One may later sinfully rebel against the implications of the act of faith, but this does not annihilate the existence of the world of faith, any more than it causes God to cease to exist. The constitution of the human person is such that he or she cannot choose to jettison a world in the complete sense of that term. This would literally be to remove the cognitive field of reference, a condition characterized as a profound form of psychological pathology, not critical insight.


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Religion qua religion functions at the most fundamental level of world formation. While individual acts of belief and action reinforce the cognitive and existential effect of a given world, no human act of cognition, even one conditioned by sin, can remove a person from the heuristic influence of the truly religious world. Thus a Christian, someone who has had an experience of faith and thus entered the world that is faith, even if latter consciously rejecting that experience, remains within the world of faith, either to salvation or damnation. “The world is independent of my will (Wittgenstein 1961, 70 n. 6.373).” And “If the good or bad exercise of the will does alter the world, it can alter only the limits of the world, not the facts — not what can be expressed by means of language. In short the effect must be that it becomes an altogether different world. It must, so to speak, wax and wane as a whole. The world of the happy man is a different one from that of the unhappy man (ibid. 72 n. 6.43).” Lindbeck (1984, 59) approaches this same issue, that salvation or damnation is “intraworldly,” by noting that “the Bible balances Cyprian’s claim that there is no salvation outside the church (extra ecclesia nulla salus) with an at least equally emphatic insistence that the beginning of damnation, of deliberate opposition to God, is possible only within the church, within the people of God.” Lindbeck is prepared for the obvious objection that a cognitivist would make to the above assertion, that salvation or damnation are intraecclesial realities. Doesn’t this deny the objective existence of the reality about which faith speaks? “On this view, there is no damnation — just as there is no salvation — outside the church. One must, in other words, learn the language of faith before one can know enough about its message to reject it and thus be lost.” Like Wittgenstein, Lindbeck (ibid. 60) insists that a world actually changes, the world in which the human person dwells. In answer to objections that this makes salvation merely fictive or imaginary, not ontologically real, it can be said, to use a simile, that those who have turned around may be standing shoulder to shoulder with their neighbors and yet be living in light rather than darkness, dawn rather than night, the beginning of the new age, not the end of the old. Speaking in more complex terms, the metaphor of a child learning a language is useful. The content of what is said

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Terrance W. Klein: How Things Are in the World by toddlers is very much the same whether they speak a primitive or a modern tongue. In both cases they express the same elementary needs and reactions in basically the same world of objects to be enjoyed or avoided and of persons to be trusted or feared. But one language may in the long run open up all the riches of human history and of a vastly promising though ominous future, while the other, the better a child learns it, imprisons him more tightly in his little tribe or village. At two years of age, the member of a preliterate culture might still be a potential Confucius, Newton, or Beethoven; at twenty, never.

The issue is first philosophical and only subsequently theological. If one begins with a cognitivist approach to theological language, conceiving it as hyperempirical, then the above discussion can only appear to be a denial of the ontological reality of salvation. Obviously, a Christian wants to affirm the real existence of heaven and hell. The problem is that the philosophy underpinning the theological affirmation wobbles. Heaven and hell need not be considered as topological affirmations beyond empirical scrutiny, a fact which is clear when one examines the actual usage of these terms in theological discourse. There heaven and hell are spoken of as definitive, existential possibilities of the human person. Can they be real possibilities in the fullest sense of the word without being topological? Yes, and a linguistic approach to theological discourse illumines why. Our ability to engage all of reality, or to be engaged by reality, is linguistic. The salient philosophical point is that affirming something to be real is a linguistic act. Real is not that which lies beyond language. The real is precisely that which appears in language. Indeed, it seems almost an inversion of logic to characterize that which is unknown as more real than that which is known. What must occur is a liberation from a picture holding us captive. In this case, the picture is an inadequate view of philosophy, or, for that matter, of science: the notion that something only becomes real when it can be objectively distanced from the knowing subject. A cultural-linguistic approach can thus affirm heaven and hell as truly definitive, existential possibilities, regardless of their topological or empirical status. That this approach corresponds, perhaps more adequately, to ordinary human experience is shown by the fact that,


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as less than definitive experiences, we already speak of human persons as dwelling in heaven or hell, even before the definitive, closing culmination of a human life is determined by death. “The world of the happy man is a different one from that of the unhappy man.” When Dante enters the final circle of hell, he encounters an “eternal frozen cold,” which can be thought of as making definitive “worldoptions” exercised by the damned during their earthly lives. “Beneath the clamor, beneath the monotonous circlings, beneath the fires of Hell, here at the center of the lost soul and the lost city, lie the silence and the rigidity and the eternal frozen cold.” According to Dorothy Sayers (1954, 68), “It is perhaps the greatest image in the whole Inferno.” The core of hell is depicted as radical, definitive closure, the rejection of God and his goodness, the world of heaven. Icy immobility well captures the consequent horror of this human choice. As von Balthasar put it (1986, 90), “Nothing can happen in Dante’s Hell, because love is absent.” In hell Dante encounters various traitors. Why do traitors inhabit the innermost circle of hell, frozen forever in the consequence of their option? Helen Luke (1975, 35-36) suggests that the traitors commit the most unpardonable of all sins. They reject the world they were given freely and in love. They end by rejecting their own selves, because to have rejected this love is to have spurned the possibility of “being” itself, which is why von Balthasar can write that “for Dante it is a sure sign of the destruction of the hierarchy of values that in the nethermost Hell the thought of posthumous fame no longer has any appeal, that the sinners desire only to be forgotten (ibid. 93).” Far better “to have never been born,” to be blotted out of history, than to endure its rejection, to have become its rejection. Satan himself is depicted as endlessly gnawing upon the three greatest traitors, Judas, Brutus, and Cassius. Luke writes (1975, 35-36): “Brutus and Cassius here are not simply leaders of rebellion against a system of government they believed corrupt. They are traitors to the Empire, which for Dante meant world-order. They are, therefore, types of the betrayal of all outer fellowship and community, as Judas represents betrayal of inner meaning and the very roots of love.” Again the inadequacy of a theological discourse patterned after the scientific shows itself. Just as scientific discourse fails to capture the

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existential reality of the human condition — philosophically it can offer nothing about precisely those realities such as love, fidelity, courage, and fear that most fully engage human beings — a theological discourse modeled after the scientific will appear muddled and inane to the scientist and fail to speak to the human person as an agent of personal choice. Attempting to sound real, according to an outdated image of how “the real” sounds to a rationalist, it simply fails to speak to the human person at the deepest level of what it means to be human. Anyone who has ever been in love knows the following fact. The world itself changes. This is why Brutus and Judas stand at the very center of hell. Each had known the love of the man he slew. For each, that man had been the source of a world. As a lover, he endowed the disparate with meaning. To take the knife against Caesar, to offer Christ the betrayer’s kiss, is more than an act of the intellectual rejection. It is the complete assault of a human person upon the absolute foundation of his own world, the love encountered in another human being. Isn’t hell made sufficiently real when it is identified as that definitive state in which the personal world of meaning offered to the human person by God has been rejected definitively? And it is a personal world of meaning, since God’s person is his meaning, is our own deepest meaning. Dorothy Sayers (1954, 68) distinguishes Dante’s inferno from that of Milton. In Milton’s inferno, the devils still sing. They produce a sort of harmony. In Dante’s hell, that is impossible. There can be no song, no harmony in hell. Hell is the absolute inversion of heavenly meaning and harmony. “Hell, in a manner, is Heaven in reverse; it is Reality seen as evil and seen so far more perfectly than it can ever be in this world. At the bottom of Hell is the Miserific Vision, and the Beatific Vision is at the height of heaven: as the Beatific Vision is the knowing of God in His Essence, so Hell is the knowing of Sin in its essence.” At the close of the 20th century, meaning well may be a more fundamental term than that of truth, although the two should not be considered as mutually exclusive. Truth, especially truth considered as a correspondence to reality, is only one facet of a broader question


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of meaning.6 Things can be true without possessing the slightest bit of significance. When things are meaningful, they must be both true and significant. In the end, one might say, to be true is to be fecund. A shift to a cultural-linguistic model of religious truth has profound implications for what has sometimes been called “natural theology.” First, what is being affirmed is that a religion, as it is lived, which is to say as it is experientially experienced, is a world, in the full sense of the term. Only a conceptual shadow of that reality can become the object of rational thought. The theologian cannot “step outside” his or her own world in order to characterize and reduce that world to the specifications of rational scrutiny. We cannot free ourselves of our own standing positions. As a heuristic world, a religion cannot become an object of intellectual scrutiny any more than the existence of God can. One cannot debate one’s self, or another, into, or out of, a world of faith. This has been a constant affirmation of Catholic theology, seen as a logical consequence of the supernatural character of faith. The above discussion merely shows that it is also a consequence of the character of human knowledge. Human beings must dwell in heuristic worlds. Their acts of cognition must have starting points, and an act of cognition cannot provide such a point without an infinite regress. A second affirmation immediately follows. The inability of theological reflection to transcend the world of religion is not a defect, a less-than-scientifically objective shortcoming. No one, not even the irreligious, escapes the fundamental human condition of dwelling in a heuristic world. Here the word “heuristic” should be emphasized. Regardless of whether the various affirmed elements of a world-view come to consciousness, the web they create becomes the only means of accessing new cognitive realities. Most of the time, only an infinitesimally small part of the world is in play at any given moment in the daily, mundane judgments of an individual. Still, the nexus which is a world acts as an integrated whole; one affirmation leads immediately to another. As Wittgenstein noted, we simply don’t

6

It should be noted here that Aquinas’ adequatio rei et intellectum should not be reduced to a mere correspondence theory of truth, as though the saint himself held positivistic views of truth which postdate him.

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pursue the chain very far at all unless cognitive circumstances force the issue. This second affirmation, the notion of a world of lived religious experience out of which all theology is done, is really none other than the traditional understanding of the theological enterprise as fides quaerens intellectum. This discussion of the fundamental characteristics of all human knowledge simply shows more clearly why faith is needed for theological reflection. One who dwells outside a given heuristic world cannot locate affirmations within that world. They would literally lack the required meaning. In part this is due to a consideration of the heuristic function of a world discussed in the first chapter. Worlds are not just cognitive edifices. They contain evaluative (ethical) and emotive components, and it is misleading to suggest that these can be atomically separated from the cognitive. Faith, as the papal encyclical Qui Pluribus asserted, involves more than an act of the intellect (Denzinger 1995, n. 2779). These words from Wittgenstein, taken from a very different context, have application here (1980b, 1:6e n. 20): “The question whether what is involved is a seeing or an act of interpreting arises because an interpretation becomes an expression of experience. And the interpretation is not an indirect description; no, it is the primary expression of the experience.” Wittgenstein was examining the psychological phenomenon of a perceived object shifting in our perceptions. “Now it’s a duck; now a rabbit.” He rejected a duality of modern thought: that expression of experience can be distilled from the experience itself, as though the latter were preexpression, prelinguistic. On the contrary, as Baker and Hacker note (1980, 544), “We do not merely see the world by means of the network of language, but we see the world through the network of language.” Theology can be said to function as an interpretation upon the experience of faith, and when this is said, the force of Wittgenstein’s remark becomes clear. It is not an adjunct description of the experience of faith, but rather an expression of faith. In other words, the human person, having experienced God, is compelled to give expression to that experience, theology being one form of such expression. The expression, however, is the experience. It is not husk. Remove it, and no experience remains. The theological enterprise is not an option


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for the religious life, nor are doctrinal and dogmatic formulations a dispensable element of the experience of faith. They are not an intellectual excretion upon a spiritual reality that stands distinct from them. They are the very texture of the garment of faith. Kaufman (1981, 266) would suggest that “doctrines and dogmas[...]are not simply to be accepted; they are to be examined, criticized, and often rejected, in the light of the image/concept of God that finally commends itself to us. It is God who is the ultimate authority and point of reference for the theologian; no doctrine or dogma can be given that high place without falling into idolatry.” The problem with this approach is that it is does posit Lindbeck’s divide between mystery and its explication, without realizing that mystery itself is a function of language. To suggest that the concept of God should be the ultimate point of reference is simply to ignore the fact that God doesn’t come before us as a referential object. Concepts condition other concepts, and any given concept of God is still only an intramundane concept. What really acts as the arbiter of dogma in Kaufman’s schema is simply the prevailing Zeitgeist. The clarity that Wittgenstein’s work brings to the discussion is the rejection of an experience/expression dichotomy. Human beings, as linguistic animals, must fashion meaning, which is not to say that truth becomes an arbitrary expression of the human will. It is to say that our linguistic utterances are our only appropriation of the truth, our uniquely human way of coming to possess the truth. Recall Wittgenstein’s insistence that our only way to know whether or not a person has understood a meaning is to observe his behavior. Meaning and understanding finds their expression in language. It is in language that they meet. “It would be just as wrong to use an experience of meaning to explain the concept of understanding meaning as to explain reality and unreality by the experience of unreality, or the concept of the presence of a human being by the feeling of a presence. One might just as well try to explain what check is in chess by a check-feeling (Wittgenstein 1980e, 1:32e n. 155).” Chess is a game, a field of rules and activity. So too is language, and it is there that meaning is forged. It is there, in language, that God is adored through the work of theology.

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Meaning, and therefore our appropriation of the truth of the gospel, is not a one-time event, either for the individual or the community. We do not possess a treasury of meaning, because meaning is not an entity. It must be continually reappropriated through our labors in language. Theology is one of those labors. “Can one keep hold of an understanding of meaning as one can keep hold of a mental image? That is, if one meaning of word suddenly strikes me, — can it also stay there in my mind (Wittgenstein 1967b, 76e s. II, n. ii)?” Just as Rahner has shown metaphysics to be an inevitable consequence of the human person’s need to integrate his most fundamental experiences of the world in order to engage the world, so too, theology provides, for the believer, a synthesis which is essential for a lived and fecund appropriation of the gospel. Through theology, we engage the world.

8~Word of the Father

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Chapter 8 Word of the Father

8.1 The experience making expression possible

R

eturning to Rahner’s theological project, the question remains: is Rahner what Lindbeck would call a “experientialexpressive theologian?” Curiously, Lindbeck asserts that he is by making reference to his well-known treatment of salvation for those outside the Christian faith. As Lindbeck reads Rahner — certainly not as he quotes him, because he scarcely does — the very notion of an “anonymous Christian” proves that Rahner is guilty of a experiential-expressive dichotomy. A weakness of Lindbeck’s book is that Bernard Lonergan and David Tracy are painted with the same brush, again without reference to their actual writings. Lindbeck (1984, 56-57) argues that Rahner and Lonergan posit a prereflective, interior experience of the divine available to all religious people, and, since they identify this experience with the saving grace of Christ, “those non-Christians who respond to the inward call already share in the same justification, the same salvation, that is at work in Christians even though, unlike Christians, they have no conscious adherence or visible sacramental bond to the historical Jesus Christ who is both the ultimate source and the only fully and finally appropriate objective correlate of their inner experience of salvation.” Few theological concepts have been seized upon as readily by pastors and catechists as Rahner’s notion of the anonymous Christian, since it provides a way to affirm the sincere religiosity and moral goodness of others, speaking of both as “salvific.” Lindbeck has a very different

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reaction (ibid. 61), finding the notion condescending rather than embracing. It can lead, he suggests, to boasting on the part of the Christian, who thus would possess an explicit knowledge that others lack. Is Rahner saving some implicit, inner core of the Christian faith, while jettisoning its categorical expression? Does the concept of “anonymous Christianity,” which has been criticized by others on the same ground as Lindbeck, show that Rahner posits a divide between experience and its linguistic expression? It need not, simply because, as Rahner presents it, experience of God is found among Christians and non-Christians, but so too is the expression of that experience. And Rahner (1974, 392) rejects the very notion that one can have an experience without a corresponding expression. “If it be true that the man who is the object of the Church’s missionary endeavor is or can be already prior to it a man who is on the way toward his salvation and finds it in certain circumstances without being reached by the Church’s preaching, and if it be true at the same time that the salvation which he achieves is the salvation of Christ, because there is no other, then it must be possible to be not only an anonymous “theist”, but also an anonymous Christian, and this (since the Church of Christ is not a purely interior reality) not in any merely intangible inner way, but also with a certain making visible and tangible of the anonymous relationship.” Rahner (1966b, 120) recognizes that to be human is to be expressive. It is to make of any relationship something visible and tangible. “This means, therefore, that man, who is commanded to have a religion, is also commanded to seek and accept a social form of religion.” Further, Rahner (ibid. 125) explicitly assigns a salvific value to the expressive systems developed by non-Christians. “A lawful religion means here an institutional religion whose ‘use’ by man at a certain period can be regarded on the whole as a positive means of gaining the right relationship with God and thus for the attaining of salvation, a means which is therefore positively included in God’s plan for salvation.” Non-Christian religions thus have a God-given role to play in the salvation of the human person who either has not yet, or never will, thematically encounter the Christian revelation. Until a person existentially encounters the Gospel, Rahner (ibid. 121) suggests that his or her religion “contains also supernatural elements arising out of


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the grace which is given to men as a gratuitous gift on account of Christ. For this reason a non-Christian religion can be recognized as a lawful religion (although only in different degrees) without thereby denying the error and depravity contained in it.” Philosophically one can hardly suggest that the inner experience of non-Christians is truly of God, while its exterior cultural and religious expression is pointless or misguided, and Rahner doesn’t. Both the experience and its expression in the lives of non-Christians must be seen as purposeful.1 He speaks of the grace available to the anonymous Christian as more than ontic, meaning by that term a grace considered apart from its human context. On the contrary, this is a grace which is conscious, and therefore expressive (Rahner 1974, 398). “Hence, if one were to expect from someone who lives outside the Christian religion that he should have exercised his genuine, saving relationship to God absolutely outside the religion which society offered him, then such a conception would turn religion into something intangibly interior, into something which is always and everywhere performed only indirectly, a merely transcendental religion without anything which could become tangible in categories. Such a conception would annul the above-mentioned principle regarding the necessarily social nature of all religion in the concrete, so that even the Christian Church would then no longer have the necessary presupposition of general human and natural law as proof of her necessity (Rahner 1966b, 129).” Rahner explicitly links a fundamental anthropological characteristic which is at work in both Christianity and non-Christian religions: the human need for consciousness to emerge from language. He goes on to argue that a certain dynamism must characterize the anonymous Christian, a movement toward ever greater expression of the experience, which expression itself is the experience. Recall a fundamental tenet of Transcendental Thomism: human beings move through concepts by way of judgements toward the Divine. “One of the effects of this grace, even in its supernatural and 1

A view reaffirmed most recently in Fides et ratio n. 71, which is worth quoting because of its convergence with the thought of Rahner on this point. “Lying deep in every culture, there appears this impulse toward a fulfilment. We may say, then, that culture itself has an intrinsic capacity to receive divine Revelation.”

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salvifically elevating form, is to cause changes in consciousness (Rahner 1966b, 130).” Therefore, the name “anonymous Christians,” “implicitly signifies that this fundamental actuation of a man, like all actuations, cannot and does not want to stop in its anonymous state but strives toward an explicit expression, toward its full name (Rahner 1974, 395).” Because Rahner considers human history itself to be Christological, every human person has been taken up into the graced event that is Jesus Christ. This transcendent reality does not, however, preclude the need for a categorical expression. This “explicit selfrealization of his previously anonymous Christianity is itself part of the development of this Christianity itself — a higher stage of development of this Christianity demanded by his being — and that it is therefore intended by God in the same way as everything else about salvation.” Rahner then concludes (1966b, 132), “Hence, it is will not be possible in any way to draw the conclusion from this conception that, since man is already an anonymous Christian without it, this explicit preaching of Christianity is superfluous.” Recall Wittgenstein’s work on a thought coming to expression. It is not as if one has the thought and then looks for the expression. So too here, the very experience of God comes as an articulated reality and propels the human person toward greater articulation, because, for a human being, articulation is experience. Finally, if personal, historical obstacles do not arise, “the expressly Christian revelation becomes the explicit statement of the revelation of grace which man always experiences implicitly in the depths of his being (Rahner 1974, 394).” The repercussions of the present discussion are far reaching. One task set for philosophy by Fides et Ratio is to explore more deeply “the relationship between conceptual language and truth, and to propose ways which will lead to a right understanding of that relationship (nn. 95-96).” Rahner’s work on anonymous Christianity provides an excellent workshop in which to view the relationship between concepts and truth being hammered out. The underlying philosophical presupposition behind his treatment of anonymous Christianity is that human beings must approach truth conceptually, which is to say that they must progressively move toward ever greater appropriation of the truth.


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But doesn’t this mean that any given conceptual formulation is thereby made relative to a particular time and place? Yes, in the sense that every concept, as the cognitive action of human beings located in a specific time and place, arises out of their human faculty of knowledge. And no, because conceptual formulations can be translated into other spatial and temporal contexts. This is a basic function of language, its communicability. To insist upon this capability is part of what Wittgenstein meant when he rejected the notion of a logically private language. Language, per naturam, is communicable (Wittgenstein 1974, 193). One human being can share the truth with another. If one understands Wittgenstein, to say that human language is conceptual is not to impugn its effectiveness. We cannot step outside human knowledge and evaluate it vis-a-vis some other perspective. There is no other perspective. Wittgenstein would simply ask us to stop (1967c 57e n.390). We have posed a problem because we refuse to accept the reality before us. “Here we come up against a remarkable and characteristic phenomenon in philosophical investigation: the difficulty — I might say — is not that of finding the solution but rather that of recognizing as the solution something that looks as if it were only a preliminary to it. ‘We have already said everything. — Not anything that follows from this, no, this itself is the solution!’ This is connected, I believe, with our wrongly expecting an explanation, whereas the solution of the difficulty is a description, if we give it the right place in our considerations. If we dwell upon it, and do not try to get beyond it. The difficulty here is: to stop.” We have no other way of knowing than the process of proceeding (judging) through collective, piecemeal, evolving conceptual acts. To call this way of knowing defective is to reject our own humanity. “Would it be correct to say our concepts reflect our life? They stand in the middle of it. The rule-governed nature of our language permeates our life (Wittgenstein 1982, 2:72e).” Where Wittgenstein and the Transcendental Thomists are in fundamental agreement is their common, dynamic understanding of language. Truth, any given moment in the skein of language is absolutely provisional. But to admit this is only to say that a cup of water drawn from a river is not a river. What is truly transcendent is

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the dynamism of language, its movement toward the absolute. This movement is present in all levels of human discourse, whether empirical, aesthetic, metaphysical, or theological. One can still argue the question of anonymous Christianity on narrower theological grounds, challenging its effect upon the uniqueness and the salvific role of the Christ event, but the very fact that Rahner places an explicit value upon the categorical formulations of non-Christian peoples negates Lindbeck’s critique that he posits too great a divide between experience and its expression. When Rahner does speak of the relationship between experience and language, he certainly doesn’t sound guilty of a dichotomy. In Foundations, he suggests that language itself is necessary for the selfreflection of the thinking subject. Since Foundations represents a synthesis of Rahner’s mature thought (1978, 16), it would seem an uniquely qualified locus from which to examine the issue that Lindbeck raises. “This original unity which we are driving at between reality and its knowledge of itself always exists in man only with and in and through what we can call language, and thus also reflection and communicability. At that moment when this element of reflection would no longer be present, this original self-possession would also cease to exist.” Rahner acknowledges that the human person is a linguistic creature, and the very idea of separating experience from self-reflecting expression in language would be a denial of what it means to be human. He goes on to juxtapose God and human language, but he does this within the classical Christian tradition, noting eloquently that God’s own self always stands beyond language, even calling language itself into question since God stands beyond the world that we know through language. This is not only classically Christian; Wittgenstein made the same affirmation in the Tractatus and never wavered from it. Rahner (ibid. 46-47; italics mine) notes that the word “God” is often invoked to show the liminal character of language. “The present form of the word reflects what the word refers to: the ‘ineffable one,’ the ‘nameless one’ who does not enter into the world we can name as a part of it. It means the ‘silent one’ who is always there, and yet can always be overlooked, unheard, and, because it expresses the whole in


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its unity and totality, can be passed over as meaningless.” His own philosophical premise returns when he immediately asserts that God is mystery not because he is beyond language but rather because he encompasses it. “It means that which really is wordless, because every word receives its limits, its own sound and hence its intelligible sense only within a field of words. Hence what has become faceless, that is, the word ‘God’ which no longer refers by itself to a definite, individual experience, has assumed the right form to be able to speak to us of God. For it is the final word before we become silent, the word which allows all the individual things we can name to disappear into the background, the word in which we are dealing with the totality which grounds them all.” Here Rahner is not speaking of human experiences of the divine, but of God himself. The text is ripe with significance. Words receive their meaning from “fields of words.” But the word “God” is a word of ultimate “unity and totality.” It stands for that ultimate horizon against which all human knowledge can be posited. Rahner’s roots in Transcendental Thomism are very much in evidence here. It is not “a definite, individual experience” standing behind this word, pace Lindbeck. It is rather the fundamental dynamism of the human person transcending each act of knowledge. The text is also poignant, because it balances a weakness in Lindbeck’s own discussion. To say that any knowledge of God must necessarily be linguistic is not the same thing as saying that God himself can be encapsulated by human speech. Lindbeck rightly attempts to illustrate the fundamental role of language in theology and faith, but his efforts seem imbalanced by not averring to God’s absolute transcendence. Nor does the Rahner of Foundations seem philosophically naive about the pervasive role of language in human cognition (ibid. 49). “Every individual in his intellectual and spiritual existence lives by the language of all. He has his ever so individual and unique experience of existence only in and with the language in which he lives, from which he does not escape, and whose verbal associations, perspectives and selective a prioris he appropriates, even when he protests against them and when he is himself involved in the ever-ongoing history of language.” This hardly sounds like an experiential-expressive theolo-

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gian making the mistake of first positing thought and then its linguistic expression. Rahner the theologian also rejects a dichotomy between experience and expression. In his essay “Considerations on the Development of Dogma (1966a, 15),” he suggests that to do so would be to commit what he considers to be the error of the Modernist, seeing the core of revelation as lying beyond human words and thus freely open to the most radical form of contemporary revisionism. “We cannot make ourselves independent, in our pilgrim state, of the assertions made in the testimony to revelation. Further, we cannot — like the modernists — set up a wordless state of experience with regard to what is meant in faith, to derive thence new and original statements of revelation in the form of intellectual assertions.” One cannot argue that the Church’s transmission of revelation is a different, distinct topic than the question of personal experience as a linguistic act. This is because revelation obviously has its origins in the personal experience of the first recipients and is directed toward the personal experience of every possible believer. Rahner’s point is that one cannot create a dichotomy between the two. The original revelatory experience cannot be approached as separable from its linguistic expression in scripture, as though we had some other form of access to that revelation by which to judge the adequacy and, perhaps, timeconditioned or inadequate expression of it in sacred scripture. Rahner clearly posits the act of revelation within language, not beyond it (ibid. 12-13): “It is also true (and this is part of the fundamental dogma of Christianity of the Incarnation) that this selfcommunication of God really takes place in the human word, and not merely on the occasion of it. Human words are not merely the external occasion for a pneumatic or mystic experience of transcendence directed toward the God who is nameless. Spirit and word can only be possessed in their indissoluble unity, undivided and unconfused. Hence the human word is open from the start to the infinitude of God. (This it is, in so far as it is natural, by virtue of its potentia oboedientialis, and so far as it is supernatural, by virtue of its being uttered by the Spirit and by virtue of its elevation by the Spirit.) And the divine Spirit is given in and through this word, assumed by himself, in his own infinity and concrete reality.”


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Nor can it be suggested that Rahner is paying lip-service to a unity that his own philosophical background does not appreciate. Among the issues that he raises regarding the development of dogma are the following: 1/ that the inner coherence of a subsequent development cannot be assessed in a strictly ratio-deductive manner, since human cognition in general is not bound to rationalistic explication. He uses an example strikingly reminiscent of Wittgenstein, namely, that he knows he will not be poisoned by his mother despite the complete absence of any ratio-deductive reasoning on the matter. 2/ that the assessment of a dogma’s congruity with earlier tradition likewise cannot be reduced to a deductive schema, ultimately because congruity rests upon acceptance by the entire community of the Church. In other words, that theological argumentation, however insightful, does not replace the united, over time and space, congruity of the entire linguistic community which is the Church. 3/ that the kerygmatic character of revelation will continue to produce subsequent development simply because “such a traditio takes place at a given moment of space and time, is necessarily historical, and absorbs the recipient and his historical uniqueness, which is also a property of his knowledge, into the process of traditio itself (ibid. 24).” A “linguistic community” is truly a pleonasm, since one cannot have the noun without the adjective, and the converse is equally true. When revelation is considered under it full existential weight, as the presence of God among us, then it can be said that each subsequent event of revelation in the life of an individual person enriches and completes the initial, foundational event. Revelation considered as the existential encounter between God and the human person can thus be considered as expanding with each call and response of faith. Rahner’s purpose is to show the inherent necessity of dogmatic development, and he correctly roots that development in the existential life of believers. The argumentation is quite in touch with developments in the philosophy of language. His mention above of the potentia oboedientialis explicitly refers his theological approach back to its philosophical foundations in Spirit in the World (ibid. 14-15). “The human word is open from the start to the infinitude of God.” This must be so, if, as that work argued, each human word, each concept formed by the human person, can only be

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posited against an infinite horizon of being. Rahner is suggesting that the human person’s ability to be a linguistic creature is dependent upon his radical orientation toward the divine. If one is true to Rahner’s philosophy – and what reason is there to presume that Rahner wasn’t? – then in terms of the human person’s appropriation of revelation, it makes no sense to posit an experience/expression dichotomy. This distorts the nature of human knowledge itself. The human person’s ability to come to self-expression is only possible because of an innate awareness of the divine. “For this grace, understood as the a priori horizon of all his spiritual acts, accompanies his consciousness subjectively, even though it is not known objectively (Rahner 1966b, 131).” As previously examined, it can be said that Transcendental Thomism literally reverse the relationship between language and experience. Granted that no ordinary human experience is prelinguistic, the prethematic experience of God acts as the foundation of human language, since human language always begins with the positing of one small assertion against an infinite expanse. When one reads Rahner back into his philosophical roots, what is clear is that he is not positing a mysterious super-entity beyond language and thus opening himself to the question of how this mystery should come to expression in language. As a Transcendental Thomist, Rahner asserts that language itself only becomes possible because of an existential orientation toward the divine, a divine never adequately designated as object. In his essay “Experience of Self and Experience of God, ” Rahner (1975, 123) describes “that kind of knowledge which is present in every man as belonging essentially to the very roots of cognition in him, and as constituting the starting-point and prior condition for all reflexive knowledge, and for all derived human knowledge in its function of combining and classifying.” God and language are fundamentally linked from the very beginning. “We are assuming, therefore, that there is such a thing as a passive experience of this kind as a matter of transcendental necessity, an experience so inescapable, in other words, that in its ultimate structures its reality is implicitly asserted in the very act of denying it or calling it into question.” For Rahner the question is not where God will come to expression in


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language. Language comes to expression in God, which is to say, we come to reflective (linguistic) self-awareness because of our orientation to the divine. “The transcendental orientation of man to the incomprehensible and ineffable Mystery which constitutes the enabling condition for knowledge and freedom, and therefore for subjective life as such, in itself implies a real, albeit a nonthematic experience of God.” In the light of the above discussion, as preliminary as the scope of this project will allow, given that a defense of Rahner contra Lindbeck is not its primary focus, when one reads Lindbeck asserting that the theology of Karl Rahner suffers from an experience/expression dichotomy, one can’t help but wonder what he is talking about. Lindbeck’s work does, however, help to refocus the initial question of the previous chapter. Does Rahner’s work sufficiently portray the necessity of categorical revelation? Two assertions can be made in response to this question. First, that insights originating in the philosophy of language help to show the intrinsic necessity of categorical revelation and its existentially binding character, and secondly, that Rahner himself adequately exploited these insights because his original philosophical option in Transcendental Thomism demanded such. This is an absolutely crucial point. It is not simply the case that Rahner fortuitously was well enough versed in questions of linguistic philosophy, so that one could say his work stands up to a examination from this perspective, but rather that the intrinsic nature of Transcendental Thomism makes possible and, indeed requires, a correspondence between the two post-Kantian systems.

8.2 The forge of language It is often suggested that Rahner collapses supernatural knowledge of God into the natural, but it is only when this distinction is maintained, as Rahner insisted it had to be, that a full appreciation of his theological acumen becomes evident. Rahner’s “metaphysics of knowledge” presumes upon the distinction between natural knowledge of God and that which, coming from revelation, is called

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supernatural. The role of language in each form of knowledge is unique, which becomes evident when they are juxtaposed. Regarding natural knowledge of God, recall the fundamental, postKantian, starting point of Transcendental Thomism. God is not one among many possible objects of human knowledge. This is also the primary theological insight of the Tractatus, one from which Wittgenstein never subsequently wavered. Whatever is going to be said about God in language must never be viewed as encapsulating the very nature of God. God is not an element of the world. On the contrary, the world stands complete on its own. “The world is all that is the case” (n. 1) and “The world is determined by the facts, and by their being all the facts.” (Wittgenstein 1961, 5 n. 1.11) No explanation coming from outside the world is needed to explain the world. The world is simply that which is. To play upon the obvious, the world is a world, a complete and sufficient nexus in itself. Here Wittgenstein is barring any approach to the world that would make of it something contingent. The world, qua world, does not need an extraworldly explanation to make it comprehensible. Philosophy need not look for a deus ex machina, need not presume that the world is not comprehensible in its, or rather our, own terms. Recall that two forms of knowledge are constantly being juxtaposed in the Tractatus. What humankind can know by way of science is being overtly examined, with a view to delimitating all that stands beyond the reach of science. The contours of a way of knowing proper to the humanities are being outlined by inversion. Rahner makes a similar affirmation. A philosophy of God which is more than a philosophical anthropology examining the role of religion in human life, but rather seeks to posit an awareness of God in human nature, need not begin by depicting the world as incapable of rational explication without reference to the divine. A philosophy of religion which seeks to pursue the ancient Greek goal of coming to an awareness of the arche or principium of the world will not begin where it did before Kant, with the positing of God’s existence in order to give a causative explanation of the world. It will rather enquire into the nature of our cognitive faculties, showing there an a priori need for a positing of God’s existence. Thus it will establish what Rahner suggests can be called a metaphysics of epistemology. In Rahner’s


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post-Kantian system, metaphysics has a dual character. It is the foundational discipline which acts to coordinate the disparate elements of human knowledge, but it also reflects upon the very cognitive ability of the human person, revealing the person as an open question. In his seminal essay “The Concept of Mystery in Catholic Theology” Rahner (1966a, 36) raises the foundational question in the relationship between natural and supernatural knowledge of God. Natural knowledge of God is not that which is obtained through the presumption that the world cannot be explained. The world, at least as it is increasingly viewed by the contemporary person, does not stand in need of extraworldly explication. “The world in which man lives today seems to him a closed system, sealed off to a certain extent from God, a universe of unthinkable extent and variety, largely impenetrable and fully determined by its own laws.” What then of God? “God has become more transcendent, and his name simply stands for the unfathomable mystery which lies behind all accessible and definable reality.” The question Rahner then raises for theology is pivotal. If the world stands as a complete and self-subsistent world, how can any natural knowledge of God be posited? Or how can a properly supernatural knowledge of God even be made comprehensible to the modern person if it does not appear as necessary to his own understanding of the world and his place within it? “It is no longer so easy for him to see a definitely constituted religion, with its thousand and one truths, customs, prescriptions, and rules, as the concrete obligation of God’s will and the necessary institution for his salvation. He finds all this so anthropomorphic and concrete that it is hard for him to realize that this multiplicity of details constitutes God’s way, and indeed the necessary way, of communicating himself to man for man’s salvation (ibid. 26-37).” Strangely enough, both Wittgenstein and Rahner affirm that what traditional theology might call a “natural order” stands on its own. The point is worth remembering, particularly since the theologians of the early modernist period thought that the only way to ensure the validity of supernatural discourse was to collapse it into the natural order, positing an essential concurrence between the two. This proved

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offensive in two quarters. The Magisterium of the Church insisted that the supernatural character of grace and revelation were insufficiently preserved in this approach, and the work of both Wittgenstein and Rahner suggests that such an approach lacks correspondence to the modern person’s comprehension of the world. Nature doesn’t seem to need the supernatural to be itself. This is why Rahner notes that the concept of mystery utilized by theology cannot be understood as that which simply eludes ratio, because there is nothing in the world that must be recognized as categorically closed to human reason, although there are certainly realities yet to be fathomed by its exercise. Rahner’s approach to a natural knowledge of God remained that of Spirit in the World, an examination of the human person reveals a potentia oboedientialis to a possible revelation of God. The word potentia requires emphasis here. What Rahner suggests as the ultimate significance of the transcendental method in philosophy is not a proof of the existence of God, but rather an explication of the human person as one ready, and, one must even say, naturally disposed to receive such a revelation. If this distinction is not remembered, it appears as though Rahner posits a conceptual, transcendental awareness or knowledge of God available to every person. This is turn raises the question of the relationship between this knowledge and supernatural revelation. What Rahner affirms, however, is not a natural knowledge of God but rather a making evident of a fundamental characteristic of the human person as revealed through philosophical reflection. The human person has an evident and undeniable potential to receive a revelation from God, a potential so inherent that its lack of fulfillment would represent a fundamental sterility in human nature itself. Given the identity between thought and language identified by Wittgenstein, it then can be said that human beings come to knowledge of God through the exertion of language. Rahner’s metaphysics of knowledge, in this regard at least, is thoroughly Thomistic. Human beings do not have an intuitive grasp of God. What can be affirmed of God outside of revelation is always piecemeal, something hammered out in the forge of language, and that which is hammered out


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shares the necessarily provisional nature of all conceptual knowledge in Thomism. Rahner likewise insists: that which is known by way of conceptual, sensual knowledge will always be less than God himself. Being qua being does not become an object of our knowledge. We only objectify individual beings, because of a preconceptual grasp of that being which cannot be objectified. To use a visual image, an object becomes distinct against a background, but, if a background itself were to become distinct, one would no longer be speaking of a background, but an object. Human beings can make any “background” into an object of cognition, but a further, subsequent background still remains in order to make this very act of identification possible. One thus arrives at an endless series, but what stands forth in the process is the dynamism of the human intellect. Either the constantly transcending human intellect is doomed to ultimate cognitive frustration, or the whither, the direction of human knowledge, leads to that ultimate satisfaction we call the Beatific Vision (Rahner 1994, 26). The key insight of Transcendental Thomism is not to concentrate upon the affirmations which our concepts might produce about God, but rather the recognition that language itself, the ability to grasp even a provisional essence in a known object, is only possible because that object reveals itself against an infinite horizon. In this sense, God appears not as that which is forged by language, but rather as the forge upon which language itself is produced. This is why Rahner can write (1978, 56), “Everything which we say here about the knowledge of God is indeed said in words, but it refers to a more original experience.” He is not thereby suggesting that we have a knowledge of God that alludes language. His assertion, put baldly, is that we know (everything that we know) because God exists. It is not that we have a knowledge of God beyond language, but that language reveals itself as conditioned and limited while the human person who wields it strives after the unconditioned and the unlimited (ibid. 61-62). A natural, prethematic knowledge of God is then possible through reflection upon the a priori structure of every human act of cognition. Rahner does not consider the analysis characteristic of Transcendental Thomism as a proof of the existence of God. It simply shows the inherent limitation of all human knowledge, or, one could say, it

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brings into relief the implicit background of our own cognitive striving. In the end, the human person is left with the option of seeing that striving as ultimately purposeful or absolutely meaningless. Transcendental Thomism reveals the human person as a radical openness to that which is absolutely other, and also as a radical yearning-for-completion. “In other words: Metaphysics, which is already a philosophy of religion, must acknowledge God as the one who is free and unknown; it must understand human persons as beings who, in our innermost spirit, live in history; it must refer us to our history and bid us listen in it to an eventual revelation of this unknown God (Rahner 1994, 8). A philosophy of religion must respect the “intrinsic autonomy and historicity of theology.” By depicting human nature as a potentia oboedientialis, it points to the possibility of revelation proceeding from God. A philosophy of religion cannot create an institution of religion that is contained within itself. The potentia oboedientialis is not, strictly speaking, a form of transcendental revelation, or, if one insists, it is a revelation of human nature rather than of the divine. In the end a philosophy of religion, or a natural theology, must “refer us to our history and bid us listen in it to an eventual revelation of this free, unknown God.” On this level, when one speaks of an awareness of God in relationship to language, it will not do to call it “prelinguistic” as the experience/expressive dichotomy Lindbeck delineates would do. Rahner does not posit a divine mystery lying beyond language in order to avoid the limitations and contingencies inherent in any given categorical revelation. Revelation isn’t yet the question at hand. Rahner posits a mystery called Being beyond language because his Transcendental Thomism sees Being itself as the ontic foundation of language. Language thus appears as ontically limited. “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world (Wittgenstein 1961, 56, 5.6).” What must be understood by the word “limited” is dual in character. It means that language is completely capable of describing the world, but that something eludes the description. The world thus known stands in need of a reference point. “The world is my world: this is manifest in the fact that the limits of language (of that language


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which alone I understand) mean the limits of my world (ibid. 57, n. 5.62).” The self provides a logical point of reference for the creation of a heuristic world. “The subject does not belong to the world: rather, it is a limit of the world (n. 5.632).” Every element of that which is affirmed in the world can be ordered as an object to the knowing subject and thus implicitly or explicitly related to every other affirmed element. However, when the knowing subject attempts to question his own role in the heuristic act of cognition, he is thrown back upon the primordial question of foundation, not causally in a mechanistic sense, but cognitively in terms of how to conceive his own act of appropriation as meaningful, as not doomed to teleological frustration. What must be the case for the human person to be able to know? What must be the ultimate relationship between ontos and logos? Then language appears as an island delineating the ocean, and the human person comes to resemble something like a satellite dish, an organ intrinsically open to a receptive act. Rahner, who is so often charged with failing to take account of the historical nature of the human person, can thus conclude by directing our attention to that which has occurred in history. His entire task can be seen as the necessity explication of why the human person must address the question which is his own self to his own history. “Man is an historical being precisely as spirit, so that he is obliged to depend upon his history not only by virtue of his biological existence, but also as the foundation of his spiritual existence. It follows from this that man, by reason of his original nature, is from the very start already directed toward the historical contingency of a revelation, should it occur. Should God, of his free choice, wish not to reveal himself but to remain silent, man would attain the ultimate and highest selfperfection of his spiritual and religious existence by listening to the silence of God (Rahner 1994, 15-16).” Rahner’s last line deserves reflection. If God had chosen not to reveal himself, the very character of our self-reflection would reveal, if not his existence, then the fundamental need of the human person to wait upon a possible revelation of God. “Man therefore is not only capable of hearing a possible word from his hidden God, but in the sense we have explained is also positively expecting it, little as he has the right to demand it (Rahner 1974, 392).” This “waiting” would

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represent not only the highest form of natural piety but also the sole course open to the human person who is not closed by an explicit rejection of his own nature. To see Rahner’s theology as fully founded upon his epistemology and metaphysics is thus to answer the question of the relationship between transcendental and categorical revelation. The first cannot be seen as supplanting the latter, nor of rendering it superfluous. Indeed the first can be said to reveal only the place of God in human life, or, perhaps better, human life as placed within God (Rahner 1994, 22). The difficulty is that Rahner himself sometimes chooses to call this prethematic awareness of a potentia oboedientialis by the, perhaps misleading, word “revelation.” Strictly speaking, it reveals not God but human nature as inherently predisposed to receive God. The importance for Rahner of his continual adherence to the metaphysics of human cognition, first outlined in Spirit in the World, is that its conception of the human person is that of a potentially infinite spirit open and ready to receive a revelation from God. That revelation, Rahner insists, cannot be reduced to a set of propositions or simply a cognitive transferral, since ultimately what God reveals is his own selfdonation to the human person (ibid. 66-68). Rahner makes explicit reference to the Thomistic principle of being and knowledge as correlative, and it is the key to understanding his depiction of the finite human person as a transcendent spirit, one potentially ready to receive God. He explains (ibid. 41), “St. Thomas supplies the logical reason for this: Cum intellectus et intelligibile in actu sint unum, because otherwise the de facto unity of knowable being and knowledge in the actual cognition could not be made comprehensible in its possibility. For St. Thomas, being and knowing are thus unius generis: they arise from a single, unified root, from an original unity.” Recall that Rahner presumes upon the gradations of being corresponding to gradations of knowledge. A being knows to the extent that it possesses being. The human person is depicted ultimately in Transcendental Thomism as that form of being which, by means of sensually based conceptual operations, strives for completion in both knowledge and being, strives for that unity of the two which is characteristic of God. It is the internal dynamism of the human


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person, “the primordial essence of man” which causes Rahner to characterize humanity as spirit in the world. God does not appear in Rahner as the supplier of answers humanity poses. Nor does he appear as the causal first agent of a universe mechanically conceived. The world, as Wittgenstein would say, is in order as it stands. God appears in Rahner because the world is restless; it appears in a state of active striving. The world, the world the human person has fashioned by the unity of intellectual, emotive, and physical drives, is complete within itself and reveals its fundamental character by its own restless striving as ordered to that which is other than the world. The legitimacy of using the term “world” here is already alluded to in the title of Rahner’s work on fundamental theology Spirit in the World. The world is not the reality standing over against the human person, but the reality we ourselves have fashioned by our engagement with that which stands around us. The world is not brute facticity, but rather a medium of self-expression. It is the place where the human person dwells, impregnating it with his own sense of self. One can certainly affirm that the world functions as a heuristic device, but it does so by continually collapsing in upon itself to create a fuller and more complete version of its own self. Recall the characterization of human cognition that Wittgenstein presented in On Certainty (1969, 16e n. 105). “All testing, all confirmation and disconfirmation of a hypothesis takes place already within a system. And this system is not a more or less arbitrary and doubtful point of departure for all our arguments: no, it belongs to the essence of what we call an argument. The system is not so much the point of departure, as the element in which arguments have their life.” Human beings naively presume that their most basic cognitive activities are built upon a bedrock, foundational correspondence between language and reality, rarely pausing to consider that the “brute” reality they apprehend already, and always, bears marks of human “workmanship.” Human cognition, as Wittgenstein conceives it, does not rest upon a complete alienum exterior to the human person, every act of cognition, it can be said, begins in media res, always preceded by others, whether they come from the individual himself or the linguistic community.

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Perhaps we would rather not be so creatively engaged with the universe. We would like truth to be something outside ourselves, to be everything human beings are not: hard, unyielding, changeless. Then our own human way of life could be tested against an unhuman bedrock. But “what counts as its test? — ‘But is this an adequate test? And, if so, must it not be recognizable as such in logic?’ — As if giving grounds did not come to an end sometime. But the end is not an ungrounded presupposition: it is an ungrounded way of acting (ibid. 17e n. 110).” One system, or world, gives way to another; what remains is the trajectory, the movement of the human person toward ever greater assimilation. There is, even in the thought of Wittgenstein, “an ungrounded way of acting” a dynamism which strives for an unity between being and knowing as the being which is the human person strives to come to complete possession of self and world. Wittgenstein wrote (1974, 377), “Where there is no method of looking for an answer, there the question too cannot have any sense. — Only where there is a method of solution is there a question (of course that doesn’t mean: ‘only where the solution has been found is there a question’). That is: where we can only expect the solution of the problem from some sort of revelation, there isn’t even a question. To a revelation no question corresponds.” The remark was intended only to illustrate, by way of counter-exposition, the idea that all knowledge is systemic. Questions only arise out of systems which prepare the way for the answer about to be given. Only a revelation as a complete alienum would stand outside this model, and Wittgenstein did not expect such an event to occur, or believe that it had. One could say that Rahner’s approach presumes upon this maxim of the Tractatus. “We feel that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched. Of course there are then no questions left, and this itself is the answer (Wittgenstein 1961, 73 n. 6.52).” Wittgenstein’s point was that within a scientific world-view, science will pose its own questions and provide its own answers. And of course the “problems of life remain completely untouched.” Given the fact that the appendage to the Tractatus deals with ethics, one can safely assume that what does not disappear are ethical problems, which globally can be characterized as questions dealing with the human person’s ultimate


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disposition over and against the world he encounters through reason. The Kantian question reappears in altered form. After the question, “What can I know?” there remains, “What must I do?” Rahner depicts a human person who does not need God as a deux ex machina to complete that which stands incomplete about the world. There is nothing incomplete within the world; it carries its own potentiality. But there remains, as Wittgenstein noted, those “problems of life,” problems ultimately about the direction of human life. What Rahner and Wittgenstein both make clear is that direction and movement may be more important than location and stasis. The former may well be the mark of the divine within us, and a pledge of accompaniment. Finally, the word of revelation itself requires consideration.

8.3 Meaning Incarnate When Rahner takes up the question of categorical revelation, the revelation which is Jesus Christ, he again roots his approach in his philosophical premises, all the while allowing the novum of revelation its full significance. This is very clear in his seminal essay “The Theology of the Symbol.” In Spirit in the World he portrayed the human act of cognition as distinguishing between an essence (which is shared by members of class) and a quiddity (which pertains to the member at hand). Here is how this distinction returns in his theological explication of the symbol. “Our first statement, which we put forward as the basic principle of an ontology of symbolism, is as follows: all beings are by their very nature symbolic, because they necessarily ‘express’ themselves in order to attain their own nature (Rahner 1966a, 224).” He goes on to explain that a symbol must share in the very nature of the thing symbolized if there is to be more than a conventional, and hence arbitrary, unity between the two. “To reach the primary concept of symbol, we must start from the fact that all beings (each of them, in fact) are multiple, and are or can be essentially the expression of another in this unity of the multiple and one in this plurality, by reason of its plural unity (ibid. 225-226).”

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All beings, by being members of a class, can thus symbolize other members of the same class. This fact, however, need not be construed as a limitation of being. He goes on to insist that it should not be thought “that an intrinsic plurality and distinction must always be merely the stigma of the finiteness of a being.” Like Rousselot before him, Rahner approaches human cognition by framing it in reference to its divine counterpart. “We know, on the contrary, from the mystery of the Trinity — we are doing theological ontology, which need not be afraid of adducing revealed data: that there is a true and real — even though ‘only’ relative — distinction of ‘persons’ in the supreme simplicity of God, and hence a plurality, at least in this sense (ibid. 226).” Rahner considers the immanent procession of the Son from the Father as the preeminent symbolization of all being. “Being as such, and hence as one (ens as unum), for the fulfilment of its being and its unity, emerges into a plurality — of which the supreme mode is the Trinity (ibid. 228).” A being realizes itself by being present to itself. “For realization as plurality and as possession of self cannot be disparate elements simply juxtaposed in a being, since possession of self (in knowledge and love) is not just an element, but the content of that which we call being (and hence self-realization) (ibid. 229).” The Thomistic roots in the absolute concurrence between being and knowledge are evident here. Rahner is anxious to align his presentation with that of Aquinas. Fullness of being means fullness of knowledge, whether of the self or other entities. A being can be and is known, in so far as it is itself ontically (in itself) symbolic because it is ontologically (for itself) symbolic. What then is the primordial meaning of symbol and symbolic, according to which each being is in itself and for itself symbolic, and hence (and to this extent) symbolic for another? It is this: as a being realizes itself in its own intrinsic “otherness” (which is constitutive of its being), retentive of its intrinsic plurality (which is contained in its self-realization) as its derivative and hence congruous expression, it makes itself known. This derivative and congruous expression, constitutive of each being, is the symbol which comes in addition from the object of knowledge to the knower — in addition only, because already initially present in the depths of the grounds of


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each one’s being. The being is known in this symbol, without which it cannot be known at all: thus it is symbol in the original (transcendental) sense of the word (ibid. 230-31).

Citing Thomas, Rahner argues that all beings must come to realize their own essences, which is to say that they remain in a dynamic process of becoming through self-realization.2 The ontos cannot be itself without becoming, or speaking, the logos. The Trinity is the preeminent, primordial manifestation of this truth, but “there is another doctrine in scholasticism which can also be adduced to confirm the concept of symbol given above [...] it is the doctrine which holds that the soul is the ‘form’ of the body, the body being the expression of the basic spiritual reality of man (ibid. 233-34).” The above is admittedly dense to anyone unfamiliar with Spirit in the World, where Rahner’s first employed Thomistic categories of epistemology. Without that background, its claim that even inanimate object “symbolize” themselves seem difficult to conceive. It must be remembered that when one speaks of “symbolization” one is already within the field of communication, or language. Thus, although Rahner is speaking of inanimate objects, he is doing so from the point of view of their appropriation by the human subject. He draws upon a Thomistic distinction between the ontic substance, which stands beyond empirical reality, and the received object, called the species. Of course for Aquinas, it is crucial that one not posit a Kantian chasm between the substance itself and the impressed species in the intellect. This is why the philosopher saint insists that the species is not a product of the human intellect, but the actual manifestation of the known substance, which is known as object. This is most comprehensible when set in the Thomistic teaching that being and knowing are circumincessive. For Aquinas being exists in order to be present to self, to be known. Rahner takes this insight, and uses it to speak of the substance expressing itself through the species. The species becomes the symbolization of the essence in time and space. There is not too much poetical license in saying that for Rahner, the world which surrounds us speaks; 2

Which is not to say that Aquinas is the only philosopher whose influence is evident here. Hegel’s certainly is as well.

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it is there for us. If, according to a scholastic approach, something transcends the limitations of space and time, the essence, it nevertheless is only known through appropriation in space and time, in a given quiddity, its symbol when viewed from the point of view of communion, a concept binding communal existence and knowledge. It might seem that Wittgenstein and Rahner must finally part company. The very concept of linguistic communion has been stretched far beyond the bounds that any Cambridge-trained philosopher could possibly accept. However, both thinkers need to be understood on a level deeper than the concepts or terms each employed. They must be understood on the level of fundamental insights. Wittgenstein’s thought is often naively characterized as having set boundaries to language, but that is not exactly what Wittgenstein means when he suggests that language is sufficient, that language is “all there is.” His point is that we need not look beyond language to find reality. Reality is not a substratum lying beyond our cognitive ken because it lies beyond language. When Wittgenstein speaks of the limit of language, he does not do so in the way Kant is often accused of doing, that of setting a boundary which cannot be passed, which only raises the question of how the original boundary was perceived in the first place. Wittgenstein speaks of a boundary to forbid the would-be philosopher from thinking to look beyond language for the real. The real, that which deserves our trust and upon which we will act with confidence, does not lie beyond language, but within it. Without ever using Kant’s terms, he is fundamentally rejecting a dichotomy of reality between noumena and phenomena. He refuses to begin with Descartes’ knowing subject and then ask how the subject ever extricates knowledge which is not self-knowledge. Ultimately Wittgenstein is suggesting that there should be a fundamental confidence in language. It works. What the human person must know is revealed there. The real is the linguistic. Why do we want it removed from our own place of existence? Rahner the Thomist espouses the same confidence in language. As he depicts the world in “The Theology of the Symbol” it is ordered toward communion. Every order of being expresses itself, because every order of being is ordered toward communion. The litmus test of this congruence occurs in their similar remarks about the soul.


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Rahner comes at it by way of Thomism. The soul is the “form” of the body, the body being the expression of the basic spiritual reality of the human person. It must be kept in mind that Aquinas never allows form and prime matter to be separated. The two realities are only distinguished conceptually. Speaking strictly from the point of view of the saint’s philosophy, souls do not become disincarnate, since body and soul have no meaning apart from one another. Wittgenstein’s comments about the soul are well worth examining, because they illustrate his fundamental conception of language and his confidence in it. He rejected the notion that a soul should be conceived as an occult reality unreachable by language, beyond ordinary human cognition. “‘What I think silently to myself is hidden from him’ can only mean that he cannot guess it, for this or that reason; but it does not mean that he cannot perceive it because it is in my soul.” (Wittgenstein 1982, 1:0 127e n. 977) Whatever one might wish to designate by means of the word “soul,” that reality is not something accessible beyond language. Wittgenstein rejects the notion that meaning somehow transcends the spatio-temporal world in which we live, rather than coming to expression within it. “You look at a face and say ‘ I wonder what’s going on behind that face?’ — But you don’t have to say that. The external does not have to be seen as a facade behind which the mental powers are at work (n. 978).” “The idea of the human soul, which one either sees or doesn’t see, is very similar to the idea of the meaning of a word, which stands next to the word, whether as a process or an object (n. 979).” Does the fact that the meaning of the word “soul” need not be sought beyond the spatiotemporal world mean that the word has no referent? Wittgenstein poses the same question and answers it.(1980b 1: 109e n. 586) “Then it is misleading to speak of man’s soul, or of his spirit? So little misleading, that it is quite intelligible if I say ‘My soul is tired, not just my mind.’ But don’t you at least say that everything that can be expressed by means of the word ‘soul,’ can also be expressed somehow by means of the words for the corporeal? I do not say that. But if it were so — what would it amount to? For the words, and also what we point to in explaining them, are nothing but instruments, and everything depends on their use.”

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In the Investigations Wittgenstein asserted that “the human body is the best picture of the human soul (1967b, 178 e s. II, n. iv),” a remark very similar to Rahner’s Thomism. It’s thoroughly Wittgenstein. The “soul” of another is the other. It doesn’t lie beyond or within. The facial expression of another, her posture as she leans in, or away, the lines upon her face, these “express” the soul. Rahner might suggest that together these physical realities form a species communicating the presence of the other who is surely present through them. They are the other’s presence by means of the symbolic. It is surely not a simple defect of human cognition that we picture angels by means of the human body, even though, as purely spiritual beings, they possess no bodies. What other way does the human person, the spirit in the world, have of expressing the spiritual? Rahner’s fundamental philosophical premise in “The Theology of the Symbol” is that reality itself is symbolic. If human beings recognize that something transcends the spatial-temporal, they also realize that it only comes to expression and appropriation through the spatialtemporal. Rahner views the human person as “spirit in the world” the unique creature constituted by the spatial-temporal, and thus limited, who continually sees beyond the limitations of matter to that which transcends. Truly Thomistic and Western, that which transcends is not to be sought in denial of the spatial-temporal. Rahner is Aristotelian, not Platonist. It is only perceived, from our point of view, only expresses itself, from a view not our own, through the material world. The world itself is thus mystical. This is not a contradiction, and it only appears so to those whose philosophical bent is Platonic, Cartesian, or Kantian. In Western thought there will always be those who want the real (meaning) to lie beyond the real (given). This is the philosophical predisposition which Wittgenstein castigated. It has a decisive influence upon theology. Many of those who find Rahner’s theological work too anthropological are philosophically predisposed to look beyond the world for the meaning of the world. When Rahner (1966a, 235) writes that “no theology can be complete without also being a theology of the symbol, of the appearance and the expression, of self-presence in that which has been constituted as the other. And in fact the whole of theology is


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incomprehensible if it is not essentially a theology of symbols” he is rooting his consideration of the supernatural in the natural. Since the perfection of being means self-knowledge, and being can only come to knowledge of the self through self-expression, the world itself is seen as a communion of beings dynamically ordered toward that horizon in which being and knowledge are one. A revelation from God, Rahner argues in Spirit in the World, is to be expected in the world. There the reasoning has to do with our nature as material spirits in time. In “The Theology of the Symbol” the reason for revelation is rooted in the nature of the Trinity itself. The perfection (in being) of the Trinity lies in its own dynamic, and yet fulfilled, act of expression. “The Logos is the ‘word’ of the Father, his perfect ‘image’, his ‘imprint’, his radiance, his self-expression.” (ibid. 236) The Son is not only, not even primarily, the ad extra expression of the Father. On the contrary, “He is truly God, that is, the Word of God, in whom God as principle (the Father), in the communication of his own divine nature, — in the full expression which constitutes a divine person, and is not addressed to a creature, — expresses himself (the Son) (Rahner 1963, 12).” In other words, the world is the way that it is, necessarily seeking expression in communion, because God is the way God is. This is why in his essay “Nature and Grace” Rahner (1966a, 176) argues that the Incarnation cannot be viewed as one among many possible modes of God’s expression. “As a rule, the connection between Incarnation and grace is thought of as merely de facto: God has in fact decreed that the order of grace should depend on the Incarnate Word. It is implicitly supposed that things could be otherwise. But is this supposition clear and certainly correct? Both the order of grace and the Incarnation derive from God’s free grace. But does it follow that both these objects of God’s gracious will, in both of which he communicates himself, ad extra, though in different ways, are really two different acts of his freely exercised love? Is there anything in Catholic principles to prevent us taking the Scotist point of view and considering the primal act of God, in which everything else is in fact given, as the self-exteriorization of God who is the love which gives itself in the incarnation?”

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What should be clear is that categorical revelation is not an addendum to the basic premises of Rahner. In Spirit in the World, discussion of the supernatural existential is intended to depict the human person as a transcendent spirit, reaching beyond the limitations of time and space for that which would bring to fulfillment a dynamic faculty of transcendence. In his essay on the symbol, Rahner suggests that the act of self-expression is a fundamental aspect of all being, beginning with God, an assertion which can only be assumed if one accepts the data of revelation as given (McCool 1980, 77). Rahner’s approach is considerably strengthened by Wittgenstein’s assertion that meaning is not a rider to language, but only comes to expression within language. Meaning does not stand beyond language and then subsequently choose where to insert itself. It is a function of language. Rahner (1966a, 237-38) beautifully reflects upon the Incarnation of the Logos and suggests that one must view the Incarnation as the essential self-expression of the Logos. We cannot suppose, he suggests, that the Logos would make himself audible and perceptible through a reality which of itself is alien to him, had intrinsically and essentially nothing to do with him, and could have been chosen at random from a whole series of such realities. No matter how close we consider the union between the speaker and his means of communication — the union is in fact hypostatic — it would not change the fact that the sign and that which is signified are really disparate, and that the sign could therefore only be an arbitrary one. Or we could put it more exactly: the assumed humanity would be an organ of speech substantially united to him who is to be made audible: but it would not be this speech itself. It itself would only tell something about — itself; it could only tell about the Word in so far as the Word used it to form words and direct actions which would divulge something about the word by their meaning and their marvelous quality. It is not surprising that a theology with these unavowed, unconscious but effective presuppositions should in the concrete make Jesus the revelation of the Father and his inward life only through his doctrine but not through what he is in his human nature. In such a position, the most that could come in question would be a revelation by means of his (virtuous) actions.


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In asserting that all creation is symbolic, which is to say communicative, Rahner makes reality linguistic (1963, 25), which is to say capable of being an expression of God. “He has not only willed to deal with us through the creation, where everything we meet with is always merely finite, a sign only, and a mere pointer to God who ever remains beyond. He has willed to act directly with us himself, so that what happens, and what he does, what he shows and what he gives, is ultimately, in reality, himself, even if as yet only in the promise that he will one day reveal himself to us face to face, with nothing to stand between him and us any more. Further, — it is the most adorable mystery of faith — he has himself become man in the person of his Word.” If one accepts Wittgenstein’s insight that meaning does not ride language like a horse, but is a function of language, then one cannot suggest that the Logos of the Father, in choosing to become incarnate, merely uttered a word in the spatial-temporal world which is not his own complete self-expression. The Jesus who appears in human history cannot be considered a word about God but most be viewed as the word of God. His humanity and his history are the selfexpression of the Father. “The being of the Logos — considered of course as that which is received by procession from the Father — must be thought of as exteriorizing itself, so that without detriment to its immutability in itself and of itself, it becomes itself in truth the existence of a created reality — which must in all truth and reality be predicated of the being of the Logos because it is so (Rahner 1966a, 238).” Following Wittgenstein, it can be said that God’s “meaning” is found in the Son, not beyond him. Or bluntly, the Son does not express meaning. He is that meaning.3 “But then, starting from these Thomistic principles, we arrive at considerations and insights which 3

Cf. Dei Verbum. n. 4. Rahner (1966a) covers this same ground in his essay “Remarks on the Dogmatic Treatise ‘De Trinitate’”where he uses the intrinsic unity between expression and meaning in order to assert that the imminent Trinity truly reveals its very self in the economy of salvation. The Son who is the vehicle of revelation to humanity is also the Father’s own self-expression to himself. “Language-as-communion” is given a Trinitarian foundation, an assertion which becomes incomprehensible if one posits a radical distinction between meaning and expression.

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show how truly and radically the humanity of Christ is really the ‘appearance’ of the Logos itself, its symbolic reality in the pre-eminent sense, not something in itself alien to the Logos and its reality, which is only taken up from outside like an instrument to make its own music but not strictly speaking to reveal anything of him who uses it (Rahner 1966a, 238).” Wittgenstein and Rahner arrive at a fundamental concurrence. Meaning exists within the world, within language. It is already given. It is not to be sought beyond, and this is true whether by meaning one means only “cognitive sense” or fully existential, salvific purpose. Meaning lies latent within the world and its language, not because the divine has been reduced to the human, but because the human exists as it does because of the divine. It exists to receive the divine. Wittgenstein might well say that meaning is incarnate within language; Rahner would insist that meaning bears a human face.

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Chapter 9 Conclusion

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n a very useful article, “Theologische Methode und Wissenschaftstheorie,” Lindbeck (1978, 267; my translation) reviewed several contemporary approaches to theological methodology noting that “as often remarked, an exclusive attention to method is an indication of a certain insecurity in an intellectual discipline.” For theology, the insecurity is at least as old as the Enlightenment and well entrenched since the scientific and industrial revolutions. It is an uncertainty shared with philosophy and the humanities as a whole. Kant asserted that metaphysics, because it is so far removed from sensibility, could never evidence the sort of progress seen in the physical sciences. Several centuries of effort, however, have not kept the “would-be” sciences from trying. Wittgenstein began his philosophical work under the tutelage of Bertrand Russell, who felt the century had arrived in which a true philosophy of science could be produced. Russell viewed the work of philosophy as a sort of vanguard to scientific thought proper. Besides coordinating the findings of science through the development of a logically perspicuous language, philosophic speculation would conceptually explore areas that might later yield themselves to empirical colonization. Perhaps the greatest shift that occurs between the thought of the earlier and later Wittgenstein is a rejection of what might be called a scientific model of philosophical methodology. Already in the Tractatus Wittgenstein (1961, 73 n. 6.52) recognized that the circumference of properly scientific investigation was severely limited. “We feel that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched. Of course there are

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then no questions left, and this itself is the answer.” What really mattered to life was left untouched by science. “The facts all contribute only to setting the problem, not to its solution (n. 6.4321).” In the Tractatus what really matters is left to silence, but it is not a derisive silence inspired by positivistic disdain of the nonempirical, or even an indifferent silence toward that which cannot be exploited technologically. The silence with which the Tractatus ends is awe in the presence of that which transcends human cognition. “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence (ibid. 74 n. 7).” Wittgenstein viewed as a disservice to the mystical the sort of philosophy which would think that conceptual systems, akin to those of science, could render the transcendent translucent (ibid. 73-74). The change recorded in the pages of the Investigations does not represent a radical reevaluation of scientific methodology, so much as a complete rejection of the possibility of constructing a philosophical system which could serve science either through the creation of a logical perspicuous language or through systemic, synthetic construction. Instead Wittgenstein concentrated his efforts in freeing philosophical thought from an undue and unhealthy emulation of scientific methodology. Philosophy must not seek the general by ignoring the particular. Absolute logical perspicuity is not a goal of philosophic analysis. Conceptual definitions, so crucial to empirical cognition, rarely serve the needs of ordinary life, where family resemblance is to be expected rather than conceptual essences. Needless to say, the later Wittgenstein did for the humanities what the early Wittgenstein had done for the sciences. Just as an entire school of positivistic-minded philosophers found the impetus and inspiration for their work in the Tractatus, so too a second wave of philosophy sought to construct a proper philosophy of the humanities upon the thought of the later Wittgenstein. It is Wittgenstein’s unique position in the 20th century that he twice redirected several generations of thought and that he was twice profoundly misread by his would-be followers. The story of Wittgenstein reading the poetry of the Indian mystic Rabindranath Tagore to the assembled members of the Vienna Circle is well known. They had invited the man they considered their philosophic mentor to address them on the philosophy of science.

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What an elegant, dramatic way to suggest that what counted most in the Tractatus was not the time-bound primary corpus of the work, but the post-World-War addendum on the “mystical” which eludes science. Wittgenstein is not available, however, to comment upon the way his work has been appropriated by those seeking a philosophic foundation for the humanities. Before concluding this work, it seems appropriate to examine what I consider to be profound misunderstandings of that work and its utility for the humanities and, in particular, for theology. First, regarding the relationship of language to reality. The Tractatus presumed to make language mirror the world. Although not at first evident, the result of this philosophic labor would be a one-to-one correspondence between a perfected, perspicuous language and reality. It is sometimes naively presumed that the latter Wittgenstein severs any relationship of language to the world, or disparages any correspondence between the two. If this were true, the result would be pure skepticism, a position Wittgenstein soundly rejects. To admit a radical discontinuity between language and the world would be to succumb to the very Cartesian dichotomy Wittgenstein deplored. The origins of that dichotomy are based in the early scientific worldview of the 16th century. The ability to delineate the exact boundaries of a possible object of knowledge has been thought to be indispensable in scientific methodology, although even here the search for such an ability may well be a will o’whisp. Nevertheless, the Cartesian dichotomy of knowing-subject and known-object was predicated upon that very division. What Wittgenstein showed, particularly in his reflections on the philosophy of psychology, is that the line of demarcation between subject and object can rarely be delineated with absolute precision. He does not, however, collapse the known world into the knowing subject. He is not an idealist or a solipsist; the former is not reducible to the latter. Wittgenstein would readily admit that science achieves its results in the way Kant suggested (1929, 17), because it dictates its own a priori conditions of employment. Yet even the most empirical of sciences cannot escape a vagueness inherent in language, particularly in the relationship between criteria and symptoms (Baker and Hacker 1980,

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373). “What to-day counts as an observed concomitant of a phenomenon will to-morrow be used to define it (Wittgenstein 1967b, 37-38e n. 79).” In his Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics Wittgenstein (1978, 65 n. 74) repudiates the notion that because he challenges the then-regnant notion of “essence,” the world has been left without foundations. “I say, however: if you talk about essence, you are merely noting a convention. But here one would like to retort there is no greater difference than that between a proposition about the depth of the essence and one about — a mere convention. But what if I reply: to the depth that we see in the essence there corresponds the deep need for convention.” It would certainly be a mistake to read Wittgenstein as suggesting, like Kant, that science works because it possesses a conceptual precision lacking to the humanities. Imprecision is an inherent feature of language, wherever it might be employed (Baker and Hacker 1980, 375). This is because imprecision, like precision, are language games, not extralinguistic moorings. Wittgenstein called for the humanities to quit aping the empirical sciences in a desire for determinacy of sense, since this was never absolute in either domain. He certainly did not suggest that the humanities lack any correspondence to the world which surrounds us and therefore have no obligation to pursue that most ancient of human goals, truth. The very opposite is the case. Human knowledge is not the Kantian determination of absolute and a priori scales of rational thought. It involves receptivity, a coming to rest in that which is given. Where the Tractatus offered an ordered calculus of cognition, the Investigations offer language games. These do not arise through human cogitation; they make it possible. Language games serve cognitive purposes or they would cease to be employed by human beings. This must be kept in mind when considering the theological enterprise, which, as a conceptual construction, is not a single language game, but rather employs them in numbers too large to ascertain. While language games are preconceptual, their employment in a theological edifice cannot be. It is a profound misreading of Wittgenstein first to speak of theology itself as a language game, and

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then to suggest that, as a game, it has no obligation to reflect reality, or to offer a synthetic means of appropriating reality. This is not because one epistemological norm has been raised to the level of the absolute, but rather because an ontological norm is seen as intrinsic to epistemology itself. Ens verum et unum. To say that reality must not be sought beyond language, but within, is not to suggest that human beings are immersed in a world entirely dependent upon their own acts of cognition. The opposite conclusion must be drawn. Human knowledge is a response to a “given,” to that which is other. Theology cannot sever itself from ontology, even as the meaning of “ontology” shifts. Far from disparaging the existence of a reality beyond ourselves, Wittgenstein’s key insight is that the reality we experience forms the prethematic, preconceptual background out of which our language games operate. What Wittgenstein did was to realign the relationship between language and reality. In doing so, he effectively ended the post-Kantian debate by ejecting its opening question of the mind’s relationship to the world. In the latter Wittgenstein, mind and world stand together in language. Language is not the “product” of the mind, nor is it a “tool” for the acquisition of reality. It is not a product of the mind because it does not arise through ratiocination. It is not a tool which spans the gap between the mind and what it knows of an external world, because neither the mind nor the world is external to language. For better or for worse, Kant had fundamentally realigned the question of metaphysics. He rejected a metaphysics understood as a conceptually based investigation of occult objects lying beyond the reach of the empirical. He did not, however, reject a synthetic role for metaphysics. It must still act as a unifying conceptual synthesis for diverse realms of human investigation. Rahner and the Transcendental Thomists responded to the Kantian metaphysical critique by taking up his first injunction to the discipline. Their reflections upon the metaphysics of knowledge, upon what must be the case for the knowing subject to adequately grasp a known object, is an attempt of speculative reason to “measure its powers according to the different way in which it chooses the objects of its thinking (Kant 1929, 25).” Where Gilson and other traditional Thomists rejected outright the

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Cartesian dichotomy between knowledge and being, upon which the Kantian critique is based, Transcendental Thomism attempted a dialogue. It was not, however, one which began with radical Cartesian doubt. The starting point was classical Aristotelian realism. We know objects outside of ourselves. What then are the transcendental conditions which make this knowledge possible? The key, after Wittgenstein, is to once again accept a “given” which lies outside the human mind, despite the fact that our knowledge of it occurs only within our own heuristic horizon. In this approach, Wittgenstein returns Western thought to its origins. Rejecting this traditional Western option leaves one the choice of either limiting reality to the mind or imposing the mind’s hegemony upon all of reality. Like Kant, Wittgenstein considered philosophical investigations to be conceptual, not empirical (1967, 82e n. 458). But like Thomism in general, he rejected the Cartesian dichotomy as a hopelessly wrong starting point. The skepticism it introduces into epistemological discourse is only possible because of a more fundamental affirmation of reality which lies latent and unrecognized. When Wittgenstein took up the question of epistemology, he ultimately began to argue that one field of discourse found its rationalization, or foundation, upon a previous one, and it too was linked in a spiraling web of affirmations. Ultimately these affirmations, when taken collectively, constituted a world of lived, affirmed realities based upon mutuality of criteria and judgements. We could not live together, or live fruitfully, without a shared discourse based upon a shared experience of reality. Rahner begins by asserting that we know reality, that every individual act of cognition finds insertion into a framework of known objects, into a system of affirmed realities. If this system, so allencompassing as to be called a horizon of thought, cannot be brought into a meaningful whole which realizes the human need to go out of the self toward that which is other in order to complete the self, in short, if the human faculty of knowledge cannot come to rest in what can surely be called the divine, then human cognition itself becomes an exercise in futility.

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In both Wittgenstein and Rahner the human person is depicted as an interlocutor who must go out of the self in order to become the self. Rahner grounds this in his reading of Thomas; Wittgenstein in the need for a community to provide the world-forming framework upon which cognition depends. In both approaches knowledge of all that really matters is always given in the meaning-nexus that we call the community. This has profound implications for any epistemology attempting to understand the nature of cognition in the humanities. Heuristic movement is always out of the self toward others. To speak a language is already to have transcended the self. In short, if the ineluctable movement of modern philosophy was to lock the self into a self-imposed isolation, post-modern thought may still succeed in revealing language as the ontic cipher of humanity’s communal nature. This juxtaposition of the work of Wittgenstein and Rahner has elucidated the following affirmations about the human person and consequently about any possible philosophical anthropology. Far from being Cartesian, isolated ghosts in machines, human beings creatively and fecundly engage reality by means of language. This engagement is accomplished by innumerable language games, which are not the result of ratiocination, but rather emerge through sustained, communal, and corporeal contact with the world. “World” is an aptly chosen word, since the presupposition is that by this word the human person acknowledges the givenness of reality. As a heuristic horizon, the world itself cannot become an object of knowledge; it cannot be rendered “at hand” or employable. Because this contact is communal it is also per naturam historical, which is to say that human cognition remains evolutionary. Because human cognition is evolutionary, one of its fundamental requirements is the creation of heuristic worlds-of-understanding which make possible advances in cognition. Heuristic worlds act as prethematic fields of self-reference, and they are necessarily selfimplicating. They are themselves not affirmed entities, but the noetic skein that makes the very act of affirmation possible. It is crucial to remember this when considering religion or faith as a heuristic world. Even something as apparently “dogmatic” as dogma itself, has a heuristic function, which is to say that its purpose is not to preclude

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investigation but to spur it on by indicating fields of possible investigation through a delineation of those already closed. Again, it helps to remember the Tractarian insight that every affirmation intrinsically carries both a positive and negative pole, the logical space carved out by an affirmation against its converse. For example, to assert that “Christ is true God and true man” is to tell the would-be seeker not to look in any field of possible solutions which does not do justice to the inherent tension contained in the affirmation. For a religion to be a heuristic world, it must remain an evolving one, one open to discovery. It must be a world ever and increasingly able to integrate apparently disparate elements of reality in a manner which synthesizes without subjugating. The latter would not be religion but the stagnation of idolatry. Like all advances in human thought, authentic religious reflection, theology, should dispel darkness, not appease our fears in its face. When no questions remain, religion is no longer true to its own dynamism of journey. The fundamental noetic drive of the human person identified by Transcendental Thomism has been squelched, and the divine image itself becomes occluded. Religion is not the offering of a world without questions, but rather the intense and ultimate questioning of the world, an act which expands the world. Religious people can be all too facile with answers, but the perennial task of faith is to question, because the very object of faith is the ever-inestimable Godhead. Because worlds are human constructs, and human beings must pose questions about the disposition of their own freedom, worlds possess a preconceptual and perhaps irreducible admixture of ontic and valuative elements. Whenever the self “sees” a world, it sees the whole from an evaluative perspective. If this does not occur, a world in the full sense of the term has not been encountered. The temptation, of course, is the reduce the world to an object at hand, which effectively forecloses the question of ethics, of value. If the world is mine, then how can a question of how I should dispose of myself over and against, or within, the world even arise? This is why the very question of ethics presupposes a certain “reverence” for the world. The problem with every system of philosophy that makes the world an end-in-itself is that it concludes by making the world no more than the end-of-the-

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self. The exaltation of human reason and human autonomy alone leads to nothing less than a profoundly inhuman form of hegemony. If a universal existential of the human person is to be sought, upon which an adequate fundamental theology can be constructed, it should be the dynamic striving of human cognition which remains constant, rather than the cumulative intellectual results of that process, which evolve in history. Human thought presumes upon, and is premised upon, a whole which it does not possess, but which makes cognition itself possible. Given the now innate contextualism of post-modern thought, Fergus Kerr (1997, viii) asks “is there a way, are there ways, of acknowledging the limitations of human existence without regarding them, perhaps with a certain resentment, as barriers, but which, on the other hand, would not simply eliminate our desire to transcend our finitude?” The work done in Transcendental Thomism at the beginning of the last century, remains a fruitful paradigm for further progress. The relativity of contemporary thought only paradoxically recalls the Transcendental Thomistic affirmation that thought itself represents a striving. Wittgenstein (1961, 56 n. 5.6) consistently called Western thought back from its tendency to look beyond language for a realm in which to posit the real. “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world (5.6).” “Language must speak for itself (1974, 63).” “Ordinary language is all right (1960, 28).” “We are struggling with language. We are engaged in a struggle with language(1980a, 11e).” Meaning is not beyond language, but within it.1 1

He also noted that even when language appears “transcendent,” this is only a function of the language game being played. Infinity is not brought thereby into language. For example, we do not gaze upon infinity when we realize that a new fraction can be introduced between any two existing ones. It’s in the nature of the game itself (Wittgenstein 1978, 137 s. II n. 42). Or “To say that a technique is unlimited does not mean that it goes on without ever stopping — that it increases immeasurably; but that it lacks the institution of the end, that it is not finished of if it has no period. Or of a playing-field that is unlimited, when the rules of the game do not prescribe any boundaries — say by means of a line (ibid. 138, s. II n. 45)” Or “As when we say ‘this thought holds all numbers’ and think that in our thought we have comprehended all numbers like apples in a box (Wittgenstein 1974, 263).” The notion of transcendence being presented here is in no way one of an apparent “infinity of magnitude” to human thought, a notion already debunked in Kant. In other words, whatever may eventually be discovered of , it will not be God!

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At the same time, Wittgenstein looked beyond language, looked for what he considered the inexpressible. This can only mean that it is legitimate to speak of a certain transcendence of language, and to mean by that, both that language is the only medium there is for human thought, for human meaning, and also that language itself is a medium, which is to say that it opens out to that which is not itself. Another who is not the self comes to expression there. To say that truth dwells within language is ultimately to say that language, as a natural reality, already possesses an inherent openness to the supernatural, a drive toward it. Language itself contains neither it own origin or its final telos. One cannot avoid the issue, the question posed by the existence of language, by arguing that the question hypostatizes language. To understand Wittgenstein is to realize that this is the one thing we cannot do. We cannot place language before us as an object for our consideration, because we cannot extricate ourselves from language, cannot shed our human skin. Language is not an object in the world requiring explication. The world is knitted together by language, but the world as a whole requires, if not explication, then the conscious adopting of a stance toward it. In one of his final conversations with Wittgenstein, Bouwsma (1986, 68; Cf. Wittgenstein 1961, 71-72 nn. 6.41, 6.421,6.43, and 6.4312) recorded the philosopher as repeating lines very similar to those he had written some forty years earlier in the Tractatus. “The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In it there is no value, it must lie outside all happening and being-so. It must lie outside the world. Ethics and Aesthetics are one. The world of the happy is quite another than that of the unhappy. The solution of the riddle of life in space and time lies outside space and time.” So many years later, and still the same conviction! Language offers us the world, but somehow it is a world which cannot itself offer as answer. A Catholic synthesis must continue to recognize both the transcendence and imminence of God, and do so within language. God remains that silence which envelopes language, and yet communion with God occurs in language because, it can be said, the Incarnation occurs within language. A Catholic synthesis, which might yet possess the power to redeem and reformulate what might be called a human

9~Conclusion

253

way of knowing, must continually affirm a vibrant tension between that which is given and our own human, cocreative, response to it. In his writings, Rahner frequently reflected upon the words of a Eucharistic hymn attributed to Aquinas, Adoro te devote latens Deitas, quae sub his figuris vere latitas. He viewed them as encapsulating his theological project, because they express the notion of the divine lying latent within the human, and yet not reduced to it. On the contrary, the human must be viewed from the very beginning as grounded in something other than itself. It is called to adore that which is both imminently close and ever transcendent. To say that in language reality speaks itself, symbolizes its own openness to the human person in that perichoresis of being and knowing which is “of God,” is to say that reality, in its most radical foundation, is personal. In the end, language tells us that the real is communion. We can conclude by saying that to be human is to stand in communion with others who are not the self; to be human is to stand in communion with God who is not us. But then a single word, spoken only once by a single human being, because it would have had to be directed out of the self toward another, would have said, eternally, the very same.

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Author Index

A Anscombe, G.E.M., 31, 32 Antiseri, Dario, 62, 81 Aquinas 24, 45, 122, 127 Aristotle 45, 122, 127 Augustine 50, 98

B Baker, G.P., 50, 67, 95 Barth, Karl, 120 Bartley, William, 27 Bell, Richard, 64 Bergman, Gustav, 118 Bouwsma, O.K., 88 Bradley, Francis Herbert, 28

C Cassirer, Ernst, 37 Cavell, Stanley, 49, 71, 78, 83, 96 Coburn, Robert, 38

D Descartes, René, 75, 82, 107, 125 Dickinson, Emily, 87

F Fogelin, Robert, 21, 22, 24, 26, 31, 52

Frazier, James, 71 Frege, Gottlob, 38 Freud, Sigmund, 105

H Hacker, P.M.S., 53, 54, 67, 80, 90, 95 Hallett, Garth, 125, 126 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 127 Heidegger, Martin, 84 Heller, Erich, 27 Hertz, Heinrich, 40 Hudson, W.D., 121 Huizinga, Johann, 58, 61

K Kant, Immanuel, 24, 36, 37, 45, 91, 93, 109, 110, 113-117, 127 Kaufman, Gordon, 84 Keightley, Alan, 60, 121 Kenny, Anthony, 112 Kerr, Fergus, 73 Kierkegaard, Søren, 33, 89

M Malcolm, Norman, 26, 86, 89 Mann, Thomas, 84 McPherson, Thomas, 82

262


Monk, Ray, 113 Moore, G.E., 43, 91

R Rahner, Karl, 57, 86, 87, 114, 117, 118, 120, 121, 123, 126, 128 Russell, Bertrand, 23-28, 36, 38, 39, 51, 112, 123

S Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 128 Skinner, B.F., 105

T Tagore, Rabindranath, 33 Tolstoy, Leo, 33, 89, 120

W Winch, Peter, 110 Wisdom. Joh, 114 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 21-33, 3545, 47-49, 51-56, 59, 61-66, 69-71, 73, 75, 77, 80-82, 84, 87-98, 100-106, 108-111, 113-116, 118, 120, 121, 123125, 128

Subject Index

263

Subject Index A abstraction, 72-73, 86, 94, 115116, 139-140, 142-143, 152153, 161, 170-171, 181 act, 13, 15-17, 27-29, 32-33, 42, 45, 51, 66-69, 79, 89, 94-96, 98-99, 103-105, 109-110, 117120, 122, 125, 128-130, 133135, 137-139, 141-144, 149150, 154, 157, 160, 162, 166169, 171-172, 179, 185-188, 190, 192-194, 198-200, 202206, 208-210, 219-220, 222, 227, 229, 231, 233, 236, 239241, 247-250 act and potency, 141-142 act of judgement, 149, 157 adequation, 24, 27-28, 46, 142, 187 adequatio rei et intellectus, 17, 24, 28, 184 aesthetics, 43, 114, 252, 258 agent intellect, 137, 152-153 analogy of being, 157 analogical, 13, 83, 122-123, 129, 156, 159, 203 analysis, linguistic, 23, 27-29, 90, 122 angels, 142, 155, 182, 238 anthropology, philosophical, 15, 109-110, 132, 224, 249

Aquinas, 24, 45, 122, 127, 138, 141, 148, 152-158, 163, 166, 171-172, 193, 209, 234-235, 237, 253, 257, 261 Aristotle, 45, 122, 127, 261 Augustine, 50, 98, 157, 193, 255, 261 automaton, 83

B Barth, Karl, 120, 129, 261 Beatific Vision, 149, 157, 208, 227 behaviorism, 73 belief, 16, 19, 33, 86, 88-89, 101102, 114, 119-121, 130-131, 191, 197-199, 202, 205, 256, 258 Bergson, Henri, 149 Bradley, F.H., 28, 261 body, 44, 50, 72-73, 83, 110, 129, 199, 235, 237-238 Brutus, 207-208 Bultmann, Rudolph, 186

C Cassius, 207 certainty, 12, 24, 79, 89-90, 92-93, 95-99, 101, 104, 109, 135, 158-

264


159, 195, 199, 202, 231, 258 Chomsky, Noam, 80 Christ, 9, 13, 33, 88, 175-177, 179, 182-183, 188, 193, 202, 208, 213-216, 218, 233, 242, 250 circumincessio, 158 coherence, 16, 24, 57-58, 69, 98, 139, 158, 161-162, 168-169, 188, 221 coherence theory, 98 cognition, 66, 96, 117-118, 122, 133, 136, 140-141, 146, 149, 151-152, 155-158, 160-161, 163, 165-171, 181-182, 187188, 195-196, 198, 205, 209, 219, 221-222, 227, 229-231, 233-234, 237-238, 244, 246249, 251 cognition as dynamic, 11, 13, 135-137, 141-144, 152, 157158, 160-163, 159-170, 182, 239-240, 251 cognition, animal nature of, 85, 155-156, 158, 211 cognitivist theology, 183, 185-186, 191, 194, 205-206 color, 52, 58-59, 92, 101, 190 colour, 30, 53-54, 59, 65, 101-103, 161, 165, 258 concepts, 9, 11, 13, 16, 27, 39-40, 59, 63, 67, 92-94, 104, 112, 114-115, 121, 125, 134, 140, 143-145, 157, 159, 161-162, 164-165, 181, 184, 194-195, 211, 213, 215, 217, 227, 236 immutable concepts, 13 conceptual knowledge, 13, 98, 137, 140, 227 convention, 64, 68, 246

conversio ad phantasma, 193 cultural-linguistic, 185, 206, 209 criteria, 7, 90, 93, 96, 100, 118, 170, 187-188, 200, 245, 248, 255

D Dante, Alighieri, 207-208, 256, 258 Dei Filius, 17, 32, 42, 127-129, 261 Descartes, René, 11, 75, 82, 107, 125, 236, 261 turn to the subject, 11, 115, 127, 135 doctrine, 10, 34, 157, 178, 183184, 211, 235, 240, 256-257 dogma, 33, 211, 220-221, 249 doubt, 34, 67, 78, 82, 89, 97-101, 147, 158-160, 162, 195, 248

E empirical, 12, 14, 18, 21, 27-28, 31, 38, 45, 59, 86, 92-93, 96, 103, 105, 111-113, 115, 117, 121, 133, 158, 160, 165, 168169, 206, 218, 235, 243-248 Enlightenment, 19, 186, 243 traditional epistemology, 11, 51 esse, 139, 154, 166 essence, 51-52, 55, 64, 67, 93-94, 98, 123-125, 127, 133, 138-140, 142-143, 159, 173, 208, 227, 231, 233, 235-236, 246 ethics, 43, 55, 119, 165, 232, 250, 252

Subject Index ethical, 43-44, 56, 86, 107, 118119, 144, 210, 232 experiential-expressive theology, 183, 186, 188-189, 191-192, 194, 213, 219

F faith, 12-13, 15-19, 32-34, 37-38, 42, 86-87, 89, 119-120, 128129, 149, 164, 176, 178, 185, 200-205, 209-211, 213-214, 219-221, 241, 249-250, 257 act of faith, 13, 17, 32-33, 42, 89, 120, 128-129, 202, 204 faith and reason, 17, 42, 203 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 176 fideism, 15, 33, 129, 202-203 Fides et Ratio, 17-19, 32, 140, 200, 202, 215-216, 261 First Vatican Council, 17, 42 Dei Filius, 17, 32, 42, 127-129, 261 Frazier, James, 71, 261 Frege, Gottlob, 38, 189, 261 Freud, Sigmund, 105, 261 fundamental theology, 12, 14-15, 18, 32, 187, 231, 251, 257

G Gilson, Etienne, 11, 152, 247, 256 God, 9, 12-13, 15-18, 21, 32-33, 36-38, 40-42, 44-45, 55-56, 63, 72, 78, 84-90, 94, 98, 107-108, 114, 120, 123, 125, 127-131, 133, 137-139, 141-142, 144145, 149-150, 153, 156, 163-

265 165, 169-173, 175-185, 187190, 192, 194-196, 198-199, 204-205, 207-211, 214-216, 218-231, 233-234, 239-241, 250-253, 256 existence, 12, 16-18, 26-27, 29, 3940, 42-43, 52-53, 57, 66, 72, 75, 82, 85, 88, 91, 94, 97-98, 102, 107, 122, 127-129, 131, 136, 138-139, 141, 145, 149-150, 154, 156, 162, 168, 170-172, 182, 190-191, 196-197, 199, 202, 204-206, 209, 219, 224, 226-227, 229, 236, 241, 247, 251-252 grace, 32, 89, 126-129, 175-177, 192, 204, 213, 215-216, 222, 226, 239 grammar, 12, 25, 47, 49, 54, 5657, 64-65, 67, 75, 77, 79-85, 87, 89, 91, 93, 95, 97, 99-101, 103, 105, 107, 109, 111, 114, 124, 132, 147, 161, 164, 185-186, 255-256, 258 as logical form, 49

H Hegel, G.W.F., 15, 127, 158, 163, 176, 178, 235, 261 Heidegger, Martin, 15, 84, 132133, 261 heuristic horizon, 29, 55, 109, 122, 248-249 heuristic movement, 22, 27, 66, 104, 123, 249 historicity of the human person, 13, 15, 86, 89, 105-106, 110-111, 116,

266


119, 128, 139, 161, 167, 173, 175, 177, 184, 204, 206, 212, 214, 219, 222, 225-226, 229230, 232, 237, 250-251 history, 17, 23, 44, 65, 73, 127, 133, 150, 161-163, 173-179, 181-182, 184, 188, 192, 197, 201, 206-207, 216, 219, 228229, 241, 251 history as Christological, 163 hope, 62, 73, 84, 88, 104, 143, 150-151 horizon, 11, 29, 38, 41-42, 45, 55, 106, 109, 122, 133, 165, 172, 190, 219, 222, 227, 239, 248249 Hume, David, 18, 171

Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Practical Reason, 169 Critique of Pure Reason, 117, 145, 256 Ding-an-sich, 12, 145-146 Kant and metaphysics, 45, 113, 115, 117-118, 122, 134-135, 141, 145, 156, 224-225, 243, 247 Noumenon, 16 Phenomenon, 42, 67, 73, 94, 101, 154, 195, 210, 217 turn to the subject, 11, 115, 127, 135 Kierkegaard, Søren, 33, 89, 262

I

L

Incarnation, 175-176, 178, 181, 192, 220, 239-240, 252 intellect, 32, 125, 135, 137-144, 148-149, 151-154, 157-158, 162, 172-173, 210, 227, 235 intellect, abstractive, 139-140, 142-144, 152-154, 162, 181 intellect, active, 139-140 intellect, agent, 137, 152-153 intuition, 30, 39, 78, 115, 137138, 140, 153, 156, 173

language, 9-14, 16, 18, 23-27, 3031, 38-41, 44-47, 49-53, 55, 5771, 73, 75-86, 88-91, 93-96, 98, 100-103, 106-110, 112, 114, 116, 118, 122-126, 136-137, 143-147, 150, 158-160, 162, 164, 170-172, 175, 179-195, 197-198, 200-201, 205-206, 210-212, 215-224, 226-229, 231, 235-237, 240-247, 249, 251-253, 255-257 language, border of, 84 language game(s), 52-52, 55, 5767, 80, 92, 94, 96, 98, 103, 106, 108, 116, 122-123, 136-137, 144, 147, 158-160, 171-172, 179-181, 195, 197, 246-247, 249, 251

J Judas, 207-208

K

Subject Index language debate, inclusive, 192 language, ordinary, 47, 59-61, 64, 71, 77, 86, 96, 251 language, private, 76, 78, 81, 217 Lebensformen, 30, 38, 64, 72, 82, 92, 94, 96, 99, 108 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm von, 143 Liberatore, Matteo, 141-142 linguistic analysis, 23, 27-29, 90, 122 linguistic turn, 9, 14, 163, 255 logic, 21, 27, 36, 38-40, 44-45, 4849, 55, 58, 60-61, 68, 90, 92, 95, 99, 123, 160, 206, 232, 258 logic, symbolic, 27, 38-39 logical form, 25, 40, 49, 55-56, 165-166 logical positivism, 26, 125 logical simples, 52 Logos, 139, 147-150, 158, 175, 229, 235, 239-242 Lonergan, Bernard J.F., 3, 10, 213 lumen intellectus, 158

M Milton, John, 208 Maréchal, Joseph, 132-133, 135, 138, 141-149, 152, 157, 162, 168-170, 182, 256 mathematics, 57, 65, 77, 90, 9596, 99, 102, 115, 246, 259 meaning and truth, 17-18, 24, 189 metaphor, 13, 40, 44, 62-63, 75, 142, 146, 165-169, 197, 205 metaphysics, 13-14, 17, 25, 27, 31, 35-37, 45, 54-55, 113-119, 121-

267 122, 133-135, 137, 139, 141145, 149, 152, 154-157, 161162, 173, 212, 223-226, 228, 230, 243, 247, 258 metaphysics, post-linguistic, 13 metaphysics, traditional, 25, 135, 141-142, 152 Michelangelo, 56, 90, 108, 163, 171 Modernist thought, 220, 225 Moore, G.E., 43, 56, 91, 257, 259, 262 mystical, 41-42, 46, 83, 107, 169, 190, 238, 244-245

N nature, 10, 13-14, 22, 32, 36-37, 42, 50, 57-58, 63-64, 66, 72, 93-94, 96, 99, 101, 107, 110112, 118-120, 126, 128-129, 131-132, 137, 143-144, 146, 148, 152-153, 155-156, 158159, 161-164, 173, 175, 177, 180-181, 183, 189-192, 195197, 201-202, 204, 215, 217, 222-224, 226-230, 233, 239240, 249, 251, 256 natural theology, 18, 28, 31-32, 63, 108, 209, 228 negation, 16, 26, 31, 39, 80, 98, 114, 130, 142, 144, 152, 179 noesis, 16, 63, 144 noetic act, 29, 119, 150, 161, 192

O ontology, 23, 27, 51, 53-54, 112,

268

Terrance W. Klein: How Things Are in the World 35, 38, 40, 43, 54, 101, 124, 134, 139, 160, 179, 181-182, 185-186, 191, 198-199, 230 atomic propositions, 25-26, 191 elementary propositions, 27

233-234, 247 ontos, 139, 147, 149-150, 158, 229, 235 ontologism, 157 ostensive definition, 50, 55, 79, 85, 88, 164, 186, 190 Q P pain, 49, 69, 78, 82-83, 85, 110 St. Paul, 108 phantasm, 139-140, 142, 152 philosophy, 9-12, 14-15, 17-18, 21, 23-24, 26, 28, 34-36, 44, 46, 49-50, 54-55, 62, 64, 68, 70, 79-80, 90, 94, 101, 104, 111114, 118, 122, 131-132, 149, 156, 163-164, 175, 182, 186, 193-194, 206, 216, 221-224, 226, 228, 237, 243-245, 249250, 255-259 philosophy of science, 12, 243-244, 255 picture, 31, 48, 55-57, 67, 72, 78, 88, 97, 104, 124, 160, 164, 169, 171, 187, 192-195, 197, 199, 201, 206, 238 picture theory, 31, 56 Plato, 157 Pope John Paul II, 17 Fides et Ratio, 17-19, 32, 140, 200, 202, 215-216, 261 positivism, 26, 31, 125 positivism, logical, 26, 125 potentia obedientialis, 7, 126, 129, 173 preapprehension, 154, 166 propositions, 21, 23, 25-29, 31-32,

Qui Pluribus, 32, 210 quiddity, 153-154, 233, 236 Quine, Willard van Orman, 91, 257 quodammodo omnia, 166

R Rahner, Karl, 5, 8, 10-15, 18-19, 57, 116-121, 123, 126-134, 137, 141, 146-147, 150-158, 162167, 169-180, 182-185, 190, 193, 196, 202, 212-216, 218242, 247-249, 253, 255, 257258, 262 anonymous Christian, 213-216 Cartesian orientation, 11 preapprehension, 154, 166 potentia obedientialis, 7, 126, 129, 173 transcendental existential, 175 reason, 12, 15, 17, 32-34, 42, 65, 68, 79, 82, 86-87, 89, 107-108, 113, 117, 125, 141-142, 145, 148, 153, 156-158, 160, 167169, 191, 197-198, 200, 202203, 215, 222, 226, 229-230, 233, 237, 239, 247, 251, 256, 258 reason and faith, 12, 15, 17, 19, 32-

Subject Index 34, 37, 42, 89, 129, 203, 210 rationality, Enlightenment, 19 reditio completa in seipsum, 163 relativism, 71 religion, 10, 33, 36-37, 56, 88, 129-131, 170, 173, 177, 183, 185, 197-200, 202-203, 205, 209, 214-215, 224-225, 228, 249-250, 256 resurrection, 88-89, 178 revelation, 8-9, 13, 17-18, 23, 32, 42, 87, 126, 128-129, 131-132, 173-183, 185, 187-189, 191193, 195-197, 199-201, 203, 205, 207, 209, 211, 214-216, 220-223, 226, 228-230, 232233, 239-241, 258 categorical revelation, 174, 176, 180, 223, 228, 230, 233, 240 transcendental revelation, 176, 228 Rousselot, Pierre, 137, 140, 143, 149, 152-153, 156-157, 162, 170, 181, 234, 257 rule, 22, 49, 66-68, 80, 93, 95-96, 160, 168, 239 rule following, 67 Russell, Bertrand, 10, 23-28, 36, 38-39, 51-52, 107, 112, 123, 189, 243, 257, 259, 262

S science, 12, 21, 28, 35, 41, 43, 54, 80, 83, 86, 106, 110-116, 118, 121, 130-131, 137, 141, 161162, 185, 191-192, 195, 201, 206, 224, 232, 243-246, 255, 257

269 science, natural, 28, 35, 161 skepticism, 91, 99, 116, 136, 171, 245, 248 Skinner, B.F., 105, 262 soul, 34, 38, 44, 71-73, 89, 138, 140, 200, 207, 235-238 space, 13, 22, 30-31, 39, 46, 108, 144-145, 149, 154-156, 163169, 171, 173, 221, 235-236, 240, 250, 252 space, logical, 22, 31, 46, 144, 250 space as metaphor, 13, 149, 163171 species, 83, 140, 142, 152-153, 235, 238 Spinoza, Baruch, 143 Sprachspiel(e), 13, 57,163, 175, 177, 179, 181, 183, 185, 187, 189, 191, 193, 195, 197, 199, 201, 203, 205, 207, 209, 211 Sraffa, Piero, 143, 259 supernatural, 13, 17, 32, 42-43, 126-129, 132, 173, 175, 177183, 209, 214-215, 220, 223226, 239-240, 252 symbol, 25, 30, 37, 55, 104, 160, 180, 190, 196, 233-236, 238240 symbol, theology of, 180, 190, 196, 233-234, 236, 238-242, 253 symbolic logic, 27, 38-39 synthesis, 18, 22-23, 28-31, 62-63, 66-67, 86-88, 100, 112, 127, 144, 148, 157, 163, 169, 182, 212, 218, 247, 252 synthetic whole, 29, 163 synthetic unity, 23, 30-31

270


T Tagore, Rabindranath, 33, 131, 244, 262 theology, 10-16, 18-19, 28, 31-32, 37, 54, 57, 63, 86-87, 108, 114, 120, 125-127, 129, 162, 174, 176, 178, 180-183, 186-187, 190, 192-194, 196, 200-204, 209-212, 219, 223, 225-226, 228, 230-231, 233, 236, 238240, 243, 245-247, 250-251, 255-257 theology, cognitivist, 183, 185186, 191, 194, 205-206 theology, cultural-linguistic, 185, 206, 209 theology, experiential-expressive, 183, 186, 188-189, 191-192, 194, 213, 219 theology, fundamental, 12, 1415, 18, 32, 187, 231, 251, 257 theology, kataphatic, 194 theology, natural, 18, 28, 31-32, 63, 108, 209, 228 via negativa in theology, 194 Thomism, 13, 16, 98, 119, 125, 133-138, 140-141, 149, 151, 159-160, 162, 172, 181, 215, 219, 223-224, 227-228, 230, 237-238, 248, 250-251, 257 Neo-Thomism, 43, 127-128 Thomism, Transcendental, 13, 16, 119, 125, 133-138, 140-141, 151, 159-160, 162, 172, 181, 215, 219, 223-224, 227-228, 230, 248, 251 Thomistic, 28, 122, 132, 136-140, 142-144, 149, 152, 154, 157158, 162, 226, 230, 234-235,

238, 241, 251, 256 abstraction, Thomistic, 139-140, 142-144, 152-154, 162 agent intellect, 137, 152-153 circumincessio, 158 conversio ad phantasma, 193 esse, 139, 154, 166 first principles, 101, 157, 162, 171 lumen intellectus, 158 phantasm, 139-140, 142, 152 quiddity, 153-154, 233, 236 quodammodo omnia, 166 reditio completa in seipsum, 163 species, 83, 140, 142, 152-153, 235, 238 Tolstoy, Leo, 33-34, 89, 120, 188, 258, 262 Tracy, David, 213 transcendental existential, 175 Trinity, 120, 180, 192, 234-235, 239, 241 truth, 17-18, 23-24, 27, 70, 73, 90, 95, 97-98, 103, 108, 130, 138, 142, 144, 157-160, 163, 175176, 182-185, 187-189, 197, 200, 202, 204, 208-209, 211212, 216-217, 232, 235, 241, 246, 252

U universals, 54, 140, 152, 155, 186

V verification, 121, 125 Vienna Circle, 244

Subject Index Vorgriff, 15

W Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 9-16, 19, 21-67, 69-73, 75-116, 118-121, 123-126, 128, 130-133, 135137, 143-147, 149, 155-167, 169-175, 177-179, 182-183, 185-187, 189-200, 203, 205, 209-212, 216-218, 221, 224226, 228, 231-233, 236-238, 240-249, 251-252, 255-259, 262 Nachlass, 10 whither, 117, 137, 146, 149, 197, 227 World, 9-19, 21-73, 75-76, 78, 8086, 88, 90-92, 94, 96-102, 104150, 152, 154-158, 160-174, 176-182, 184, 186, 188, 190, 192, 194-210, 212, 214, 216, 218, 220-222, 224-226, 228242, 244-252, 255-258, 262, 264 World as mystical, 41, 42, 46, 107, 169, 238 World as heuristic device, 15, 16, 42, 108-109, 145, 165, 169, 231 worldview, 15, 38, 157

271

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