Back to the running-up-against-the-limit

“This running-up against the limits of language is Ethics”

As I have already pointed out, the connection between ethics and the experience of limitation is clear in Wittgenstein's conversations with the Vienna circle, recorded by Waismann. In conclusion, I will cite the passage at length, and sum up what has been examined so far.

“I can readily think what Heidegger means by Being and Dread. Man has the impulse to run up against the limits of language. Think, for example, of the astonishment that anything exists. This astonishment cannot be expressed in the form of a question, and there is also no answer to it.

Everything which we feel like saying can, a priori, only be nonsense. Nevertheless, we do run up against the limits of language. This running-up-against Kierkegaard also recognized and even designated it in a quite similar way (as running-up-against Paradox). This running-up against the limits of language is Ethics. I hold that it is truly important that one put an end to all the idle talk about Ethics-whether there be knowledge, whether there be values, whether the Good can be defined, etc. In Ethics one is always making the attempt to say something that does not concern the essence of the matter and never can concern it. It is a priori certain that whatever one might offer as a definition of the Good, it is always simply a misunderstanding to think that it corresponds in expression to the authentic matter one actually means (Moore). Yet the tendency represented by running-up-against points to something. St. Augustine already knew this when he said: What, you wretch, so you want to avoid talking nonsense? Talk some nonsense, it makes no difference!”²⁸⁰

In the above, Wittgenstein’s example of the running up against the limit is the same example that he presents in his Lecture on Ethics, an experience of absolute value and the astonishment that anything exists. I discussed this example of astonishment in the beginning as an instance of experiencing limitation in terms of meaningfulness. Wittgenstein also refers to the Heideggerian notion of dread, which amounts to a painful experience of limitation. Both experiences of astonishment and dread were related to the notion of meaning through meaningfulness and meaninglessness.

I have argued that such experiences -either in their painful or in their pleasant versions, bring us in contact with the groundlessness of meaning. In the experience of meaningfulness, meaning seems overabundant as if it had come from somewhere else as opposed to language itself, while in the

280 Wittgenstein, L. (1979) Ludwig Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle: Conversations Recorded by Friedrich Waismann, B.F. McGuiness, ed., Oxford: Blackwell, p.69

experience of meaninglessness, there seems to be no meaning, as if language were deprived of it.

The attempt to express such states in language leads necessarily to nonsense, which brings us in contact with the groundlessness of meaning. Our tendency to conceal or avoid this groundlessness manifests itself either through the temptation of transcendence and the metaphysical nonsense that accompanies it or the temptation of facticity, and the nonsense of empty talk that accompanies it.

Both temptations are temptations of deflection that arise from an urge to solve as quickly as possible a problem of meaning that seems to have emerged.

However, as we see in the passage just cited, while in his Lecture on Ethics Wittgenstein speaks of “nonsensicality” as being the “very essence” of ethical expressions, he nevertheless insists that this tendency of our human mind points to something. Furthermore, to see what this tendency points to one needs to go ahead and talk some nonsense. I have so far understood this to mean that paying attention to nonsense can promote an understanding of our tendency to seek a safe ground for meaning, and hence it can allow for an acceptance of groundlessness and an opening to the miracle of language as such.

It is in the self-understanding about our inclination to deflect and not remain exposed to the world, that the importance of this experience lies. It is what helps us understand something about the “resistances of our will” and what creates the space for a good or a bad exercise of the will, for either a movement of deflection (either through facticity or through transcendence) or a movement which brings us in peace with the world. In this chapter I will elaborate more on this point through Wittgenstein's reference to Kierkegaard.

Finally, I will claim that being in peace with the world does not exclude the experience of limitation, but rather presupposes it. For the agreement we have talked about in the previous chapter is not an agreement arising from deflection but an agreement which presupposes an acceptance of limitation.

Becoming aware of sin

I will start by Wittgenstein's reference to Søren Kierkegaard and his explicit analogy between the running up against paradox and what Kierkegaard calls an absolute paradox²⁸¹. Kierkegaard

281 See Chapter 3 “The absolute paradox”(pp.37-54) in Kierkegaard, S. (1985) Philosophical Fragments/Johannes Climacus : Kierkegaard's Writings, Vol 7, edited and translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

describes the absolute paradox as the passion of thought to know the absolute different. The paradox lies in the fact that thought seeks to find that which would negate itself , “to want to discover something that thought itself cannot think”. This absolute difference, the unknown against which thought runs up Kierkegaard calls “the God”:

“This, then, is the ultimate paradox of thought: to want to discover something that thought itself cannot think. This passion of thought is fundamentally present everywhere in thought ...[...] But what is this unknown against which the understanding in its paradoxical passion collides and which even disturbs man and his self-knowledge? It is the unknown. But it is not a human being, insofar as he knows man, or anything else that he knows. Therefore, let us call this unknown the God.”²⁸²

What is interesting is that Kierkegaard also sees the running up against the limit as bringing about a kind of self-understanding. Kierkegaard's thinking is the following: Thought cannot by itself come to know the absolutely different, because doing so would require thought to negate itself. If this absolutely different is God then there is no human way of knowing him directly. How can God allow us to know him if by definition he is impossible to be thought and known? Here Kierkegaard finds a very interesting way out: God can enable us to know him through making us know or think not of something which belongs to his nature but of something in us that makes us absolutely different from God. Kierkegaard thus turns the problem of knowing the absolutely different (the unknown) into a problem of knowing ourselves.

But what is this something that is in us and makes us absolutely different from God or which makes God the absolutely different? This “something” cannot be anything we receive from God, because if we were made in his image and likeness then this something would have to exist in God as well. What makes us absolutely different from God but resides only in us, Kierkegaard says, is sin. By making us aware of sin God enables us to know him²⁸³ and to deal with the absolute paradox:

“Just to come to know that the God is the different, man needs the God and then comes to know that the God is absolutely different from him. But if the God is to be absolutely different from a human being, this can have its basis not in that which man owes to the God (for to that extent they are akin) but in that which he owes to himself or in that which he himself has committed.

What, then, is the difference? Indeed, what else but sin, since the difference, the absolute difference, must have been caused by the individual himself...”²⁸⁴

I will try to link this idea of paradox as what allows us to know something about ourselves (our

282 Kierkegaard, S. ibid. p.37 and p.39

283 For Kierkegaard the ultimate paradox is God's incarnation; God shared our human nature, in order to allow us to know our sin, in order to teach us the difference between us and him.

284 Kierkegaard, ibid. p.46-47

sins) with my analysis of Wittgenstein's account of this experience. As it has been suggested, the running up against the limit of experience points to the groundlessness of meaning, while the two forms of speaking which may accompany it (metaphysics or empty talk) point to our difficulty of accepting this groundlessness. Wittgenstein's respect and his suggestion not to abandon the nonsensical utterances means then that we can gain something from such experiences, that an understanding of our difficulty to accept the groundlessness can open us to something precious, which I called the erlösende aspect of language.

Kierkegaard as we saw has a similar way of regarding these experiences²⁸⁵ and he calls this something that we come to know through them, sin. For Kierkegaard the importance of such

“experiences” would presumably be that they allow us to know our sin, which is what creates the absolute difference in the first place.

What is this sin that such experiences could allow us to see from Wittgenstein's perspective? It should be clear by now that sin is related to not being in agreement with the world, to the non- acceptance of the world-in-language, the world as our everyday life²⁸⁶. The Wittgensteinian “sin”, the bad exercise of the will is not a specific action, and has no specific-propositional content, it is mostly an attitude towards the world. Bad exercise of the will is having a world that has no significance for me, a world-of-facts. Both temptations that accompany an experience of limitation, finitude and transcendence, are a sort of deflection, an avoidance of being-in-the world as it is. As such, they both involve a kind of disharmony, a non-agreement with the world.

On the contrary, the act of recovering meaning -which as I had argued in the beginning cannot but pass through these two temptations of deflecting, involves a “leap of faith” (to use again Kierkegaard’s term) or an act of trusting language. Recovering meaning presupposes seeing language not as a mere instrument for speaking about things or facts nor as an instrument for discovering some hidden features of reality (through formal logic or metaphysics), but as the only mirror upon which we see a reflection of ourselves and our relation to the world.

In the beginning of the thesis, when I offered a description of the experiences of limitation, the

285 Kierkegaard (as Vigilius Haufniensis) also draws this distinction between the speaker and what he says: “to understand a speech is one thing, and to understand what it refers to, namely the person, is something else” See Kierkegaard S. (1980), Kierkegaard's Writings, VIII, Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin, ed. and tr. Reidar Thomte, Princeton: Princeton University Press, p. 142

286 We could also say that sin is the loss of faith in language. As Heidegger says: “Sin, however, is essentially different from moral failure. Sin exists only in the sphere of faith. Sin is the lack of faith, the revolt against God as the Redeemer.” Heidegger, What is called thinking, ibid., p.103.

notion of exposure came up and it was suggested that the term also refers to the amount of light allowed to fall on the film when a photograph is taken. I then suggested that this aspect of the term

“exposure” gestures towards a creative or transformative aspect of this experience, namely the aspect of “bringing to light” and thus allowing creation. We can now see what this light is: it is not a light that comes from a transcendent source, a light that allows us to see something specific but rather one that allows us to see as such. As Soulez says: “the light is not that of some revelation. It accompanies, rather, a “ synoptic” manner of seeing language as “ in order,” as it is, of understanding our world.”²⁸⁷

Seeing the problem as joy

One may be left with the impression that it is possible to create a universe of peace and harmony, and that no real problem can touch us if we follow the good exercise of the will and accept that the world is independent from our will. Such an unproblematic and worry-free universe may however seem to be in complete contradiction with our point of departure, namely to the running up against the limit experience.

If the aim of the Tractatus (or Wittgenstein's philosophy) is to free us from worrying and to bring us in peace with the world, then isn't the experience of limitation an unnecessary moment of frustration, a moment which almost drives us mad when we try to understand it? Having come all this way, can't we now think of it as an unnecessary tragic moment? Yet, this line of thought would take us back either to the temptation of transcendence, or to that of facticity.

On the one hand, such a life without worries, such a life in full peace with the world can only be a life outside language. Baltas describes how animals give us the impression of enjoying a transcendence-like union with the world; as he says: “For pure life, life without an overarching “I”

and the worries it comprises or generates, life as such, is animal life. [...] Of course, this world is in a deep sense different from ours: it is not arrived at in the ways I have been describing but is unproblematically always already there. [...] For, we actually see and feel the deep contentment in a cat’s purring, in the lazy movements of a lion that has satiated its hunger, in the big brown eyes of a cow peacefully grazing in the field.”²⁸⁸

On the other hand, not seeing anything problematic about life could also be the symptom of a

287 Soulez, ibid. p.129

288 Baltas, A., ibid. p.59

view that is blind to meaning, and which is reduced to the making of sense -or (should we say) to common sense as a reminder of the empty, “rumbling and roaring” character of this kind of discourse and of this state of being. Heidegger also stresses the blindness of common sense towards what is problematic, and hence towards what is most worth our attention: “As if sound common sense the last resort of those who are by nature envious of thinking as if this common sense whose soundness lies in its immunity to any problematic, had ever caught on to anything at the source, had ever thought through anything from its source !”²⁸⁹

Wittgenstein has the following to say on the question of what it means to not see a problem at all in the first place and the blindness that this involves:

“The fact that life is problematic means that your life does not fit life's shape. So you must change your life, and once it fits the shape, what is problematic will disappear.

But don't we have the feeling that someone who doesn't see a problem there is blind to something important, indeed to what is most important of all?

Wouldn't I like to say he is living aimlessly -just blindly like a mole as it were; and if he could only see, he would see the problem?

Or shouldn't I say: someone who lives rightly does not experience the problem as sorrow, hence not after all as a problem, but rather as joy, that is so to speak as a bright halo round his life, not a murky background.”²⁹⁰

The first part of the citation expresses the spirit of peace and agreement: if one changes her life, what is problematic will disappear. But the responses of transcendence and facticity also seem to fit the bill: the transcendence solution would be to regard the problem as a manifestation of our entrapment in language, thus turning towards some metaphysical solution to deal with the problem, or, better, to make it vanish. The facticity solution wouldn't see a problem in the first place, but if someone did see a problem the response here would be to attempt to stress the illusory character of the problem. Recall the two sorts of deflections: in the case of kindness for instance, it can be either considered a manifestation of some transcendent source or a language game or character thing.

However Wittgenstein differentiates himself from both these stances, because he is immediately suspicious of the phrase: what does it mean to see life as non-problematic? Isn't there a certain blindness involved when one sees no problems at all?

Kierkegaard seems to put forward a similar thought regarding the absolute paradox when he writes: “... Paradox is the passion of thought, and the thinker without the paradox is like the lover

289 Heidegger, What is called Thinking?, ibid. p.71

290 Culture and Value, ibid. 31e (MS 118 17 r c: 27.8.1937)

without passion: a mediocre fellow.”²⁹¹ I take what Wittgenstein describes as blindness or as living aimlessly to be similar to what Kierkegaard calls “without passion” or “mediocre”.

Wittgenstein not only regards not seeing a problem as blindness but moreover as blindness towards what is of the utmost importance. If the experiences that we have described open us up to the problem of life, then not having such experiences is a kind of blindness. But how can we keep both an agreement with the world and a respect for such experiences?

Wittgenstein provides the answer in the above passage: we can do so by experiencing the problem as joy and not as sorrow. The solution is not to shut our eyes faced with such experiences nor to deflect from them but to see such experiences as an opportunity for a different relationship with the world. This is a constant struggle that we fight with ourselves. The fact that one accepts that meaning cannot be grounded on nothing else but our own practices in life does not mean that the problem of meaning disappears. Life will throw back at us this problem again and again. The aim was never to annihilate the problem, but to see it in a different way, to see it as a gift rather than a curse.

We can now return to the notion of light; indeed Wittgenstein offers us again the same analogy:

to see the problem as joy is to see it as a bright halo round one's life, not a murky background. I would add that this light that we also saw in connection with the notion of exposure is a light which helps us see language as a miracle rather than a cage.

An experience of limitation can make us see language as a miracle, by helping us understand our “ desperate need to go beyond words which is born of the “ miracle” that is language”. [Thus we manage to see this miracle as] “a miracle without revelation, for we remain amazed without having to explain or understand”²⁹².

291 Kierkegaard, S. (1985), ibid. p.37

292 Soulez, ibid. p.140