Understanding the Question:

Wittgenstein on Faith and Meaning

1. Eccentric Senses of 'Belief' and 'Question'

The role of belief in religion is always the subject of the greatest misunderstandings, as well as some of the subtlest meditations. The student of religion may be drawn to those direct expressions of spiritual insight with regard to which belief seems abstract and superfluous; and yet when one wants to indicate the religious attitude, the commitment to "something higher", as a fact of personal significance, few notions seem more apt than belief or faith. The peculiar logic of religious faith is that unlike beliefs which are held in lieu of verified knowledge, faith is often valued precisely because it is faith, and does not concern the objectively verifiable.

Although this surely expresses an important spiritual truth, it creates an impression of eccentricity, because we are quick to connect believing with justification and confirmation, and to understand mystery only as the hiddenness of some fact. A similar eccentricity pertains to the notion of questioning for its own sake (i.e., in order to develop a particular sense of questionableness), rather than for the sake of getting an answer. This sense of questioning increasingly defines the position of the philosopher, who is gradually giving up the idea that his job is to investigate certain sublime facts about the world (any more than it is the task of the theologian to demonstrate facts about God). Ludwig Wittgenstein, as a young man, wrote three sentences which connect this sense of questioning with belief in God, in such a way as to illuminate the logic (and thus the apparent eccentricity) of both.

1. To believe in a God means to understand the question about the meaning of life.

2. To believe in a God means to see that the facts of the world are not the end of the matter.

3. To believe in God means to see that life has a meaning.[1]

In the first sentence believing is connected with understanding a question. One can surmise that this understanding is something over and above having (i.e. asking) the question ‑‑ some positive insight which constitutes the ground of the belief. But understanding a question is not the same as answering it, although it may entail that one knows how to answer. The third sentence seems to refer to an answer, but it is puzzling: it does not actually speak of seeing the meaning in life, but only of seeing that there is one. Since in each case it is a matter of defining belief in God, one may suppose that "seeing that life has a meaning" is to be equated with understanding the question about it. The situation might then be analogous to understanding the question, "What is 3577 times 41903?" Here understanding means seeing that there is a rule for proceeding, knowing what it is, and knowing that one could get the answer by following it. But in the case of the meaning or sense (Sinn) of life, I think that more is implied. Seeing that "there is" meaning in this case is very close to, if not identical with, seeing "what it is". And this implies that "understanding the question" here means more than knowing what to do in response to it ‑‑ it means actually doing what is appropriate. To clarify this doing is to see through the eccentricity of the question which seeks no answers and the faith which takes no support from objective facts.

2. Facts and the Problem

To explain this positivity in the absence of answers and facts, let us start from the second of Wittgenstein's sentences. "That the facts of the world are not the end of the matter" is an expression of challenging simplicity. It does not refer to some other‑worldly facts to be contrasted with worldly ones, for 'world' here means all the facts, "all that is the case."[2] If this makes the expression sound like a riddle, something Wittgenstein wrote near the end of his life might show the direction in which it aims. In speaking of the belief in God as the ground of all phenomena, he said:

The attitude that's in question is that of taking a matter seriously and then, beyond a certain point, no longer regarding it as serious, but maintaining that something else is even more important.[3]

Presumably this "something else" which grounds all facts is in no sense a fact itself.

Wittgenstein does speak of differences in the "boundaries" of "my world"[4] and of "transcendental marks"[5] which could distinguish a good or happy "world" or life from a bad one. This sounds as if the "something else" really were a fact in a simple sense; as if it were only a question of distinguishing, say, psychological facts from physical ones. Or again, he sometimes connects the "waxing and waning" of the world (i.e., of its "limits") with meaning and value; so that we seem to have the old fact/value dichotomy (a distinction, one might say, of "objective"‑facts from "value"‑ or "subjective"‑facts). And when he says that "we can call God the meaning of life, i.e. the meaning of the world",[6] he seems merely to be translating psychological facts into theological ones. Experiences of significance are made to "transcend" the individual by being posited in the universal Ground of significance ‑‑ only this ground is said to withdraw from all speech, "showing" itself but never letting itself be "said".

Undoubtedly this "showing" has something to do with the distinction in "attitude" mentioned above, but the matter remains unclear. Is 'fact' being used here merely as a term for the class of things excluded from Wittgenstein's concern? Is the notion of the "transcendental" merely a way of exalting a certain attitude through metaphysical representation? Wittgenstein was indeed prone to a romantic fascination with representation at that time ‑‑ a kind of shamanism with mathematical poetry that he later looked back on as an attempt to "bring something higher under the sway of my words."[7]

And yet the essence of the insight that "the facts of the world are not the end of the matter" is simpler than the explanation in terms of the subjective and the transcendental. This simple essence unfolds a richness of thought which, in thinking such as Wittgenstein himself later practiced, overcomes the weaknesses of the transcendental attitude: it is not a willful attempt to bring "something higher" under our power, yet it maintains a quality of thought which still directs its highest estimations of value "above". For example, in relation to his philosophical work, he wondered in 1947: "Is what I am doing worth the effort overall? Only as long as it receives a light from above....If the light from above isn't there, I can surely be no more than clever."[8] That which eludes all demonstration and analysis is here seen as the element of good fortune or grace in thinking, that which we cannot compel. This is characteristic of his later approach to philosophizing.[9]

Already in the Tractatus, the essence of the thought which says "facts aren't the end of the matter" can be found, set though it is in the context of absolute limits and final solutions. In the midst of the section which applies the notion of limits to language and the world (the facts), we find the sentence "The facts all contribute only to setting the problem, not to its solution," followed by this simple statement:

It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists.[10]

"How things are" says the same as "the facts"; "how things are" always and of necessity raises a certain problem. But its solution, the "mystical" insight "that life has a meaning", is connected only with seeing that the world exists. To see this is not to see that some state of affairs rather than another is the case;[11] he even denies (in the course of the discussion of the essence of Logic)[12] that this insight is any experience at all. Little wonder, then, that it cannot be put into words!

Wittgenstein said that if the answer could not be put into words, neither could the question ‑‑ but this pertains above all to the question he has talked about understanding. Though the question cannot be well‑formulated in accordance with some theory of representation, it puts itself into words nonetheless; and these words can be understood, that is, appreciated. The fact of their occurrence is inexplicable ‑‑ and thus not a "fact" ‑‑ just in the sense that they seem to lack a familiar context; they seem to point to something which is as unique as the drama of my own life. "The facts set the problem"; it pertains to their essentially finite or "limited" character. I would explain this "limit" as only the limitation of being present, of occurrence in the drama of life. Presence is the traditional concept for the mysterious interplay of universality and particularity, public meaning and privacy or silence, which is expressed in Wittgenstein's words. What's important is to see this limiting boundary as a form‑giving one, or again as a light in which things take on a new intelligibility. Where the limit is appreciated as a certain dramatic contextuality, religious belief and philosophical understanding may coincide.

3. Appreciation of the Problem through the 'limit' of Presence

For young Wittgenstein, a fact is a fact in so far as it enters into "my world", that is, the field or horizon of intelligibility implicit in language. The horizon is the horizon of presence: of the givenness of a determinate meaning or state of affairs. Metaphysics is familiar with this givenness "as such" under the names of 'intuition', 'inner sense', etc. The limitation of the facts in their accessibility to us can also be expressed as subjectivity or the finitude of thought.

But implicit in all such expressions is this "limitation" of presence: the requirement that meaning be determinate because it enters into the real (current) situation, with real (past) conditions and real (future) implications. "Presence" names the actuality of a situation in the sense of that which compels our judgments and interpretations of experience at a given time ‑‑ that which really is. And that which is present is always correlative to some possible act of perceiving/interpreting; whatever compels us can only do so in ways by which we are ready to be compelled, i.e., which we are able to notice. There is an interdependence thus expressed in the notion of presence which can be viewed from the side of the object, as causal dependence (in terms of realism and determinism), or from the side of the subject, as the original receptivity which has freely yielded in advance to that which is allowed to compel and determine it (Idealism). Wittgenstein feels this bivalence as a tension, a struggle between two "godheads" (world and transcendental ego).[13] The notion of limit symbolizes the tension in terms of "inside" and "outside": for Wittgenstein, silence is the non‑being which forms the background and boundary, embracing all existence in an original, passive freedom.

"The problem" refers to the disparate relation between human significance, urgent and undeniable with regard to its fulfillment, and the unaccomodating, contingent facts in and among which significance must be situated and discovered. Awareness of the question occurs most vividly in the sense of self‑presence, presence to oneself; in other words, a dramatic sense of ongoing life, or as Wittgenstein more precisely said, "consciousness of the uniqueness of my life."[14] The absolute character of self‑presence (of the horizon, the Kantian "I think") is felt as the free or "original" side of the limitation of presence: it owes nothing to that which fate may send to appear within it ("the facts"). It is indebted only to the givenness of being as such ‑‑ "that the world is there." This givenness is not "experienced" in the sense of being given, being present; it makes itself felt rather in the silence that precedes and outlasts everything present. And yet this existential truth, with its attendant freedom, belongs only to the "limit‑situation",[15] to the momentary rupture in "the facts" (and our taking‑account of them) which lets "that it's there" be felt. The sense of pure presence is due to a contrast with the temporal flow of experience, a contrast which necessarily cannot be maintained as such (since to maintain is to integrate in the flow). As time goes on, the boundary‑experience itself becomes "a fact": in attempting to integrate the boundary‑experience in order to realize the freedom it promises, the thinker sees the boundary enclosing the facts as an interface where "something higher" shows its features. The "pure here‑now" becomes a sort of standard for the accomplishment of life processes; but it is a standard which refuses to remain fixed (every time you try to apply the standard, it turns out you have to grasp from the beginning what you thought you had just settled). Because of this, Wittgenstein says "Man cannot make himself happy without further ado."[16]

What I want to say is that "understanding the question" is part of this further ado; or rather, it is both the preliminary glimpse of the pure possibility of freedom in the "limit‑situation", and the protracted effort to make that possibility actual. In the latter sense it means somehow bringing the limitedness of the facts into their everyday appearance ‑‑ gradually making them shine with the light "from above". And yet this "shining" as it grows somehow never loses its character of dawning, i.e., of original glimpse ... and thus of pure presence.

Wittgenstein also used the language of illumination in his later years to describe the dissolution of the problem of life ‑‑ that is, the understanding which is not answering, but only attainment of the comprehensive perspective.[17] He said first that someone who saw no problem in life struck him as "living blindly, like a mole." Such a person must first come to the point of sorrow ‑‑ must see that his or her own life does not accord with Life, feeling in this sense "sick" or sinful ‑‑ and then, as part of an overall process of living appropriately, see the sorrow change from a "dubious background" obscuring the facts to a "bright halo" surrounding, and presumably illuminating them.

Not only is this language of conversion and healing obviously religious, it addresses precisely the nexus of religious meaning where "belief" plays its part: in the process of receiving the light from above, there is undoubtedly a sense of gratefulness, love and trust which implies reliance on or being in accord with something, and thus, taking things in a certain perspective, or again, taking them seriously up to a point... In so far as trust and love falter and evade us, in so far as the serious and the frivolous continually switch places, faith itself becomes something to be pursued and cultivated. It is not a state of mind into which we can simply put ourselves, but something into which we can grow: "Life can educate one to a belief in God."[18] A proof which would turn faith into certainty would attempt to bring the illumination under its sway (to register it on propositional film). It would end up extinguishing the light, by removing its peculiar "halo"‑like or background character (making it a present, focused fact).

In faith which maintains itself for the sake of the spreading of the light, the "limit‑situation" is opened up to its own "insides", to the discovery of meaning amongst "the facts". How then does it maintain the simplicity of "that it's there"? How does it experience the conviction "that life has a meaning"? It preserves the background or "halo" of the insight "that it is" through continued meditation on the circle of presence ‑‑ of becoming‑present and self‑presence.

4. Presence and Faith

On the same day that Wittgenstein wrote his three sentences about belief in God, he concluded: "Only someone who lives not in time but in the present is happy." The horizon of presence, of intelligibility, had to be closed to the past and future ‑‑ closed in order to exclude death, fear and hope;[19] and closed so as to insure the determinacy of all language. Only within this closure could propositions be true; only from the transcendental standpoint, the view of things as they appear in the limit‑situation, only "in the light of eternity" could the world be found good and life happy.

And yet we know that language is historical. No one can teach us this better than the author of the Philosophical Investigations. And a deeper sense of happiness applies not to the moment but, as Aristotle said, to someone's life as a whole. If we needed to be reminded of the painful necessity of the "futher ado" and of the dynamic meaning of the limit of presence, Kierkegaard would remind us: as when, after pointing to the "deception concealed in contemplation", which lies in the way it "foreshortens time" in order to give rise to a "spurious eternal well‑roundedness", he evokes the plight of one who is deceived into thinking that truth lies only in the limit‑situation:

Now instead of keeping his contemplation to himself and holding himself to the contemplation in order to penetrate time with it in a direct but gradual manner, the double‑minded person lets time cut him off from contemplation.... The moment of contemplation he had recklessly misunderstood as being earnest, and then as this earnestness really approached, he threw off contemplation, and misunderstood the moment of contemplation as a delusion, until he again becomes earnest in the moment of contemplation.[20]

Self‑presence is the "uniqueness of my life" as the immediate insight "that it's there"; but the urgent and compelling character of my present dramatic involvements gets closed off by the image of a perfect (complete) world glimpsed in "the present". Self‑presence gets entangled in representation (and the theory of representation), in maintenance of the closure of intelligibility, rather than being opened by and into earnestness. The freedom associated with "life in the present" becomes detached from its contextual meaning due to the impression of "universality" it creates.

But presence itself is the opening out of future as well as the closing up of the past. And traditional pictures of subjectivity (ranging from transcendental schemata to the problems of "philosophy of mind") are best viewed as poses which are not maintained, which stand outside of ordinary language in implicit disdain for "the facts". Wittgenstein devoted his mature philosophizing to deconstructing the linguistic pictures of self‑presence;but this does not signify any rejection of the sense of presence.[21] On the contrary, his enterprise is an effort to earnestly engage "the facts" in such a way that they are made to reflect the superior light, and never to assert themselves as the end of the matter.

In order to take things seriously "up to a point", I must first take them seriously. This "point" has a contextual definiteness which is only symbolized by the transcendental, by what Pierce called "our glassy essence" ‑‑ the frozen immediacy of self‑presence. We can indeed bound our primary concerns with a contextual temporal wholeness which, "taking the long view", puts things into a "higher" perspective. This dramatic contextuality corresponds, phenomenologically, to the way we live within language, in an original familiarity with it. But its wholeness is not a simple immediacy. It is an irregular web of particular practices and historical sedimentations of meaning, habit and perception.

The "glassy essence" can be a representation for the soul in a practical spiritual sense ‑‑ for the silence embracing experience in a halo of respect for what is higher. But in metaphysics it is inevitably taken as a fact, an object of knowledge: the "glassy essence" is the answer to questions about self‑presence. By exposing the representational confusions inherent in such answers, Wittgenstein restores the openness of embracing silence to its actual dramatic context. (I mean, this can be the effect of his writing in particular cases; and I believe it is the effect he desired.) The fact "that life has a meaning" can then be appreciated in the particularity of the way life "is there" and is meaningful. Every time a question about the "glassy essence" is dissolved, the invisible halo around the facts is better understood ‑‑ and, we could also say, it is better believed. Better understood, in that we get more in touch with our own motivations for clinging to the representations of freedom, more in tune with the basic rhythms of presence and absence in our lives as they are (rather than as they "must be" or are supposed to be in the limit‑situation). Better believed, in that the eccentric opening of the circle of presence enlivens our thinking, not as an outside stance which we re‑present, but as the element of grace in thinking which embraces the factual in trust and love. This embrace is the apprehension of the meaning which "lies outside the world", because in it we do not objectify ‑‑ rather, we respond, we acknowledge, we act: we learn the possibility of living meaningfully as itself being the "message", or good news, which is ever new because it lies only in the act of embracing.

This message (the Gospels) is seized on by men believingly (i.e., lovingly). That is the certainty characterizing this particular holding‑for‑true, not something else.[22]