Meaning in Life: a Wittgensteinian Approach

Meaning in Life: A Wittgensteinian Approach

Seyed Reza Hosseini

Submitted in fulfillment of

the requirements of the degree

DOCTOR LITTERARUM ET PHILOSOPHIAE

in Philosophy in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Johannesburg

Supervisor: Professor Thaddeus Metz

Co-supervisor: Professor Johan Snyman

May 2013

Acknowledgements

An idea expands like a seed in the soil. So many things have to happen so it grows. There are people involved here; places too, like the streets of Tehran. That’s what an acknowledgement is about.

I am grateful to my supervisors, Professor Metz and Professor Snyman, whose comments and suggestions have been crucial in the development of my thoughts in this work. But, of course, there are more important things that you taught me, to which I express my deepest gratitude.

I am grateful to the Philosophy Department at the University of Johannesburg for providing generous financial support for me to present a paper at the 35th International Ludwig

Wittgenstein Symposium in Kirchberg am Wechsel, Austria and attending the 19th conference of the European Society for Philosophy of Religion in Utrecht, Netherland. On both occasions, I had the opportunity to share my ideas and seek feedback and comments. Some of those comments made some impacts on my writing. I am especially grateful to Professor Hans Sluga for his comments on my paper, which was a shorter version of Chapter Four.

I am also thankful to my friend, Oisín Eoin Keohane for proofreading chapters Five and Six and giving some precious comments on them.

Finally, I want to thank my family, my wife, Lebo. You are home!

Previously Published Work

The following paper is taken from Chapter Four:

Hosseini, R. (2012). In Defense of the Ordinary: A Wittgenstein Approach Toward the Theories of Great Meaning. In M. G. Weiss & H. Greif (Eds.), "Ethics, Society, Politics", Papers of the

35th International Wittgenstein Symposium, Volume XX (pp. 120-123). Kirchberg am Wechsel:

Ontos Verlag.

Statement of Length

This thesis contains 93 724 words, in compliance with the guideline of about 75 000 words recommended by the Faculty of Humanities.

Declaration

I, Seyed Reza Hosseini, declare that this thesis has not in part or in whole been submitted at any other university or other academic institutions and that the content of the thesis is my own work, except those parts that are acknowledged to have been taken from other sources.

Signature

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Table of Contents Introduction ...... 1

The Research Question ...... 1 An Overview of the Literature ...... 3 Clarification of the Project and Method ...... 7 Overview of Chapters ...... 12 1. Book of Facts, Book of Values ...... 19

Introduction ...... 19 The Tractatus as a Treatise on the Meaning of Life ...... 21 The Tractarian Reading of Realism/Idealism Debate ...... 29 A Tractarian Account of the Meaning of Life ...... 33 Ethics as ‘Enquiry into the Meaning of Life’ ...... 39 2. A Tractarian Approach to the Literature on Life’s Meaning ...... 53

Introduction ...... 53 Supernaturalism ...... 54 Naturalism ...... 69 Unlivability of the Tractarian Philosophy of Life ...... 80 3. On Aspect-Seeing and Meaning in Life ...... 91

Introduction ...... 91 Aspect-Seeing and Aspect-Blindness ...... 93 Attitude/Opinion Dichotomy ...... 98 Aspect-Seeing and the Meaning of Life ...... 100 On Religion as a Way of Seeing the World ...... 106 Objections and Clarifications ...... 115 Conclusion ...... 118 4. In Defense of the Ordinary: Wittgenstein, Marquard, and Theories of Great Meaning120

Introduction ...... 120 Marquard on Inflated Conceptions of Meaning ...... 123 Essentials of the Dietetics of Expectation of Meaning ...... 128 iv

Great Meaning versus the Ordinary Meaning ...... 137 Levy on ‘Downshifting and Meaning in Life’ ...... 145 Particularity and Theories of Great Meaning ...... 153 Conclusion ...... 161 5. On Detachment or Why the Shopkeeper Does Not Investigate His Apples ...... 164

Introduction ...... 164 Doubt in the Stream of Life ...... 167 On Certainty and the Meaning of Life ...... 177 Nagel, Irony and Its Limits ...... 184 Indifference, Fear, and Failure: Wittgenstein, Rosenzweig, and Cavell on Philosophical Skepticism 199 Conclusion ...... 210 6. The Human Voice: Confession as the Grammar of the Question of Life’s Meaning .... 213

Introduction ...... 213 The Grammar of the Question ...... 216 Objections and Clarifications ...... 238 A Case Study: Mr Chandler and the Meaning of Life ...... 241 Wittgenstein’s Private Conversations ...... 246 Into the Abyss of Life ...... 257 Conclusion ...... 258 7. Conclusion ...... 261

The Way Forward ...... 268

Introduction

The Research Question

Though for a large portion of the twentieth century the question of life’s meaning wasn’t a favorite question among analytic philosophers, recent developments, especially within the last

30 years, show that the meaning of life is no longer ‘the black sheep of normative family’

(Metz 2002: 811). As Thaddeus Metz and others have already noted, most normative philosophers had been more comfortable discussing notions such as ‘happiness’, ‘well-being’ and ‘value’ and, thus, the notion of ‘meaningfulness’ has not been considered as a distinguished category that could account for a good life (cf. Wolf 2010, Metz 2013). However, there is enough evidence to suggest that the question of life’s meaning ‘has come firmly back onto the philosophical agenda’ (Cottingham 2013: 115). Long has passed since the day a distinguished analytic philosopher announced in his presidential address to the American

Philosophical Association that ‘once in a time of weakness and lapse of judgment he wrote a paper on the meaning of life’ (Adams 2002: 71). In fact, the very existence of a growing body of literature on the meaning of life shows that ‘the problem does not go away’ (Cottingham

2003: 2) and one is bound to enquire about the ‘problem’ somewhere in one’s life.

The main aim of most analytic philosophers who write on life’s meaning is to develop and evaluate theories and principles that, according to them, indicate what can confer meaning on one’s life. That is to say, the fundamental question of the literature is: ‘Is there anything (God, individuality, happiness, objective values, etc.) that is necessary and sufficient to confer meaning on my life?’ In a nutshell, the assumption is that there is a universal answer to the

question of the meaning of life, which is the essence of it. So if one wants to find an answer to the question of the meaning of life, one has to search for a sufficient and necessary element that all the meaningful lives share or upon which they are founded. In other words, there must be

(or there is not) something to confer meaning on one’s life. This is what Ludwig Wittgenstein

would call ‘craving for generality’ (1969: 17) and in my thesis, I intend to critically explore the

literature on the meaning of life in the English-speaking world from a Wittgensteinian

perspective.

The literature is mostly led by a ‘tendency’ to seek a general answer to the question of what, if

anything, can confer meaning on one’s life. According to Wittgenstein, however, when

philosophers use these concepts and ‘try to grasp the essence of a thing’ (1958: § 116), they

always have to ask: Is the concept actually used in this way in ‘everyday use’ and in real life?

The duty of a philosopher, in this view, is to ‘bring words back from their metaphysical to their

everyday use’ (ibid.), and this is exactly what I think is lacking in the literature.

I just pointed out only one major issue that is related to the literature, i.e., essentialism.

However, there are more facets of Wittgenstein’s philosophy that are pertinent to the main

questions of the literature and also yet have not been addressed in a systematic fashion. To

name a few, the relation between meaning in life and what Wittgenstein calls ‘world-picture’,

the non-cognitive and existential character of any attempt to talk about the meaning of life, the

inexpressibility of propositions of value, the precedence of life over the intentional pursuit of

meaning, and discarding the dichotomy between ‘superlative’ and ‘ordinary meaning’ are

among other facets of Wittgenstein’s philosophy that, as I shall argue, are pertinent to

reflecting on the meaning of life. Moreover, there are also some other important,

Wittgensteinian issues that I will not address since they have already been discussed. For

example, I will not discuss the implications of the notion of ‘family resemblances’ for our understanding of the concept of the meaning of life.1

So, the main question of my thesis is this: Considering the literature on the meaning of life

among English-speaking philosophers, what would a Wittgensteinian view add to it? What

elements of Wittgenstein’s philosophy can be used to contribute to the existing literature by

addressing some of its questions? Therefore, this study might be viewed as a critical evaluation

of the literature on life’s meaning.2 It is a strange irony that Wittgenstein, who spent almost his

whole philosophical career on the question of meaning, is mostly absent in the literature and

that commentators ‘write, for the most part, as though Wittgenstein had never existed’ (Phillips

2004: xviii). I will evaluate the hypothesis that Wittgenstein’s body of texts, though neglected

in the literature, can provide promising answers to some of its main questions and problems.

An Overview of the Literature

The literature has been divided into three different approaches toward the meaning of life

(Klemke 1981; Klemke & Cahn 2008; Metz 2002, 2008; Seachris 2013):

Supernaturalism: According to the dominant strand of this approach, the meaning of life is found in relation to a god or God, a transcendental being who created the world. In this view,

without the existence of God, life has no meaning and purpose (Hartshorne 1984; Morris 1992;

Adams 1999; Cottingham 2003; Craig 2013, to name a few). In the literature a distinction has

been made between ‘God-based’ theories and ‘soul-based’ theories of supernaturalism. While

1 For more on the family resemblances between theories of life’s meaning, see Metz 2001; 2002: 802-803. 2 Hereafter I mostly refer to the literature on the meaning of life as ‘the literature’.

the former suggest the meaning of life depends on relating with God who is omnipotent, omniscient and the ground of the physical universe (Hartshorne 1984; Davis 1987; Adams

1999; Metz 2000; Craig 2013), the latter concentrate on immortality as the only thing that ultimately matters and thus for which having a soul is necessary (Morris 1992; Fischer 1994;

Harris 2002; Metz 2003).

Naturalism: Denying the claim that the meaning of life is dependent upon the existence of a god, the dominant views in this approach hold that since there is no good reason to believe in the existence of a transcendent god, there is no good reason to believe that a transcendent god can confer meaning on one’s life. One can also believe in the existence of God but deny his existence is sufficient for meaning in life. In other words, human beings, independently of any supernatural being, can constitute meaning, whether we believe this meaning is subjective, i.e., depends on an individual’s set of desires and choices (e.g. Taylor 1970; Williams 1976;

Frankfurt 1988; Trisel 2002) or objective, i.e., mind-independent (e.g. Nozick 1981; Singer

1995; Audi 2005; Wolf 2010). Thus, Harry Frankfurt (1988) as a subjectivist claims that one’s life is meaningful as long as one cares for or loves something. Likewise, Richard Taylor

(1970), as one of the most influential subjectivists, by reconstructing the myth of Sisyphus argues that one’s life is meaningful as long as one obtains whatever one strongly desires. Or

Alan Gewirth (1998) as an objectivist holds that the meaning of one’s life depends on transcending oneself by exercising reason in a way that goes beyond self-interest. Likewise,

Robert Nozick (1981) argues that one’s life is meaningful to the extent that it transcends and connects with an object of worth, and Susan Wolf (2010) argues that a meaningful life is a life in which there is a balance between the ‘objective worth’ and ‘subjective attraction’. That is, her account is a synthesis of objectivism and subjectivism. In general, the notion of

transcending oneself is of key significance among objectivists.

Most anthologies on the meaning of life have similar classifications of the existing approaches

to the question of life’s meaning, with some slight differences between them. For example,

while Klemke & Cahn (2008) refer to ‘theistic’ and ‘nontheistic’ approaches, Metz uses the

terms ‘supernaturalism’ and ‘naturalism’ to describe the same approaches (Metz 2002). In my research, I mostly refer to Metz’s classifications. Before attending to nihilism, let me clarify some points here. I take naturalism or nontheism to be the idea that the source of value and meaning in life is not necessarily something perfect, eternal, and transcendent to our natural

world, i.e. the physical world as known best by the scientific method, and that there are other this-worldly and non-supernatural meaning-conferring sources. These natural meaning-

conferring sources are either objective or subjective as I just mentioned above.

An analogy might be of help here to see the difference between objectivists and subjectivists

in the literature. Think of the way a moral objectivist and a moral subjectivist defend their

claims. A moral objectivist suggests that there are some ethical propositions that are true in

virtue of their relation to some mind-independent features of the world, independent of the

attitudes of human beings or any supernatural entity. On the other hand, a moral subjectivist

denies that moral propositions refer to such objective facts and claims that these kinds of

propositions are about, or expressive of, the attitudes of people. Analogously speaking, objectivists with regard to the meaning of life are like moral objectivists and subjectivists are like moral subjectivists. So when a person says that there are some objective moral values in the world she is a moral objectivist, but when the same person suggests that these objective moral values can confer meaning on one’s life, then, she is objectivist with regard to meaning.

Likewise, when a person suggests that moral values are all about the attitudes and dispositions

of the moral agent, she is a moral subjectivist, but when the same person claims that meaning

of one’s life is a function of one’s personal set of desires, passions, commitments, or attitudes,

then she is a moral subjectivist who is subjectivist with regard to life’s meaning as well. It is

interesting that, to my knowledge, all the scholars in the literature take a stance toward meaning that is perfectly compatible with their moral stance. For example, I don’t recall that

there is any one in the literature who claims that moral values are objective and at the same

time claims that meaning of life is a ‘subjective affair’. This goes to show how one’s moral

stance deeply affects one’s approach toward life’s meaning and vice versa.3

Nihilism: According to this approach, life is meaningless or absurd because the world fails to

meet our demands for meaning. Viewing life sub specie aeternitatis, i.e., from the standpoint

of eternity, nihilists claim that life is valueless, insignificant or always harmful (Martin 1993:

556; Benatar 2006: 107; Nagel 2008: 150). As Metz (2007) has noted, it is interesting that

‘most contemporary arguments for nihilism [. . .] do not appeal to supernaturalism as an

account of what would confer meaning on life; they rather contend that the relevant naturalist

requirements for a meaningful life are nowhere present’ (2007: 20). For example, Raymond

Martin argues with a Schopenhauerian tone that life is meaningless because either we have not

reached our goals and we suffer, or we have and thus we are bored (1993: 560).

Now, considering the above broad classification, I shall argue that there are a variety of

parallels that could be drawn, and points of contention that could be highlighted, between a

probable Wittgensteinian approach and the current literature in order to give new perspectives

to the current debates in the literature. Wittgenstein left some ‘scattered remarks’ (Kober 2006:

110) about value and ethics that are a source of thoughtful ideas about the meaning of life. This

3 I will discuss the relation between meaning and morality in more detail in Chapter Six.

is true especially considering the fact that to him ethics and our enquiry into ‘the meaning of life’ were synonymous (Wittgenstein 1965:4). But more significantly, there are some elements in Wittgenstein’s general philosophy that have far-reaching implications for our way of approaching the question of life’s meaning.

Clarification of the Project and Method

In my thesis, I have deliberately chosen not to provide a solely exegetical work on

Wittgenstein’s philosophy or the literature on life’s meaning. So the scope of my research is rather narrow. To avoid confusion, by ‘Wittgensteinian’ I mean a perspective developed from

Wittgenstein’s body of texts, and not necessarily and merely views of commentators in the secondary literature on Wittgenstein’s philosophy. My aim is to engage actively with the literature on life’s meaning and, thus, I will refer to the exegetical works on Wittgenstein only to the extent that they are related to my discussion of various topics.

Another important issue that needs to be clarified now is my position with regard to the heated issue of different interpretations of Wittgenstein’s philosophy. Let me briefly explain the situation. In the secondary literature on Wittgenstein’s philosophy there is a split between those philosophers who view Wittgenstein’s later works as a continuation of his earlier philosophy and those who see a new anti-theoretical dimension in Wittgenstein’s later works. Furthermore, there are even some who refer to Wittgenstein’s ‘Post-Investigations’ works, especially On

Certainty, and argue that, beside the early and later Wittgenstein, there is still another major shift in his philosophy so that we should recognize a ‘third Wittgenstein’.

So, currently there are four major ways of reading Wittgenstein: 1) The traditional reading of

him, which sees a division between the earlier and the later works. Peter Hacker is the main

representative of this view (Hacker 2001). By this view, the Tractatus and Philosophical

Investigations are two separate works and the latter is a critique of the former. The Tractatus,

in this view, represents the first phase of Wittgenstein’s philosophy, which essentially is about

drawing the limits of meaning by showing the ‘logic of our language’. 2) The ‘second

Wittgenstein’, on the other hand, is not concerned with a theory of meaning that connects the

meaning of a word to a particular pattern of external reality but rather to one in which the

meaning is derived from the use of the word. Pears (1988), Dummett (1991), and Hacker

(2001) are some of the proponents of this view.

3) ‘The New Wittgensteinians’ who believe there is a unity between the early and the later

Wittgenstein and discard the dual reading of him. Alice Crary and R. Read’s collection of

essays in The New Wittgenstein (2000) include most exponents of this reading, such as Stanley

Cavell, John McDowell, James Conant, and Cora Diamond. The difference between the

traditional readings of Wittgenstein and the New Wittgensteinians is that the latter believe the

fundamental aspect of Wittgenstein’s philosophy is its ‘therapeutic’ nature. 4) The proponents

of the ‘Third Wittgenstein’ who claim that Wittgenstein’s post-Investigations works, especially

On Certainty, consist of a shift in Wittgenstein’s views from Philosophical Investigations,

especially from its first part. In this view, examining the relation between philosophy and

psychology is one of the main themes of Wittgenstein’s writings after 1946 (cf. Kerr 2008).

Now, where does my research stand with regard to these various interpretations? As I said

earlier, in my research I shall relate to the secondary literature on Wittgenstein only to the

extent that it has a bearing on contributing to making claims about life’s meaning. Again, my research is not an exegetical work, a defense of one of the established interpretations of

Wittgenstein’s philosophy. In this regard, the method of my research is similar to those few

other works that examined the question of life’s meaning from a Wittgensteinian perspective.

For example, Yuval Lurie (2006) is focused only on the Tractarian approach toward the

‘problem of life’ and David Kishik (2008) tries to show the interlocking connections between

words, life and meaning in Wittgenstein’s later works as he critically compares them with the

writings of Augustine and Tolstoy on life’s meaning.4

What distinguishes my research from the previous works is that I shall extensively explore some of Wittgenstein’s ideas and apply those ideas as some conceptual tools to critically examine the literature. I agree with Paul Tyler that ‘the aim of Wittgenstein’s approach is to cultivate . . . a “change of aspect” in our way of seeing the world’ (Tyler 2011: 40-41).

Therefore, I am sympathetic in my reading of Wittgenstein with those Wittgensteinians who believe Wittgenstein’s philosophy is ‘therapeutic’ (Genova 1995; Crary 2000). That is, I shall argue that the aim of a Wittgensteinian approach toward the question of life’s meaning is ‘to bring about the understanding which consists precisely in the fact that we see the connections’

(Wittgenstein 1958: §133). My aim is to show the ‘connecting links’ between life and meaning in everyday life. Another key difference between my work and previous Wittgensteinian works is that my thesis is a systematic exploration of the limits of a theoretical approach to meaning.

In my thesis, there is one major theme running through all the chapters, which is the limits of a theoretical approach toward the meaning of life. What binds different chapters of my thesis

4 For more works related to Wittgenstein and meaning in life see Thomas (1995, 1997, 1999); Thompson (1997, 2000); Lurie (2006); Kishik (2008); Arnswald (2009). There are other works, which address related issues to life’s meaning such as religion and value: Barrett (1991); Verbin (2000); Litwack (2009). However, except Lurie (2006) and Kishik (2008), none of these works address the literature on life’s meaning from a Wittgensteinian perspective.

together, beyond being about Wittgensteinian ideas, is their anti-theoretical nature. This is not to belittle theoretical approach toward the question of life’s meaning, but to show its limits.

Here some clarifications about what I mean by theory might as well clarify what I mean by anti-theoretical.

I take a theory of life’s meaning to be an answer that philosophers provide in searching for the elements that all meaningful lives have in common. In this view, there is a claim for universality of a theory of life’s meaning. A successful theory, then, would be a principle that can plausibly explain why wide ranges of different lives are meaningful (or meaningless). For example, the theory that claims fulfilling God’s purpose makes one’s life meaningful is a standard theory of life’s meaning in that it is not concerned about an individual’s life; it refers to a condition or some conditions in virtue of which all people’s lives can be meaningful.

Likewise, subjectivists like Taylor (1970) or Frankfurt (2004) who suggest that one’s life can be meaningful in virtue of one’s ‘strong desire’ for, or ‘caring about’, something, are also offering a general theory about life’s meaning. By ‘anti-theoretical’ I mean in my research I am not hankering after an affirmative or negative theory about the ‘ultimate constituents’ of the meaning of life in general, which can be applied to all or most human beings.

Now, when I suggest that any general theory of life’s meaning has significant limits, I am referring to those principles that claim universality, that is, those principles that suggest they are able to offer, once and for all, an account of the conditions of life’s meaningfulness. In short, my research is anti-theoretical in three senses:

1. That theory alone is not enough to lead to a clear understanding of the ways people

experience life’s meaning;

2. That theory alone is not enough to change one’s attitudes or one’s ‘way of seeing

the world’, which is something that philosophers should be concerned with.

3. That it is at least improbable, if not impossible, to arrive at a universal well-founded

theoretical statement about the meaning of life. In other words, general theories of

life’s meaning fail to convey the ‘senses’ of their claims.

Each of these aspects shall be discussed in detail. I shall address the first sense on various occasions in Chapter Two, Four, and Five. The second aspect will be addressed exclusively in

Chapter Three, which deals with the significance of aspect-seeing and aspect-dawning. The third sense will be discussed in Chapter One, Two, and partly Chapter Six.

Once again, my approach is anthropological not metaphysical. I am concerned not with the meaning of life per se but with the ways in which the meaning of life is experienced in everyday life. My research is an attempt to move away from theory and back ‘to the things themselves!’ as summarized in Edmund Husserl’s injunction. Thus, the aim is to reach a

‘perspicuous’ (Wittgenstein 1958: § 122) understanding of life’s meaning through what Rush

Rhees once called the ‘anthropological method’ (Rhees 1970: 101). This method is in a sense similar to what John Cottingham calls the ‘holistic’ method. Discussing various theoretical methods of approaching questions such as the nature of morality and value and highlighting their limitations, Cottingham reminds us:

Here it is worth stepping outside the seminar room for a moment, and remembering

that in our ordinary human life and experience, the characteristic way in which we

normally achieve understanding within the domain of meaning, as opposed to the

domain of physical phenomena and their explanation, is not analytically but

holistically: not by taking things apart but by reaching across and outwards. The

significance of thoughts and desires and beliefs and intentions is typically revealed

when they are located within a wider network, connecting up, both synchronically and

diachronically, with the current actions and the continuing lives both of individual

human beings and of the groups of which they are necessarily a part (Cottingham

2009b: 11).5

Likewise, I might say, my aim is to step outside the ‘seminar room’ and be mindful of the

‘ordinary life’ and the ways in which we think of meaning in life.

Overview of Chapters

After this introduction, in Chapter One, Book of Facts, Book of Values, I provide a brief introduction to the Tractarian account of life’s meaning. This is to provide a background against which to discuss some major claims of the scholars in the literature on life’s meaning.

The Tractatus’ main claim is that all the problems of philosophy arise because we misunderstand the ‘logic of our language’. To avoid this, Wittgenstein claims, we have to draw a sharp line between what can be meaningfully said within the boundaries of language and what cannot be said but can only be ‘shown’. The Tractatus concentrates on the conditions of

‘sayability’ of each proposition and separates ‘what can be said’ from ‘what can only be

shown’. In fact, the showing/saying dichotomy is at the core of the Tractatus. Utterances of

value, according to the Tractatus, cannot be expressed in meaningful propositions. A brief

discussion of Wittgenstein’s arguments will show his reasons for belief in the inexpressibility

of value. However, realizing the inexpressibility of value depends on understanding the

‘structure’ of the ‘world’. So, even though the main arguments of the Tractatus are not directly

5 I shall discuss the similarity between Cottingham’s ‘holistic’ method and Wittgenstein’s ‘anthropological method’ in more detail later.

related to the discussions of life’s meaning, they have far-reaching implications for the

Tractarian conception of life’s meaning and that is the reason I will discuss them.

While in Chapter One I shall focus more on giving a broad picture of the Tractarian account of meaning in life, in Chapter Two, A Tractarian Approach to the Literature on Life’s

Meaning, I critically analyse some fundamental views of naturalists and supernaturalists in the literature. Whereas most supernaturalists and naturalists take the expressibility of their theories on the meaning of life for granted, Wittgenstein draws attention to the limits of what can be conveyed through meaningful language. Alternatively, Wittgenstein invites us to see the effects of our ‘tendency’ to say something about the ‘ultimate meaning of life’. Furthermore, by discussing Peter Singer’s account of ‘ethical life’ as an objective source of life’s meaning, I raise some objections to the justificatory nature of most naturalists’ claims about the meaning of life. I argue that even when one accepts the validity of these justificatory arguments, they are unlikely to be successful in bringing about a change in one’s attitude and one’s ‘way of seeing the world’. This, in turn, leads to the fundamental idea that was implicit in Wittgenstein’s early philosophy but cultivated in his later writings, namely, ‘the primacy of praxis’, as John

Cottingham puts it. Finally, I suggest that the Tractarian view, beside all the plausible objections that it raises against most theories of life’s meaning, is aspect-blind to the communal nature of human life and thus it remains an unlivable view. In fact, Wittgenstein himself was the one who first realized his naïve idealism in his Tractarian philosophy and thus a turn in his philosophy was bound to happen. I discuss some of the objections raised by commentators to the Tractarian view, e.g. Lurie’s objections, and I argue that most objections are variations of one single objection: That the Tractarian account of meaning of life is oblivious to the other forms of experiencing the world. However, as early as the 1930s Wittgenstein began to see the

‘grave mistakes’ (Wittgenstein 1958: x) in his Tractarian philosophy, the most important of

which was the realization that our language has some functions that are not descriptive of facts

at all. He recognized that the endless varieties of human experiences can be conveyed through

language and it doesn’t need to be factual to make sense. The ‘grammar’ or the function of the

words in our everyday life determines their meanings and not pre-determined rigid logical

forms. And thus it seemed that the door was open for a dramatic turn in his view of life and

philosophy that is pithily described by Emyr V. Thomas as a turn ‘from detachment to

immersion’ (Thomas 1999: 195).

In Chapter Three, On Aspect-Seeing and Meaning in Life, I draw attention to the intimate

connection between the meaning of life and aspect-seeing and discuss the implications of this view for our understanding of the meaning of life. Most often, seeing an aspect, like seeing a face as friendly, amounts to having an attitude toward that aspect. For Wittgenstein the

significance of the notions of ‘aspect-seeing’ and ‘aspect-blindness’ lies in the connection between the concept of seeing-as and ‘experiencing the meaning of a word’ (Wittgenstein

1958: 214). Likewise, I argue that there is a connection between the concept of seeing-as and experiencing the meaning of life. In other words, I argue that the way we experience the meaning of life is analogous to the way we see an aspect. Seeing the world as a ‘friendly home’, seeing the vicissitudes of one’s life as the will of God, seeing the human life consumed by our ‘cosmic loneliness’, are some examples of ‘seeing-as’. Most supernaturalist accounts of life’s meaning fail to pay due attention to the significance of one’s attitude and one’s ‘way of seeing’ (ibid: § 461) and, thus, are unlikely to bring about a change in one’s way of seeing the world. That is, they fail to bring about the dawning of religious aspects on the non-believer. In other words, a supernaturalist who argues that life would be meaningless without believing in

God and making a connection with him would be successful in bringing about a change in the non-believer’s way of seeing the world only if, and to the extent that, her arguments make the non-believer see that this ‘dust of the earth’, as a supernaturalist might believe, is indeed made in the ‘image of God’.6 A theoretical discussion of the conditions of meaningfulness is unlikely to lead to a change of aspect. I might agree with a believer that God is the ultimate source of meaning and yet remain unable to see the world religiously. However, those in the literature who emphasize the significance of ‘praxis’ and one’s way of living and seeing take the limitations of a merely theoretical approach toward the question of life’s meaning seriously

(Cottingham 2003, 2005, 2009a).

Due to the significance of the ordinary in Wittgenstein’s later works, I dedicate the rest of my research to exploring the implications of the ordinary for our understanding of life’s meaning from three different perspectives: The ordinariness of meaning, the certitude of life, and the confessional aspect of enquiring into the meaning of life – all of which, I shall argue, are related to everyday life. Thus, in Chapter Four, In Defense of the Ordinary: Wittgenstein,

Marquard, and Theories of Great Meaning, I challenge some grand theories and, hereby, draw attention to the significance of the ordinary in the construction of meaning. My tools to do so are the views of Wittgenstein and Odo Marquard. The latter’s account of the meaning of life in his essay, ‘On the Dietetics of Expectation of Meaning: Philosophical Observations’

(1991), is very similar to that of Wittgenstein in that both emphasize the significance of the ordinary. I discuss Marquard’s criticisms of ‘sensational’ approaches toward the problem of

6 John Cottingham alluded to this expression in his paper, ‘Dignity, Autonomy, and Embodiment’ that was presented at 19th ESPR conference in Soesterberg, Netherland, September 2012. Cottingham writes, ‘On the Judaeo-Christian view, . . . human beings, despite their frailty (formed of the ‘dust of the earth’) are, as the Hebrew Bible has it, made in the image and likeness of God’.

life’s meaning, and afterwards I raise some objections to what I call ‘exclusivism’ in the

literature. The exclusionary accounts of life’s meaning are those views that, first, make a

theoretical distinction between the great and the ordinary and, second, theorize what they deem

to be the ultimate constituents of ‘great meaning’ in life. Some of the exclusionary accounts of meaning that I shall address include Schlick’s theory of ‘play’ (2008), Taylor’s theory of

‘artistic creations’ (1999), Levy’s ‘work theory’ (2005), Camus’ ‘heroism’, and Metz’s ‘unified account of great meaning in life’ (2011).

In Chapter Five, On Detachment or Why the Shopkeeper Does Not Investigate His Apples, my aim is to view the notion of ‘detachment’ from a perspective different from that of most skeptics about meaning. I shall focus on Thomas Nagel’s account of ‘the absurd’ as I think his thought on this topic is exemplary of skeptical approaches toward the meaning of life. My response to Nagel will take its cue from Wittgenstein’s last text, On Certainty, as it is concerned with the problem of skepticism, the solutions to it, and the significance of ‘certainty’ in our life. I also critically evaluate Richard Taylor’s subjectivist theory of life’s meaning and highlight the pessimistic background against which Taylor arrives at his subjectivist theory, a point that is mostly ignored by the commentators in the literature. Furthermore, I shall dedicate a section to discuss the implications of the text for the ways most naturalists and supernaturalists in the literature approach the question of life’s meaning. I believe this task is highly pertinent to the literature, especially considering the fact that, to my knowledge, so far those few philosophers who have also written on Wittgenstein’s account of meaning of life have hardly addressed On Certainty. I shall also make a distinction between what I call the

‘deflationary’ and ‘inflationary’ responses to the absurd, and I argue that though Nagel’s objections to the ‘inflationary’ responses (Schopenhauer’s ‘negation of the will’, Nietzsche’s

‘amor fati’, Camus’ ‘heroism’ and Benatar’s ‘anti-natalism’) are plausible, his own deflationary solution, i.e., ‘irony’, is problematic. Furthermore, making a distinction between philosophical and existential skepticism, I shall discuss three different accounts of the source of philosophical skepticism. So, I shall discuss Stanley Cavell’s distinction between ‘knowledge’ and ‘acknowledgement’, Franz Rosenzweig’s distinction between the ‘sick’ and the ‘healthy’ mind, and Wittgenstein’s allusion to ‘indifference’ and its relevance to philosophical skepticism.

Finally, in Chapter Six, The Human Voice: Confession as the Grammar of the Question of

Life’s Meaning, I attempt to bring all the elements of my views in previous chapters together.

So, I shall draw attention to what I call the ‘confessional’ aspect of human enquiry into the

meaning of life. I argue that a Wittgensteinian approach toward the meaning of life is

concerned with ‘the grammar’ of the meaning of life and I suggest that in our everyday life, the

grammar of the question of life’s meaning is mostly confessional. I take confession to be any

type of declaration that is meant to express one’s attitude toward (one’s) life as a whole. That

is, it is an activity in which one shares or describes one’s understanding of life. I discuss and

defend my suggestion in more detail by referring to various philosophers, including

Wittgenstein, Stanley Cavell, Garrett Thomson, etc. Afterward, I provide two examples of a

confessional approach by examining James Joyce’s Dubliners and Wittgenstein’s ‘private

conversations’ with himself in his diaries. Furthermore, I suggest that only a confessional

approach can provide a convincing account of the apparently inconsistent views of

Wittgenstein on the meaning of life in his diaries.

To sum up, my modest aim is to initiate a conversation by introducing some ideas and themes

to the literature that, in my view, are worthy of consideration by the scholars in the literature.

Having said that, I would like to make it clear that my research is not a comprehensive survey

of the literature. Throughout my thesis I sometimes raise some issues and concerns from a

Wittgensteinian perspective, introduce a few new ideas, share some objections, and highlight what I deem to be important. It seems possible to me that some of the claims I make in my research might have some criss-crosses with other works in the rapidly growing literature in

which case the non-comprehensive nature of my work should be taken into consideration.

However, as far as the works of Wittgensteinian scholars who have written on life’s meaning is

concerned, I have tried to cover all the (few) works that so far have been written on

Wittgenstein’s account of life’s meaning.

In my research I engage with the questions of the literature not in an attempt to provide a

definitive answer or a theory of life’s meaning but to search for a ‘perspicuous representation’

(Wittgenstein 1958: § 144) of the ways in which those questions are asked. Thus, though in

chapters One and Two I address the Tractarian fact/value dichotomy and its distinction

between ‘sentences that have sense and the many ways in which we make sense of nonsense’

(Nordmann 2005: 216), my aim is to portray the background against which Wittgenstein’s turn

from the theoretical to the ordinary happened. And, in chapters Three to Six, my aim is not to

explain an account of life’s meaning but to describe the ways in which we encounter the

question of life’s meaning and engage with it in countless ‘modes of our complicated form of

life’ (Wittgenstein 1958: 174).

Chapter One

Book of Facts, Book of Values

Introduction

The received perception of the main question of the literature on the meaning of life is, ‘What,

if anything, can confer meaning on one’s life?’ (Metz 2002; Klemke & Cahn 2008; Nielsen

2008; Wong 2008). There are some variations to the main question, but, I think, they all refer

to the above question. For example, Wai-hung Wong distinguishes between three types of

questions concerning the meaning of life, which are cosmic, general, and personal questions.

The cosmic question is, ‘What is the meaning of life?’; the general question is ‘What is a

meaningful life?’. And the personal question, naturally, is, ‘What is the meaning of my life?’

(Wong 2008: 123). With the cosmic question I probably refer to the fact of life on earth, the

destiny of humankind and the universe, etc. In the general question I might refer to the

conditions of a meaningful life, one that can be applied to all human beings. The personal

question, on the other hand, is independent of the cosmic question and refers to the

particularity of my own life.

However, it seems that this division overlooks the interlocking connection between these three

types of questions, because, in a sense, cosmic or general questions can indeed be personal

questions as well, since a specific person deems the questions important. In our quest for the

meaning of life, one’s remembrance of stealing fruit from the neighbor’s tree or one’s

‘Rosebud’, á la the film Citizen Cane, can be as significant as the purpose of the emergence of

life on a tiny portion of the Milky-way galaxy. Saint Augustine’s recollection of his innocent

mischiefs in his youth is a good example:

Yet I lusted to thieve, and did it, compelled by no hunger, no poverty . . . A pear tree

there was near our vineyard, laden with fruit . . . To shake and rub this, some lewd

young fellows of us went, late one night . . . and took huge loads. Behold my heart, O

God, behold my heart. . . . It was foul and I loved it. . . . Fair were the pears we stole,

because they were Thy creation, Thou fairest of all, creator of all (Augustine 1966: 25-

28).

Add to this Augustine’s intense affairs with his ‘concubines’ (ibid: 116), the significance of his mother in his life, his restless heart, and his ‘destructive pleasures’.1 Every single human being,

one might say, begins the question of the meaning of life with a set of facts, like the way

Augustine did. That is to say, when we talk about our lives we do not refer to some abstract

entities and concepts. Thus, asking, ‘What, if anything, can confer meaning on life?’ in a sense

implies a question about the relation between facts and values. In other words, our conception

of the relation between facts and values has a significant impact on our understanding of the

meaning of life. For example, a subjectivist, like Taylor (1970), who claims that meaning of

1 In Augustine’s striking words, ‘I was entangled in the life of this world, clinging to dull hopes, of a beauteous wife, the pomp of riches, the emptiness of honours, and the other hurtful and destructive pleasures’ (Augustine 1966: 112).

life is a function of one’s personal passion about something is already denying that there are

things in life that are objectively valuable. On the other hand, an objectivist might say some

facts are of intrinsic value and that the more one’s life is involved in these valuable activities,

the more meaningful it is. So, one’s answer to the question of the relation between fact and

value, I think, significantly affects one’s conception of the meaning of life.

In this chapter, I critically examine one of the most radical answers in the history of modern philosophy to this question, and then I discuss the implications of this answer for one’s understanding of the meaning of life. I am referring to the Tractatus Logicus-Philosophicus.

The Tractatus, as an attempt to draw the limits of facts and of what can be said meaningfully, highlights the limits of value and what cannot be said as well. It can be seen as a treatise on the meaning of life in that it equates propositions of value with our tendency to say something about the ‘sense of life’ (Wittgenstein 1966: § 6.5). Note that a critical study of the Tractatus and its implications for our quest for the meaning of life needs an analysis of its arguments.

That is, first I have to discuss premises that led to the book’s conclusions about the meaning of life. Considering my aim, I shall discuss the secondary literature on the Tractatus only to the extent that it gives us an insight into the book’s account of meaning in life. So, my aim in this chapter is to provide a Tractarian account of meaning in life and then, in the next chapter, to examine some theories of life’s meaning based on the Tractarian view and to criticize the

Tractarian view itself.

The Tractatus as a Treatise on the Meaning of Life

During the course of World War I, Ludwig Wittgenstein, a young soldier by then, used to write

down his thoughts in his notebooks. His notes were mainly on logic and its relation to our

language, but one could also find notes of a personal nature that would reflect his existential

concerns, from fear of death to the implications of ‘living in agreement with the world’. It was based on these notes that Wittgenstein published the only philosophical book of his life.

Wittgenstein’s choice for the title of the book was ‘Philosophical Notebook’, but G. E.

Moore’s suggestion was an elegant one: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which bears an analogy to Spinoza’s famous opus. The book was published in 1922, with an introduction by

Bertrand Russell, who found it highly significant. It had a huge impact on the thinking of analytic philosophers, especially members of the Vienna Circle who were famous for their hardcore Logical Positivism. The book’s main aim is to show that all the problems of philosophy arise because we misunderstand the ‘logic of our language’. To avoid this,

Wittgenstein suggests, we have to draw a sharp line between what could be meaningfully said within the boundaries of language and what cannot be said but can only be ‘shown’.

In the following sections, I argue, following Wittgenstein, that the distinction between ‘what can be said’ and ‘what can only be shown’ could also be seen as a distinction between fact and value. In other words, I argue that the most important reason to consider the Tractatus as a treatise on the meaning of life is the implications of this dichotomy for our conceptions of the meaning of life. The Tractatus is a book on the relation between fact and value and hence, I argue, it can inform issues of meaning in life. That is to say, the fact/value dichotomy in the

Tractarian view entails the life/meaning dichotomy.

Utterances of value, according to the Tractatus, cannot be expressed in meaningful propositions. A brief discussion of Wittgenstein’s arguments will show his reasons for belief in the inexpressibility of value. However, realizing the inexpressibility of value depends on

understanding the ‘structure’ of the ‘world’, because, Wittgenstein has it, when we see the world ‘aright’ we would acquire everything that we must know about value. Thus, in the

Tractatus, one might say, Wittgenstein tries to describe the world, as he ‘found it’

(Wittgenstein 1966: § 5.631), in seven propositions:

1) ‘The world is all that is the case’.

2) ‘What is the case — a fact — is the existence of states of affairs’.

3) ‘A logical picture of facts is a thought’.

4) ‘A thought is a proposition with sense’.

5) ‘A proposition is a truth-function of elementary propositions. (An elementary

proposition is a truth function of itself)’.

6) ‘The general form of a truth-function is [p, ξ, N (ξ)]. This is the general form

of a proposition’.

7) ‘What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence’.

According to the traditional interpretations of the Tractatus, it addresses the central problems of philosophy that deal with the world, thought and language, and presents a ‘solution’ to these problems, which is grounded in logic and in the nature of representation.2 The world can be

accurately represented by thought, which is a proposition with sense, since they all — world, thought, and proposition — share the same logical form. So, one might say, the thought and the

proposition can be pictures of the facts.

Wittgenstein starts his book by claiming that the world consists of the ‘totality of facts’ (1). For example, it is a fact that it is raining, that the cat is on the mat, that the earth revolves around

2 For traditional interpretations of Wittgenstein, see Anscombe 1959; Pears 1970; Mounce 1981; Barrett 1991, Hacker 2001. For therapeutic interpretations of Wittgenstein, see Diamond 1991; Conant 2000.

the sun, etc. That is to say, the fact is what we describe by means of a proposition. Facts are existent states of affairs (2) and states of affairs, in turn, are composed of combinations of objects. Objects can fit together in various determinate ways. They may have various properties and may hold diverse relations to one another. Objects combine with one another according to their logical, internal properties. Moreover, an object’s internal properties determine the possibilities of its combination with other objects – this is its logical form. Thus, states of affairs, being comprised of objects in combination, are inherently complex. The states of affairs that do exist could have been otherwise. This means that states of affairs are either actual (existent) or possible. For example, in our world there are no elephants in the North

Pole, but it is completely possible to imagine a world in which elephants live in the North Pole.

The totality of states of affairs – actual and possible – makes up the whole of reality. The world is precisely those states of affairs that do exist. In the world people do not grow wings in a chemical reaction, and thus, they can’t fly. Such a state of affairs does not exist. Therefore, such a world does not exist.

The same logical principles that determine states of affairs also determine what can be meaningfully said or thought. Wittgenstein explains this by introducing his famous idea that thoughts and propositions are pictures – ‘the picture is a model of reality’ (Wittgenstein 1966:

§ 2.12). Pictures are made up of elements that together constitute the picture. Each element represents an object, and the combination of objects in the picture represents the combination of objects in a state of affairs. The logical structure of the picture, whether in thought or in language, is isomorphic with the logical structure of the state of affairs that it pictures.

Furthermore, by claiming that ‘[o]nly the proposition has sense’ and that ‘only in the context of a proposition has a name meaning’ (ibid: § 3.3), Wittgenstein provides the reader with the two

conditions of a meaningful proposition.3 First, the structure of the proposition must conform to the constraints of logical form, and second, the elements of the proposition must have reference. These conditions have important implications. The analysis must culminate with a name being a primitive symbol, and this is manifested by the very abstract character of both names and (simple) objects. Moreover, logic itself gives us the structure and limits of what can be said at all. In fact, Wittgenstein himself considered the idea of the limits of what can be said to be the key theme of his book:

The whole sense of the book might be summed up in the following words: What can be

said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in

silence. Thus the aim of the book is to draw a limit to thought, or rather – not to

thought, but to the expression of thoughts: for in order to be able to draw a limit to

thought, we should have to find both sides of the limit thinkable. . . . It will therefore

only be in language that the limit can be drawn, and what lies on the other side of the

limit will simply be nonsense (ibid: preface).

Following the analysis of world-thought-language, and developing and arguing for the general form of propositions, Wittgenstein concludes that all meaningful propositions are of ‘equal value’. For example, to borrow an example from his ‘Lecture on Ethics’, a proposition that describes the falling of a stone and a proposition that describes a murder have equal value, that is, they stand on the same factual level. Subsequently, he ends his book by alluding to what cannot be said and refers to it as ‘the mystical’, which must be passed over in ‘silence’ (7), and announces that propositions of ethics, aesthetics, and metaphysics are outside the realm of what

3 This proposition obviously refers to Frege’s famous dictum in his Foundations of Arithmetic: ‘Never to ask for the meaning of a word in isolation, but only in the context of a proposition’ (Frege 1980: x).

can be meaningfully said. By ‘unsayable’ Wittgenstein refers to what cannot be meaningfully conveyed based on the criteria of meaningfulness so far explained. For example, consider the

absolute value that most of us ascribe to human dignity and think of a proposition that can

clearly convey that absolute value so that everyone could fully understand the value of human

dignity. Wittgenstein’s point is that there is a ‘limit’ to what can be expressed meaningfully

with language. Throughout the Tractatus, Wittgenstein emphasizes the logical limits of my

language and the world:

The limits of my language mean the limits of my world (ibid: § 5.6).

Logic pervades the world: the limits of the world are also its limits. So we cannot say in

logic, ‘The world has this in it, and this, but not that.’ For that would appear to

presuppose that we were excluding certain possibilities, and this cannot be the case,

since it would require that logic should go beyond the limits of the world; for only in

that way could it view those limits from the other side as well.

We cannot think what we cannot think; so what we cannot think we cannot say either

(ibid: § 5.61).

Wittgenstein’s point is that the logical structure of thought and language determines the limits

of every world that I can conceive. Logic determines the limits of every possible world. One of

the conclusions that Wittgenstein draws from this is that it is impossible to go beyond language

by means of our thought. To try to do so is to attempt to think outside logic. In other words,

logic, according to Wittgenstein, determines the limits of every state of affairs that can exist

and everything that can be sensibly said or thought.

In a sense, what Wittgenstein does in the Tractatus is similar to a thought experiment

introduced by William James in his book, The Varieties of Religious Experience. The only

difference is that each comes to a completely different conclusion by the thought experiment.

James invites us to participate in a thought experiment that demonstrates, according to him, the

impossibility of abstracting oneself from values that confer meaning on our experience of the

world:

Conceive yourself, if possible, suddenly stripped of all the emotion with which your

world now inspires you, and try to imagine it as it exists, purely by itself, without your

favourable, hopeful or apprehensive comment. It will be almost impossible for you to

realize such a condition of negativity and deadness. No one portion of the universe

would then have importance beyond another; and the whole collection of its things and

series of events would be without significance, character, expression, or perspective

(James 1987: 141).

Whereas James denies the possibility of a world in which people could conceive themselves

stripped of any value judgments, the Tractatus claims that not only is it possible to do so but

that this is how the world is. The world that the Tractatus tries to describe is ‘stripped of all the

emotion’ and ‘purely by itself’– the world, as it were, without the human face. We call it the

‘Tractarian world’, a world where only the ‘law of causality’ decides what can be described.

As Wittgenstein says, ‘what can be described can also happen: and what the law of causality is

meant to exclude cannot even be described’ (1966: § 6.362). The law of causality is meant to

exclude ‘my will’ and whatever that is related to it. That is to say, ‘there is no logical

connexion between the will and the world’ (ibid: § 6.374). The good or bad will can only alter

the ‘limits of the world’; it cannot alter facts. In other words, neither our good will nor values can alter the ultimate factuality of all the things that happen in the world. Wittgenstein claims,

The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is at 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 itself be accidental. It must lie outside the world (ibid: § 6.41).

Wittgenstein’s claim that ‘in the world everything is as it is’, is crucial in understanding his

account of value and meaning in life. When Wittgenstein suggests that no value exists in the

world, he in fact claims that he is describing the world in-itself. The Tractatus is about an

individual who faces the world and tries to see it as it is. In a sense, what had been started with

Descartes’ individualistic attempt to step outside the custom and prejudice of his age and had

continued with Hume’s Treatise on Human Nature and especially Kant’s three Critiques came

to a dramatic end in the Tractatus. All these philosophers who developed modern philosophy

were dealing with the relation between the world and our knowledge of it. In the modern

metaphysical worldview, as Yuval Lurie suggests, ‘an ontological gap has opened up between

what is termed “the world as we know it” and “the world as it is in itself”’ (Lurie 2006: 105).

The distinction between ‘appearance’ and ‘reality’, on the one hand, and between ‘subjective’

and ‘objective’, on the other hand, are other expressions of this ontological gap in modern

philosophy. According to Kant, for example, time and space, as well as concepts that refer to

material objects, like color and substance, do not refer to features of the world in itself. Rather

the way we know the world is a function of our cognitive abilities and, thus, we can have

access only to the phenomenal world, i.e., the world as it is represented to us. Furthermore,

Kant even goes further and suggests that humans as autonomous rational beings construct

values. Therefore, if we want to know the world as it is we are supposed to acquire our knowledge from a different source than our current cognitive abilities. However, according to

Kant, any attempt to acquire such knowledge will remain a speculative cognition. As I will

argue in the next section, this debate continues in the Tractatus and the solution that

Wittgenstein offers to solve the realism vs. idealism debate is crucial in understanding

Wittgenstein’s account of meaning in life. It is crucial, because it was in light of this obsession

to know the world as it is in itself that Wittgenstein offered one of the queerest responses to the

‘problem of life’ in 20th century philosophy. I shall address this issue in Chapter Two but next I

attend to Wittgenstein’s solution to the problem of realism/idealism.

The Tractarian Reading of Realism/Idealism Debate

The contention between ‘realism’ and ‘idealism’ in modern philosophy was precisely over the

possibility of knowing the world in itself. While realists claim that there is a real world outside

us that can be known in different ways, idealists hold that knowledge of the world is only a

function of our cognitive abilities. There are also some extremists in the idealism camp who

claim not only we don’t have access to the world as it is, but we also can’t have access to the

ways other people perceive the world (solipsism). In this section I briefly discuss

Wittgenstein’s views about the debate as I think refuting or accepting his conception of life’s

meaning requires paying due attention to the foundations upon which he arrived at his

Tractarian ‘solution’ to the problem of life. As I shall argue in Chapter Two, Wittgenstein’s

‘autistic’ conception of life stems from some indirectly related metaphysical and

epistemological views that need to be addressed.

Wittgenstein claims that he has found the solution to the problem of idealism/realism: The source of all the problems is the very distinction between the phenomenal world and the world in itself. Both idealism and realism are based on the assumption that the concepts of world and my world, or life or my life, refer to different things. However, Wittgenstein suggests that all the concepts that he uses to talk about the world, his life and life in general all refer to the same things. The dichotomy will collapse when I realize that ‘the world’ is in fact ‘my world’. He uses an analogy to elaborate this. The relation between the world and ‘I’ is analogous to the relation between the ‘visual field’ and ‘the eye’. Wittgenstein writes,

The world and life are one.

I am my world. (The microcosm.)

There is no such thing as the subject that thinks or entertains ideas.

If I wrote a book called The World as I Found it, I should have to include a report on

my body, and should have to say which parts were subordinate to my will, and which

were not, etc., this being a method of isolating the subject, or rather of showing that in

an important sense there is no subject; for it alone could not be mentioned in that book.

The subject does not belong to the world: rather, it is a limit of the world (1966: §§

5.621- 5.632).

Wittgenstein’s point is that the subject is a transcendental limit of the world, like logic. Note that Wittgenstein draws a distinction between ‘the philosophical I’, i.e., the subject and ‘the human body’ and suggests the latter is ‘a part of the world among others, among beasts, plants, stones, etc.’ (Wittgenstein 1979a: 82). In fact, Wittgenstein’s solution to the problem of solipsism/realism lies in destroying the very dichotomy. As he suggests, ‘I objectively confront

every object’ (ibid: 80) but I cannot objectively confront the ‘I’. That is, the ‘I’ is not an object

that one can confront. According to James Atkinson, ‘if we want to understand what

Wittgenstein means by the I, we must begin by . . . eliminating everything I objectively

confront that I believe forms my sense of individual identity. This includes eliminating the

physical and psychological attributes we normally attribute to personal identity’ (Atkinson

2009: 38). Wittgenstein calls this process of elimination, the shrinking of the ‘I’ to ‘an

extensionless point’ (1979a: 82). When we do so, we cannot say that the subject exists or does not exist. In other words, if the subject is neither an object that is configured in a state of affairs, nor a name that is configured in an elementary proposition, it does not belong to the

world.

Note that Wittgenstein does not deny human personhood. By ‘subject’ he refers to the metaphysical self and suggests ‘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’ (1966: § 5.641). What Wittgenstein denies here is the

‘thinking’ subject, not the ‘willing’ subject and this is the willing subject, i.e., the ‘I’, who is the bearer of good and evil. In addition, as far as my body is concerned, it too is part of the world, like a ‘stone’ or a ‘beast’; there is no metaphysical ‘I’ in the world.4

Thus, Wittgenstein thought the dichotomy would collapse as soon as we realize that the ‘I’

belongs with the rest of the world. As he writes, ‘Idealism singles men out from the world as unique, solipsism singles me alone out, and at last I see that I too belong with the rest of the world, and so on the one side nothing is left over, and on the other side, as unique, the world.

In this way, idealism leads to realism if it is strictly thought out’ (1979a: 85).

4 See Wittgenstein 1979a: 80.

Wittgenstein did not bother to explain what the difference between the willing subject and the

metaphysical thinking subject is and one might rightly question the distinction. One might ask

how is it possible to will good or evil without having a concept of good or evil. For

Wittgenstein, the logical necessity in the world acts like a guarantee that ensures my world is the world. That is to say, in the world there is only one logical necessity to which every possible world is subject. In other words, solipsism is ruled out because my world is seen as the world, which includes others.

Now, what are the implications of the whole idealism/realism debate for Wittgenstein’s conception of the meaning of life? One answer would be to draw attention to Wittgenstein’s way of considering the fact of human life as something that ‘belongs with the rest of the world’. In this view, as I will explain later in this chapter, the factual status of, for example, the falling of a stone and the killing of a person are on the same factual level. For Wittgenstein, the rationale of ethics is our deepest tendency to deny that human beings belong with the rest of the world; it is to deny that the only things we have are facts and not values. Furthermore, when we read in the Tractatus that ‘Death is not an event in life’ (1966: § 6.4311), which is in a sense a statement about the meaning of life, we can see its relation to a view that considers human beings as a part of the world like the ‘beast’ or ‘stone’ or tree.

So far, I have briefly discussed some key elements of the Tractatus. These elements work as a ground upon which Wittgenstein presents his views of ethics and the meaning of life. To this, I will attend in the next section.

A Tractarian Account of the Meaning of Life

The last four pages of the Tractatus consist of the implications of the Tractarian worldview for

Wittgenstein’s understanding of ethics. These pages contain some very concise and enigmatic statements about the unsayabilty of ethics, the nature of the will, death, the insufficiency of our temporal immortality to solve the problem of life, the mystical, and silence; as if Wittgenstein has been reluctant to put these brief statements in the final draft of the book. For Wittgenstein, by then, the ‘correct method’ of doing philosophy, was ‘to say nothing except what can be said, i.e., propositions of natural science . . . 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’ (Wittgenstein 1966: § 6.53). Ironically, however, as Russell noted,

Wittgenstein managed to say ‘a good deal’ about the unsayable.5

What is the gist of Wittgenstein’s propositions concerning ethics? One might suggest it is his fundamental belief that words are capable of conveying only facts and not values. The logical framework of the Tractarian world allows us to express facts, which alone can be said. To talk about value is to go beyond the limits of meaningful language, whereas in the Tractarian world, the only thing we have is ‘facts, facts, facts, but no Ethics’ (Wittgenstein 1965:7). There is a limit, in this view, to what can be said, and all the propositions that can be said are of ‘equal value’ (Wittgenstein 1966: § 6.4). In a sense, in the Tractarian world facts have only face value. The common characteristic of all the facts in the world is only one thing: They are all

‘accidental’ (ibid: § 6.41) and what is accidental cannot convey value. For example, the fact that the sun rises from the east and that the earth revolves around the sun could have been

5 See, Russell’s introduction to the Tractatus 1966: xxi.

simply otherwise, but when we say ‘lying for selfish reasons is wrong’ we cannot imagine a world in which such lying is morally right, i.e., it is not accidental; it has an absolute value.

Wittgenstein’s argument can be restructured as follows:

• Facts of the world are accidental.

• All propositions concerning facts are contingent, i.e., they might be otherwise.

• Ethics is concerned with value.

• The only necessity is logical necessity and the only impossibility is logical

impossibility.

• If there were propositions of value in the world they must follow logical necessity and

they must be contingent.

• This would make propositions of value accidental.

• Value cannot be accidental, since if it were accidental, it wouldn’t be value; it would,

then, be a fact. Therefore,

o In the world, it is impossible to have propositions of ethics.

o Value must lie outside the world.

The first implication of this argument (I call it the ‘dichotomy argument’) is reflected in §

6.423, where Wittgenstein suggests that it is impossible to talk about the will in so far as it is

‘the subject of ethical attribute’. That is to say, when we talk about the good or bad exercise of the will we should know that it does not alter the world, i.e., the totality of facts. It can alter only the ‘limits’ of the world. As I have discussed earlier, by ‘limits of the world’ Wittgenstein means the subject, the ‘I’. So, in a sense, Wittgenstein says the way one exercises one’s will has an effect, though the effect either cannot be expressed in the world or can be expressed but not as value laden. These effects are ethical; they change one’s attitude toward the world. Now

we can understand Wittgenstein when he writes, ‘the world of the happy man is different from

that of the unhappy man’ (ibid: § 6.43). Unhappiness, in this view, is the result of a bad

exercise of one’s will. An unhappy person does not accept the world and lives in disagreement

with it. A person who lives so fails to see that contingencies of life are independent of her will.

They happen, in Kai Nielsen’s words, without ‘rhyme or reason’ (Nielsen 2005: 147). In fact,

the ‘problem of life’, Wittgenstein claims, springs from living in disagreement with the world.6

It seems that the logical consequence of the unsayability of propositions of value for

Wittgenstein is the question that if the answer to the question of value cannot be put into

words, why should we, then, continue assuming that the question can be put into words. Thus,

we read, when an answer cannot be put into words, the question cannot be put into words either

(ibid: § 6.5). Put differently, when a question can be expressed in meaningful language, it is

‘possible to answer it’. Wittgenstein suggests that one of the most fundamental mistakes of

philosophers is that they dwell on the problems that cannot be put into words, the most

important of which is the problem of life. Moreover, anything that can be expressed through

either question or answer is indeed subject to doubt.7 With regard to the unsayable

Wittgenstein simply says there is nothing to ask and nothing to answer, and the only questions

that can be asked are the questions of ‘natural sciences’. However, even if we answer the

questions of science, we won’t be able to answer the problem of life:

6 In Chapter Three, I will discuss Wittgenstein’s conception of happiness and its relation to attitude. 7 In this view, skepticism, Wittgenstein has it, is nonsensical because it raises doubt where there is no question. As Wittgenstein says, ‘doubt can exist only where a question exists, a question only where an answer exists, and an answer only where something can be said’ (Wittgenstein 1966: § 6.51). According to Atkinson, doubt can also reveal the mystical, because one might doubt the meaning of life and think there must be an answer for his doubt which is expressed in the question of life’s meaning. However, when the sense of life becomes clear, one realizes that the sense or meaning of life cannot be put into words, i.e., it is ‘mystical’. See Atkinson 2009: 32-33.

We feel that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the

problem of life remains completely untouched. Of course there are then no questions

left, and this itself is the answer (ibid: § 6.52).

Note the distinction that Wittgenstein draws between ‘problem’ and ‘question’. Whereas a

‘question’ can be put into words and thus can be answered, the ‘problem’ cannot be put into

words and thus it will remain untouched. One feels that the chain of thoughts in the Tractatus,

expressed in a numeric order, has a domino effect. That is, what has been started with the first proposition of the book, which claims that ‘the world is all that is the case’ (ibid: § 1), reaches

a mystifying end, which is one of the key points of the book:

The riddle does not exist (ibid: § 6.5).

Wittgenstein’s point is that the only way to solve the problem of life is to make the problem

disappear.8 The problem will vanish when one realizes that it cannot be framed into a question and thus no answer can be found in words for it (ibid: § 6.521). In a sense, the only solution to the problem of the meaning of life is changing one’s aspect, one’s way of seeing the world.9

This view is in agreement with that of those Wittgensteinian commentators who emphasize the

‘therapeutic’ conception of Wittgenstein’s philosophy. Bob Plant, for example, highlights the

similarities between Pyrrhonist philosophers and Wittgenstein. According to Plant, ‘for the

Pyrrhonist it is the human tendency toward belief per se that constitutes the malady requiring philosophical “treatment”. Only by eliminating this craving are we released from superfluous

8 Galeb Thompson rightly suggests that there is a similarity between Tolstoy and Wittgenstein in seeing the solution to the problem of life in its disappearance. See Thompson (1997). 9 In chapter three, I will discuss the significance of aspect-changing in a Wittgensteinian approach to the question of life’s meaning.

existential burdens and can thereby attain the requisite state of ataraxia – an untroubled and tranquil condition of the soul’ (Plant: 2005: 13-14). Likewise, the craving to find an ultimate answer to the problem of life will fade away once we come to the realization that there is not any riddle to solve. The very realization that neither the question nor the answer can be put into words is the result of a therapeutic approach to philosophy. In the penultimate section of the

Tractatus, Wittgenstein famously writes:

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 (1966: § 6.54).

The Tractatus’ propositions act like steps of a ladder so that one can climb up and see the

world aright. Philosophy itself is seen as an ‘activity’ and not ‘a body of doctrine’ (ibid: §

4.112). This activity is a transcendent activity since by doing it one reaches a point where one

sees the world aright. The Tractarian therapy aims at seeing the world aright. One might ask,

what would it be like to see the world aright? For Wittgenstein, when one sees the world

aright one sees the limits of the world, i.e., the boundary between what can be said and what

can only be shown. The Tractatus draws the limits of what can be said in order to signify the

unsayable and the moral stance one should ideally take with regard to them. The last

proposition of the book alludes to this point when, ironically, in one of the most enigmatic

endings of a philosophical work in the history of (analytical) philosophy we read: ‘What we

cannot speak about we must pass over in silence’ (ibid: § 7).10

10 The vast discrepancy between the commentators over the last proposition of the Tractatus shows how ambivalent this statement is. While some interpret the silence referred to in this statement as an ‘ethical’ silence (Edwards 1982; Shields 1993), others view it as an aesthetic statement (Rozema 2002). Logical Positivists were so fascinated by the radical ‘verificationism’ of the Tractatus that they overlooked the significance of the ‘ethical’ in the book, whereas Wittgenstein himself considered the Tractatus as an ethical project. (See, for example, Luckhardt 1996: 92.) According to the ‘resolute’ reading of the Tractatus, proposed by Cora Diamond and James Conant, we shouldn’t infer from the last proposition of the Tractatus that there are some ‘important’ things that cannot be said and thus we have to be silent about them. Wittgenstein’s allusion to silence refers to nothing; it doesn’t allude to some ‘infallible truths’. On the other hand, traditional commentators of the Tractatus, like P.S. Hacker, claim that the Tractatus draws a line between the things that we can speak about and a world of things of which we cannot speak. That is to say, in Hacker’s reading, the Tractatus offers a two-world metaphysics. What is interesting in the ‘resolute vs. non-resolute’ reading debate, I think, is the fact that both parties have enough documents to support their claims and attribute their view to Wittgenstein himself. For example, Anscombe, as a traditional reader of the book, refers to § 6.432 and argues that God does not reveal himself in the world of accidental things. Because, if whatever is the case in the world is accidental, why does Wittgenstein mention the non-accidental (Anscombe 1959: 171)? However, referring to § 6.54, Diamond asks how seriously we can take that remark concerning the nonsensicality of the Tractatus’ propositions. She suggests that we should take Wittgenstein at his words and read him literally, otherwise what we do is nothing but ‘chickening out’: That is what I want to call chickening out. What counts as not chickening out is then this, roughly: to throw away the ladder is, among other things, to throw away in the end to take seriously the language of ‘features of reality’. To read Wittgenstein himself as not chickening out is to say that it is not, not really, his view that there are features of reality that cannot be put into words but show themselves (Diamond 1995: 181). Note that both Anscombe and Diamond refer to the same text to validate their arguments, and yet both appeal to different aspects of the Tractatus. A resolute reader, thus, deems Wittgenstein’s statements on the mystical and the problem of life as insignificant, whereas Hacker or Anscombe put a lot of weight on these parts. For more on resolute reading, see also Conant 2000: 174-217. Most recently, Hans Sluga disputed the ‘interpretation business’ that is running in the exegetical literature on Wittgenstein’s philosophy. According to Sluga, it seems that we are caught in a spiral of ‘increasing hyper-specialization of the exegetical type of philosophizing’. This process is in danger of ‘losing view of the world’. The problem with much of the literature on Wittgenstein’s philosophy, according to Sluga, is that it lacks precisely the passion with which Wittgenstein would struggle with his ‘burning questions’. Viewing Wittgenstein’s philosophy from a historical perspective, Sluga argues that ‘the questions that occupied Wittgenstein so passionately are no longer so deeply burning to us’ (Sluga 2012; forthcoming). The burning questions, in Sluga’s view, are now those questions that are concerned with our social existence (the unstoppable growth of population, the unstoppable growth of technology, and the environmental crises).

Wittgenstein’s reluctance to explain his arguments in the Tractatus has led to some misleading interpretations of his ethical views. When Russell begged him to clarify and explain the declarative remarks of the Tractatus, Wittgenstein retorted that explaining them was like ‘to dirty a flower with muddy hands’ (Monk 1990: 54). When one finishes reading the book, one feels that something has been avoided intentionally. However, seven years after the publication of the Tractatus, in his ‘Lecture on Ethics’, Wittgenstein managed to address the so-called

‘missing links’ in the book. The Lecture is highly significant in understanding Wittgenstein’s view on the meaning of life since it addresses precisely those elements that he passed over in silence in his book. However, whereas in the Tractatus he rejects any attempt to say something about human values, in the Lecture he recognizes it as a fundamental human ‘tendency’ to be concerned about the ‘ultimate meaning of life’. As I will argue in Chapter Two, the identity of ethics with our tendency to give a sense to the facts of the world, i.e., to say something about the meaning of life, is one of the key ideas that Wittgenstein held throughout his life. To this lecture I attend next.

Ethics as ‘Enquiry into the Meaning of Life’

‘Lecture on Ethics’ might be seen as a footnote to the Tractatus and is written in the same spirit, though in the former Wittgenstein is more charitable in explaining and demystifying his views of value. That includes the nature of value, the mystical, morality and the meaning of life. In the Lecture, he considers ethics as an attitude toward the world and not a theory for a set of actions or prioritization of our moral acts. When we read the Lecture it is best to keep in mind Wittgenstein’s emphasis on the fact/value dichotomy, the saying/showing distinction and

the unsayability of propositions of ethics, as discussed in the Tractatus, because the Lecture is an attempt to provide further arguments for them.

By adopting G. E. Moore’s definition of ethics as ‘the general enquiry into what is good’,

Wittgenstein tries to add ‘more or less synonymous’ expressions to his definition and writes, ‘I could have said Ethics is the enquiry into what is valuable, or, what is really important, or I could have said Ethics is the enquiry into the meaning of life, or into what makes life worth living’ (Wittgenstein 1965:5). Then he suggests that each of these expressions can be used in two different senses that are the ‘trivial or relative sense’, on the one hand, and ‘the ethical or absolute’ sense, on the other. What is the difference between good in the relative and good in the absolute sense? Wittgenstein claims that ‘every judgment of relative value is a mere statement of facts and can therefore be put in such a form that it loses all the appearances of a judgment of value’ (ibid: 6). For example, when we say ‘From Johannesburg N1 is the right road to Cape Town’, we simply mean ‘This is the way you have to go if you want to get from

Johannesburg to Cape Town in the shortest time’.

To stipulate the distinction and contrast between absolute value and fact, Wittgenstein appeals to another statement: ‘No statement of fact can ever be, or imply, a judgment of absolute value’

(ibid.). That is to say, facts of the world cannot ‘attribute’ any value to the world itself.

Whatever happens, and is, in the world, stands on the same level with other facts in the world.11 The metaphor of an ‘omniscient person’ and his ‘world-book’ shows the depth of

Wittgenstein’s belief in the fact/value dichotomy. He asks us to suppose this person ‘knew all the movements of all the bodies in the world dead or alive and that he also knew all the states of minds of all human beings that ever lived’ (ibid.). Now, if this person were to write all he

11 Cf. Wittgenstein 1966: §§ 6.41, 6.4321; 1979a: 73.

knew in a big book, that book would contain everything but ethical judgments, because, for

Wittgenstein, ‘words can only express facts’ (ibid: 7) and they fail to express values. If I could write value in the world-book, according to Wittgenstein, it wouldn’t have value at all. Here

Wittgenstein brings out yet another metaphor to express himself:

If a man could write a book on Ethics which really was a book on Ethics, this book

would, with an explosion, destroy all the other books in the world (ibid).

That is to say, writing the book of ethics entails destroying the book of facts. Roughly

speaking, Wittgenstein’s claim is that if I can write ethics, it means that I can ‘say’ it and if I

can say it, it means that ethics has a ‘sense’. If it has a sense, it means that it is factual.

Whatever is factual is accidental. However, ethics is not accidental and thus it cannot be

written. Note that the words like ‘saying’, ‘sense’, ‘factual’ and ‘accidental’ follow

Wittgenstein’s terminology in the Tractatus and have specific meanings. Of course, I can say,

for example, that harming innocent people for a selfish reason is morally wrong and I trust any

rational person would agree with this and act accordingly. But this is not Wittgenstein’s point.

His point is that the sense of a moral value cannot be expressed by justificatory explanations. If

someone asks why harming innocent people is morally wrong, I might respond, because human

life has absolute value and harming the innocent disregards that absolute value. If he asks, then,

why human life has absolute value, I might say because God has given life to human beings, or

because humans are autonomous or because it is in the interest of society, etc. However,

according to Wittgenstein, every possible answer given to justify the absolute value of human

life will face another question, and so on and so forth, ad infinitum. But none of these

explanations can convey fully the absolute value of human life, i.e., it cannot be said, let alone

be proved. In other words, an absolute value cannot be a describable state of affairs.

Why are we, then, still ‘tempted’ to use such expressions as ‘absolute value’ and what do we try to express when we do so? Wittgenstein refers to some ‘particular’ and yet ‘personal’ experiences of absolute value. He mentions the fact that these examples are highly personal and other people might find other experiences more ‘striking’ (ibid: 8). I will return to this issue shortly by offering another example.

Wittgenstein offers three experiences in which one feels the absolute value. These examples are all related to the notion of ‘the mystical’ briefly mentioned in the Tractatus:

• Wondering at the existence of the world

• Feeling of absolute safety

• Feeling guilty

Then, right away, he warns us, as if he wants to correct himself, that the ‘verbal expression which we give to these experiences are nonsense’ (ibid: 8). I can wonder at something being the case, ‘which I could conceive not being the case’. But, Wittgenstein claims, it doesn’t make sense to wonder at the existence of the world because ‘I cannot imagine it not existing’. As for the second experience, I can be safe in my house but, physically, it is impossible to say ‘I am safe, nothing can injure me, whatever happens’. The conclusion that Wittgenstein makes of these clarifications is that ‘a certain characteristic misuse of our language runs through all our ethical and religious expressions. All these expressions seem, prima facie, to be just similes’

(ibid: 9). When I say Robert Sobukwe had a valuable life I don’t mean it in the same sense that

I would speak of some ‘valuable jewelry’, but ‘there seems to be some sort of analogy’. The analogy in the experience of wondering at the existence of the world is that one says God has created the world. For the second experience one says we are safe in the hands of God.

Furthermore, feeling guilty can be described by saying that ‘God disapproves of our conduct’.

In all of these three examples, we appeal to an analogy, a simile. However, a simile, like a metaphor, is a kind of comparison of something with something else, and this implies that what is compared, in the simile, could also be described without using simile. With regard to the experience of absolute value, however, if, for instance, we drop the simile of God as the Father, we find ourselves unable to describe him in non-metaphorical language.

Throughout the Lecture, one has a mixed feeling. On the one hand, Wittgenstein says there are some experiences of absolute value and, on the other hand, he immediately warns us that sentences that attempt to express these experiences are nonsensical. It appears that Wittgenstein wants to say that there are some nonsensical experiences that are, in fact, very important.12 I think there are two reasons for Wittgenstein’s ‘disquietude’ throughout the Lecture. The first one is Wittgenstein’s self-conscious attempt to avoid sounding like someone who merely repeats the claims of Logical Positivists. While for the Logical Positivists all that matters is the verifiable meaningful language, and they are content with it, for Wittgenstein, the most cardinal problems of life are precisely the ones that cannot be talked about (Engelmann 1967:

97-111). The second reason has to do with Wittgenstein’s disapproval of what he calls

‘claptrap about ethics’ (Monk 1990:282). He was always disapproving of the tendency to view ethics as a science alongside other branches of knowledge. According to Wittgenstein, reducing ethics to a science that deals with human actions entails reducing the moral life to a public phenomenon. In this view, ethics is concerned with what publicly happens, with action and reactions and it has to do with large-scale social structures. Or, as James Edwards says, in this view ‘ethics is inseparable from politics’ (Edwards 1982: 239). Wittgenstein had the same

12 This is in conformity with Hacker’s reading of the Tractatus. See, Hacker (2000).

thing in mind when he once said to Rhees, ‘it was strange that you could find books on ethics

in which there was no mention of a genuine ethical or moral problem’ (Rhees 1970: 98-99).

For Wittgenstein, it is a big misunderstanding of the nature of ethics to consider it as a science

that gives us some prescriptions, some ‘set of actions’ to improve the world. Ethics, for

Wittgenstein, begins through the experience of absolute value. It is an attitude toward the world

as a whole and, hence, it is about a way of being and not a way of doing. This is why Hans

Sluga characterizes Wittgenstein’s ethics as ‘visionary ethics’ (Sluga 2011:133) as opposed to

‘prescriptive and normative’ ethics.

Wittgenstein’s conception of absolute value and his examples refer to his own personal

experiences, and he never claims that his examples are exhaustive. A naturalist might wonder at the existence of the world without describing her experience by referring to God.

Wittgenstein’s choices to describe the experience of absolute value remind one of his famous

statement that ‘I am not a religious man, but I cannot help seeing every problem from a

religious point of view’ (Drury 1984: 91). However, I think, Wittgenstein’s tendency to link

ethics with religious experiences can be very misleading if we overlook the fact that he refers

only to some idiosyncratic experiences. He appeals to some religious experiences without

committing himself to any religious doctrine. We might also say that Wittgenstein’s interest in

using religious terms, as is reflected in his diaries, has something to do with his firm personal

conviction that any question concerning the meaning and value of life is ultimately a religious

question (I will discuss this in Chapter Six).

Moreover, I think the important element in Wittgenstein’s account of ethics is his emphasis on

one’s ‘way of seeing’ and one’s attitude toward the world and not his interest in integrating

religious experiences with ethics. For, I submit, there are other experiences of absolute value

that are not necessarily religious and yet have the same characteristics of an absolute value as

described by Wittgenstein. While Wittgenstein’s experiences are personal, there are, I believe,

some interpersonal experiences of absolute value. By interpersonal I mean some experiences

the objects of which are other persons and not the world as a whole. I think one of the most important interpersonal experiences that most of us have is experiencing the moral weight of the human face, as introduced in Emanuel Levinas’ conception of ethics. In Hillary Putnam’s

reading of Levinas, ‘[f]or Levinas, the irreducible foundation of ethics is my immediate

recognition, when confronted with a suffering fellow human being, that I have an obligation to

do something’ (Putnam 2004: 24).13 This obligation for most of us is a first-hand immediate

experience, which, according to Wittgenstein’s criterion, can be shown but cannot be said. In

this experience, too, we appeal to a simile (the moral weight of the human face), but if we drop

the simile there is no fact behind it. However, the nonsensicality of my experience does not

change my attitude toward it. As I have said earlier, the reason Wittgenstein calls ethical

propositions ‘nonsense’ is to show that the words we use to express our feeling cannot be given

a factual sense. However, it does not make our ethical experience less important to us. On the

contrary, ‘if I could explain the ethical only by means of a theory, then what is ethical would be

of no value whatsoever’ (Wittgenstein 1979b: 117). Wittgenstein finishes his lecture with an

avowal of reverence toward ethics:

My tendency and I believe the tendency of all men who ever tried to write or talk Ethics

or Religion was to run against the boundaries of language. This running against the

walls of our cage is perfectly, absolutely hopeless. Ethics so far as it springs from the

desire to say something about the ultimate meaning of life, the absolute good, the

13 For an in-depth comparison between Wittgenstein’s views of ethics and Levinas, see Plant 2005.

absolute valuable, can be no science. What it says does not add to our knowledge in any

sense. But it is a document of a tendency in the human mind which I personally cannot

help respecting deeply and I would not for my life ridicule it (Wittgenstein 1965:11-

12).

In this passage, some elements are highly related to the question of life’s meaning. First,

Wittgenstein identifies ethics with our tendency to say something about the ultimate meaning

of life. Note that by ‘saying’ Wittgenstein refers to the Tractarian distinction between

saying/showing. That is to say, ethics wants to say something that can only be shown. It cannot

be science and it does not add to our factual knowledge. So far, Wittgenstein’s claims are

similar to expressivist or emotivist theories of ethics, which claim one’s ethical utterances do

not refer to some facts and only express one’s attitudes or emotions (Ayer 1952; Stevenson

1963). However, whereas emotivism denies the objectivity of moral value, Wittgenstein rejects

any emotivist conception of ethics, since emotivism itself is an attempt to theorize or ‘say’

something about value by reducing it to a product of one’s dispositions. Moreover, whereas

relativism is the idea that there are not any objective criteria to judge the validity of ethical

claims, Wittgenstein suggests that absolute values can be felt but cannot be expressed

meaningfully, even as truth relative to a given social background. What Wittgenstein rejects is

any attempt to treat ethics as something that stands in need of justification. Fragile and

‘hopeless’ as it stands, ethics expresses our deepest tendency to give a meaning to our lives.

This view is in sharp contrast to relativistic theories of ethics that brush aside absolute value on

the ground that it is not objective, and consider value a subjective affair. Furthermore, and most

importantly, the value of ethics, for Wittgenstein, precisely springs from the fact that it is unsayable.

So, on the one hand, Wittgenstein’s view of value resembles the Logical Positivists’ views of the nature of ethical propositions, since both emphasize the nonsensicality of ethical propositions (Schlick 1930; Carnap 1996) , and, on the other hand, he parts company with them by asserting that the nonsensicality of ethical propositions does not render them irrelevant. As

Alfred Nordmann suggests, ‘a great many expressions are nonsensical and yet not senseless’

(Nordmann 2005: 160-161). I think the distinction between ‘nonsensical’ and ‘senseless’ is very illuminating. A proposition is nonsensical if it cannot be made to ‘look like good scientific sentences and if it cannot be analyzed or clarified’ (ibid: 164). But it doesn’t mean that the nonsensical proposition does not have a sense. The nonsensical, thus, shows the limits of my language, and since ‘the limits of my language are the limits of my world’, we conclude that the nonsensical shows the limits of my world. Ulrich Arnswald shares the same view. In the

Tractatus, he writes,

To say that a statement makes sense is the same as the observation that the statement

relates to objects in the world and that it is contingent. By the same token, to say that a

statement is nonsensical is only to state that it is not about such a statement. The

category ‘nonsense’ largely serves in the Tractatus to differentiate and is not a tool of

critique (Arnswald 2009:14).

Another point of contention between Wittgenstein and the Logical Positivists is the former’s disagreement with any reductionism with regard to moral values. According to Wittgenstein, any reductionist approach toward values ultimately devoids them of any value. More importantly, it deprives us of a ‘perspicuous’ (Wittgenstein 1958: § 122) understanding of moral issues. Consider the reductionist view that holds saying that someone’s life is meaningful is nothing but saying that a person feels satisfied upon achieving his or her aims

(Wohlgennant 1987).14 According to Wohlgennant, believing in the meaningfulness of one’s

life is only an expression of one’s satisfaction. In more radical cases, there is an attempt to

reduce everything to physical phenomena. I can explain away Mother Teresa’s life, for

example, by claiming that she was suffering from an obsessive-compulsive disorder that made her drown herself in people’s suffering to amend her unsettled relationship with a perceived

God. In M. Taine’s words:

Whether facts be moral or physical, it makes no matter. They always have their causes.

There are causes for ambition, courage, veracity, just as there are for digestion,

muscular movement, animal heat. Vice and virtue are products like vitriol and sugar

(Taine as quoted in James 1987: 18).

In a sense, Wittgenstein’s aim in his lecture is to show that reducing everything to describable

facts is indeed another instance of ‘misunderstanding the logic of our language’. Such a view

of value reveals also an attitude toward, and a ‘way of looking at’, facts. However, ‘the scientific way of looking at a fact is not the way to look at it as a miracle’ (Wittgenstein

1967:11).15 A positivistic view, like that of Taine, sees nothing significant and important in

human commitment to moral values; everything can be explained away and demystified. As

Engelmann suggests, ‘Positivism holds – and this is its essence – that what we can speak about is all that matters in life. Whereas Wittgenstein passionately believes that all that really matters in human life is precisely what, in his view, we must be silent about’ (Engelmann 1967: 97).

The second element that separates Wittgenstein from Logical Positivists is his firm belief that

our quest for the meaning of life is a fundamental tendency in us, a tendency that he respects

14 For a criticism of this kind of reductionism with regard to life’s meaning see Metz (2002). 15 See also, Wittgenstein 2003: 82-84.

deeply. In this view, our tendency has something to do with the experience of absolute value.

The nonsensicality of the experience of absolute value does not render it insignificant; rather it

only makes it incommunicable.16 If we return to the Tractatus, now we can understand

Wittgenstein’s point better when he refers to those people to whom the sense of life become clear and wonders why they are unable to say what constitutes that sense.17

In a sense, Wittgenstein’s aim is to draw our attention to the incommunicability of most human

experiences. Drawing a line between what is communicable and what cannot be communicated is highly significant because it makes us aware of the limits. As Wittgenstein puts it, ‘There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical’ (1966: § 6.522). Consider the experiences of a Holocaust survivor. The best

we can say is that those experiences were traumatic, terrifying, abhorring, etc., but what does

guarantee that these words express properly what she has gone through? How do we

communicate our feelings when we are in love? How do we make sure that the message is

delivered? Examining the ways we approach and experience these kinds of questions, Alfred

Nordmann writes, ‘When I say that I love you . . . I am reaching across an unbridgeable abyss.

You have no means to compare the content of this statement to the real state of affairs in my

head and heart, nor can I be sure that what you understood me to say is just what I meant by it.

In fact, I cannot control the meaning of this phrase even for myself’ (Nordmann 2005: 205).

16 I do not want to imply here that according to Wittgenstein there are some nonsenses that are significant nonsenses. James Conant and Cora Diamond reject the traditional reading of the Tractatus and suggest the idea that there are some profound nonsenses with regard to which we have to remain silent is in sharp contrast to the spirit of the Tractatus. Conant argues against those who claim that ‘for the Tractatus the propositions of ethics and religion – as well as either all or only the most important propositions of the Tractatus itself – are both nonsensical and deeply significant’ (Conant 1989: 247). For a criticism of the ‘resolute’ interpretation of Wittgenstein see, for example, Lippitt & Hutto 1998. 17 See, Wittgenstein 1966: § 6.521.

Who knows, I might be saying it out of feeling inferior. I might declare my love because I am

longing to hear the same from her. I might be saying it because I am terrified of being lonely

again. Or, I might be saying it because I realize that she is the only pure thing in my life. I even

might be saying it, and it happens all the time, because I want to taste what it means to have a

family.18 Likewise, one might think of all the other experiences that one finds hard to express.

Wittgenstein refers to some of these experiences in the Tractatus and the Lecture and highlights the nonsensicality of any attempt to treat them like some factual entities that can be easily communicated. As I will show in the next chapter, Wittgenstein’s main objection to the current strands in the literature on the meaning of life would be precisely the fact that the

expressibility of the meaning of life is taken for granted.

What Wittgenstein calls the ‘strictly correct method’ (1966: § 6.53) of doing philosophy is

nothing but to pay attention to what one says. Whereas most commentators in the literature on

the meaning of life freely use some concepts and terms and take their communicability for

granted, Wittgenstein wants us to pause and ask what meanings they have given to certain

signs in their propositions. Philosophers in the literature appeal to words like ‘love’,

18 Cf. the film Run Lola Run by Tom Tykwer in which Lola starts asking questions from her boyfriend Manni: ‘‘Do you love me?’ – ‘Sure I do.’ – ‘How can you be so sure?’ – ‘I don’t know. I just am.’ – ‘I could be some other girl.’ – ‘No.’ – ‘Why not?’ – ‘Because you are the best’ – ‘The best what? The best girl of all the girls in the world.’ – ‘Sure.’ – ‘How do you know?’ – ‘I just do.’ - ‘You think so.’ – ‘Okay, I think so.’ – ‘You see?’ – ‘What?’- ‘You aren’t sure.’ – ‘Are you nuts or what.’ – ‘What if you never met me?’ – ‘What do you mean?’ – ‘You would be telling the same thing to someone else.’ – ‘Okay, if you want to hear it.’ – ‘I don’t want to hear anything; I want to know how you feel.’ – ‘Okay, my feelings say that you are the best.’ – ‘Who is ‘your feeling’ anyway?’ – ‘It’s me. My heart.’ – ‘Your heart says ‘Hey Manni, she is the one’?’ – ‘Exactly.’ – ‘And you say, ‘Thanks for the information, see you around.’ – ‘Exactly.’ – ‘And you do what your heart says?’ – ‘Well, it really doesn’t say anything. I do know. It just feels.’ – ‘So, what does it feel now?’ – ‘That someone is asking rather stupid questions.’ – ‘Man, you aren’t taking me seriously.’ – ‘Lola, what is wrong? Do you want to leave me?’ – ‘I don’t know. I think I have to make a decision.’’ (Tykwer 1999).

‘transcendence’, ‘purpose of God’, ‘salvation’, ‘happiness’, etc. without considering the possibility that those words might not convey the same message that they intend. In Notebooks,

1914-1916 where Wittgenstein contemplates happiness, he reminds himself of the ‘complete unclarity of all these sentences’ (1979a: 79). It is easy to assume that there is a mutual understanding between philosophers who write on the meaning of life and the readers, that someone sends a message and the other receives it. Nordmann suggests that we all tend to forget that most of what we say with regard to ethical, religious and aesthetic matters is incommunicable and thus we fall into the same trap of misunderstanding and misjudgment that the Tractatus warns us. As Nordmann says,

It is easy to lose sight of the categorical distinction between making things out of words

and putting things into words, between agreement on the truth and falsity of a

descriptive sentence and a feeling of mutual understanding. And far from being a

harmless philosophical misunderstanding, the confusion of these things can actually be

dangerous. If we start believing that our co-ordinated use of words (She says: ‘I love

you,’ he says: ‘I love you, too’) somehow contains real understanding, shared values or

common truths, we may take the fact of communal co-ordination as evidence for a

grounding in meaning, values, cultural norms. We might thus allow the sheer

pervasiveness of a nonsensical phrase to make us forget that it is nonsensical

(Nordmann 2005: 216).

According to Nordmann, if we are to have a clear view of the use of our words, we need to be aware of the categorical difference between ‘sentences that have sense and the many ways in which we make sense of nonsense’ (ibid.). As I will argue in the next chapter, most theories in the literature on life’s meaning overlook this categorical difference. However, the Tractatus, as

it stands, despite its radicalism and all its flaws, can still draw the attention of philosophers to the limits of their theories to convey their senses and bringing about a change in one’s life.

Several objections can also be raised against the Tractarian account of life’s meaning, the most important of which is Wittgenstein’s ‘aspect-blindness’ to the modes of our ‘complicated form of life’ (Wittgenstein 1958: 174). So, critically analyzing the major theories in the literature from a Tractarian perspective does not mean that I agree with the Tractarian conception of life’s meaning. And rejecting the Tractarian conception of life’s meaning does not necessarily mean that the Tractarian objections to the common strands in the literature should be overruled.

Chapter Two

A Tractarian Approach to the Literature on Life’s Meaning

Introduction

As I said in the Introduction, the literature has been divided into three major strands, which are

supernaturalism, naturalism and nihilism. In this chapter, I examine some paradigm cases of these major strands and provide some Tractarian comments and criticisms. In the previous chapter, I discussed Wittgenstein’s account of life’s meaning and his firm belief in the inexpressibility of value or ‘sense’ of life. My aim in this chapter is to highlight the points of contention between the Tractarian view and some major theories in the literature. This will provide a major insight into what I think has been neglected in the literature. However, my aim is not only a comparative study, but also to provide new ways of looking at familiar themes, particularly with regard to religion and meaning, and attitude and meaning. So, what I discussed in Chapter One helps us to shed a light on the literature from a different perspective.

Introducing and integrating Wittgensteinian ideas into the current literature provides some critical tools to examine, first, the literature from a fresh perspective and, second, to engage with the question of life’s meaning in a different manner. This task is of importance, especially considering the fact that there is only a vague trace of Wittgenstein in the literature. This is

surprising especially considering the fact that Wittgenstein spent almost all his philosophical

career on the question of meaning.

In the second part of this chapter, I raise some objections to the Tractarian approach toward the

meaning of life, the main of which is the Tractatus’ ‘autistic’ conception of life as discussed by Ernest Gellner (2005). I also argue that the Tractarian view of life suffers from an ‘aspect-

blindness’ with regard to a fundamental aspect of our life, which is our communal life. In other

words, Wittgenstein himself, in his Tractarian philosophy, falls into the same metaphysical trap

that he tried to warn philosophers against. However, the fact that Wittgenstein himself was

bewitched by similar urges to provide a universal solution to the ‘problem of life’ does not

necessarily mean that his criticisms of metaphysical tendencies to theorize about the ‘ultimate

meaning of life’ are incorrect. To these criticisms I attend next.

Supernaturalism

I think it is important to clarify a point first. I think the assumption that there is a clear-cut

distinction between all three approaches toward the meaning of life, that their titles can

precisely represent various theories within each approach, can be very misleading. For

example, supernaturalism is often defined as the view that holds the meaning of life is found in

relation to God, a being transcendent to the natural world but who created it, and that without

the existence of God life has no meaning and purpose.1 However, this broad categorization

does not say much about the vast differences between friends of supernaturalism. Therefore, I

view terms like ‘supernaturalism’ or ‘naturalism’ only as some umbrella concepts for a wide

1 See, for example, Hartshorne 1984; Morris 1992; Craig 1994; Adams 1999; Cottingham 2005.

variety of perspectives that have some family resemblances between them.

Toward the end of the Tractatus we read, ‘The correct method in philosophy would really be . .

. to say nothing except what can be said . . . 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’ (1966: § 6.53). As far as supernaturalists are concerned, we might

ask, what meanings have they given to their signs? To answer this question from a Tractarian

perspective, first we have to ask what the gist of supernaturalism is. I think the answer is that

supernaturalists, at least in the Abrahamic tradition, believe that there is a Supreme Being who

confers value on the facts of the world. In this view, in the presence of God almighty the

fact/value dichotomy collapses. Everything has an ultimate purpose and value. ‘Every soul

shall taste of death . . . and unto us shall ye return’ (The Qur’an III, 185; XXI, 35; XXIX, 57).

In the Qur’an the earth is seen as a sacred place; one walks on earth and in front of God.2

Interestingly, in the Arabic language there is no word for ‘fact’.3 To put it in Wittgensteinian

terms, in supernaturalism the whole world of facts ‘waxes and wanes’ completely, so that it

becomes a completely different world.4 As Wittgenstein says, ‘to believe in a God means to

see that the facts of the world are not the end of the matter’ (1979a: 74). According to most supernaturalists, if everything could be ultimately reduced to facts, then human endeavors in life would be pointless. Without God, even our benevolence and good will, which are the sources of meaning according to some naturalists, would be of little significance. John

Cottingham writes,

2 Cf. The Qur’an XX, 12. 3 I am indebted to Professor Seyyed Hossein Nasr who discussed this in an interview with me. See also, Nasr 1976, 1989. 4 Cf. Wittgenstein 1966: § 6.43.

If there is nothing to support the hope that the good will ultimately triumph, if

essentially we are on our own, with no particular reason to think that our pursuit of the

good is any more than a temporary fragile disposition possessed by a percentage

(perhaps a minority) of a certain class of anthropoids – then . . . the very idea that some

lives can be more meaningful than others begins to seem a fantasy (Cottingham 2003:

72).

Cottingham’s point is that pursuit of the good, as objectivists claim, is necessary but not sufficient to confer meaning on one’s life and only the existence of God can give an ultimate purpose to our good will. In other words, Cottingham has it that only a supernatural transcendence can confer meaning on life.

On the other hand, some objectivists defend the fundamental view that the mere existence of

God and relating to him in the right way does not rule out other possible ways of acquiring meaningfulness like transcending oneself by actively engaging in objectively valuable activities. Creativity, benevolence, and compassion are some examples of objectively worthwhile elements in one’s life. Moreover, from an objectivist perspective, one can believe in God and yet be convinced that only one’s deeds in life, apart from one’s relation with God, determine whether one’s life is meaningful or not. What Cottingham considers as a ‘fantasy’

(2003: 72) is indeed a fundamental claim of objectivists. It is a fantasy, Cottingham has it, because our immanent life and what we do in it is not enough: We need to connect to a transcendent Being, one that guarantees our immortality and gives an ultimate purpose to our mortal lives in this world. A response would be to suggest that it is quite possible to imagine a

God who indeed creates the world and out of his infinite wisdom declines to confer immortality on human beings. That is, in this situation people’s death would be the end of the

matter (no resurrection, no residence in God’s memory, no reincarnation, none of those

theological solutions). It appears that a supernaturalist who believes ‘God’s ways are beyond

human understanding’ (as most supernaturalists do) would be in agreement with this scenario.

However, I suspect they will find many reasons to undermine this possibility (Morris 1992;

Fischer 1994; Adams 1999). It would be, they might say, against God’s wisdom to create human beings and then let them be wiped out from the face of the earth purposelessly.5 As

Robert Nozick says,

A significant life, in a sense, is permanent; it makes a permanent difference to the world

– it leaves traces. To be wiped out completely, traces and all, goes a long way toward

destroying the meaning of one’s life . . . Mortality is a temporal limit and traces are a

way of going or seeping beyond that limit. To be puzzled about why death seems to

undercut meaning is to fail to see the temporal limit itself as a limit (1981: 582,595).

I think this is the most fundamental claim of supernaturalists: Mortality destroys the meaning

of life.6 One does not usually feel the depth of this idea, as Cottingham says, in the ‘seminar

room’ (2005: 6). Realizing one’s mortality is something, reading about it is something else.

Here we should think of the ‘ultimate torment’ (Wittgenstein 1980: 46) that most people

experience when they think about their death. It seems that supernaturalists are willing to attribute everything to God (omnipotence, omniscience, infinite mercy, and infinite compassion) as long as God confers immortality on human beings. In general, most

5 In fact, process theologists raise similar kinds of questions and try to find an answer to them. For example, Delwin Brown writes, ‘if God, like the human mind, is a succession of occasions of experience, there seems to be no metaphysical guarantee that God preserves all values. That is, it is at least possible that some values become lost, even to God’ (Brown 1967: 30). See also Trethowan (1983). 6 See, Tolstoy 1987, Pojman 2008, Craig 2013.

supernaturalists think immortality is a necessary condition of a meaningful life.7

Moreover, if a naturalist asks why immortality is so important for supernaturalists, the answer

is: Because only immortality of our souls can solve the problem of life. For most

supernaturalists, believing in God and believing in the immortality of the soul are two sides of

the same coin. However, from a Tractarian view, what the supernaturalists fail to take into

account is that immortality might procrastinate our annihilation indefinitely, but it does not

solve the problem of life:

Not only is there no guarantee of the temporal immortality of the human soul, that is to

say of its eternal survival after death; but, in any case, this assumption completely fails

to accomplish the purpose for which it has always been intended. Or is some riddle

resolved by my surviving forever? Is not this eternal life itself as much of a riddle as

our present life? The solution of the riddle of life in space and time lies outside space

and time (Wittgenstein 1966: § 6.4312).

Metz suggests that no supernaturalist ‘maintains that mere extension is sufficient for life’s meaning’ (2002: 790). Instead some supernaturalist believe ‘an infinite amount of time is a

7 However, in the supernaturalist approach, there are also theories that suggest other attributes of God are essential for meaning, attributes such as infinity (Nozick 1981), ‘unity’ (Hartshorne 1984), ‘redemption’ (Davis 1987), and ‘atemporality and simplicity’ (Metz 2000). For example, Robert Nozick argues that elements of a meaningful life is a matter of relationship with something that is already meaningful. Empowering people, for example, is seen as meaningful because it promotes autonomy and justice. But for justice to confer meaning on lives, it must have already obtained its meaning from something else. Similarly, this last element also have its meaning from somewhere else, as Nozick says: About any given thing, however wide, it seems we can stand back and ask what its meaning is. To find a meaning for it, then, we seem driven to find a link with yet another thing beyond its boundaries. And so a regression is launched. To stop this regress, we seem to need . . . something which is unlimited, from which we cannot step back, even in imagination, to wonder what its meaning is (Nozick 1989: 167). And of course this final element that confer meaning on all the other meaningful elements is nothing but God.

necessary condition’ of other elements that confer meaning on life (ibid.). In this view, for example, immortality is necessary for obtaining ‘perfect justice’. From a Tractarian view, however, neither immortality nor other metaphysical conditions like perfect justice or God’s love can solve the problem of life. For example, Hartshorne suggests that God’s love for all creatures is the source of meaning. According to Hartshorne, when we are in love we have a strong tendency to make another’s experience one’s own, that is, when we are in love we usually pay attention to every detail of her life, we remember her life, etc. Likewise, since God loves us all, it is safe to say we shall be in His recollection forever (Hartshorne 1984). Or, John

M. Fischer draws an analogy between our worldly pleasures and divides them into repeatable and nonrepeatable pleasures. The former are those pleasures that we would like them to be repeated. From this, then, he arrives at the conclusion that considering the fact that we get never bored of repeatable pleasures, we might say the experience of immortality is in a sense analogous to the experience of repeatable pleasures and it does not necessarily lead us to the problem of boredom (Fischer 1994).

According to Wittgenstein, these kinds of metaphysical solutions, whether it is ‘infinity’ or

‘simplicity’, ‘love’ or ‘recollection’, all try to say something that cannot be said and, therefore, they fail to give meaning to their claims. The senses of these claims cannot be expressed in what Wittgenstein calls meaningful language and, thus, they remain some speculative utterances about the ultimate nature of reality. However, these utterances, from a Tractarian perspective, represent our strong ‘tendency’ to say something about the ultimate meaning of life. The correlation between one’s life and one’s religious tendency is of a key significance in understanding Wittgenstein’s account of religion. For Wittgenstein, if one’s religious utterances do not spring from one’s life, they are devoid of any meaning. As he wrote 15 years

after the publication of the Tractatus in February 1937:

A religious question is either a question of life or it is (empty) chatter, this language

game – one could say – gets played only with questions of life. Much like the word

“ouch” does not have any meaning – except as a scream of pain (Wittgenstein 2003:

211).

That is, a religious question, like a ‘scream of pain’, refers to the believer’s life. I think

Wittgenstein’s statement is not merely trying to propose a non-cognitive account of religion, the view that religious statements do not express factual propositions and thus cannot be true or false, that is, they are not capable of being objectively true. Rather, I submit, it tries to highlight a ‘way of seeing’; it says the life of the questioner gives ‘sense’ to the religious question. As far as the literature on life’s meaning is concerned one might wonder how questions such as whether we are immortal in virtue of being recollected in God’s memory or merging with

God’s identity could be related to one’s life. These theories treat the question of religion as if it is a scientific question. On the other hand, Wittgenstein suggests that we should view religion not as a theory but as an ‘event’, not as a ‘doctrine’ but as a ‘tendency’:

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. Those who speak of such things [. . .] are simply describing what has

happened to them, whatever gloss anyone may want to put on it (Wittgenstein 1980: 28;

emphasis added).

The connection between life experiences and religious utterances is a recurrent theme in

Wittgenstein’s writings throughout his philosophical career.8 A religious conviction shows

itself in its regulatory effects on the believer’s life (I shall discuss this in more detail in Chapter

Three).

To sum up, unlike most supernaturalists who concentrate on the existence of God and a soul to

indicate what would make a life meaningful, Wittgenstein concentrates on the effects of such

beliefs in the life of the believers. In fact, one of the main reasons Wittgenstein had utmost

respect for thinkers such as Augustine, Kierkegaard, Leo Tolstoy, and William James, was the

inseparable connection that he found in their works between life and religious tendencies.

Friends of supernaturalism in the literature suggest that without the existence of God life would

be purposeless, and the idea that there are some non-theological objective moral values that confer meaning on life is seen as insignificant compared to the ‘comprehensive meaning’ that

God confers (Hepburn 1966; Craig 2013). Undermining naturalists’ values in order to glorify

religious beliefs has become a trend among most supernaturalists: 9

8 An analysis of the relation between life and religious beliefs can be found in one of Wittgenstein’s later works, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief (1967). Wittgenstein argues that to understand religious language one has to understand the effects of it on the religious person’s life. For example, Wittgenstein argues, if we tell someone who believes in the Last Judgment to provide a proof for his belief, ‘he will probably say he has proof. But he has what you might call an unshakable belief. It will show not by reasoning . . . but rather by regulating for in all his life’ (Wittgenstein 1967: 53-54). The point is that the language game of evidence is of no use here. That is to say, it wouldn’t help us to understand the believers’ point. If there were evidence, ‘this would in fact destroy the whole business’. The whole evidence talk, according to Wittgenstein, is under the influence of scientific criteria. It makes us search for the indubitable evidence, for example historical evidences of the existence of Jesus. However, even if there were as much evidence as for Mussolini, it wouldn’t be relevant or significant. Because, ‘The indubitability wouldn’t be enough to make me change my whole life’ (ibid: 57). See also, Wittgenstein 1980: 46, 53, 64, 85, 86. 9 However, one can also find striking exceptions who advise supernaturalists to ‘epistemic modesty’ with regard to the question of life’s meaning. Phillip L. Quinn’s approach is a good example. He writes:

God loves and cares for us. [. . .] We live not by impersonal rules but in relation with a

Cosmic Lover, one who has our best interests in mind and is powerful enough to ensure

that we are as happy as we are good. Secularism lacks this sense of cosmic love, and it

is, therefore, no accident that it fails to produce moral saints like Jesus, Maimonides [. .

.] Gandhi [. . .] You need special love to leave the world of comfort in order to go to a

desolate island to minister to lepers [. . .] or to lay down your life for another [. . .] From

a secular point of view altruism is not only stupid, it is antilife, for it gives up the only

thing we have, our little ego in an impersonal, indifferent world (Pojman 2008: 28).

Supernaturalists passionately seize hold of an ‘interpretation’ of life, and religious beliefs, for them, is like ‘a passionate commitment to a system of reference’ (Wittgenstein 1980: 64). This is why religious instructions take the form of a ‘description’, a ‘portrayal’ of that system of reference. In this regard, undermining other systems of reference is an effective way to portray one’s system of reference. As Wittgenstein says, ‘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 . . . I ran to it and grasped it’ (ibid.). Pojman claims above that secularism does not offer ‘special love’; it is selfish, and it denies any possibility of altruism and benevolence. In other words, you will be hopeless if you take their route. However, it seems that their success

Christians [shouldn’t] exaggerate the certainty about life’s meanings to be derived from their narratives. [. . .] What is more, other religions have reasonable stories to tell about life’s meanings, as do some nonreligious worldviews. [. . .] Christians ought to adopt an attitude of epistemic modesty when making claims about life’s meanings. They can be, I think, entitled to believe that Christian Narratives provide the best story we have about life’s meanings. But claims to furnish the complete story should, I believe, be advanced only with fear and trembling. When Christianity secures life’s meanings, it should not offer Christians so much security that they acquire the arrogant tendency to set their story apart from and above all other sources of insight into life’s meanings (Quinn 2008: 40).

in letting me see the ‘hopelessness’ of my life does not prove the logical coherence of their system of reference. It seems that their success in disclosing the depth of my hopelessness can show only the fragility of the human condition, but, alas, not more. The fragility of life educates us to a belief in God (cf. ibid: 86). However, any ‘attempt’ to go beyond this hopelessness, any attempt to say something about the ultimate meaning of life, any attempt to utter what cannot be uttered, only shows our ‘longing for the transcendent’ (ibid: 15). Religion, like ethics, for Wittgenstein, remains a ‘hopeless’ ‘tendency’ (Wittgenstein 1965:12). Note that he is not belittling this tendency. Rather, his point is that this tendency is hopeless because it tries to express something that is inexpressible, as discussed in the previous chapter.

One might curiously ask if religion and ethics are nonsensical, why Wittgenstein respects them so ‘deeply’ (ibid.). I think clarifying the term ‘nonsense’ can be helpful here. Wittgenstein does not use this term as a rebuking expression. The Tractarian nonsense, as Arnswald noted, is a technical term (Arnswald 2009). It has nothing to do with the ‘everyday use’ of it,10 which is usually related to foolish, absurd, objectionable, impudent, or trifling words or deeds.11 A passage from the Tractatus, I think, shows Wittgenstein’s point clearly:

Most of the propositions and questions to be found in philosophical works are not false

but nonsensical. Consequently we cannot give any answer to questions of this kind, but

can only establish that they are nonsensical. Most of the propositions and questions of

philosophers arise from our failure to understand the logic of our language (1966: §

4.003).

10 Probably Wittgenstein himself, in his later philosophy, had thought of the fact that the words ‘sense’ and ‘nonsense’ in the Tractatus had been used without reference to ‘everyday use’. 11 Cf. Oxford English Dictionary

But Wittgenstein’s next statement is the most illuminating:

And it is not surprising that the deepest problems are in fact not problems at all (ibid.).

That is to say, our deepest problems including the ‘problem of life’ are indeed nonsensical, because our language fails to express them meaningfully. Moreover, when our answers to the problem of life cannot be put into words, Wittgenstein concludes, neither can the problem be put into words.12 Therefore, our deepest problems, in this view, are not problems because we only fail to give a sense to them.

As I hope I have made it clear so far, Wittgenstein’s stance toward a supernaturalist account of meaning in life is twofold. On the one hand, we see a Wittgenstein who wants to put an end to all the ‘claptrap about ethics’ (Monk 1990:282) and discards all supernaturalist attempts to say something about the ultimate meaning of life, and, on the other, we see a Wittgenstein who

‘deeply’ respects the human tendency to quest for the ultimate meaning of life. However, respecting a tendency is one thing and being approving of the claims made due to the existence of that tendency is quite another. Wittgenstein’s main criticism of the supernaturalist accounts of life’s meaning targets their tendency to indoctrinate their experiences of what can give life an absolute value. Analogically speaking, I might say, to say that supernaturalism provides the best account of life’s meaning would be like saying that pursuing an artistic life is the best life one can pursue. The nonsensicality of the phrase ‘artistic life’, in the Tractarian sense, can easily be seen when we see an actress of a sentimental soapy and Mozart are both named

‘artists’. This is exactly the reason for Wittgenstein’s stubbornness with regard to the questions of value, as we see in his conversations with Logical Positivists recorded by Waismann:

12 Cf. Wittgenstein 1966: § 6.5.

Is value a particular state of mind? Or a form attaching to some data or other of

consciousness? I would reply that whatever I was told I would reject and that not

because the explanation was false but because it was an explanation (Wittgenstein

1979b: 116).

And further on,

What is valuable in a Beethoven sonata? The sequence of notes? No, it is only one

sequence among many, after all (ibid.).

By the same token, in a Tractarian view, supernaturalist theories of the meaning of life are

undermined precisely because they are only explanations. And these theoretical explanations

fail to capture the absolute values that they are meant to represent. How do we know, for

instance, that two persons share the same belief-system and refer to the same absolute value?

How reliable are the grounds of investigation to find out the veracity of their claims? In

Wittgenstein’s words, ‘Two people may say they believe the same things, and yet

investigations of the grounds may show their beliefs are not even comparable’ (2003: 404).

Certainly, no supernaturalist in the literature wants to accept that a self-centered control-freak who treats his wife and his children as if they do not exist, is the same as a man who shelters

his family and teaches his children modesty and composure in the face of hardships. However,

they both might go to the same church and they both consider their lives meaningful.13 The

point is that here one’s way of life defines belief. Put in Wittgensteinian terms, a religious

13 Here a supernaturalist might respond that ill-treatment of one’s family is not God’s purpose and thus he does not live a meaningful life. However, the father might have a rather different interpretation of ill-treatment, as is often the case.

belief is like a ‘tightrope’; it is almost useless until you see someone is walking on it.14 It appears that most supernaturalists, ‘bewitched’ by the glory of the tightrope, forget that at the end of the day someone has to walk on it. That is to say, only the life of the believer gives

‘depth’ to a belief that might seem absurd. Wittgenstein writes, ‘A sentence can appear absurd

and the absurdity at its surface be engulfed by the depth which as it were lie behind it’ (ibid:

155). This can be linked to religious thoughts and beliefs: ‘what gives it depth . . . is . . . the life led by the one who believes it’ (ibid.). So, we might say, a Wittgensteinian view puts any judgment of supernaturalist claims concerning the meaning of life on hold until their effects on the believer’s life are seen.

Moreover, most supernaturalist accounts of life’s meaning have something in common, no matter if they are God-based or soul-based, or if instead of God’s purpose (Davis 1987,

Moreland 1987, Craig 2013) we deal with God’s love (Hartshorne 1984), ‘infinity’ (Nozick

1989) or ‘simplicity’ (Metz 2000).15 What is common is that most of them fail to pay due

attention to the lives of believers in God. ‘It is one thing to talk to God and another to talk of

14 Cf. Wittgenstein 1980: 73: ‘An honest religious thinker is like a tightrope walker. He almost looks as though he were walking on nothing but air. His support is the slenderest imaginable. And yet it really is possible to walk on it’. See also Malcolm 1972: 21. 15 Purpose theory is a favorite theory among most supernaturalists and, at the same time, has faced several objections. For example, Kurt Baier suggests that purpose theory denies human autonomy and degrades us to some tools whose only function is to fulfill duties assigned to us by God (Baier 1981; see also Murphy 1982, Singer 1995). Metz argues that purpose theory is a theory about ‘the conditions for a meaningful life, not about whether these conditions obtain. It says that life would be meaningful if and only if (or just to the extent that) God existed and gave us a purpose that we then fulfilled; it make no claim about whether life is in fact meaningful’ (Metz 2002: 784). However, it seems that this observation does not apply to all the purpose theorists, because the moment they say the meaning of life is contingent upon God’s existence and his purpose they overrule the fact that the way people live with this belief is more important than the belief itself, and thus they indeed say something to the effect that only fulfilling God’s purpose confers value and meaning on our lives.

God to others’ (Wittgenstein 2003: 183), Wittgenstein once said. It appears that most

supernaturalists are good at talking of God but fail in paying due attention to the lives of people

who talk to God.

However, there is a growing body of texts in the literature that takes the regulatory effects of

religion on the believer’s life seriously. Kolakowski, for example, highlights the practical

aspects of religion and views religion as an activity (Kolakowski 2001) and Cottingham shows

the significance of the ‘spiritual dimension’ (Cottingham 2005) of human life. Cottingham

suggests that if religious discourse is to ‘engage us on more than a narrowly intellectual plane’,

it may help if we shift the focus of discussion from the domain of religion to the closely related

domain of ‘spirituality’. There is widespread agreement, Cottingham has it, on the value of

spiritual domain ‘despite the polarisation of outlooks’. Spirituality, Cottingham writes,

[H]as long been understood to be a concept that is concerned in the first instance with

activities rather than theories, with ways of living rather than doctrines subscribed to,

with praxis rather than belief. [. . .] We have to acknowledge what might be called the

primacy of praxis, the vital importance that is placed on the individual’s embarking on a

path of practical self-transformation, rather than (say) simply engaging in intellectual

debate or philosophical analysis (Cottingham 2005: 3-5).

By ‘primacy of praxis’ Cottingham means that our practical involvement with religion comes before and is more important than a theoretical discussion of the doctrines of religion. In

Kolakowski’s words, ‘people are initiated into the understanding of a religious language and

into worship through participation in the life of a religious community, rather than through

rational persuasion’ (Kolakowski 2001: 172). In this regard, to understand religion, or rather

supernaturalist views of the meaning of life, we should shift the focus to the praxis, to what the

believers do with their beliefs. We should shift our focus from the strategy of ‘logical analysis’ to the ‘strategy of involvement’ and the ‘strategy of praxis’ (Cottingham 2005: 12) if we are to understand religious answers to the problem of life. Understanding the life of a believer, as

Cottingham suggests, needs a kind of ‘openness’ and ‘responsiveness’ with regard to the praxis of religious belief. However, whereas Cottingham holds the truth of religious ‘doctrines’ can be understood best through an openness to the regulatory effects of them in the life of the believer, Wittgenstein is hesitant about any attempt to indoctrinate religious tendencies.

To sum up, Wittgenstein’s concern with regard to supernaturalists’ attempts to capture theoretically the ultimate sense of life springs from his fundamental conviction that theorizing value is equal to destroying it. The second issue that I have tried to highlight is the intimate connection between one’s life and one’s belief-system in Wittgenstein’s views of value, something that is often neglected among supernaturalist theories of life’s meaning. Whereas most supernaturalists claim that life would be meaningless without God, it is easy to find self- righteousness and difficult to see meaningfulness among some people who declare themselves religious. However, Wittgenstein had utmost respect for what he would call ‘authentic religiosity’. But unlike the typical optimism of supernaturalists, he warns us that ‘if you want to stay within the religious sphere you must struggle’ (Wittgenstein 1980: 86). As I will discuss in Chapter Three, in a sense, this ‘struggle’ alludes to the believer’s struggle to see the world religiously, that is, to keep seeing the world religiously once a religious aspect has dawned on her.

Naturalism

Whereas most supernaturalists believe that only God can confer value or meaning on life that is immortal, naturalists question God’s monopoly in conferring value. As I briefly mentioned in the Introduction, naturalists claim that human beings can constitute meaning independently of any supernatural being, whether we believe this meaning is subjective, i.e., depends on an individual’s set of desires and choices or objective and mind-independent.

It is beyond the scope of my discussion to examine all the naturalistic accounts of the meaning of life in detail. So I confine myself to examine what I think is the most fundamental aspect of naturalism, i.e., the view that the meaning of life is not necessarily found in a relation with God or a soul. I examine this idea from both a Tractarian and a naturalistic perspective. I think this fundamental belief can be found in Peter Singer’s book, How Are We to Live? Ethics in an Age of Self-Interest, which is indeed a paradigm case of a naturalistic account of meaning in life.

In this book, Singer defends the idea that our lives can be meaningful by engaging in activities that are intrinsically valuable (1995: 231). An activity is intrinsically valuable if the value of that activity springs from its own nature. Intrinsically valuable activities are also ‘objectively worthwhile’, that is, they have value independently of our desires and judgments. Singer argues that ‘we can live a meaningful life by working toward goals that are objectively worthwhile’

(ibid.). According to Singer, pain is intrinsically evil and the reduction of the total amount of avoidable pain in the universe is objectively worthwhile.

However, reducing the total amount of pain is not only one objectively worthwhile activity among many others. Singer goes so far as to suggest that the best way to make one’s life worth living is to devote it to the reduction of ‘avoidable pain in the universe’. He calls this ‘an

ethical life’, and declares that ‘living an ethical life enables us to identify ourselves with the

grandest cause of all, and [. . .] is the best way open to us of making our lives meaningful’

(ibid: 259). Briefly addressing the subjectivist approaches to the problem of life’s meaning,

Singer suggests that Richard Taylor’s subjectivism, which is in fact following the dominant

spirit of the twentieth century, as expressed by ‘existentialists, by Logical Positivists and many

contemporary philosophers’ (ibid: 232), leads to problematic results. If we reduce meaning to

nothing but a function of our inner desires and wishes, we shall face the problem of boredom

and loss of purpose in the societies where ‘the narrow pursuit of material self-interest is the

norm’ (ibid: 277).

On the other hand, an ethical approach to life, as an ideal alternative to narrow subjectivist

approaches, changes the way we identify priorities in life and gives us a broader picture of life

and its meaning. And since it is possible to live ethically regardless of the existence of God or

lack thereof, the absence of God does not render all human lives meaningless. What

supernaturalism fails to take into account is the endless possibilities in human life by which

people gain meaning, and all these possibilities, for Singer, spring from one single principle: human solidarity and compassion. The force of this value is so overwhelming that, I think, no philosophical account of meaning in life can hope to survive unless either it is based on this principle or it accommodates enough space to integrate this principle into the account. It is interesting that even some hardcore pessimists who deny any possibility of meaningfulness in life have their own advice to reduce suffering in the world, for example by advocating anti-

natalism (Benatar 2006). Singer ends his book with an optimistic message:

If 10 percent of the population were to take a consciously ethical outlook on life and act

accordingly, the resulting change would be more significant than any change of

government. . . . Anyone can become part of the critical mass that offers us a chance on

improving the world before it is too late. . . . You will find plenty of worthwhile things

to do. . . . You will know that you have not lived and died for nothing, because you will

have become part of the great tradition of those who have responded to the amount of

pain and suffering in the universe by trying to make the world a better place (1995:

278-280).

So, Singer, like all the other naturalists, claims that value does not need to be conferred by

God. An ethical life, a life dedicated to reduce avoidable sufferings, does not have less capacity

to make one’s life meaningful than the existence of God.

Now, I think a comparative analysis of Wittgenstein’s views of the objectivism of moral values

and that of objectivists in the literature like Singer can show the depth of their disagreements

and reveals vast differences in their conception of value and hence meaning of life. Waismann

relates a conversation between Wittgenstein and his friends in Moritz Schlick’s house in 1930.

They discussed Schlick’s new book in which Schlick distinguishes between two theological

interpretations of ethics. According to the first interpretation, which, for Schlick, is the

‘shallower’, an action is good if it is what God wills. The second interpretation, which, for him,

is ‘deeper’, is that the good has its own intrinsic value. And if God wills it, it is because of its

intrinsic value, not vice versa. Wittgenstein’s response to this view is highly illuminating in

showing the difference between the two approaches:

I think that the first interpretation is the profounder one: what God commands, that is

good. For it cuts off the way to any explanation ‘why’ it is good, while the second

interpretation is the shallow, rationalist one, which proceeds ‘as if’ you could give

reasons for what is good. The first conception says clearly that the essence of the good

has nothing to do with facts and hence cannot be explained by any proposition. If there

is any proposition expressing precisely what I think, it is the proposition ‘what God

commands, that is good’ (Wittgenstein 1979b: 115).

Naturalists consider value as something explainable like a natural phenomenon and hence they

reduce it to the sphere of facts, of what ‘can be said’. So, here Wittgenstein would raise the

same objections to naturalists that he raised against supernaturalists: That ‘propositions can express nothing that is higher’ (Wittgenstein 1966: § 6.42). Wittgenstein’s response to Schlick is, to say the least, counter-intuitive, but it highlights his firm conviction that treating value as something explainable is only a tendency to run against the boundaries of our language. I intuitively believe, for example, that helping others is a value whether God is approving of it or not. So, relating the good to the will of God seems problematic. However, viewing God as the source of the good, for Wittgenstein, is ‘profounder’ because it cuts off all the explanations. It

is profounder, that is, to stop explaining value as if it stands in need of an explanation.

Consider a good such as benevolence. If I view it as something explainable, I might give a

utilitarian or Kantian explanation for it. Or I might view it as an evolutionary aspect of human

nature. And if someone questions those explanations I might defend them by yet another

explanation, and so on and so forth. But if it is an absolute value, why does it need that much

justification and explanation? Wittgenstein writes,

The absolute good, if it is a describable state of affairs, would be one which everybody,

independent of his taste and inclinations, would necessarily bring about or feel guilty

for not bringing about (1965: 7).

I might try to define the absolute good as if it is a describable state of affairs, but then my

description would fail to convey the ‘coercive power’ of the absolute good. On the other hand,

I might say benevolence is good because it is God’s will. The explanation is over; I give an

absolute value to benevolence. ‘What is good’, Wittgenstein writes, ‘is also divine. Queer as it

sounds, that sums up my ethics’ (1980: 3). Wittgenstein’s ‘queer’ stance toward value, I think,

makes more sense when we evaluate problems that an objectivist moralist would face. What

seems problematic in objectivism is not the belief that so many people have similar goals in

life, but the suggestion that there is a correct perspective from which human actions should be

judged. When Schlick claims that the good has intrinsic value he is already assuming that the

human mind has access to this. Objectivists have a tendency to evaluate moral judgments as if

they are some kinds of empirical judgments. Whereas it seems easy to prove the universality

and objectivity of an empirical claim, it is not clear how a claim like ‘lying is wrong’ is not the

mere expression of one’s ‘attitude’ or ‘preference’ and is instead an objective claim. Moreover,

it seems difficult to deny that any moral judgment is ultimately from one perspective among

countless perspectives that are logically possible.

An objectivist might point to the intuitive force of some moral claims felt by most moral agents

and arrive at the conclusion that these claims must be objective or at least universal. But as

Paul Johnston says, the fact that most people act as if their moral judgments are independent of

them does nothing to change the logical status of these claims (Johnston 2003: 5).

Another response would be to suggest, as some evolutionists do, that most human beings tend

to commit themselves to a set of principles that cut across their own desires and sometimes

they are even inclined to sacrifice themselves. However, the objectivist might say the reason people tend toward a set of actions is that they find them morally right. In other words, the objectivist suggests that we tend to act morally not only because of our subjective dispositions.

In a sense, I might say, she holds a personal opinion and announces that her opinion is not,

actually, personal. In Johnston’s words, ‘having embraced a particular position, she

congratulates herself on it being the correct position and wants us to take her self-endorsement

as independent confirmation’ (ibid: 6).

Furthermore, I suspect when we accept that there are objective moral judgments, we will ultimately see almost everyone claiming that his/her moral judgments are universally right. The

contradictions that I briefly mentioned apply to any theory that tries to explain the nature of

value and find a justifiable terminus for it. Bernard Williams, in his book Ethics and the Limits

of Philosophy, examines various efforts to give a coherent foundation to ethics and concludes

that any such attempt is doomed to fail. According to him, however, the recognition of this

failure is a turning point in the history of philosophy, because it makes philosophy to come to

terms with the consequence of it, which is the collapse of its greatest hope. Once we reject the

idea that there is an absolute way of understanding value and human nature, Williams writes,

A potential gap opens between the agent’s perspective and the outside view. We

understand – and most important, the agent can come to understand – that the agent’s

perspective is only one of many that are equally compatible with human nature, all open

to various conflicts within themselves and with other cultural aims (Williams 2006: 52).

Williams’ solution to the conflict between the ones who see ethics as a matter of ‘disposition’

and the ones who view it as a matter of ‘truth’, is to depart from the ‘Christian method’ of thinking about the conflict and return to the Greeks. By this, he means a return to a way of

thinking that views ethics as a highly significant element in human flourishing, one that is not

concerned with the idea of a morally correct view of the world. What is important, then, is the

practical effects of ethics on human life in society and not the abstract concerns about the

nature of ethical claims. We should leave, according to Williams, the traditional obsession with

objective ethics and move toward a modern conception of ethics, a movement that he considers

as a transition from ‘ignorance’ to truth. The realization that there is no objective values,

Williams believes, ‘can be seen as a liberation, and a radical form of freedom may be found in the fact that we cannot be forced by the world to accept one set of values rather than another’

(ibid: 128).

However, ironically, Williams is not less traditional when it comes to certain issues. His view

is a good example of what Johnston calls ‘the conflict in modern society between a theoretical

rejection of moral concepts and a practical commitment to them’ (Johnston 2003: 19).

Concerning ways of teaching right and wrong to our children, Williams writes,

We ourselves (most of us) are identified with some ethical considerations and have a

conception of human well-being that gives a place to such considerations. We wish,

consequently, to bring up our children to share some of these ethical, as of other

cultural, conceptions, and we see the process as good not just for us but for our

children, both because it is part of our conception of their well-being and also because,

even by more limited concepts of happiness or content, we have little reason to believe

they will be happier if excluded from the ethical institutions of the society. Even if we

know that there are some people who are happier, by the minimal criteria, outside those

institutions, we also know that they rarely became so by being educated as outlaws. As

a result of all that, we have much reason for, and little reason against, bringing up our

children within the ethical world we inhabit, and if we succeed they themselves will see

the world from the same perspective (Williams 2006: 48).

In Williams’ case, what is curious is that he rejects all kinds of justificatory attempts to establish the objectivity of moral judgments, and yet his approach is not less justificatory than

the ones he refutes, though he warns us that we should not impose our values on future generations (ibid: 173).

By emphasising the ‘ethical life’, Singer also tries to explain the meaningfulness of a life dedicated to the reduction of avoidable sufferings. In modern society, which is driven by self- interest and pursuit of material ends, Singer suggests most people are doomed to face the meaninglessness of life once their material goals are obtained. In this situation, the most viable alternative is an ethical life. Singer, with almost a messianic tone, announces that ‘if, over the next decade, a critical mass of people with new priorities were to emerge, . . . if their co- operation with each other brings reciprocal benefits, . . . then the ethical attitude will spread, and the conflict between ethics and self-interest will have been shown to be overcome’ (1995:

279). The reason we should take an ethical stance toward life is that it works, ‘psychologically, socially, and ecologically’ (ibid.). However, one might ask, what if it did not? Would an ethical life be less meaningful then? More importantly, is the conflict between an ethical life and the life of self-interest as easy to overcome as he suggests? Imagine a rich entrepreneur who goes to a third world country to open a production line and thus recruits thousands of jobless people with low salary. This way he saves a lot of money for himself and reduces the sufferings of thousands of people. It seems that, based on Singer’s account, he would have a meaningful life because he reduces some people’s suffering, but I think this view is very problematic and I

doubt Singer himself would call it an ethical life. What Singer fails to take into consideration in his account is the significance of one’s attitude in choosing an ‘ethical life’.16 He assumes that

the moral weight of attention to people’s sufferings is too overwhelming to need any

16 There are other objectivists like Wolf (2010) who take this objection seriously and consider meaning in life a function of both subjective involvement and objective value.

justification. In Singer’s words, ‘in comparison with the needs of people starving in Somalia,

the desire to sample the wines of the leading French vineyards pales into insignificance’ (ibid:

277). One cannot help sympathizing wholeheartedly with what Singer says here. However, the

fact remains that realizing the insignificance of my way of life is not sufficient to make me change my attitude toward life. The man who drowns himself in debt to catch up with the

unnecessary requirements of modern life might feel ashamed or sorry for what happens to

people in poor countries and at the same time he might feel redeemed by donating $50 to an

unknown charity organization on the internet. In other words, ‘indubitability’ of an ethical life

‘wouldn’t be enough to make me change my whole life’ (Wittgenstein 1967: 57).

Finally, one might ask whether the reduction of avoidable suffering in the world is the only

option available to people who are genuinely searching for meaning in their lives. An artist, a

caring mother, a football player, and a couple in love might view their lives meaningful but not

because they are doing anything special to reduce the avoidable pain in the universe. As Erik J.

Wielenberg notes, ‘perhaps the ethical life needs to be characterized a bit more carefully’

(2005: 30) because based on Singer’s account, ‘the painless annihilation of all life would

drastically reduce the amount of avoidable suffering in the world’ (ibid.) and yet, obviously,

Singer wouldn’t consider it as an objectively worthwhile goal.

I am sympathetic to Wittgenstein’s strong rejection of any attempt to theorize and explain the

good or absolute value, which I think springs from his fundamental belief that ‘if I could

explain the essence of the ethical only by means of a theory, then what is ethical would be of

no value whatsoever’ (Wittgenstein 1979b: 117). Consider, for example, the commandment:

‘You shall not kill’. It appears that most of us feel the overwhelming moral weight of human

life and yet we feel that no words can express it. A moralist might say there is a ‘correct’

perspective from which one can realize the absolute rightness of this moral command, but, one

might ask, what does a correct perspective mean? If ethical judgments are absolute, how can

they be related to one’s perspective? Moreover, one might suggest that it is in the interest of

society or that one is better off if one obeyed the commandment. But, then, who decides what

the interest of the society is and what determines one’s well-being. And hence a chain of explanations is launched against a chain of questions. However, none of these explanations, I submit, is able to make me see the absolute value of the commandment. That is, they fail to give me the ethical attitude, which would have made all the burdens of justifying the moral command unnecessary. Likewise, someone who is blind to the sufferings of fellow human beings does not need the philosophical promises of meaningfulness, advocated by most objectivists. What he needs is a change of attitude; an aspect of human life has to dawn on him

(as I will discuss in the next chapter). In this view, the dawning of an aspect shows what the objectivist fails to explain.

Throughout his book, Singer tries to drive our attention away from our narrow self-interest and to the suffering of others. However, just because someone is good at showing me the urgency of doing something does not mean that I will find my way about to ultimately do so. I think one of the things we can take away from Wittgenstein’s radical views of ethics is that an ethical life begins from within, not from without, as in Singer’s account. The question is, how can I even begin an ethical life without leaving my vanity aside? Moreover, is it that easy to do so as

Singer implies? It seems to me that the one who spends his life, out of vanity, on pursuing his self-interest, can also become the one who attends to the suffering of others out of vanity.

Wittgenstein writes, ‘The edifice of your pride has to be dismantled. And that is terribly hard work’ (1980: 26). People who have the luxury of looking for meaning only to avoid boredom

might feel good upon being told that they can have very meaningful lives by starting to pay

more attention to the pain of others (animals included), but this does not necessarily make their

moral life more integrated. A bored selfish person who is going through a midlife crisis does

not need a pile of information about the human condition in poor countries to understand the

need to begin an ethical life; he needs to leave aside his ‘vanity’ first and that is not an easy

task.17 In Wittgenstein’s words, ‘the man will be revolutionary who can revolutionize himself’

(ibid: 45). It seems that Singer wants to invite all to an ethical conversion while what he ends

up doing is nothing but a social campaign.

So much for Singer’s account of life’s meaning. As I said earlier it is beyond the scope of my

discussion to analyze all naturalistic accounts of meaning in life. However, what is common to

most of them, and I tried to touch on it, is that they are justificatory in nature, i.e., they try to theorize and explain what they consider as the constituent element(s) of a meaningful life.

Wittgenstein, on the other hand, suggests that any attempt to justify value and meaning will

ultimately fail to convey their ‘senses’.

As I shall discuss in Chapter Three, the later Wittgenstein arrived at the conclusion that one’s

conception of life’s meaning (whether it is supernaturalist or naturalist) is neither a hypothesis nor a regular perceptual belief but rather a type of aspect-seeing. In this view, the kinds of

proofs and justifications that are applicable to it would have to engage people in a manner that

would help them ‘notice’ (Wittgenstein 1958: 213) a different aspect of the world from that of

theirs. This is why the standard theories of the meaningfulness of life are likely to be

17 Cf. Wittgenstein 1980:48: ‘And only if I were able to submerge myself in religion could these doubts be stilled. Because only religion would have the power to destroy vanity and penetrate all the ‘nooks and crannies’. Read religion here as a ‘passionate commitment to a system of reference’ (ibid: 64).

unsuccessful in bringing about a meaningful life. For Wittgenstein, seeing an aspect (e.g.

seeing one’s life as the grace of God) is not only to have a mental image in our mind. Rather it

is an attitude, a way of acting and a way of experiencing the world. The problem, as Jennifer

Faust has noted, is that on the one hand, ‘few if any nonbelievers are convinced of the truth of

religious doctrines (and thus converted) on the force of religious arguments. . . . On the other hand, religious arguments seem beside the point for those who already believe; that is a religious believer is one who already assents to religious tenets’ (Faust 2008: 72).18

In the next section, I raise some objections to the Tractarian account of meaning in life, and where needed I provide some clarifications especially with regard to the ‘queerness’ of living in the Tractarian world. I argue that Wittgenstein himself, in his Tractarian philosophy, was suffering from an aspect-blindness with regard to the most important aspects of human life.

Unlivability of the Tractarian Philosophy of Life

The general feeling after reading the Tractatus is often that of bewilderment and shock. As

David Wiggins writes, ‘there is something unforgettable’ in the passages of the Tractatus

concerning the meaning of life. But,

a moment’s thought about what it would take to practice the philosophy of life that is

set out [in these passages] is enough to show how near to impossible it must be to live

by this philosophy – either by its letter or by its spirit (Wiggins 2004: 375).

I think the impossibility of a Tractarian way of life stems from the fact that the Tractatus offers

18 In Chapter Three, I will elaborate more on the limits of arguments in changing one’s belief.

a static account of life, one that tries to transcend the world and view it sub specie aeternitatis.

The unhappy result of such detachment from the world and its contingencies was the view that

there is not any difference between the life of a human being and the life of an object, like a

stone or a tree. One wonders what kind of world would be a world in which ‘death is not an event in life’ (Wittgenstein 1966: § 6.4311). Or, consider the striking analogy in his next statement where he writes, ‘Our life has no end in just the way in which our visual field has no limits’ (ibid.). The Tractarian subject, thus, is surrounded by facts and it has to come to terms with the unsayability of whatever that has something to do with value.

As I discussed in the previous chapter, Wittgenstein’s account of ethics is completely different from the conventional interpretations of ethics as a set of rules and principles. In the Tractarian world that Wittgenstein built in his youth, ethics and value is sent into exile: God does not reveal himself in the Tractarian world. And not only God but also ‘the other’ is absent in his static world of facts. It is not a coincidence that throughout the Tractatus or Notebooks 1914-

1916 there is not a single reference to the simple fact that we humans, after all, live in a community. There is no moral message, no obligations, no duties and no universal commands.

In those few pages about ethics he is only referring to himself: How can I be happy against the misery of the world?, ‘What do I know about the purpose of life?’, etc. Ethics is identified with the ‘enquiry into the meaning of life’ (Wittgenstein 1965: 5) and thus is turned into a private and personal ‘thrust against the boundaries of language’ to say something about the ultimate value of life, about the wonder of human existence. As Wittgenstein said to his friend

Waismann,

At the end of my lecture on ethics I spoke in the first person: I think that this is

something very essential. Here there is nothing to be stated anymore; all I can do is to

step forth as an individual and speak in the first person (Wittgenstein 1979b: 117).

And this first-person talk in the ‘Lecture on Ethics’ was only a confession of ‘hopelessness’

and fragility of his tendency to say something about the ultimate value of life,19 a hopelessness

that he respects deeply and for his life would not ridicule it (Wittgenstein 1965:12). However,

one might rightly object to this view and suggest that, maybe, it is only in virtue of this first-

person perspective that Wittgenstein finds ethics ‘hopeless’. It is a strange irony that the

Tractatus tries to provide a ‘crystal-clear’ view of the ‘totality of facts’ (Wittgenstein 1966: §

1.1), and yet it ends up making a prison for the self out of ideals like finding the ‘final solution

of the problems’ (Wittgenstein 1966: 5) through a perfect language. Dieter Mersch calls this

situation a ‘paradox’ and suggests,

Turning away from the world, refusal, which first permits the attitude of non-

intervention, is lastly rooted in the negation of the other. Therefore, in his solution lies a

reversal and betrayal of what is precisely a constituent part of the ethical problem.

Ethics beyond the question of alteriority remains blind; it forfeits, to think radically, its

status as ethics. Ultimately, Wittgenstein was in default of an answer to this problem:

his ethics of showing was solely restricted to the individual; it resigned to personal

deed; for that reason, an answer to the individual ‘puzzles of life’ also conditioned not

answering the puzzle of others (Mersch 2009: 48-49).

What the Tractarian ethics offers is reaching a ‘reflective equilibrium’ through the experience

of the mystical. In a sense, the mystical takes the place of ethics, that is, the meaning of life is

found in the experience of the mystical – experience of the world as a ‘limited whole’. To use a

19 In Chapter Six, I shall argue that from a Wittgensteinian perspective, the quest for the meaning of life is a confessional activity.

term from Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein, in his Tractarian philosophy, was held

captive by a ‘picture’ (Wittgenstein 1958: § 115) of life so much so that he became oblivious to

the life of others. This is why Ernest Gellner calls the Tractatus an ‘autistic work’ (Gellner

2005: 63).20 And this was bound to happen. As Gellner says, ‘if you accept the cognitive

authenticity of nothing other than your own directly accessible data, in the end you are

confined to a prison whose limits are indeed those data. If they are constituted by your

immediate consciousness, by yourself in effect, then your self eventually becomes your prison’

(ibid: 43).

This closed conception of life, however, remains intriguing and sublime for the people to

whom Wittgenstein alludes in the preface to the Tractatus (1966: 3); people to whom the sense

of the world, after a long period of contemplation and doubt, become clear and they see the

‘world aright’ (ibid: § 6.54), and thus learn how to ‘live in agreement with the world’

(Wittgenstein 1979a: 75). In a sense, we might say, when Wittgenstein wrote to his friend that

the point of the Tractatus was ‘ethical’, he meant it was a treatise on how to live in agreement

with the world. And as far as the question of life’s meaning is concerned, there are people who

try to live so. There are such gardeners, teachers, bag packers, and pilgrims of the unknown

worlds. It seems that this way of living is led by a mystical attitude, detached from the ‘misery

of this world’ (ibid: 81), done with the nightmare of history, finding solace in the ‘life of

knowledge’ (ibid.) and living in the present like Tolstoy’s ‘simple people’. Wittgenstein

20 Gellner connects the Tractatus to a long tradition in modern philosophy, starting with Descartes, and continuing with Hume and Kant. In this tradition, Gellner has it, an individual, in a giant attempt, tries to capture the whole nature of reality and the connection of the self to nature. Gellner rejects the Tractatus’ solipsistic approach and questions the main claim of the book, as being unrelated to communal reality. See, Gellner 2005: 43-109.

himself tried to live so for almost seven years.21 According to Lurie, this way of life, though

devoid of religious contents, has a religious attitude to it. Lurie suggests, Wittgenstein ‘would

like to adopt an attitude toward his life that is manifested through bowing one’s head before

what can only be wondered at, but never explained in a philosophical manner . . . However . . .

he does not subscribe to the delusion that a sensible solution to the question about the meaning

of life can be formulated’ (Lurie 2006: 162).

Lurie raises some objections to Wittgenstein’s solution to the problem of life. His first

objection is that there is no reason to believe the meaning of life is contingent upon

experiencing the mystical. Life can be still wondrous even without the experience of the mystical. Life can be meaningful through the experience of love, creativity, passion, etc.

One response to this objection would be to say that even though Wittgenstein’s conception of the mystical has indeed a religious tone, both in the Tractatus and the ‘Lecture on Ethics’, he does not rule out other types of experiencing the world which can be a source of meaning. As I said, in the Lecture he emphasizes the ‘personal’ nature of his examples of experiencing

‘absolute value’ and thus, one might say, other sources of experiences like love or joy of life can also be viewed as some mystical experiences as long as they convey a ‘sense’ of the world as a whole. Someone who is in love and feels wholeheartedly the vulnerability of his being and the invincibility of his love at the same time might experience a sense of the world as a whole, which defines love in a mystical fashion to him. So, I think, we can avoid this objection by a lenient reading of the mystical in Wittgenstein’s early philosophy.

Lurie’s second objection is that Wittgenstein has reduced the problem of life to ‘the desire to

21 For an in-depth study of Wittgenstein’s life during 1921 to 1929 when he returned to Cambridge, see Monk (1990). McGuinness (1988) also covers Wittgenstein’s life up to 1922 when he published the Tractatus.

experience life as having some transcendental or divine meaning’ (ibid: 163), which cannot be described. However, if Wittgenstein’s arguments for non-cognitivism are correct, then no conception of a meaningful life can be expressed in a meaningful way and ‘it is unclear how to justify in a rational and objective manner any meaning that people find in their lives’ (ibid.). I agree with Lurie on this one, but we should also bear in mind that Wittgenstein only wants to admonish us about our tendency to theorize the ultimate meaning of life.

Thirdly, Lurie has it, by limiting the problem of life only to those who are yearning for

‘absolute value’ in their lives, Wittgenstein is limiting the problem to a religious context without any justification. People who are in the agony of pain and suffering in their lives wish to live without suffering, not to live to experience the mystical (ibid: 164). I would like to add here that this objection is, in a sense, referring to Wittgenstein’s aspect-blindness concerning the other modes, or the ordinary ways, of living in the world about which I say more below.

In short, I think most objections to the Tractarian account of life’s meaning are variations of one single objection: That the Tractarian account of the meaning of life is oblivious to the other forms of experiencing the world. This objection was so fundamental that it made Wittgenstein return to Cambridge to sort out what he referred to as ‘grave mistakes’ (Wittgenstein 1958: x) in the Tractatus. One might say, one of the gravest mistakes, at least as far as the Tractarian conception of life’s meaning is concerned, was Wittgenstein’s yielding to a strong urge to see the world, in Thomas Nagel’s words, ‘from nowhere’. According to John Churchill, the

Tractatus represents an inclination

[T]o portray our apprehension of the world on the model of a subject who surveys it

from no particular perspective – from everywhere and nowhere, a perspective which is

not essentially related to a particular, embodied, culturally and historically conditioned

human being. . . . And its corrective is the perspective of the later Wittgenstein, locating

our rationality in the context of the ‘natural history of humanity’, not in the abstract

thought of a lone subject yearning for union with the world and God (Churchill 2009:

129).

The man who thought he has found the final solution to the problems of philosophy spent

enough time among ordinary people to find out the lacunae in his Tractarian theory of

meaning. As early as 1930 he started to doubt whether it is possible to have a single general

account of factual propositions, and he could see by then that there are different systems of

propositions.22 He also realized that our language has some functions that are not descriptive of

facts at all. He recognized that the endless varieties of human experiences can be conveyed

through language and it does not need to be factual to make sense. The ‘grammar’ or the function of the words in our everyday life determines their meanings and not the pre-

determined rigid logical forms.

Thus, Wittgenstein’s philosophy evolved from the Tractarian search for eternal essences to an

acknowledgement of particulars. According to the Tractatus, as Russell Goodman suggests,

‘there are just three things one can do with language: say, show, and utter nonsense’ (Goodman

2004: 173). However, by the time he was writing Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein

had a completely different answer to the question: ‘How many kinds of sentence are there?’

The answer was as follows: ‘countless kinds: countless different kinds of use of what we call

“symbols”, “words”, “sentences”’ (Wittgenstein 1958: § 23). Wittgenstein realized that his

‘grave mistake’ was his conviction that there is a clear-cut way of describing and categorizing

everything. He could see by then how language meshes with human life and that understanding

22 See, Rhees 1970.

either of them necessitates understanding the other.

All of these realizations led Wittgenstein to a fundamental turn in his thought from a metaphysical to an ‘anthropological method’ (Rhees 1970: 101). This method involves close attention to the use of words and practices in the community. The new method made

Wittgenstein abandon most of his Tractarian ideas including the concept of the self and the world. He moved away from the conception of the self as a detached spectator who sees the world sub specie aeternitatis to one who is an actor in human’s ‘forms of life’. In Thomas’ words, Wittgenstein’s later philosophy is a shift ‘from detachment to immersion’ (Thomas

1999: 195). Consequently, Wittgenstein’s account of the relationship of the self to the world was transformed and, in John C. Kelly’s words, ‘the door seemed to be open to a new account of ethics’ (Kelly 1995: 581), and one might add, to a new account of the meaning of life. This new account of meaning was no longer concerned with the ‘final solution’ to the problem of life. Instead, it was more concerned with those little things that constitute our ‘complicated form of life’. In other words, one might say, a transition or a Gestalt switch happened. Iris

Murdoch’s allusion to ‘a two-way movement’ can aptly describe this transition. At the beginning of The Sovereignty of Good, she writes,

There is a two-way movement in philosophy, a movement towards the building of

elaborate theories, and a move back again towards the consideration of simple and

obvious facts. McTaggart says that time is unreal, Moore replies that he has just had his

breakfast (Murdoch 1970: 1).

Likewise, Isaiah Berlin writes of two ways of experiencing and seeing the world: like a fox or like a hedgehog. The fox knows many little things but the hedgehogs knows a single big one

(Berlin 1978). The hedgehog usually wants to find, in David E. Cooper’s words, what is

‘beyond human’ (Cooper 2005: 126) but the fox is content with the little answers. Not

surprisingly, the literature on life’s meaning is divided between the foxes and the hedgehogs

and, thus, we might say, in the literature we mainly see two different ways of understanding the

meaning of life. The foxes search for meaning in the lives of the individuals. That is, they are not concerned whether life as a whole and the creation of the universe has a purpose or

meaning. The claim here is that people’s life can be meaningful whether or not life as a whole,

or the cosmos, has a meaning. The hedgehogs, on the other hand, search for meaning outside

the ‘hurly-burly’ of life, and believe that for life to be meaningful the human life in general or

universe as a whole has to have an over-arching ultimate point and purpose (Examples:

Schopenhauer, Camus, Nagel, and Cottingham are hedgehogs; Wolf, Frankfurt, and Metz are foxes).23 The hedgehog believes that it doesn’t make sense to talk of meaning in the life of the

individual if life itself as a whole is meaningless and that individual lives can be meaningful if

only they are ‘answerable’ to something beyond human (to borrow an analogy from Cooper,

writing philosophy books might spread philosophical knowledge, but if philosophy itself is a

waste of time, so is writing the books (ibid: 128).) On the other hand, a fox might say there are

many ways in which a life can be meaningful and that it is a grave mistake to make the affirmation of life depend on an absolute proof of meaning (cf. Marquard 1991).

The distinction between the foxes and the hedgehogs can be more clarified by drawing another useful distinction. In the literature a distinction has been made between the meaning of life and the various ways in which one can find meaning in life (Marquard 1991; Edwards 2008; Wong

2008; Wolf 2010). The first group has a holistic conception of life’s meaning and enquires

23 It is far beyond the scope of my research to discuss whether there is a way to reconcile the tension between these two ways of understanding meaning and, to my knowledge, this question has not been addressed in the literature, except in Cooper (2005).

whether life as whole has a meaning or not, whereas the second group leans toward individualist conceptions of life’s meaning.

In a sense, Wittgenstein’s transition from his Tractarian philosophy to his ‘anthropological’ philosophy might be viewed as a transition from being a hedgehog to being a fox. Recall that in his ‘Lecture on Ethics’ Wittgenstein complains that no matter what happens in this world, the only thing we have is ‘facts, facts, facts, but no ethics’ (Wittgenstein 1965: 7). Some years later, thanks to his new turn, he could have also written somewhere in his diaries that whatever happens in this world, the only thing we have is life, life, life, but no theory of life’s meaning.

What can we take away from the Tractarian conception of life’s meaning? In the preface to the

Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein mentions that he had the intention to publish ‘those old thoughts’ in the Tractatus together with the ‘new ones’ in the Investigations and that ‘the latter could be seen in the right light only by contrast with and against the background of my old way of thinking’ (1958: ix). Likewise, the main reason I dedicated the first two chapters to

Wittgenstein’s ‘old way of thinking’ was to show the new ideas in the right light. In a sense the difference between the old and the new ways of thinking lies in the significance of shifting away from the abstract and the ideal and toward the concrete and the ordinary in the latter. So, my discussions in the next chapters, from the significance of our ‘way of seeing’ to the appreciation of that ‘extraordinary thing called ordinary life’24, from the absence of skepticism

and our groundless ‘trust’ and certainty’ in our everyday life to the confessionality of our quest

for life’s meaning, should be seen against the background of a way of thinking that searches for

the ideal language, the ideal solution to the problem of life, mystical heroism, and oblivion of the other.

24 See Putnam’s introduction to Rosenzweig 1999:11.

Furthermore, there are some elements in Wittgenstein’s Tractarian philosophy that have far-

reaching implications for the way we approach the question of life’s meaning and, thus, are

worth considering. I think Wittgenstein’s key idea is that treating moral values as something explainable is not the right way of establishing a connection with those absolute values, and it leads to what he once called ‘claptrap about ethics’ (Monk 1990: 282).

The second element that we can take away is Wittgenstein’s emphasis on the limits of what any

theory of life’s meaning can convey. It is important to be aware of the differences between the

things that have sense ‘and the many ways in which we make sense of nonsense’ (Nordmann

2005: 216). We do not need to live like a monk to live up to the Tractarian conception of life’s

meaning and Wittgenstein himself never gave up these two fundamental views even though he

gave up his Tractarian philosophy.

In his later philosophy, concepts and words have a ‘home in our life’ and they have meaning

only in ‘the flux of life’, ‘the bustle of life’, or ‘the stream of life’ (Wittgenstein 1990: § 173).

And the meaning of life is not an exception – though most commentators in the literature talk

about it as if it is. The meaning of life is found, as it were, on the streets of life. Wittgenstein’s

advice to the one who thinks of the meaning of life is: ‘Don’t think, but look!’(1958: § 66).

What do we see when we look at life? To this I will attend in the next chapter.

Chapter Three

On Aspect-Seeing and Meaning in Life

Introduction

In previous chapters, I discussed Wittgenstein’s Tractarian views about the inexpressibility of propositions of value and I tried to highlight the implications of this radical, though prima facie defensible, view for our understanding of the meaning of life. While in Chapter One I focused more on giving a broad picture of the Tractarian account of meaning in life, in Chapter Two I tried to critically analyze some fundamental views of naturalists and supernaturalists from a

Tractarian perspective. I argued that whereas most supernaturalists take the expressibility of their theories of the meaning of life for granted, Wittgenstein draws attention to the limits of what can be conveyed through meaningful language. Alternatively, Wittgenstein invites us to see the effects of our ‘tendency’ to say something about the ‘ultimate meaning of life’ in the lives of the believers. Furthermore, by discussing Singer’s account of ‘ethical life’, I raised some objections to the justificatory nature of his view of the meaning of life. I argued that even when these justificatory arguments are accepted as valid, they are unlikely to be successful in bringing about a change in my attitude and my ‘way of seeing the world’, an issue that should also concern philosophers. This is why I have dedicated this chapter to a discussion of the

significance of ‘aspect-seeing’ and ‘attitude’ in our understanding of the meaning of life,

exploring various implications for the ways we approach the issue of life’s meaning.

Though Wittgenstein was not the one who coined the phrase ‘seeing-as’, he showed the significance of this notion in the structure of concept formation and meaning, broadly construed. In this chapter, I show the significance of aspect-seeing in one’s conception of the meaning of life. I shall argue that one’s relation with the meaning of life, from a

Wittgensteinian perspective, is more a matter of ‘aspect-seeing’ – that is, a theoretical apprehension of ways in which meaning is conferred on one’s life does not provide a

‘perspicuous’ understanding of the ways we engage with the meaning of life. Our orientation toward the meaning of life is not exhausted by theory and, I think, we should pay due attention to other facets, such as aspect-seeing. I hope that by exploring notions of ‘aspect-seeing’ and

‘aspect-blindness’ I will be able, first, to show some points of contention between Wittgenstein and other philosophers in the literature and, second, to propose a Wittgensteinian method of approaching the question of life’s meaning, as an alternative, or supplement, to the current methods in the literature. It is an alternative, because it doesn’t attempt to say what the content of the meaning of life is but, rather, it is concerned with how we experience it.

The notion of aspect-seeing, as William Day and Victor J. Krebs (2010) show in detail, is of utmost significance for Wittgenstein, and the secondary literature on aspect-seeing is expanding rapidly. However, I refer to the literature on aspect-seeing only to the extent that it highlights the relation between aspect-seeing and the meaning of life. In the next two sections,

I analyse Wittgenstein’s views about aspect-seeing and its related discussions like attitude/opinion distinction as discussed in Philosophical Investigations, and then, in the third and fourth sections, I apply those views to examine 1) some important questions and issues that

are related to the question of life’s meaning and 2) Wittgenstein’s own views of various topics

related to the notion of ‘aspect-seeing’ such as changing one’s life and the nature of religious beliefs. However, I attend to the latter only insofar as it informs plausible accounts of meaning in life and hence my discussion will not be merely exegetical.

Aspect-Seeing and Aspect-Blindness

In part II of Philosophical Investigations (section 11), Wittgenstein explicitly discusses aspect-

seeing and its related topics. However, the subject appears in several other books.1 A growing

body of secondary literature on various aspects of ‘seeing’ and their implications for our

understanding of aesthetics, value, and even animal ethics (Crary 2007) suggests that most

Wittgensteinians have begun to take the importance of aspect-seeing in Wittgenstein’s

philosophy seriously (Cavell 1979; Mulhall 1990; Verbin 2000; Monk 2001; Kellenberger

2002; Rhees 2003; Litwack 2009; Day & Krebs 2010). For example, Ray Monk writes, ‘the

form Wittgenstein’s later work takes is not to advance a thesis and then to defend it against

possible objections, but rather to say, “Look at things this way”’ (Monk 2001: 5). Or, Verbin

(2000) and Kellenberger (2002) discuss the significance of aspect-dawning for one’s religious

life. Likewise, there are several other exegetical works on the significance of ‘aspect-seeing’ in

1 Other remarks on aspect-seeing appears in Wittgenstein 1990: §§ 155-225; 1988a: §§ 411-436, 505-546, 860- 890, 952-1137; 1988b: §§ 355-391, 435-497, 506-557; 1998a: §§ 146-180, 429-613, 622- 812; and 1998b: 12c- 19e. Related remarks on this subject can also be found in Wittgenstein 1969, 1975, 1978, 1980. The substantial presence of this discussion in Wittgenstein’s body of texts implies that aspect-seeing was not only a diversion from the main discussions of Philosophical Investigations. As Day and Krebs suggest, ‘It is a mistake to imagine that the remarks on aspect-seeing are a mere diversion [in] Investigations. They are, rather, the expression of a theme whose figures and turns we might have been hearing, however, faintly, all along’ (Day & Krebs 2010: 5).

Wittgenstein’s body of works. However, in what follows I view aspect-seeing as a conceptual tool to analyze the way we approach the question of life’s meaning.

In part II of Investigations Wittgenstein writes:

I contemplate a face, and then suddenly notice its likeness to another. I see that it has

not changed, and I see it differently. I call this experience ‘noticing an aspect’ (1958:

193).

Here we are dealing with the two ‘uses’ of the word ‘see’. The first use deals with our normal visual experience; we see an object, a drawing, etc., and we use the expression ‘I see this’. In the second use of the word ‘see’, according to Wittgenstein, we see a likeness, a similarity between two different things, for example a likeness between two faces. In everyday life, we usually encounter this experience when we see a similarity between a mother and the son, a similarity between two pieces of music (say, the Adagio by Albinoni and the Air by Bach), the likeness between two movies in terms of their themes, etc. In all of these experiences seeing one object leads to discovering or seeing the other one. So, noticing an aspect, as Day and

Krebs suggest, has a ‘double aspect’ (2010: 8). It is an experience in which we realize that something changes, and yet we know that nothing has changed. In other words, ‘we know that the change is not (so to speak) in the world, but (so to speak) in us’ (ibid.). A classic example of seeing-as or noticing an aspect, one that is also used by Wittgenstein (1958: 194), is

Jastrow’s duck-rabbit as shown below:

The picture can be seen as the duck or the rabbit, depending on the center of one’s concentration when one looks at the picture. If you concentrate on the left side you most probably first see a duck but if you concentrate on the right side of the picture you most probably will see a rabbit. Now imagine how someone who hasn’t seen a rabbit in her life would see the duck-rabbit picture. In this situation one approaches the picture differently; an aspect is missing in her approach, though the picture is the same.

Wittgenstein makes a distinction between ‘continuous seeing’ of an aspect and ‘dawning’ of an aspect (ibid.). In my whole life I might have seen the picture and only have seen a duck

(continuous seeing) and when I manage to see the rabbit in the picture, an aspect of the picture

‘dawns’ on me. As Wittgenstein says, ‘The expression of a change of aspect is the expression of a new perception and the same time of the perception’s being unchanged’ (ibid: 196). In a sense, the expression of a change of aspect is usually accompanied with an ‘exclamation’, which manifests the change of aspect. In the dawning of the rabbit-picture on me I exclaim, ‘I see a rabbit now!’ The exclamation of the change of aspect is similar to one’s cry when one is

in pain; ‘it is forced from us’ (ibid: 197). We don’t simply give a report when a new aspect

flashes on us; the report is accompanied with an exclamation of the change of aspect. One’s

‘tone of voice’ usually ‘expresses the dawning of an aspect’ (ibid: 206). Or, ‘the likeness

makes a striking impression on me; then the impression fades’ (ibid: 211).

The other important notion that, as we will see, is highly related to one’s conception of life’s

meaning is the notion of ‘aspect-blindness’. Wittgenstein asks

Could there be human beings lacking in the capacity to see something as something−

and what would that be like? What sort of consequences would it have? . . . We will

call it aspect-blindness (ibid: 213).

If I see someone and fail to see the smile in her face, then I am aspect-blind to the human

smile. An aspect-blind person will have an altogether different relationship to the pictures to which he is blind. But aspect-blindness is not limited to pictures. One can be aspect-blind to various experiences in life. Imagine someone who is unable to understand and appreciate a piece of music. The way we approach that piece of music is completely different from the way

he does. In so many ways, Wittgenstein states, aspect-blindness is ‘akin to the lack of a musical

ear’ (ibid: 214).

What makes the notion of ‘aspect-blindness’ important lies in the connection between the concept of seeing-as and ‘experiencing the meaning of a word’ (ibid: 214). The question for

Wittgenstein is: ‘What would you be missing if you did not experience the meaning of a word?’ (ibid.) Imagine yourself wanting to teach your child the meaning of the word ‘friendly’ or ‘unfriendly’. To do so, I might assume the best way is to use the ostensive method of teaching words, i.e., pointing at a face and telling her: ‘This is a friendly face’ or ‘This is an unfriendly face’. We wrongly tend to believe, as Verbin notes, that teaching a concept is as easy as teaching the name of an object, say, duck (Verbin 2000). Thus, I might show a human

face to the child and call it friendly, but then the child might interpret the friendly face as a

smiling face. I submit the important point here, one that is pertinent to the question of life’s

meaning, is that there is a history or a life behind every aspect-seeing and when one is blind to

an aspect, one is in fact blind to the life or the history related to that aspect. Pointing to an

aspect is not enough; one has to have a prior experience of that aspect to see it.2 The child will

not learn the meaning of friendliness merely by an ostensive method of teaching words; life’s

experiences will teach her what a friendly face is. I mean she needs a lot of training to learn

these kinds of concepts. Or, as Verbin suggests, learning of concepts ‘presupposes a certain

agreement in judgments, a certain uniformity in experiencing and reacting to various facts of

our world’ (ibid: 12). For example, the child should be able to distinguish between a smile and

a frown and she should be able to express different reactions to each of them. According to

Wittgenstein, most of the time our common ‘forms of life’ guarantee this uniformity in

experiencing the world. This is the point of Wittgenstein’s famous remark when he writes:

If language is to be a means of communication there must be agreement not only in

definitions but also (queer as it may sound) in judgments (1958: § 242).

What would it have been like if we hadn’t had agreement over basic definitions, concepts and

behaviors like smiling, frowning, anger, a cry of pain, etc.? It is because of our agreement in judgment that when I see someone in pain, according to Wittgenstein, I do not infer that she is

in pain, I simply react to the pain. The human pain is transparent to us. However, not all

behaviors and concepts are as transparent to us as pain-behavior. In Wittgenstein’s words, ‘One

human being can be a complete enigma to another’ (ibid: 223). We sometimes experience this

in encountering people from different traditions and cultures. In these situations, I might feel ‘I

cannot find my feet’ (ibid.) with them. They are not accessible to us. We are aspect-blind to

their form of life.

2 For example, for me to be able to see clasping hands as an expression of praying or desperation, I have to have a history in which I have been familiar with the concept of prayer.

Shortly, I shall discuss the significance and the implications of aspect-seeing and aspect-

blindness for our perceptions of life’s meaning. I suggest one’s understanding of meaning of

life is highly dependent on one’s way of seeing the world. But before discussing this there is

yet another important issue that is related to aspect-seeing and that is the attitude/opinion

dichotomy.

Attitude/Opinion Dichotomy

In this section I explain the distinction made in the Investigations between having an attitude and having an opinion toward something. I argue that in a large number of cases seeing an

aspect amounts to having an attitude toward it. But what is the difference between attitude and

opinion? I think our opinions are usually cognitive, that is, they usually have to do with our knowledge claims, which can be proven wrong or right, whereas our attitudes are emotive and expressive. For example, you might have an opinion about the cause of someone’s illness but the way you would react to his pain is the result of having an attitude toward a human being in

pain. While you are expressing an opinion by telling the patient about the cause of his illness,

you express an attitude by holding his hands and keeping your voice down. A patient in bed forces new attitudes on you, like the way life teaches you to clasp your hands when, for instance, you are desperate and not when you are bored.

Wittgenstein invites us to imagine all the people around us are automata even though their behavior is as usual. He mentions that we might find this idea ‘a little uncanny’, but, he

continues:

Just try to keep hold of this idea in the midst of your ordinary intercourse with others, in

the street, say! Say to yourself, for example: ‘The children over there are mere

automata; all their liveliness is mere automatism.’ And you will either find these words

becoming quite meaningless; or you will produce in yourself some kind of uncanny

feeling, or something of the sort (1958: § 420).

The reason we find the idea of viewing people as automata a little ‘uncanny’ is given in the second part of Investigations, as if Wittgenstein finds an answer to the question he has asked before. It is difficult to imagine a human being as an automaton because, Wittgenstein suggests, ‘my attitude toward him is an attitude toward a soul. I am not of the opinion that he has a soul’ (ibid: 178). In the course of our ordinary lives we are already involved in a ‘stream’ of interactions with other human beings and the meaning of our relations with fellow human beings seem ‘transparent’ (ibid: 223) to us (I elaborate on the usual transparency of human behaviour in more detail in Chapter Five). The meanings of signs and codes of life are transparent to us precisely in the same way that the meanings of words are clear and transparent to us. For Wittgenstein, the meaning of a word is its life, i.e., its uses in the ‘stream of life’ show the meaning of it. As David Kishik suggests,

For Wittgenstein, to say that a sign is alive and to say that it is meaningful amounts to

the same thing. The meaning of a sign is its life, and the life of a sign is its meaning.

The words ‘life’ and ‘meaning’, ‘alive’ and ‘meaningful’, are used interchangeably

(Kishik 2008: 125; emphasized by the author).

Likewise, I react to other people’s pain; I can respond to a smile with a smile. I do not consider people in my community as robots and I trust they don’t either. Their ‘liveliness’, their cry of

pain, and their transparency make my attitude toward each of them an attitude toward a soul.3

And I would like to suggest our attitude toward fellow human beings is in fact a ‘way of seeing’ (Wittgenstein 1958: § 461) and receiving them. In short, usually our lives fit into ‘life’s mould’ (Wittgenstein 1980: 27) and thus we do not view life as a problem. Life is transparent to us as long as we fit into ‘life’s mould’.

However, one way or another, some of us face the question of the meaning of life one day.

That is to say, for some of us the transparency of life fades away and life becomes an ‘enigma’ that needs to be solved. In the next section I will analyse some of the questions related to the

‘problem of life’ based on what I have discussed so far.

Aspect-Seeing and the Meaning of Life

In the Blue Book, Wittgenstein alludes to a person who constantly asks questions such as,

‘What is the meaning of a word?’, or ‘What is meaning?’ He describes this situation as some sort of ‘mental cramp’ in which ‘we feel that we can’t point to anything in reply to [these questions] and yet ought to point to something’ (Wittgenstein 1969:1). On another occasion he talks about the same urge and mental cramp that makes us search for answers that will be

‘given once and for all; and independently of any future experience’ (1958: § 92). According to

Kishik, it is one’s ‘blindness to the way by which language meshes with life that is the cause of this mental cramp’ (Kishik 2008: 113). I agree with Kishik when he suggests that we feel the same urge and mental cramp when we ask questions such as ‘What is the meaning of life?’ or

3 For an insightful discussion about the concept of ‘soul’ in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, see E. B. Litwack (2009), Wittgenstein and Value: The Quest for Meaning.

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‘What is the value of life?’. However, unlike Kishik, I am not sure the question of life’s meaning emerges as a result of our ‘blindness’ to the ways ‘language meshes with life’. Rather, it appears that we ask the question because the sense of life is no longer ‘transparent’ to us.

That is to say, our ‘blindness’ is not blindness toward the grammar of our language and its relation to life; rather, it is an aspect-blindness toward the transparency of life. For instance,

Leo Tolstoy writes,

[F]ive years ago, something very strange began to happen with me: I was overcome by

minutes at first of perplexity and then of an arrest of life, as though I did not know how

to live or what to do, and I lost myself and was dejected. But that passed, and I

continued to live as before. Then those moments of perplexity were repeated oftener

and oftener, and always in one and the same form. These arrests of life found their

expression in ever the same questions: ‘why? Well, and then?’ (Tolstoy 2008: 7).

The way Tolstoy characterizes his situation is very illuminating. He touches on some common aspects of our experience when we encounter the question of life’s meaning. That is, I think most of us who genuinely struggle with the question of life’s meaning go through similar experiences, though, obviously, with different intensity. Let me briefly elaborate these aspects.

1) Strangeness of the situation: I think it is not coincidental that most people who begin to

search for the meaning of life find their quest ‘uncanny’; the question of life’s meaning sounds

strange, as Tolstoy alludes above. It seems strange that while we actually live we quest for the

meaning of life. That is, we feel mere living is not enough; there must be a purpose, a point

behind living. It appears that we need to find an Archimedean point to see life from above as

an observer. We often feel that our concern is life as a whole and thus we might come to

believe that the question ‘is one of the most important questions’ (Klemke 2008: 2). In other

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words, the question is not merely of theoretical interest and, according to some, it has

significant practical consequences on one’s life (Camus 2008).

2) Perplexity: Questioning the meaning of life is usually in sharp contrast with what we

normally experience in everyday life. We compare the transparency of our day-to-day lives

with the uncertainty that accompanies the question of life’s meaning and we might feel that we

are losing our way. To quote from Tolstoy again,

‘Amidst my thoughts of farming, which interested me very much during that time, there

would suddenly pass through my head a question like this: ‘All right, you are going to

have six thousands desyatínas of land . . . and three hundred horses, - and then?’ And I

completely lost my senses and did not know what to think farther’ (2008: 8).

Thus, we might feel we don’t have any ‘foundation to stand on’ (ibid.). That is what losing

one’s way means. Wittgenstein even suggests that all philosophical problems have ‘the form:

“I don’t know my way about”’ (1958: § 123).

3) Arrest of life: R. M. Hare gives a vivid image of what Tolstoy calls an ‘arrest of life’. He tells the story of a ‘well-balanced young man’ who got affected by the ‘violence’ of reading one of Camus’ novels, The Stranger (Hare 1981: 242). This young man after reading the novel

starts acting strangely and as it turns out he becomes convinced that ‘nothing matters’ (ibid.).

In the case of the young man the arrest of life is manifested in his erratic behavior. An analogy

might be of help here: All of a sudden you find yourself in a cinema watching an absurd movie.

The arrest of life is one’s reluctance to watch the movie; it is a sudden realization that one can

leave the cinema at any moment and yet one sees that everyone is watching the movie as if

there is nothing more important than that.

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In short, questions concerning the value and the meaning of life are often accompanied (or even might be caused) by being cut-off from the surrounding circumstances of one’s life. In other words, one cannot find one’s feet within one’s form of life. This is the point of

Wittgenstein when he writes,

The way to solve the problem you see in life is to live in a way that will make what is

problematic disappear. The fact that life is problematic shows that the shape of your life

does not fit into life’s mould. So you must change the way you live and, once your life

does fit into life’s mould, what is problematic will disappear (1980: 27).

What is puzzling in Wittgenstein’s statement is that he asserts that one must change one’s way of life but his elaboration does not help to clarify his claim. Since changing one’s way of life does not merely mean changing one’s lifestyle, diet, friends, partner, etc., and it is quite possible to change every external factor in one’s life and yet remain unhappy in life. However,

I think the attitude/opinion distinction discussed above can clarify Wittgenstein’s point. One might say, it is not what happens in our lives but rather our attitudes toward them, that is, our

‘way of seeing’ that determine whether we are happy or unhappy.

Wittgenstein claims that changing one’s life makes one’s life ‘fit into life’s mould’. However, one might ask, isn’t the same ‘life’s mould’ part of the problem of life’s meaning? Moreover, how can I fit into life’s mould if I saw it as the source of all problems? What does guarantee that the problem of life will be solved if I fit into life’s mould? In a passage that alludes to the

Tractarian view of life, and is a critique of it, Wittgenstein raises the same question:

If someone believes he has found the solution to the ‘problem of life’ and is inclined to

tell himself that now everything is simple, then to refute himself he would only have to

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remember that there was a time when this ‘solution’ had not been found; but at that

time too one had to be able to live, and in reference to this time the new solution seems

like a coincidence (Wittgenstein 2005: 309e).

So, on the one hand, he suggests that the problem will disappear if one changes one’s way of

life and, on the other hand, he proposes that even without this solution one ‘had to be able to

live’. As if Wittgenstein views the same problem from two different perspectives. However, in

both statements he refers to the ‘dawning’ of new aspects on one’s life. I think what

Wittgenstein means by changing one’s life, in the first statement, is in fact nothing but the dawning of a new aspect on one’s life. In Ray Monk’s words, ‘the consequence of a change of aspect might be a change of life’ (Monk 1990: 516). A father who decides to take care of his family does not necessarily do so after concluding that, for example, there are some objective values like ‘benevolence’ and ‘compassion’ that make one’s life meaningful. His decision is

probably the consequence of the dawning of an aspect of life on him. Experiences of ‘various

sorts’ (Wittgenstein 1980: 86) in his life lead to a change in his perception of life. In this case,

‘the expression of a change of aspect is the expression of a new perception’ (Wittgenstein

1958: 196).

The significance of aspect-dawning becomes clear when we consider the way people change or

reevaluate their religious beliefs. Nancy Bauer’s account of the way her faith disentangled from

her sense of ‘moral rectitude’ and sloughed off bit by bit ‘like an old skin’ is very illuminating.

‘I still cannot say’, Bauer writes, ‘exactly how or why this happened. . . .But I can say what did not happen: I did not lose my faith as a result of someone’s advancing a philosophical demonstration of its inherent irrationality’ (Bauer 2005: 212). Here we should openly take into consideration the agony of a sincere believer to whom the religious aspect of the world no

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longer dawns. Wittgenstein writes, ‘if you want to stay within the religious sphere you must

struggle’ (1980: 86). The struggle, I think, of wanting to stay in the religious sphere is the struggle to keep one’s religious attitude toward the world. It is the struggle to experience the dawning of religious aspects on one’s life.4 One cannot see the vicissitudes of one’s life as ‘the

will of God’ unless one’s general attitude toward the facts of the world is so:

In the sense in which asking a question and insisting on an answer is expressive of a

different attitude, a different mode of life, from not asking it, the same can be said of

utterances like ‘It is God’s will’ or ‘We are not masters of our fate’ (ibid: 61).

When a believer says that the vicissitudes of her life is God’s will, she is not giving a causal

explanation of what has happened in her life. She is ‘expressing an attitude to all explanations’

(ibid: 85). The dawning of new aspects usually brings about new attitudes. A prisoner who starts sending letters to his kids might do so thanks to the flashing of a new aspect on his life and not necessarily as a result of contemplating values of care and family. He might do so

because the fact that his kids are the only living beings related to his life has dawned on him

(an attitude has flashed on him). Likewise, another person might fail to see sufferings of other

human beings; he might fail to see ‘humanity in a man’:

We tend to take the speech of a Chinese for inarticulate gurgling [while] someone who

understands Chinese will recognize language in what he hears. Similarly I often cannot

discern humanity in a man (Wittgenstein 1980: 1).5

So far I discussed the notion of aspect-seeing and its related issues like aspect-blindness and

4 The metaphor of the ‘tight-rope walker’ (Wittgenstein 1980: 73) also touches on the same issue: that the struggle of a religious believer is like the struggles of a tight-rope walker. 5 Interestingly, this statement was written in 1914, in the early stages of his Tractarian philosophy.

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aspect-dawning and tried to show their relevance to our understanding of meaning in life. In

the next section, I discuss Wittgenstein’s views about the implications of religious beliefs, and

I argue that supernaturalists’ defense of the idea of God as the ultimate source of meaning in the literature can be viewed as the defense of a certain way of ‘seeing the world’ and making a

connection with it.

On Religion as a Way of Seeing the World

Lectures and Conversations on . . . Religious Beliefs emphasizes the centrality of aspect-

seeing in the life of the believer. As I argue below, the relevance of these lectures to the

discussion of life’s meaning is that Wittgenstein tries to show the fundamentality of world-

pictures in one’s way of seeing the world meaningfully. The lectures are apparently only about

religious belief but they can also (arguably) be seen as an attempt to show the implications of

what one considers to be the meaning of life. In order to describe and explore the nature of

religious belief, Wittgenstein provides some examples to show how a believer sees the world

differently from a non-believer. A believer might see pictures of Michelangelo (e.g. ‘God

created man’) not as ‘simply representing a powerful old man sailing through the air in a whirl

of robes’, but as a symbol of divine intervention. There is also the case of the person who sees

everything that happens to her as ‘retribution’ (Wittgenstein 1967: 54), reward or punishment,

whereas someone else would see the same incidents and the same events as simply fortunate or

unfortunate happenings in her life. In other words, believer and non-believer use different

‘pictures’. For example, consider a religious picture that most believers appeal to: ‘God’s eye

sees everything’. The way to understand the picture, according to Wittgenstein, is to recognize

the application of this picture in the believer’s life. By trying to prove that her belief in God’s

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eye is incoherent and irrational we would simply misunderstand the point. Wittgenstein says:

‘God’s eye sees everything’ – I want to say of this that it uses a picture. I don’t want to

belittle the person who says it . . . We associate a particular use with a picture . . . What

conclusions are you going to draw? . . . Are eyebrows going to be talked of, in

connection with the Eye of God? . . . If I say he used a picture, I don’t want to say

anything he himself wouldn’t say. I want to say he draws these conclusions (ibid: 71-

72).

In other words, Wittgenstein is only trying to describe the effects of belief in God’s eye in the life of the believer. We will miss the whole point if we immediately start to ask questions that the picture appears to force upon us. If someone says that God has spoken to him, asking him about God’s accent is to miss the entire point. Hillary Putnam’s reading of Wittgenstein’s remark is worth quoting at length:

Religious people do employ pictures, and . . . they draw certain consequences from

them, but not the same consequences that we draw when we use similar pictures in

other contexts. If I speak of my friend as having an eye, then normally I am prepared to

say that he has an eyebrow, but when I speak of the Eye of God being upon me, I am

not prepared to speak of the eyebrow of God. But the impressive thing here is not what

Wittgenstein says, but the limit he places on his observation. Pictures are important in

life. The whole weight of a form of life may lie in the pictures that that form of life uses

(Putnam 1994: lii).

And I want to add not only ‘form of life’ but also a way of seeing and a certain attitude lie in the pictures that believers employ. Consider the following examples: God as the Father, God as

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the savior, God as the judge, God as Love, etc. The picture itself, on its own, is silent; one’s

relation to it, i.e., the ‘application’ (Wittgenstein 1958: § 422) gives it its meaning. For

instance, God as the Father to a believer means that we are all his children, that he cares about

us, that he shelters us, that we are not lost, etc. In a sense, the picture of God as a father brings

about or leads to other pictures and concepts. It forces, that is, a way of seeing the world.

Questioning the truth of this picture will not stop the believer from regulating her life based on

this picture (cf. Wittgenstein 1967: 56). Wittgenstein connects the world-picture of religious

people and its impact on their lives by the following example:6 ‘Suppose somebody made this

guidance for this life: believing in the Last Judgment. . . . Asking him is not enough. He will

probably say he has proof. But he has what you might call an unshakable belief. It will show,

not by reasoning or by appeal to ordinary grounds for belief, but rather by regulating for in all

his life’ (ibid: 53-54). For Wittgenstein, the whole idea is that the language-game of empirical proof doesn’t apply here. There is no evidence, and ‘if there were evidence, this would in fact destroy the whole business. Anything that I normally call evidence wouldn’t in the slightest influence me. . . . [one might say, in religious matters] the best scientific evidence [to reject or prove the existence of God] is nothing’ (ibid: 56). In other words, scientific evidence is not enough to force a way of living on me. The believer appeals to a picture of the world, one that has a regulatory effect on her life. Consider, for example the picture of the world as a friendly home:

There is life after death. Death is not the end of the matter. But we shall live on,

recognizing each other in a better world. We have eternity in our souls and are destined

for a higher existence. So if Hebraic-Christian theism is true, the world is a friendly

6 In Chapter Five, I will discuss the centrality of World-pictures in shaping one’s conception of life’s meaning.

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home in which we are all related as siblings in one family, destined to live forever in

cosmic bliss in a reality in which good defeats evil (Pojman 2008: 29).

Obviously, most naturalists deny this picture and argue that there is not enough ‘evidence’ to prove that supernaturalists’ picture of the world as a ‘friendly home’ is true (Schopenhauer

1966; Nietzsche 1968, 1974; Benatar 2006; Russell 2008). However, from a Wittgensteinian perspective, all that a philosopher can do is describe the application and regulative function of the picture in the believer’s life (in Chapter Six I will discuss Wittgenstein’s distinction between description and explanation). The aim is to understand a life, not to judge it. That is, the aim is not to provide a theory to discard other theories of life’s meaning. Religion, for a genuine believer, is not a highly probable theory about the ultimate nature of reality, but a

‘passionate commitment to a system of reference’ (Wittgenstein 1980:64). This system of reference, for Wittgenstein, regulates one’s life; the believer finds the meaning of life in the regulatory dimension of her commitment. This commitment is not an arbitrary commitment.

The religious ‘system of reference’ forces a certain type of seeing the world and acting in it.

For example, it cannot force a believer to commit herself to tasting as many chocolate as she can or to solving puzzles, but it might lead the believer to see a strange beauty in realizing that

Mohammad and Jesus stared at the same moon that she does now.

So, in a sense, the believer invites us to see some aspects of the world in the way she does. It is not surprising that most supernaturalists in their arguments try to show the hopelessness of the human condition without the existence of God (Cottingham 2003; Pojman 2008; Craig 2013).

Interestingly, most supernaturalists refer to the scientific picture of the world and its destiny to describe our hopelessness. As Craig writes,

Scientists tell us that everything in the universe is growing farther and farther apart. As

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it does so, the universe grows colder and colder, and its energy is used up. Eventually

all the stars will burn out, and all matter will collapse into dead stars and black holes.

There will be no light at all. There will be no heat. There will be no life, only the

corpses of dead stars and galaxies, ever expanding into the endless darkness and the

cold recesses of space, a universe in ruins. The entire universe marches irreversibly

toward its grave. So not only is each individual person doomed, the entire human race

is doomed. The universe is plunging toward inevitable extinction. Death is written

throughout its structure (Craig 2013: 159).

That is indeed a typical naturalist account of the ultimate destiny of the universe.7 However, what is interesting is the conclusions that naturalists and supernaturalists draw from this.

Whereas most naturalists tend to believe the meaning of life is possible only through the

recognition of our indifferent world and embracing either various objective values or subjective

preferences of individuals, most supernaturalists conclude that from a value-less world we can derive neither subjective nor objective values.8 In Pojman’s reading of Russell’s ‘Free Man’s

Worship’, ‘on the firm foundation of unyielding despair we can only build that which is desperate’ (Pojman 2008: 28). In other words, according to most supernaturalists, there is no happy end in naturalists’ picture of the world. However, the good news, for supernaturalists, is that the existence of God can give ‘purpose’, ‘meaning’, and ‘justice’ to the world and to the

individuals. As I discussed in Chapter Two, Wittgenstein describes this situation by appealing

to an analogy: ‘It would be as though someone were first to let me see the hopelessness of my

7 Interestingly, Russell’s account of the meaning of life is precisely founded upon the same picture of the world that Craig describes above. See, Russell 2008: 56. 8 See, for example, Taylor 1970; Singer 1995; Wielenberg 2005; Russell 2008.

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situation and then show me the means of rescue until, of my accord. . . I ran to it and grasped

it’ (1980: 64). It is not surprising that religious discourse among people of faith is saturated

with dooms-day scenarios. The fact is that there are enough catastrophes and mess around that

from a religious perspective can be seen as evidence of our hopelessness:9 We should look at

‘the means of rescue’ against the background against which our hopelessness is portrayed.

The supernaturalist’s belief in God as the ultimate source of meaning of life did not begin with a philosophical conviction in the first place so that it could be discarded by a philosophical clarification later on. On the other hand, the vicissitudes of life might flash new aspects on the believer’s life. ‘An aspect dawns and fades away’ (Wittgenstein 1998a: § 438) and if we want to feel it and be aware of it, ‘we must bring it forth again and again’ (ibid.). In this view, losing one’s faith might be the result of the fading of an aspect of the world. By the same token, one doesn’t come to see the world religiously as a result of someone’s advancing a rational explanation of the existence of God. Verbin suggests,

Justification and evidence in the dispute between the believer and the non-believer

should take the form of neither a logical deduction nor an empirical induction. Owing

to the experiential component in religious beliefs, owing to the manner by which they

are similar to seeing, a metaphysical proof that a certain event is a miracle, that a

certain text is God’s word, that the world is God’s creation, are not likely to work

(Verbin 2000: 20).

According to Wittgenstein, even what believers and non-believers consider as explanation is highly influenced by their way of seeing the world. Nancy Bauer’s anecdote alludes to this.

9 As a good example of this trend among supernaturalists in the literature, see C. S. Lewis’ paper, ‘On Living in an Atomic Age’ (2013).

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She writes in 2003, while she was reflecting on the question ‘Is there anything beyond human understanding?’, a child in her son’s elementary school went to bed with a mild stomach bug and never woke up. As the news spread all over the neighborhood in the next day everyone had the same question: Why? Of course there was a rational explanation for his death but it didn’t stop so many people to continue asking why. To the point that one night her eleven year-old daughter came into her room, crying ‘I just don’t understand, Mommy . . . Why did Jordan die?’ (ibid.) Bauer, unable to answer her question, remembers her own father’s response to her when she was ten years old and suffering from juvenile depression:

My father told me that God was crying for me . . . and when he said this I burst into

fresh tears, largely because I felt bad that my own sadness was making God, who had

felt so far away during those days, feel so bad. I’m not sure whether it was my despair

or my father’s sense that he had failed to convey to me what he had meant to convey by

saying that God was crying for me that caused his tears to well up and overflow. But I

have always been grateful for that moment, in which I came to grasp the value – the gift

– of . . . something that no argument could have brought me to understand. This was not

a gift that I was able to give to my daughter the night she came to me sobbing (ibid:

213).

In other words, Bauer was unable to explain the death of Jordan the way her father would have explained, because she didn’t have access to an aspect of the world that her father had. Her integrity would have been at stake had she told her daughter that ‘God’s ways are beyond human understanding’. The only explanation that was at Bauer’s disposal for the death of

Jordan was a scientific explanation but that was not something that could stop her daughter and other people from asking ‘why?’. That is, they were not searching for a ‘causal explanation’.

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Rather, they were expressing an attitude toward all the explanations. A straight scientific explanation is that the child died of ‘asymptomatic, undiagnosed juvenile diabetes’ and that is the end of the matter, but a believer will not find it convincing. A believer might find the causal explanation of an event very limiting and unsatisfactory. A supernaturalist might say ‘the ways of God are beyond human understanding’ to give a transcendent sense to what is deemed unexplainable but then a naturalist, like Kai Nielsen, might retort it is confused to talk about

God’s plan not because God’s ways are beyond human understanding but because all God-talk is either false or confused. ‘If God is utterly beyond human understanding’, Nielsen argues,

‘then there is nothing to be said, nothing to be thought, nothing to be perplexed about, nothing to wonder at’ (Nielsen 2005: 157). The vicissitudes in human life, Nielsen has it, ‘happen for no rhyme or reason’ (ibid: 147). It seems that Wittgenstein personally agrees with Nielsen that there is no rhyme or reason behind vicissitudes in human life.10 However, unlike Nielsen,

Wittgenstein suggests that the same vicissitudes in human life can educate one to a religious way of seeing the world. ‘Life’, Wittgenstein writes,

can educate one to a belief in God. And experiences too are what bring this about; but I

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 . . . Life can force this concept on us

(1980: 86).

On another occasion Wittgenstein talks about the necessity of having a ‘certain kind of upbringing’ (ibid: 50) to believe in God, i.e., to see the world religiously. In other words, by arguing and providing some ‘proofs’ for the existence of God, one cannot display the religious

10 See, for example, Wittgenstein 1980: 71 (‘But man exists in this world, where things break, slide about, cause every imaginable mischief. And of course he is one such thing himself’.)

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aspects of the world to a nonbeliever. (And, after all, one wonders what kind of world would be

the world in which the existence of God could be proven as something alongside the existence

of physical objects?) Moreover, even believers ‘would never [. . .] come to believe as a result

of such [arguments]’ (ibid: 85). Note that this is not to imply that traditional justifications and

proofs in religious discourse are trivial. On the contrary, justifications and proof can also be

successful but only to the extent that they bring about the dawning of religious aspects on the

non-believer.11

To sum up, I argued that supernaturalists appeal to a religious ‘picture’ of the world, which

brings about a religious way of seeing life and its meaning. I discussed the world as a ‘friendly

home’ and God’s eye upon us, as two examples of the pictures to which a believer might refer.

The disagreement between supernaturalism and naturalism is not merely over the theoretical

conditions of life’s meaningfulness. Rather, it is over different ways of assessing the

vicissitudes of life. Even though some aspects of these different ways of appraising life might

‘criss-cross’ and overlap, the fundamental aspects are not easy to reconcile. For example, a

supernaturalist and an objectivist might both believe that benevolence is a meaning-conferring

value, but their difference, then, lies in the level of significance that each ascribes to it (I shall

discuss this issue in more detail in Chapter Five).

11 Jennifer Faust makes a distinction between epistemic and non-epistemic uses of philosophical arguments for the existence of God and suggests that even though the standard arguments for the existence of God are unlikely to persuade non-believers, they have various other functions. For example, ‘argumenta are often a part of doctrinal or theological training, they are often voiced during sermons, they serve as aids in exegetical work, and they are often aimed at increasing the understanding of those who already adhere to the beliefs stated in their conclusions’ (Faust 2008: 83).

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Objections and Clarifications

So far I discussed some implications of the notion of aspect-seeing and its related topics

(aspect-dawning and aspect-blindness) for our understanding of the meaning of life. I discussed the continuity of this notion in the writings of Wittgenstein, both in his early and later writings, and I suggested that our perception of the meaning of life can be well understood by viewing it from the framework of aspect-seeing. This, in turn, shows the limits of theorization in the discussions of life’s meaning among the scholars in the literature. Highlighting the distinction that is made in Investigations between attitude and opinion, I also argued that seeing an aspect of life is accompanied or correlated with having an attitude toward that dawned aspect. In this section, my aim is to address two related objections that might be raised against the ideas I discussed so far. The first objection is that limiting the meaning of life to a matter of aspect- seeing and aspect-dawning reduces the meaning of life to a ‘subjective affair’ (Markus 2013).

That is, anyone could interpret the meaning of her life based on what she thinks is an aspect of life that has dawned on her. Thus, a pessimist might claim that people who deny the absurdity of life are aspect-blind to the most fundamental aspect of human life and an objectivist might retort that the pessimist is aspect-blind to those objective values that most human beings share and respect, and so on and so forth.

This is an important objection but it doesn’t refute my suggestion. Explaining the experience of life’s meaning within the framework of aspect-seeing does not necessarily amount to relativizing it. By suggesting that one’s understanding of life’s meaning is a kind of aspect- seeing, I want to draw attention to the ways we experience it. My focus is not the conditions of a meaningful life, but, rather, the ways those conditions are seen and experienced in our lives.

In other words, I suggest the experience of life’s meaning is a living experience in which one’s

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whole way of seeing and assessing life is involved, whether we believe it is a subjective or

objective affair. An objectivist who believes every human being, in virtue of being human, deserves respect and dignity might provide very strong arguments in support of his claims. But

his arguments would be of little help to a person who usually fails to ‘discern humanity in a

man’ (Wittgenstein 1980: 1). What is lacking here is less a theory of human dignity and more

the dawning of an aspect of life on him in which the human dignity is still inviolable or sacred.

Seeing the world as a ‘friendly home’, seeing the vicissitudes of one’s life as ‘the will of God’,

seeing life as ‘a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing’, and seeing

coming into existence as a ‘harmful’ event are not merely some theoretical views; they are

ways of approaching life to either of which one arrives not merely as a result of someone

establishing their philosophical coherence.

The other objection, which is related to the first one, is concerned about the unhappy

consequences of a Wittgensteinian approach toward religious belief. If religious beliefs are a

matter of ‘seeing-as’, if one’s belief in God is a ‘simile’ (Wittgenstein 1980: 29) and it does not

refer to a Supreme Being, then we should conclude that religious beliefs are some ‘symbols’

which are used to describe the believer’s attitudes and emotions. This view is called ‘non-

realism’12 (Hick 2004: 198) and philosophers like John Hick and others not only disagree with

12 For a detailed criticism of non-realism see Hick 2004: 175-210. Some Wittgensteinian commentators, like Barrett (1991), also disagree with a non-realistic approach and hold that one can never find a ‘reductionist’ approach in Wittgenstein’s philosophy of religion. According to Barrett, Wittgenstein ‘never said that religious belief is nothing more than a way of life according to a picture. [. . .] Nor is there any evidence that this was what he meant’ (Barrett 1991: 257). However, he acknowledges the fact that some of Wittgenstein’s remarks can be interpreted in a non-realistic way (ibid.). Anyway, I think the burden of proof is on Barrett and he should have at least supported his objection by referring to some elements of Wittgenstein’s philosophy that are sympathetic to the realism of religious belief. In Wittgenstein’s body of texts there are some ‘scattered remarks’ (Kober 2006: 110) on religion, of highly idiosyncratic nature, which at the most show Wittgenstein’s struggles with religion and

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non-realism but with similar attempts to reduce religion to an ‘autonomous’ language-game, which is cut-off from other language-games and makes sense only for its believers and doesn’t refer to anything outside of it. Hick suggests,

The unacceptable feature of the position is that by treating religious language as

autonomous – as a language-game with its own rules or a speech activity having

meaning only within its own borders – it deprives religious statements of ‘ontological’

or ‘metaphysical’ significance . . . The logical implications of religious statements do

not extend across the borders of the Sprachspiel into assertions concerning the character

of the universe beyond that fragment of it which is the religious speech of human

beings. Religious language has become a kind of ‘protected discourse’, and forfeits its

immemorial claim to bear witness to the most momentous of all truths (Hick 1964: 239-

40).

Likewise, one might object that reducing religious beliefs to one’s attitudes and perspectives deprives religion of its ‘ontological significance’.

One response to this objection would be to suggest that the very idea that drawing an analogy between religious beliefs and aspect-seeing is reductionist is against the spirit of a

Wittgensteinian way of doing philosophy. A theory that discards other theories by introducing new theories and systems can be anything but Wittgensteinian. A Wittgensteinian approach toward any subject is defined by its method and not its content. I never claimed that religious

the way he tries to understand how a person stays ‘within the religious sphere’(Wittgenstein 1980: 86). But the most intriguing aspect of religion, for Wittgenstein, was its power to destroy one’s vanity (cf. Wittgenstein 1980: 48). However, being intrigued by the spiritual power of religion in shaping one’s life is one thing, and believing in the realism of religious discourse is another (a distinction that has to be made clear in the study of Wittgenstein’s views of religion). For non-realism in religious belief, see Phillips 1970.

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belief is nothing but the expression of one’s attitude or one’s way of seeing the world. In fact,

A Wittgensteinian approach puts all the essence-talks in the bracket. So, in a Wittgensteinian approach there is a shift from ‘essence’ to ‘grammar’ (1958: § 373).13 The grammar, i.e., various uses of any concept show the meaning of it. As Wittgenstein says, ‘The way you use the word ‘God’ does not show whom you mean – but, rather, what you mean’ (1980: 50). In other words, ‘the way you use the word God’ shows a way of living or relating with the world and, as far as a Wittgensteinian approach is concerned, the aim should be to describe the ways people use words such as ‘God’ or ‘the meaning of life’ and what they mean by them.

I suspect hick and other realists would not find this explanation satisfactory. A realist might rephrase Hick’s objection and point out that leaving out the ‘ontological significance’ of religious beliefs is in contrast to the ideal of ‘perspicuous representation’ or description of religious beliefs since it totally ignores the ontological dimension of belief in God. It seems to

me that here there is a categorical difference between an approach that tries to understand the

‘applications’ of religious beliefs in the life of the believer and a view that is committed to

prove the existence of God.

Conclusion

In this chapter, I discussed the intimate connection between the meaning of life and aspect-

seeing and discussed the implications of this view for our understanding of the meaning of life,

in general, and religious beliefs, in particular. I mainly focused on the religious way of seeing

the world to illustrate the importance of aspect-seeing in one’s conception of life’s meaning.

13 In Chapter Six, I will discuss this in detail.

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Most supernaturalist accounts of life’s meaning fail to pay due attention to the significance of

one’s attitude and one’s ‘way of seeing’ (Wittgenstein 1958: § 461) and, thus, are unlikely to bring about a change in one’s conception of life’s meaning. That is, they fail to bring about the dawning of religious aspects on the non-believer. In other words, a supernaturalist who argues

that life would be meaningless without believing in God and making a connection with him,

would be successful in bringing about a change in the non-believer’s way of seeing the world

only if, and to the extent that, his arguments make the non-believer see that this ‘dust of the

earth’ is indeed made in the ‘image of God’.14 A theoretical discussion of the conditions of

meaningfulness is unlikely to lead to a change of aspect. I might agree with a believer that God

is the ultimate source of meaning and yet remain unable to see the world religiously.

The aim of a Wittgensteinian approach toward the question of life’s meaning is to understand the ways people talk about life’s meaning in everyday life. To that extent, the concentration is more on what is ‘dear and ordinary’ (Wittgenstein 1975: § 347) than to what is deemed great and extraordinary by commentators in the literature. In the next three chapters, I shall focus on the ordinariness of meaning and approach this idea from three different perspectives: The ordinariness of meaning, the certitude of life, and the confessional aspect of enquiring into the meaning of life – all of which related to everyday life. In the next chapter I critically examine the pervasive tendency among some commentators to make, first, a distinction between the

great and the ordinary and, second, to construct some ‘houses of cards’ called ‘theories of great

meaning’.

14 Cf. Genesis 2:7 and 1: 26.

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Chapter Four

In Defense of the Ordinary: Wittgenstein, Marquard, and Theories of

Great Meaning

Introduction

The question of life’s meaning has not been a favorite topic among normative theorists.

According to E. M. Adams, analytic philosophers have given enormous attention to the question of value but ‘scarcely’ any to the phenomenon of meaning in connection with life

(Adams 2002: 71). That is to say, questions of morality or ‘well-being’ would seem acceptable but it would seem embarrassing to talk about the meaning of life. Metz suggests that there might be two reasons for the fact that the meaning of life has not received due attention. The first reason might be that normative theorists are not aware of ‘any clear and precise analysis of the question of the meaning of life’. Philosophers, Metz suggests, ‘are more confident as to the senses of “well-being” and “right action” than as to those of “life’s meaning”’ (Metz 2002:

782). The second reason, according to Metz, might be that common Kantian and utilitarian outlooks continue to dominate and define the way we think of ‘normative categories’ (ibid.). It seems that there is yet another important reason for the fact that normative theorists are reluctant to systematically address the question of life’s meaning: The question of the meaning

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of life sounds like a pseudo-religious question, one that is beyond the concern of any philosopher who talks sense.

However, the growing body of texts on the meaning of life, especially within the last thirty years, shows the problem ‘does not go away’ (Cottingham 2003:2). It appears that the question of life’s meaning is even more pressing in the absence of religious traditions that used to provide convincing answers for it. The question for some of us is as important as a religious question and, one might say, it has become like a ‘surrogate’ to one’s religious feelings. In the absence of an absolute being who once was the ultimate source of meaning and value in life, some think, one has to search for a new source of meaning. Nietzsche writes:

As we thus reject the Christian interpretation and condemn its meaning like counterfeit,

Schopenhauer’s question immediately comes to us in a terrifying way: Has existence

any meaning at all? It will require a few centuries before this question can even be

heard completely and in its full depth (Nietzsche 1974: 308).

What is interesting in Nietzsche’s case is that he rejects any kind of religious answer to the question of life’s meaning and yet he considers the question itself to be a grand question: ‘Has existence any meaning at all?’ Faced with apparently a grand question, some philosophers cannot help but providing a grand answer for it, be it ‘negation of the will’ (Schopenhauer

1966), ‘freedom and responsibility’ (Sartre 1956), ‘guardianship of Being’ (Heidegger 1977:

36), ‘will to power’ (Nietzsche 1968), ‘heroism’ (Camus 2008), or even artistic creations

(Taylor 1999). It seems that our ‘tendency’ (Wittgenstein 1965: 11) to say something about the ultimate meaning of life is so strong that nothing less than an absolute answer can satisfy our urge.

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These grand theories are not necessarily supernaturalist. Schopenhauer’s metaphysical account

of the human condition is a good example of a theory that provides an absolute answer to the

question of life’s meaning.1 In this approach, the aim is to capture the ‘ultimate constituents’

(Schopenhauer 1966: 312) of life. Likewise, all the grand theorists try to find the ‘ultimate constituents’ of the meaning of life, once and for all, and ‘independently of any future experience’ (Wittgenstein 1958: § 92). Following Wright Mills, by grand theory I mean any form of abstract theorizing in which the formal organization and the arrangement of concepts takes priority over understanding the everyday social world. Grand theories, in this view, are more or less separated from the concrete concerns of everyday life and its variety (Mills 1959).

In this chapter, my aim is to challenge some grand theories by drawing attention to the significance of the ordinary in the construction of meaning. My tools to do so are the views of

Wittgenstein and Odo Marquard. The latter’s account of the meaning of life in his essay, ‘On the Dietetics of Expectation of Meaning: Philosophical Observations’ (1991), is very similar to that of Wittgenstein in that both emphasize the significance of the ordinary in the constitution of meaning. In the next two sections, I first discuss Marquard’s criticisms of ‘sensational’ approaches toward the problem of life’s meaning and then I examine his suggestions to solve what he calls ‘the immoderateness of our demand for meaning’. Afterwards I raise some objections to the pervasive tendency among some theorists in the literature to theorize what

1 According to Schopenhauer, the essence of human existence, as with all living things, is will. Human beings are nothing but ‘objectified will’: ‘Teeth, gullet, and intestinal canal are objectified hunger, the genitals objectified sexual impulse’. Since will is our essence whatever we do is a function of our will. The basis of all willing, he claims, Is need, lack and hence pain, and by its very nature and origin it [i.e. the human being] is destined to pain. [And] its life swings like a pendulum to and fro between pain and boredom, and these two are, in fact, its ultimate constituents (Schopenhauer 1966: 312).

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they deem as the ultimate constituents of ‘great meaning’ in life. To do so, I discuss Schlick’s theory of ‘play’ (2008), Taylor’s theory of ‘artistic creations’ (1999), Levy’s ‘work theory’

(2005), Camus’ ‘heroism’, and Metz’s ‘unified account of great meaning in life’ (2011). A theory of great meaning in life, as opposed to the ‘ordinary meaning’, is a theory that claims one’s life can become significantly worthwhile and valuable in virtue of orienting one’s life toward some objectively valuable goals, which usually require outstanding perseverance and vision. In this view, the meaning that is acquired in virtue of writing, for example, Anna

Karenina is substantially different from writing reviews in a yellow page or caring about one’s garden. Note that perseverance alone in one’s life projects and activities does not necessarily secure great meaning. Instead, one’s perseverance should be oriented toward some activities that are objectively worthwhile. Moreover, what separates great meaning from the ordinary meaning is the transcendental characteristic of the former as compared to the latter. That is, the claim here is that with great meaning there is at least some level of self-sacrifice and transcending one’s narrow self-interest.

Now, bear in mind that in this chapter I do not reject the difference between the great meaning and the ordinary meaning. What I shall question is the idea that the difference between the two can be theorized and set forth in some general principles. I question the need for a theory of great meaning and not the existence of great meaning itself in the lives of some people, whatever that might be.

Marquard on Inflated Conceptions of Meaning

Some philosophers argue that the whole problem of the meaning of life is very recent and a

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product of late modern life (Marquard 1991: 30; Young 2003: 1). In this view, for a large

portion of history we were not concerned about the meaning of life since we used to be quite certain that we knew what it was. We believed that beyond this world there was another world

and the whole life was a journey toward it. Thus, human life used to be seen as a story with a

clear beginning and a clear end (a ‘happy end’, in Pojman’s words). In other words, once upon

a time the meaning of life was transparent to us. Most of us didn’t need an account of a

meaningful life because we were living meaningful lives. However, things changed and

gradually philosophers became aware of what Schopenhauer called the ‘problem of life’.2

According to Marquard, even the concept of ‘sense’ or ‘meaning’ in general has undergone some major changes in the modern era, which is relevant to the question of life’s meaning.

Marquard claims that the concept of sense or meaning can be defined by three different concepts. Though all of these concepts are somehow related to the question of life’s meaning, I only focus on the third conception: 3

• The concept of sense that relates to sensuality or ‘the senses’ (Marquard 1991: 30).

• The concept of sense or meaning that relates to ‘intelligibility’ (ibid: 31).

• Finally, the concept of sense that relates to ‘happiness’ (ibid: 32).

The first function of the concept of sense relates to the human sense. Sense is ‘what a person

has who, by noticing, can enjoy or suffer’ (ibid: 30) and human beings notice by their five

2 For a discussion of the effects of the emergence of modern sciences and philosophy on our new understanding of the meaning of life, see Young (2003). 3 Marquard refers to the German word Sinn, which, in English, has the double meaning of sense and meaning and his conceptual analysis of Sinn amounts to an etymology of Sinn as sense, and not of Sinn as Bedeutung (meaning as [very literally] signification). This raises an interesting issue. The standard expression for the meaning of life in German is Sinn des Lebens, whereas, Bedeutung des Lebens would point to the significance of (a/somebody’s/my) life, which may be an important sub-issue of the meaning of life.

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senses. The term ‘common sense’ derives from this definition of sense. Something is common sense if ordinary people can notice it.

We also use the concept of sense when we talk about the intelligibility of something or lack thereof (the second). The intelligible dimension includes roughly what Kant would include under judgment or concepts and language. If someone claims, for example, that ‘skepticism does not make sense’, she refers to sense as intelligibility, the ability to understand. Or when we read in the Tractatus that ‘the sense of the world must lie outside the world’ (1966: § 6041) it is obvious that by ‘sense’ he means sense as intelligibility.

The third concept of sense or meaning is what Marquard calls the ‘emphatic concept’

(Marquard 1991: 33) of sense or meaning. In this view, ‘sense or meaning is what something has that is (if necessary, absolutely) . . . worthwhile’ (ibid.). By ‘worthwhile’, he means something that we consider as important, something that makes us feel ‘happy’, something that is emphatically related to human life. When we enquire about the meaning of life we usually refer to the emphatic concept of sense or meaning. (What makes life absolutely worthwhile?)

The emergence of the emphatic concept of meaning, Marquard suggests, is a specific feature of the late modern era and it seems that the question of life’s meaning becomes increasingly unavoidable. As Nietzsche once remarked, when people talk a lot about ‘values’ we should know that values are in trouble. Likewise, Marquard suggests, the nature of the question of life’s meaning has become negative, i.e., people talk about the loss of meaning and at present what we see is the ‘emphatic lamentation of the loss of meaning’ (ibid: 34).4 Albert Camus is a

4 Maybe it is important to note that Marquard wrote this essay in the middle of the 1970s – when at least West Germany was at the peak of the post war rebuilding of German technology and the economy, and post war existentialism was on the wane but had not yet lost its grip on the Weltanschauung of the older generation. Hence

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notorious example in this regard. The opening statement of the Myth of Sisyphus vividly

describes this lamentation: ‘There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is

suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental

question of philosophy’ (Camus 2008: 73). As if our lives depend on finding an absolute

answer to Camus’ question.

In lamenting the deficit of meaning, we demand an absolute answer to the pressing question of

the meaning of life. This is why Marquard connects the problem of the loss of meaning in our

time to the ‘mentality of demands’. As he says, ‘the experience of meaning deficits does not

always have to be due to lack of meaning; it can also result from excessive expectations of

meaning’ (1991: 36). In other words, it is not that there is no meaning in life but that our demands for meaning are immoderate. In our everyday life we undertake many meaningful activities but we want something more significant that these ordinary meanings. As the

members of modern society, preoccupied with the mentality of demand, we are ‘spoiled’ by the

repeated satisfaction of our demands, and so we want to be spoiled with meaning as well.

One might object that just because a person is thinking about the meaning of his life doesn’t

necessarily mean that, first, she does this with the mentality of demand and, second, she is a

member of a Western society. I am not sure when a young teacher in Malawi thinks of her

life’s meaning, she does it out of being spoiled by the mentality of demand. However, let us

assume that Marquard is only addressing the members of modern Western society. Granted

that, I think there is a point in his claim: that, in the quest for the meaning of life, most of us

expect to find an answer that gives our life an absolute meaning, not a relative one. So, for

the reference to the ‘emphatic lamentation of the loss of meaning’ (and, later on, the rise of the counseling professions).

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example, we might search for the meaning of life in general and not my life’s meaning alone.5

Marquard’s interesting solution to the problem of ‘the immoderateness of the demand for

meaning’ is, simply, a ‘diet’ (ibid: 37) with regard to our expectation of meaning. The aim of

what he calls a ‘dietetics’ of the expectation of meaning is to sober up our intoxicated

expectations and to moderate our demands for meaning. But, for Marquard, this is not to suggest that we should do away with all the cravings for meaning. As I shall explain shortly, his dietetics consists of avoiding those ‘sensational’ approaches that aim at giving an absolute answer, ‘independently of any future experience’, to the question of life’s meaning.

Not surprisingly, supernaturalists would be the best targets of Marquard’s dietetics, since they

defend a Transcendent Being who is the source of life’s absolute meaning, but it doesn’t mean

that we cannot find such demands among naturalists. Moritz Schlick’s concept of creative

‘play’ as the only source of meaning in life is an example of such tendency in the literature.

Schlick believes if we want to find a meaning in life we must seek for activities that are

valuable in themselves. In this view, creative and artistic activities are the best source of meaning. By ‘play’ Schlick means ‘any activity which takes place entirely for its own sake, independently of its effects and consequences’ (Schlick 2008: 65).6 Therefore, in a sense, the meaning of one’s life is a function of one’s involvement in self-engaging, self-explanatory activities, activities that carry their own purpose and value within them, independently of any

5 For a discussion of the difference between the question of life’s meaning in general sense and in personal sense, see, Wong 2008. 6 I think here Schlick is referring to activities that psychologists call ‘optimal experience’, a desirable state of consciousness that enhances a person’s psychic state. Optimal experiences can be said to happen when people are able to meet the challenges of their environment with appropriate skills, and accordingly feel a sense of well- being, a sense of mastery, and a heightened sense of self-esteem. For more discussion, see Csikszentmihalyi (1988).

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extraneous goals.

However, Schlick’s theory seems less promising when we realize how immoderate the

expectation of the theory is. Simply, in Schlick’s theory there is not any place for people who

do not have the luxury of playful activities. I think one’s pleasure from one’s activities cannot

be the only meaning-conferring factor in life. For example, a shoe-maker who enormously

enjoys his job and views shoe-making as an end in itself might live, in Schlick’s view, a

meaningful life. On the other hand, the same person is unlikely to live a meaningful life if he

views his job as the last resort to pay-off his house mortgage. Shoe-making in this case is not

an end in-itself and thus, in Schlick’s theory, cannot be viewed as a meaning-conferring

activity. But, what if the shoe-maker viewed his job as a necessary sacrifice for a greater good

that is his family? If there was only one reason to reject Schlick’s theory, that reason would be

the life of an ordinary man who takes a second low-paid job in order to keep his family together. I think Schlick’s account of the meaning of life is not only immoderate, in

Marquard’s sense, but also counter-intuitive.

Essentials of the Dietetics of Expectation of Meaning

Marquard’s recipe or dietetics with regard to our expectation of meaning is pithily stated:

‘Sense – and this one ought to know – is always the nonsense one lets go’ (Marquard 1991:

38). In our quest for the meaning of life, Marquard has it, there are some approaches,

assumptions and tendencies that one has to avoid, the most important of which is the nonsense

of aiming directly at meaning. In this section, I discuss various assumptions and tendencies

that, according to Marquard, are nonsenses from which we he have to desist. Marquard’s

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approach, as we see in the next section, has some similarities with Wittgenstein’s in that both

try to highlight the significance of appreciating the ordinary in the constitution of meaning in

our lives. And as I discuss their views I examine some theories in the literature to show the

contrasts between two different ways of seeing. First, I start with the problem of aiming

directly at meaning and try to find its examples in the literature on the meaning of life.

By aiming directly at meaning, Marquard refers to an attitude that is, according to him, best pictured in Hegel’s story of the man who wanted fruit, and who consequently spurned ‘apples, pears, plums, cherries’, because ‘what he wanted was not apples but fruit; not pears, but fruit; not plums, but fruit; not cherries, but fruit’ (ibid: 39).7 Likewise, what the person who aims

directly at the meaning of life wants is not reading, but meaning; not writing, but meaning; not

work, but meaning; . . . not helping, but meaning; . . . not carrying out duties, but meaning’

(ibid.). This person is not aware of the fact that ‘no human being has a direct relation to meaning’ (ibid: 40). What we call ‘meaning’ is always conferred indirectly by different aspects of life. Tolstoy’s moving account of his misery during the time he was confronted with the problem of life is a good example of what Marquard calls ‘aiming directly at meaning’:

All that happened with me when I was on every side surrounded by what is considered

to be complete happiness. I had a good, loving, and beautiful wife, good children, and a

large estate . . . I was respected by my neighbours and friends, more than ever before,

was praised by strangers, and, without any self-deception, could consider my name

famous. . . . And while in such condition I arrived at the conclusion that I could not

live, and fearing death, I had to use cunning against myself, in order that I might not

7 In the English-speaking world, this mistake is known by the term Gilbert Ryle coined, viz. the ‘category mistake’.

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take my life (Tolstoy 2008: 8).

The question of life’s meaning for Tolstoy began right at the time he apparently had all the

reasons to consider himself happy. However, happiness was not enough and because he wanted

to aim directly at meaning, nothing could make his life meaningful. What Tolstoy wanted was not family but meaning, not wealth but meaning, not fame but meaning, not artistic creations but meaning, not good children but meaning. Put differently, Tolstoy was not aware of the

‘paradox of happiness’, the idea that happiness cannot be acquired directly, it can only be acquired indirectly. Henry Sidgwick writes, ‘Happiness is likely to be better attained if the extent to which we set ourselves consciously to aim at it be carefully restricted’ (Sidgwick

1907: 405). Likewise, for Marquard, when we aim directly at the meaning of life, we fail to acquire it. As Camus once wrote, ‘You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life’. Our tendency to aim directly at meaning, Marquard has it, makes the problem of the meaning of life

‘sensational’ and ‘plunges human beings into unhappiness’ (Marquard 1991: 42). Marquard suggests that the reason human beings have this tendency is ‘the human need for excitement and sensation’. Even when we deny meaning, we might do so in a sensational manner and thus we manage to satisfy our need for excitement and sensation.

Marquard’s claim might apply to some people but I doubt Tolstoy’s need for excitement led him to a ‘sensational’ approach toward the meaning of life. One might say, Tolstoy did so because he wanted to give a sense to his life as a whole and this is a human endeavor and not an exciting game (I will discuss this point in more detail in Chapter Six).

However, I think Marquard is right in seeing a link between aiming directly at meaning and taking a sensational approach toward the meaning of life. His point is that there is an

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exaggerated, an all or nothing, expectation of meaning. That is, when one aims directly at meaning one is unlikely to rest content with the everyday concrete answers that are at our disposal, like undertaking a project, raising a family, gardening, empowering the oppressed, etc. Not surprisingly, the literature is saturated with this exaggerated expectation of meaning

(Buber 1970; Hartshorne 1984; Davis 1987; Morris 1992; Fischer 1994: 257-270; Benatar

2006; Pojman 2008: 27-30; Quinn 2008: 35-40; Russell 2008: 55-61; Schopenhauer 2008: 51;

Camus 2008: 72; Craig 2013). In Wittgensteinian terms, the ‘family resemblance’ between these works is their tendency to offer an all-encompassing answer to the question of the meaning of life. Camus’ opening statement in the Myth of Sisyphus concerning suicide as the most fundamental question of philosophy is a good example of a sensational approach toward the meaning of life. As Marquard says, sometimes even the negation of the meaning of life is sensational. David Benatar’s defense of anti-natalism is another example:

Each one of us was harmed by being brought into existence. That harm is not

negligible, because the quality of even the best lives is very bad – and considerably

worse than most people recognize it to be. Although it is obviously too late to prevent

our own existence, it is not too late to prevent the existence of future possible people.

Creating new people is thus morally problematic (Benatar 2006: VII).

Plunging into unhappiness! Benatar claims the harm of coming into existence always and significantly outweighs the good of it and thus it is our moral duty to avoid harming future generations by bringing them into this world. It is beyond the scope of my topic to examine the plausibility of Benatar’s arguments but it is interesting to note that in the literature the tendency to solve the problem of life by destroying it is not such an anomaly.

Marquard’s recommendation concerning this yearning for an all-encompassing ‘super-

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meaning’ is a farewell to the sensational and the cultivation of un-sensational meaning through

indirectly aiming at it. This strategy is concerned to reduce our expectation of meaning. In order to achieve this, we have to desist from at least four varieties of nonsense:

• Prohibiting questions about the meaning of life;

• Contempt for small answers to those questions;

• Perfectionism;

• Making the affirmation of life depend on an absolute proof of meaning.

I first briefly touch on the last two nonsenses, which are two variations of the nonsense of aiming directly at meaning discussed above. By perfectionism, he means the demand that we should only accept what is perfect, perfect love, perfect art, perfect friendship, perfect understanding, etc. The consequence of such a demand, for Marquard, is usually the denial of

‘the good in what is imperfect’ (1991: 46). We should shift away from the mentality of all-or- nothing and toward the soundness of the ‘second-best possibilities’. The average and the ordinary might not look elegant but it doesn’t mean there is no good in it. We might say one could also believe in perfection while holding that one ought not to aim at it directly. For example, I might have an ideal of friendship but I don’t need to urge myself and my friends to live up to that ideal. Likewise, we should desist from the nonsense of making the affirmation of life depend on finding an absolute proof of meaning. The best example is Nietzsche’s question mentioned at the beginning of the chapter: ‘Has existence any meaning at all?’ or ‘Why is there anything at all, rather than nothing?’ According to Marquard, the answers to absolute questions are not something that we can ‘furnish’: ‘Our life is too short for that, because a limit is fixed to it by death’ (ibid: 47).

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The other tendency we have to desist from is prohibiting the question of meaning by, for

example, declaring these kinds of questions meaningless, because metaphysical answers to the questions of life’s meaning at least preserve the questions. This recommendation seems in sharp contrast with other suggestions of Marquard discussed above. For one thing, his emphasis on the indirectness of meaning clashes with metaphysical answers to the question of life’s meaning. Marquard’s point is that metaphysical answers to the questions of life’s meaning at least keep the question itself alive and ‘often questions of sense or meaning can only be kept hold of by means of metaphysical answers’ (ibid: 43). Moreover, even if we were to supply those questions with moderate and non-metaphysical answers we must ‘first of all have those questions’ (ibid: 44). Marquard’s suggestion seems puzzling especially considering

the fact that no one, or at least no ordinary person, gives a metaphysical answer to the question

of life’s meaning only for the sake of preserving the question. It seems that Marquard has underestimated the force of metaphysical answers to the question of life’s meaning. For one thing, there are many strings attached to the metaphysical answers and we can’t ask people to,

first, avoid all the sensational metaphysical answers to the question and, then, want them to

keep the question of meaning alive by sticking to their metaphysical answers. A nihilist, for

example, aiming directly at meaning and taking a sensational approach toward the meaning of

life, lives by his nihilistic answer to the question of life’s meaning and, thus, embraces

anything that, for Marquard, plunges human beings into unhappiness.

The second tendency that we have to desist from, which I think is the most important of them,

is contempt for small answers to the question of the meaning of life. By ‘small answers’,

Marquard means all the immediate tasks that we usually deal with in everyday life. Think of occupations, family, responsibilities and specific activities and routines as examples of

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immediate tasks. Marquard’s point is that our daily routines and tasks, the contextuality of our

lives, give a sense of structure, order, and purpose to a large portion of our lives. Kids need to

be picked up from school, someone has to fetch them; assignments have to be handed in,

someone has to finish them; deadlines are approaching, something must be done; trains depart

on time, we have to arrive at the station on time; the cat is missing and the sheep is lost, we

bring them back home, etc. In short, there is always something to ‘attend to’. Roughly

speaking, Marquard’s point is that you think about the meaning of life after pulling out the

rotten tooth not during it, and even after that there is another thing to attend to. Likewise, most

of us don’t think of the unavailability of meaning when we are actively engaged with ordinary,

and mundane projects. In other words, for Marquard, there are always some ‘delaying factors’

in the course of our day-to-day life to which we attend. Our act of living usually does not stand in need of meaning. As we will see in Chapter Five, this is very central in my Wittgensteinian

approach toward the meaning of life.

On account of these ‘little delaying factors’ (Marquard 1991: 44) we usually procrastinate

encountering the question of the meaning of life in a direct manner. Our habits and daily tasks

give a quite un-sensational meaning to our life. The meaning of life, Marquard has it, depends

more on immediate things than on ultimate ones. I surely cannot answer the question ‘Why is

there anything at all, rather than nothing?’, but it does not mean that I will lead a meaningless

life due to my failure in finding an answer to this question. Note that this view is in sharp

contrast with claims of most pessimists who believe these kinds of questions (which should

yield an absolute answer) are ‘the most urgent of questions’ (Camus 2008: 72). According to

Camus, it is only after facing this question that one encounters the ‘absurd’. One has to

overcome daily life to face the truth of the absurd. Camus unwittingly admits Marquard’s claim

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that people live a meaningful life as long as they have something to attend to but, unlike

Marquard, he insists that encountering the absurd is unavoidable. ‘Before encountering the absurd’, Camus writes,

The everyday man lives with aims, a concern for the future or for justification. . . He

weighs his chances, he counts on ‘someday’, his retirement or the labor of his sons. He

still thinks something in his life can be directed. In truth, he acts as if he were free, even

if all the facts make a point of contradicting that liberty. But after the absurd everything

is upset. . . . Thinking of the future, establishing aims for oneself, having preferences –

all this presupposes a belief in freedom. But [after encountering the absurd] I am well

aware that that higher liberty, that freedom to be, which alone can serve as basis for a

truth, does not exist. Death is there as the only reality (ibid: 77).

While Marquard claims that our daily little tasks can grant us a solid ground upon which we

build up the foundation of an un-sensational meaningful life, Camus denies the solidity of such

a ground. Interestingly, Camus emphasizes that encountering the absurd is not the end of the

matter and that ‘knowing whether or not one can live without appeal is all that interests’ (ibid:

78) him. Certainly, Marquard’s answer to his question is positive: We do not despair as long as we have something to which we attend. On the other hand, these daily tasks, for Camus, become a stone that human beings ceaselessly roll to the top of the mountain, as in the myth of

Sisyphus, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. Punished by gods, Sisyphus had

to live an eternal, absurd life. However, for Camus, Sisyphus is a hero. Even in the face of the absurd one can be a hero. Every one of us faces a stone that has to be rolled to the top of life’s

mountain, one that unavoidably will fall back again and again. However, the absurd man accepts his destiny and ‘says yes and his effort will henceforth be unceasing’. This is what

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makes him a hero: Having the will to live without appeal even in the face of the absurd. The very struggle toward the height of our life’s mountain ‘is enough to fill a man’s heart’ (ibid:

81).

Thus, the un-sensational reception of life’s daily tasks and being content with them in

Marquard’s account turn into the heroic affirmation of life in spite of its absurdities in Camus’s

account. One might ask, what is the difference between Camus’ sensational approach and

Marquard’s un-sensational approach if both result in the affirmation of daily life? If I am

supposed to rest content with everyday life’s tasks and activities, why shouldn’t I be quite

sensational about it? A Marquardian response might be that a sensational affirmation of life

like that of Camus is a ‘perfectionist’ approach, one that fails to see the ordinariness of life. In

other words, one doesn’t need to be a hero in the face of the absurd to live a worthwhile life.

Someone who is only satisfied with a heroic approach toward life runs the risk of neglecting the existent reality, the fact that most of us lead ordinary lives. Only ‘masochists of meaning’

(Marquard 1991: 46) or people with grandiose self-perceptions can call themselves heroes in the face of the absurd.

In the next section, I argue that the pervasive tendency among the scholars in the literature to idealize or aggrandize the meaning of life stems from a similar type of heroism and is blinded by a ‘one-sided diet’ (Wittgenstein 1958: § 593), i.e., one-sided examples. In other words, most philosophers who hanker after a theory of ‘great meaning’ neglect the ordinary sources of meaning, because, in their view, the ordinary sources of meaning lack the sensational heroic zest to satisfy our longing for a significantly meaningful life.

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Great Meaning versus the Ordinary Meaning

Before discussing the great/ordinary dichotomy, I need to clarify something here. My

objections to the dichotomy do not imply that I suggest there is no great meaning in life. The

point is that any attempt to theorize it is bound to provide a selective and biased account of

great meaning because any such attempt has to brush aside the particularity of human life for

the sake of achieving a general account of great meaning.

In Philosophical Investigations we read, ‘[a] main cause of philosophical disease – a one-sided

diet: one nourishes one’s thinking with only one kind of example’ (ibid.). A good example of this one-sidedness can be seen in the criteria based on which some commentators in the literature separate ‘great meaning’ from the ordinary meaning. A curious example: Richard

Taylor who is famous for his strongly subjective theory of meaning, in a U-turn-like statement

claims,

A meaningful life is a creative one, and what falls short of this lacks meaning, to

whatever extent. What redeems humanity is not its kings, military generals and builders

of personal wealth, however much these may be celebrated and envied. It is instead the

painters, composers, poets, philosophers, writers – all who by their creative power

alone, bring about things of great value, things which, but for them, would never have

existed at all (Taylor 1999:14; emphasis added).

Note the pseudo-religious tone of Taylor when he talks about the redemption of humanity by

original artists and creative thinkers. As I shortly explain, Taylor’s theory is a good example of

what I call ‘exclusivism’ in the literature since Taylor denies the possibility of meaning for the

majority of people. In fact, on another occasion, Taylor claims that our capacity for creative

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activity is hardly exercised. Our capacity for creativity is only a possibility and this possibility only realized ‘here and there, more or less, and fully realized in exceptional persons’ (Taylor

2013: 303). I want to challenge this elitist tendency among some scholars in the literature by posing some questions on their exclusionary accounts of life’s meaning.

One might ask, for example, on what basis are we justified to divide meaning into the great and the ordinary? It seems that the answer is obvious. We all can tell the difference between a shopkeeper, who gives a discount to the poor, and Mother Teresa. It seems perfectly fine to say

Mother Teresa’s life had distinctively greater meaning than the shopkeeper’s. Likewise, it is difficult to even think of comparing someone like Tolstoy with a columnist in a cheap magazine. It seems that the difference between a great meaning and an ordinary meaning is clear: Great meaning is synonymous with great value, something that is significantly worthy of admiration; it is more about the significance of one’s life. Put differently, I might take pride in writing a fantastic review for a film magazine, but I should always bear in mind that the credit goes to the filmmaker. The distinction seems evident. However, I argue that the dichotomy between the great meaning and the ordinary meaning in exclusionary accounts of life’s

meaning is mostly based on ‘one-sided’ examples and thus fails to provide a ‘perspicuous

representation’ (Wittgenstein 1958: § 122) of the state of affairs.

I discuss an example to show what I mean by one-sidedness. The standard examples of lives

with ‘great meaning’ include people like Mother Teresa, Picasso, Dostoyevsky, Mandela,

Darwin, Freud, etc. – all of these figures have had outstanding achievements in specific fields

in their lives. For example, Mandela is praised because of his lifetime struggle to promote

justice and not because he was a professional heavy weight boxer when he was young; or not

because of the romantic affairs in his life. Mandela is seen as the man who freed a nation from

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oppression, an exceptional moral achievement the significance of which cannot be

underestimated by any reasonable human being. However, mightn’t we say that Mandela was

the representative and symbol of the movement of so many people who stood up for a cause? I

am referring to people like those pupils in Soweto on 16th June 1976 when they revolted

against the Apartheid education system, Sam Nzima (the photographer who took the iconic

photo of 13-year-old Hector Pieterson being carried away after he was shot by the police)8,

Peter Hain, Eddie Daniels, Miriam Makeba, all the 69 nameless ordinary people who died

during the Sharpeville massacre on the 21st March 1960.9 Add to this list Es’kia Mphahlele10,

Robert Sobukwe, Walter Sisulu, Ahmed Kathrada, Oliver Tambo and countless other people who one way or another had a role in the anti-Apartheid movement.

Now, when we say Mandela’s life has a great meaning and significance we mean he fought for the right cause, which was the promotion of justice. The ideal of the promotion of justice conferred great meaning on his life. And certainly we can say the same of people like Walter

Sisulu and Oliver Tambo. But what about anonymous people, like all the young students on

16th June 1976 in Soweto? What will justify granting less than a great meaning to these people?

Of course, most of those students were ordinary people and exclusivists in the literature might

8 On this day children protesting with banners were attacked by police firing teargas. The children replied by throwing stones and the police replied with shots. 9 During the Sharpeville massacre on 21 March 1960, police opened fire on people protesting (outside a police station in Sharpeville in the Vaal Triangle) against the pass laws, resulting in 69 people being killed and 180 wounded. Baragwanath hospital had been reduced to a war zone. Baragwanath housed 143 survivors - men, women and children - under police guard. Surgeons are shocked by the wounds - normally only seen in battle - multiple gunshot wounds, bones powdered by heavy caliber bullets. Many wounds were inflicted from the victims' backs. Of the 143 admitted, there were 110 men, 29 women and 4 children. Three of those admitted to the hospital died. The bodies of those who died were brought by truck to a mass funeral. 10 In 1959, Es’kia Mphahlele published his memoir, Down Second Avenue, illustrating the injustices of apartheid. The memoir covers his early childhood and manhood.

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suggest that those folks were some ordinary people who did an extra-ordinary job one day and

that their lives as a whole cannot be deemed as great. However, the question is what does

neatly define the boundary between a great and an ordinary meaning and who decides what it

is. Where does an ordinary meaning end and a great one begin? Should I necessarily achieve

something significant to gain a great meaning? Can greatness be an achievement at all? (An actor in a soap opera might think that he has achieved something; a best-seller, a politician, a student, a farmer, a manager, a commander, and an organization achieve something. They all can say ‘I have achieved this or that!’ but under what circumstances could I say ‘I achieved greatness’?) These questions, as I discuss shortly, are meaningless if we don’t consider the context from which they are raised. The answers to those questions lie in particularity. In the rest of this section, I argue against the great/ordinary dichotomy and suggest that exclusivists overlook the loose boundaries between the two.

Firstly, loose boundaries between the great and the ordinary can be seen in the fact that there are many areas where it is hard to tell or where there isn’t even a correct way of drawing a line between the great and the ordinary meaning. For example, a teacher in a rural area of a poor country might find her job extremely tiring or might think there is nothing extraordinary about her job and yet implicitly be aware of the fact that education is the keystone of her students’ well-being. In other words, sometimes she considers the downside of her job (limited facilities, isolation, and low payment). Nevertheless, she also feels the urge that she has a duty toward those kids. The teacher might not feel like Mother Teresa but does it mean that her life is not morally outstanding? That is, she is a devoted teacher and she tries hard. She is not on the

cover of magazines and thus the world does not know about her, but what does greatness have to do with the world, with fame? Mightn’t we say, the greatest good, if there is any, are these

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little sacrifices of ordinary people for the common good? And it seems that there are such

plumbers, nurses, electricians, photographers, journalists, housewives, farmers, parents, etc.

who face similar situations like that of the teacher. In 2009, in a cold winter’s day in

Johannesburg there was a power cut in our complex. The whole day we waited for the

electrician to come and fix the problem but no one pitched. In the evening I decided to call a

friend, who used to be an electrician, but by then he had lost his job and most of the time was

busy drinking with his friends. He came and checked the cables and main switches. One of the

main cables had burnt, as he said, and we had to wait until he could buy the materials after the

weekend. Later that night I heard some noises and when I went out I saw him working in the

dark. ‘Why did you come back?’, I asked. ‘I can’t see people staying in the dark’, he replied.

Now, by all the exclusivist standards, he is an ordinary man and nothing outstanding will

probably come out of his life, but my question is whether this is a clear picture of his whole

life. This picture fails to see his generosity in spite of his poverty, his extended hand when it

was not expected, and his resilience against an environment that would shrink his dignity bit by

bit. That is, upon a ‘perspicuous’ examination of his life some aspects might dawn on us that

are missing in an exclusivist approach. These aspects make us see the connection between his

life and his words: The man who lives in a 2×2m2 room next to the toilet of a congested

building cannot stand seeing people staying in the dark.11 Wittgenstein writes,

The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their

simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something – because it is always

11 It might be suggested that his life is meaningful in virtue of such attitudes and actions, but it would be more meaningful and would have greater meaning if they had impacted more deeply or beyond the immediate reaches of the situation. However, I think the very idea of comparing his life with a life in which his actions and attitudes have more impacts is problematic, since it does not take into account the surrounding circumstances of his life.

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before one’s eyes.) The real foundations of his enquiry do not strike a man at all. Unless

that fact has at some time struck him. – And this means: we fail to be struck by what,

once seen, is most striking and most powerful (1958: § 129).

One fails to see, that is, the most important aspects of things because they are deemed ordinary

and insignificant. It seems that we have to transcend the ordinary to capture the essence of

things. However, Wittgenstein has it, what we need is attention to details and the ordinary. We

have to find ‘humble’ uses of words and concepts, i.e., their ‘everyday use’.

We are under the illusion that what is peculiar, profound, essential, in our investigation,

resides in its trying to grasp the incomparable essence of language. That is, the order

existing between the concepts of proposition, word, proof, truth, experience, and so on.

This order is a super-order between – so to speak – super-concepts. Whereas, of course,

if the words ‘language’, ‘experience’, ‘world’, have a use, it must be as humble a one as

that of the words ‘table’, ‘lamp’, ‘door’ (ibid: § 97).

Likewise, exclusivists are of the opinion that providing a theory of ‘great meaning’ sheds light

on what is profound and highly significant in our lives. One might think there is nothing more

sublime than finding the answer to the question: What can make our lives highly significant?

So we search for the great because it seems that the distinction line between the great and the

ordinary is clear; and here is exactly where we go astray because we then fail to see some of

the ‘most important’ aspects of things. According to some Wittgensteinian commentators, the

reason Wittgenstein invites us to shift our attention from what is ‘peculiar’ and ‘profound’ to

the ordinary is to show us the wonder of the ordinary. For instance, Philip R. Shields suggests,

When . . . Wittgenstein shows us the strangeness of the familiar, he is trying to shift our

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perspective from the mundane to the religious and to recapture the special sense of

wonder and awe which he felt was extinguished by the prevailing scientific

Weltanschauung (Shields 1993: 111).

Likewise, James C. Edwards claims that Wittgenstein’s later philosophy is at its core a return

to ‘an important moment of the Western religious vision, namely, that moment which exalts the

essential sacredness and mystery of all things’ (Edwards 1982: 240). It is beyond the scope of

my analysis to explore and decide whether Shields’ and Edwards’ interpretations of

Wittgenstein are reliable or not.12 However, I would like to add that the latter’s reading goes too far when he mystifies Wittgenstein by connecting his philosophy to ‘an important moment of Western religious vision’ or religious perspective. Anyway, the fact remains that attention to the particular and the ordinary is of significance in Wittgenstein’s approach to philosophy.

Furthermore, exclusivist accounts of great meaning in life are based on some assumptions that can be very misleading. One misleading assumption is that great meaning is necessarily something extraordinary. Metz’s selection of examples of the great meaning is highly illuminating. His examples include ‘rescuing thousands of Jewish children from the Warsaw

Ghetto, explaining the fate of the universe, and writing the Great American Novel’ (Metz 2011:

390). Of course, no one would deny the moral, intellectual, and aesthetic significance of these works, respectively; and thus it is easy to call them examples of great meaning. Examples are

important since they clarify concepts. What is common in Metz’s examples? They are, I think,

all about making a difference in the world, doing something the effects of which transcend

12 In his book, Wittgenstein’s Religious Point of View (2006) Tim Labron provides a critical analysis of Shields’ arguments in his book, Logic and Sin in the Writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1993). According to Labron, Shields’ reading is highly dependent on the Tractarian philosophy and leaves almost all Wittgenstein’s later philosophy aside.

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one’s self-interest.13 These tasks are highly demanding and need determination. But mightn’t

we say that a teacher in a deserted area and a person who does everything to save his family

from falling apart are exactly doing the same self-transcending demanding jobs that in the long

term do make a difference in the world? An ordinary man realizes that his now uncontrollable

addiction is bound to destroy his family, and thus makes the most difficult decision to change

his life, to rise from ashes.14 He might not have an extraordinary story but one might say he shares the same moral principle with the savior of children from the Warsaw Ghetto. After all,

one cannot rule out the possibility that both of them might have done so in virtue of an

‘unshakeable belief’ (Wittgenstein 1967: 54) that ‘Whoever saves one life, saves the world entire’.15

The second objection to the great/ordinary dichotomy among exclusivists has to do with our

moral sense. To put it in Marquardian terms, one cannot help noticing a sense of ‘contempt’ for

ordinary answers to the meaning of life. The ordinary has come to be regarded as dull, unoriginal, mundane, and tedious. So as soon as these connotations are attached to it, one hardly would be willing to call oneself ordinary, no matter how much one might deserve it.

13 We might also say that it is Metz’s selection of examples that is misleading and that he would agree that self- transcending activities could be applied over a much wider spectrum. 14 This also might be considered as a good example of aspect-dawning discussed in the previous chapter. 15 It refers to a verse of Talmud: ‘Whoever destroys a soul, it is considered as if he destroyed an entire world. And whoever saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world’. See, Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:5; Babylonian Talmud Tractate Sanhedrin 37a. Interestingly the same verse with similar wording can be found in the Qur’an. The difference is that the Qur’an refers to ‘mankind’ instead of ‘the world entire’: For this reason did we prescribe unto the children of Israel that he who slayeth anyone (man), without (that being for) murder, or for mischief on earth, (it shall be) as though he hath slain mankind as a whole; and he who saveth it (a human life), shall be as though he hath saved mankind as a whole (The Qur’an, V: 32).

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Wittgenstein alludes to the moral implications of this segregation when he asks,

Are all men great? No. – Well then, how can you have any hope of being a great man!

Why should something be bestowed on you that’s not bestowed on your neighbour? To

what purpose?! If it isn’t your wish to be rich that makes you think yourself rich, it must

be something you observe or experience that reveals it to you! And what do you

experience (other than vanity)! Simply that you have a certain talent. And my conceit

of being an extraordinary person has been with me much longer than my awareness of

my particular talent (1980: 47).

Once the dichotomy is established, an exclusivist might tempt to show the ways of achieving

the great meaning. If theoretically we could establish what the great meaning is, then, why

shouldn’t we show the practical ways of achieving it? Neil Levy’s account of ‘superlative

meaning’ in life through what he calls ‘open-ended activities’ is indeed an attempt to show the

ways of achieving great meaning. I think Levy’s account shows, in an important sense, the

unhappy consequences of, first, believing in the great/ordinary dichotomy and, second,

providing a theory of ways of achieving great meaning. In the next section, I exclusively

examine this exclusivist theory.

Levy on ‘Downshifting and Meaning in Life’

Levy’s paper on ‘Downshifting and Meaning in Life’ is an exemplary case of exclusivism in

the literature. He starts off by suggesting that in the Western world people are wealthy and

‘getting wealthier’ and this has led to a ‘rise’ in their ‘happiness’. However, Levy claims,

people do not feel the presence of ‘values’ in their lives as much as they feel the presence of

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‘happiness’ (this is called a paradox). As a result, so many people are reorienting their lives,

‘away from the pursuit of wealth and toward the pursuit of meaning’ (Levy 2005:176) and

hence the emergence of the downshifting movement. According to Levy, downshifters

probably will be successful in finding meaning in their lives, but ‘to the extent they seek

superlative meaning, the highest, most satisfying . . . they are looking in the wrong place’.

They have to search for ‘supremely valuable’ (ibid: 186) open-ended activities such as artistic activity, promotion of justice, or pursuit of truth, that is, activities that are related to the great sources of meaning, namely, ‘the good, the true, and the beautiful’. The pursuit of close-ended activities, Levy suggests, is ‘circular’ and necessarily leads to the problem of boredom. The best example of close-ended, circular activities is given by David Wiggins when he talks about a farmer ‘who grows more corn to feed more hogs to buy more land to grow more corn’.16 On

the other hand, one cannot imagine an end for open-ended activities because as our activities evolve so do the ends at which we aim. Think of, for example, ‘the pursuit of truth’. The idea of a ‘finished and entirely true system of knowledge is literally inconceivable beforehand’

(ibid: 185). The open-endedness criterion guarantees that we will not have to face the problem of ‘boredom’ in our activities. If Sisyphus were supposed to acquire a purpose in his life by

being told that he could build a castle with all the stones he had to roll up, his life would have

turned completely meaningful. However, according to Levy, as soon as Sisyphus finishes his

castle-building his life would become meaningless again, because he wouldn’t have anything

else to do.

Open-ended activities have some common characteristics: They are ‘hard’ (ibid: 187) and they

need intellectual and physical effort. And often they require ‘great courage’. The message that

16 See, Wiggins 1998: 100.

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Levy wants to convey to the ordinary downshifters is clear:

Downshifters are only half right. Meaning in life can be pursued in just the way they

have suggested. By cutting work hours, and thereby leaving more time for family, for

friends, for the simple joys of a life which is less stressed and more in touch with

beauty and the natural environment, we really can make our lives more fulfilling. But

we cannot achieve superlative meaning in this way. Such meaning, the meaning which

can be looked full in the face by the most reflective without fear or flinching, is only to

be found in work (ibid: 187).

Levy emphasizes that his definition of ‘work’ does not necessarily refer to paid work (though, he does not forget to include himself among those few ‘privileged’ philosophers and artists who get paid to be engaged in the pursuit of superlative meaning (ibid.). The pursuit of open- ended activities that confer great meaning on our lives requires sustained ‘effort, concentration, attention, striving and perhaps . . . failing’ (ibid.).

Several objections can be raised against Levy’s account of ‘superlative’ meaning. The first objection has to do with the inegalitarian nature of Levy’s account. It is inegalitarian because it acknowledges that only an elite can have the most meaningful lives. According to Cottingham, any inegalitarian account of life’s meaning is ‘bleakly restrictive’. The assessment that only a small percentage of human beings can achieve a superlatively meaningful life,

seems both psychologically indigestible and ethically repugnant. It is ethically

repugnant because it goes against the long compassionate and egalitarian tradition,

rooted in the best of Christian and Islamic thought, that every human creature is eligible

for salvation: that the unique dignity and worth of each human being confers infinite

value on every one of us. . . . And [it] is indigestible, except perhaps for the most robust

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of Übermenschen, since it expects us, quite unrealistically, to have the confidence to

embark on an arduous and demanding voyage with no special reason to hope for a fair

wind, no assurance that we have anything beyond our own meager resources to aid us

in the struggle (Cottingham 2003: 69-70).

That is to say, any theory of meaning, Cottingham has it, must take into account the

vulnerability of the human condition. In this view, ‘superhuman heroism’ of the kind Levy offers, denies any possibility of significant meaning to ‘countless’ numbers of human beings, whereas egalitarian religious traditions confer absolute meaning on all human beings. In fact,

Levy goes so far as to claim that the fact that ‘meaning-conferring’ activities are difficult is ‘a positive advantage’ (Levy 2005: 187) of his account.

I would like to raise a concern with regard to Cottingham’s objection to inegalitarianism. It seems that the egalitarian conceptions of the meaning of life are not necessarily ‘rooted’ in religious traditions, and it is completely possible to believe in a naturalist and yet egalitarian account of meaning of life.17 Besides this, I found it very interesting that most theories of great

meaning come from friends of naturalism.18 It seems that, at least as far as the great meaning is

concerned, supernaturalists are more lenient. It makes sense because, after all, the existence of

God confers a universal (if not an individual) purpose and meaning on life. In fact, one might say, the meaning that supernaturalists refer to has, according to them, an absolute value. It

would be odd to think of a supernaturalist who says that God almighty confers ordinary

meaning on human life. The meaning that supernaturalists refer to is the ‘absolute meaning’. In

17 At least most subjectivists in the literature have an egalitarian conception of life’s meaning. See, for example, Taylor (1970), Kekes (2000). 18 For an overview of naturalist theories of great meaning in life, see Metz (2011).

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other words, according to most supernaturalists, the existence of God is a necessary condition

of an absolutely, or in Hepburn’s words, ‘comprehensively’ meaningful life (Hepburn 1966).

Surprisingly, the great meanings that naturalists defend and present, sometimes even with a

quasi-religious tone, often have the character of absolute value, almost the same as that of

supernaturalists, but in a secular disguise.19

The second objection has to do with the simple fact that in the presence of both ordinary and

superlative meaning, one might reasonably value the former more than the latter. For example,

consider a person who is leading a very promising scientific project and she is highly satisfied

with her project. According to Levy’s criteria, she is engaged in an open-ended activity, which

requires sustained concentration and striving and there is also a possibility that the whole

project might fail. Now, Levy would have a problem if the scientist decides to reduce her

working hours so that she can spend more time with her children. Alternatively, she might even

consider her life most meaningful when she is with her family. Levy’s response, I think, would

be that the scientist rests content with the ‘ordinary meaning’ (Levy 2005: 188) and that she

fails to see the significance of engaging in an open-ended activity, which confers great

meaning on her life. In other words, the great meaning can only be found in valuable ‘projects’

and not in private needs or interest. It seems that you have to be in Levy’s camp if you want to

have a superlative meaning.20

19 See, for example, Nietzsche (1968); Russell (2008). Russell writes, ‘How in such an alien and inhuman world, can so powerless a creature as man preserve his aspirations untarnished? A strange mystery it is that nature, omnipotent but blind, in the revolution of her secular hurryings through the abysses of space, has brought forth at last a child, subject still to her power, but gifted with sight, with knowledge of good and evil’ (2008: 56). 20 Metz also raises another objection. According to Metz, the most important part of Levy’s theory begs the question. That is, if we ask why is it that the pursuit of open-ended activities confers great meaning on life, the

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And finally, I think in Levy’s account engaging with a large portion of open-ended activities,

except the pursuit of justice, has been considered as a function of ‘wealth’ (Levy 2005: 176). In

other words, one’s wealth, largely, determines whether one can pursue open-ended activities.

As Levy claims,

It seems to be the case that an enormous proportion of the world’s population is cut off

from the projects which might secure superlative meaning, including almost everyone

in the third world. . . . In a more just world in which resources, material and intellectual,

were more fairly distributed, far more people could participate in [open-ended] projects

(ibid: 189; emphasis added).

In Levy’s view, we all can participate in the pursuit of justice, regardless of our social contexts,

if some basic conditions were obtained. However, I think there are more open-ended activities

that are not context-dependent. For one thing, consider aesthetic activities that deal with a great

source of meaning, i.e., ‘the beautiful’. Levy might have a specific definition for aesthetic

activities in which case he should have stipulated it. Therefore, I assume Levy considers an

aesthetic activity an open-ended effortful activity, which requires sustained concentration and

striving, the result of which is the creation of an artwork. That is to say, appreciative aesthetic

activity is not considered as an aesthetic project (that can be said to belong to ordinary people).

Now, either Levy is not aware of aesthetic projects done in what he calls, rather pityingly, ‘the

third world’, or he does not consider their works as projects of worth. As I am writing these

words I am listening to a piece composed by Mulatu Astatke who happens to be an Ethiopian

answer, in Levy’s account, would be that these activities make progress toward ‘supremely valuable’ goals (Metz 2011: 398).

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jazz artist, and I cannot help but finding Levy’s claim, at best, biased.21 Moreover, it is also a

fact that sometimes in totalitarian regimes artistic activities turn into a very powerful tool for self-expression, the effects of which cross the boundaries between wealthy and poor societies in Levy’s account. Polish cinema during the 1980s and 1990s and Iranian New Wave cinema

are two counterexamples for Levy’s account. When Wittgenstein asks, ‘Why should something

be bestowed on you that’s not bestowed on your neighbour?’ (1980:47), Levy’s response

would probably not be far from saying, ‘Because luckily I am a white male from the First

World’.

In addition, one of the reasons we usually value the lives of many great achievers is their

composure in the face of grave situations like poverty, injustice, and deprivation and yet being

able to engage with highly significant open-ended projects. This fact undermines Levy’s claim

that a large portion of the world is ‘cut-off’ from projects that might secure superlative

meaning.

Besides the above objections, I think Levy’s emphasis on the ‘pursuit of justice’ as one of the

‘most meaningful projects’ is very interesting. However, my concern is that viewing the pursuit

of justice as a project might limit it to socio-political dimensions. I can view the struggle

against racism as a project, but it is difficult to think of justice (as a project) with regard to the

people in our immediate environments like our loved ones and our friends. In everyday life we

do not view friendship and family relations as projects. In other words, the way we interact

with people in our immediate environments cannot be viewed as a work in Levy’s terms,

though they might be viewed as open-ended activities.

21 Add to this list, Hossein Alizadeh, Abbas Kiarostami, Nusrat Fateh Alikhan, Ustad Ali Akbar Khan, Miriam Makeba, and Shirkoo Bikas – all of them coming from the third world.

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Before attending, in the next section, to the problems that particularity of life pose to the theories of great meaning, let me briefly return to Wittgenstein’s view on the triviality of systematizing ethics and, then, link it to the exclusivists’ tendency to theorize the great meaning. From a Wittgensteinian perspective, I submit, if we could explain the great meaning by means of a theory then what is great ‘would be of no value whatsoever’ (Wittgenstein

1979b: 117). In other words, our tendency to theorize great meaning is the same as our tendency to theorize ethics. As O. K. Bouwsma says, Wittgenstein’s criticism of ethics was not so much that it, or its content, was wrong, but that it was ‘trivial’:

Ethics [is] telling someone what he should do. But how can anyone counsel another?

Imagine someone advising another who was in love and about to marry, and pointing

out to him all the things he cannot do if he marries. [. . .] How can one know how these

things are in another man’s life? (Wittgenstein as quoted in Bouwsma 1986: 45)

I would like to suggest the same thing applies to the theories of great meaning in life; exclusivism runs the risk of neglecting the particularity of a person’s life, which is usually the key factor in defining her greatness. Imagine a scientist who has to choose between rejecting a very prestigious job offer in another country to stay with his family and leaving them to actualize his intellectual capabilities. Now, if we are not utilitarian, which route could we possibly offer to this person? Which route does confer the greatest meaning on this person’s life? Rush Rhees alludes to the same complexity with regard to moral dilemmas and the inadequacy of any theory to justify one’s decision. What makes a moral decision difficult,

Rhees writes,

Is not that I am bewildered by the rules or uncertain which rule applies here. It is that

what I have to do goes against what I feel to be deeply important; I shall be doing what

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I feel I would give my life to avoid doing – harming those I least want to harm. The

problem is difficult because whichever course I take I shall be doing something for

which I can never forgive myself (Rhees 1970: 88).

In the face of moral predicaments like this, Schlick’s play theory or Levy’s work theory show their limits. In fact, any ethical theory, which claims that it has an answer to the scientist’s

problem will probably be blind to the particularity of her life. Likewise, theories of great

meaning, I think, are specifically most vulnerable when it comes to the particularity of our

lives.

So far I discussed some exclusionary accounts of meaning in life and try to show what might be at stake when one aims at drawing a sharp line between the great and the ordinary and tries to theorize ways of achieving great meaning. In the next section, I discuss in more depth the problems that the particularity of life might pose to the theories of great meaning in life, in

general, and Metz’s ‘unified account of great meaning in life’, in particular.

Particularity and Theories of Great Meaning

Metz’s stimulating theory of great meaning in life attempts to provide a unified account of the

common element between the three sources of great meaning. That common element, Metz has

it, is self-transcendence:

The good, the true, and the beautiful confer great meaning on our lives insofar as we

transcend our animal nature by substantially using our rational nature positively with

regard to facets of human life that are largely responsible for many of its other facets

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(Metz 2011: 402).

Based on this definition, a moral achievement, for example, confers great meaning on life to the extent that it involves substantially honouring ‘autonomy’, which is largely responsible for much about the course of people’s lives. Supposing that the scientist mentioned above decides to stay with his family and we consider it as a moral achievement, the question is how does her decision possibly honour her family’s autonomy? If anything, it seems that by deciding to stay with her family she will in fact sacrifice her own independence, if not her autonomy.

Another relevant example is the life of Paul Gauguin, discussed by Bernard Williams (1976).

According to Williams, Gauguin was right to abandon his family since the result of his

decision was the creation of some masterpieces and no one today could wish that he had chosen otherwise (ibid: 23-27). Let us leave aside the traditional moralist’s objection that

Williams’ suggestion is a paradigm case of an immoral point of view, because as a matter of fact what Williams insinuates is that the end justifies the means.22 I think it suffices to raise the

22 For a critical discussion of Gauguin’s decision see also Cottingham 2003: 24-28. According to Cottingham, it is very difficult to deny that the achievements of great artists or intellectuals are naturally seen as meaningful. However, if there is no a moral ‘overarching structure or theory that confers meaning on life, no normative pattern to which the meaningful life must conform, then a meaningful life reduces to little more than an engaged life in which the agent is systematically committed to certain projects he makes his own, irrespective of their moral status’ (2003: 26). In fact, Cottingham’s criticism applies to all the subjectivist theories of meaning of life as well. In Cottingham’s view, a meaningful life is necessarily a moral life whereas subjectivists do not have difficulty, to use Cottingham’s words, ‘biting the bullet’ of considering immoral lives meaningful. John Kekes’ theory is a notorious example in this regards: That immoral lives may be meaningful is shown by the countless dedicated Nazi and Communist mass murderers . . . and by people whose rage, resentment, greed, ambition, selfishness and sense of superiority or inferiority give meaning to their lives and lead them to inflict grievous unjustified harm on others. Such people may be successfully engaged in their projects, derive great satisfaction from them, and find their lives . . . very meaningful (Kekes 2000: 97).

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question of how far is Williams willing to go in defense of Gauguin’s great art. Paul Johnston raises the same concerns by suggesting that based on Williams’ view, if Gauguin needed to kill somebody to provide the money for his trip to Tahiti, then probably this too would have been justified considering what he achieved when he got there (Johnston 2003: 18). Art has been exalted so immeasurably that nothing seems to be able to offer resistance against the charm of viewing great art as a source of great meaning in life. In Johnston’s words, ‘art’ has become the

‘last refuge of absolute value. Somewhat strangely, belief in art seems to survive belief in right and wrong, as if it were easier to accept that there can be no objective judgments about human actions than that there are no objective distinctions in art’ (ibid.).

I doubt Metz agrees with Williams’ view about Gauguin’s decision, but then one wonders what would be his solution to Gauguin’s predicament? His theory does not address these kinds of dilemmas and he is solely concentrated on the conditions in virtue of which something can confer great meaning on life. To be fair, a theory like that of Metz is not meant to have a solution for all the particular human predicaments. Granted that, my question is how does

Metz’s theory at least help us to understand those human predicaments mentioned above (the scientist and Gauguin)? Or, how could Levy’s account be possibly of help in these two situations?

With regard to the beautiful as another source of great meaning, Metz suggests that aesthetic creation can confer great meaning to the extent that it involves creating an object that reveals some facets of human experience that are largely responsible for ‘other facets of human experience’. Gauguin, of course, managed to create some great works of art that reveal some fundamental facets of human life, and, thus, it would be safe to say that Gauguin led a life of great meaning. However, what if Gauguin himself considered the way he treated his family as

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a moral failure, a source of shame. What if upon reading, ‘What is a man profited, if he shall

gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?’ (Matthew 16:26), he concluded that he has lost

his soul?

On the other hand, a Wittgensteinian approach would suggest to take into consideration the

surrounding circumstances in which Gauguin decided to leave his family, instead of appealing

to any given theory to judge if Gauguin did the right thing. What is missing here, one might say, is particularism. How can we judge whether Gauguin did the right thing without knowing,

among other things:

• Whether his wife really loved him;

• Whether he provided his family with subsistence;

• Whether there was a sense of family between them at all;

• Whether or not Gauguin thought of his departure as a relief for the family;

• Whether or not there was a possibility to take the family with to Tahiti;

• Whether or not he asked someone to look after his family while he was away;

• Whether or not his wife was strong enough to go on with her life;

• Whether or not the children suffered any significant trauma due to the absence of their

father;

That is to say, the depth of a moral or immoral act can only be comprehended through close

attention to the surrounding circumstances of it. The same thing applies to understanding

oneself. As Wittgenstein says,

Understanding oneself properly is difficult, because an action to which one might be

prompted by good, generous motives is something one may also be doing out of

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cowardice or indifference. Certainly, one may be acting in such and such a way out of

genuine love, but equally well out of deceitfulness, or a cold heart. Just as not all

gentleness is a form of goodness (1980: 48).

In the light of what Wittgenstein says here another objection to Metz’s theory can be raised. It seems that Metz’s theory mainly concentrates on the final products of, so to speak, the great

meaning’s factory and not the intentions behind them. For example, consider a photographer

with an exceptional talent in capturing the ordinarily tragic life of people in West Africa. Now, based on Metz’s theory, his aesthetic creations can confer great meaning on his life insofar as

those pictures reveal some fundamental facets of human condition, which, I assume, is the case

in my example. Therefore, the ‘great meaning’ is conferred. However, I think the meaning is

conferred too hastily and easily, because, I believe things might change when we consider the

moral ‘motives’ of the artist. If we find out that the photographer is a psychopath who

unconsciously enjoys watching people suffering while he is shooting, I am not sure if everyone

would be willing to consider him a great artist who leads a life of great meaning. That is to say,

the great meaning is conferred on the photos, not on the photographer.

On the other hand, we would react differently when we find out the same photographer has

been contemplating to quit photography for good, because at a point in his life he has encountered a moral dilemma the expression of which was the question that ‘What if I am feeding from people’s suffering?’23 This specific piece of information certainly changes even

the way we look at the photos; it makes us see an aspect, which has the character of ‘depth’,

23 The fact that we are referring to the same artworks but two vastly different human beings, seems a bit uncanny. And I think mentioning the fact that every artwork separates from its creator and finds its own independent identity is important but irrelevant to the discussion.

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i.e., the fact that the moral weight of dealing with human suffering could be tremendous. It helps us to see the whole situation from a totally different perspective. Considering these two examples, I believe most of us would tend to give great meaning to the second character. We do so because, I think, we have access to something that is missing in Metz’s account: We have access to some crucial aspects of his life, i.e., his attitudes. Greatness of a person lies within her attitude. On the other hand, in Metz’s account attitude is not enough. For Metz attitude is part of our rational nature, our intelligence, and so is integral to our appraisal of the artist.

However, my point is that close attention to these details might lead to new assessments.

Metz’s main concern is finding the ‘common element’ between the three sources of great meaning, not the background against which the great meaning is obtained. Put differently, his theory is more concerned with what we do and less with the accompanying attitude. His question is:

Supposing, within at least the Western tradition, that moral achievement, intellectual

reflection, and aesthetic creation can constitute extremely admirable and non-hedonistic

choice-worthy ends, does this triad have a single property in virtue of which they do?

(Metz 2011: 390).

On the other hand, the explicit distinction that has been made between the good, the true, and the beautiful, overlooks the fact that in the ‘stream of life’ they simply ‘overlap or criss- cross’24 each other. For example, consider works of the photographer James Nachway. One might rightly see in his moving pictures not only an aesthetic dimension, but discover a pressing call to reevaluate our moral status. One might see an aesthetic creation as a moral act,

24 cf. Wittgenstein 1958: § 66.

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as Nachway himself indeed does.25 So, if we do not limit intellectual reflection to natural

sciences, which I think is not the case in Metz’s account either,26 then, arguably, Nachway’s

works can be seen as some contemplations on the human condition. That is to say, Nachway’s

pictures are ‘moral achievement, intellectual reflection, and aesthetic creation’, all at the same

time.

I am not suggesting that Metz rules out the possibility that a phenomenon can relate to two or

more sources of great meaning, but at least he hasn’t addressed it. My point is that there is not

a clear-cut distinction between these sources of great meaning as Metz suggests.

One might rightly argue in favor of Metz’s account that even an ethical reflection is an

intellectual reflection with regard to some fundamental aspects of human life. That granted, my

question is why should we limit moral achievements the way Metz does? According to Metz,

ethical accomplishments are positively oriented toward people’s ‘agency’. In other words, the

more our moral act empowers people’s autonomy the more meaning it confers on our lives.

‘The more intensely one supports people’s decision making’, Metz writes, ‘the more meaning

that will accrue to one’s life’ (ibid: 402). Examples include ‘promoting democracy and liberty’,

‘freeing people from tyranny’, ‘giving people urgently needed medical attention’ (ibid.).

However, one might ask, is there any moral achievement that is not related to people’s

autonomy? I submit the answer is yes. The above-mentioned photographer who morally

scrutinizes himself lest he does not take advantage of human’s suffering, shows the depth of his

moral life. However, what he does has hardly anything to do with people’s autonomy, and yet

25 Hence, again, the significance of aspect-seeing in a Wittgensteinian account of value. 26 As Metz says, with regard to the fundamentality condition of intellectual reflection, ‘it seems there are two domains in which apprehending basic conditions would be significant, roughly, humanity and reality’ (2011: 404). I think my example meets the first condition, i.e. ‘humanity’.

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it is, I think, an important moral achievement.

Furthermore, I think even our most ordinary actions can sometimes have moral connotations

depending on the surrounding circumstances. M. O’C. Drury gives a clear image of such

ordinary behaviors. Drury relates that he and Wittgenstein once went horse riding and they

were looking for a place to rest. Then they saw a group of people on the field and Wittgenstein

said, ‘We are going back. These people are working. And it is not right that we should be

holidaying in front of them’ (Drury 1984: 138). Drury continues, ‘I thought of the many times I

had been to these sands and such an obvious thought had never occurred to me’ (ibid.). No

one’s life is saved here, there is no hero; but one can’t help contemplating the moral aspect of

this simple incident. In another letter to Drury, Wittgenstein highlights the significance of

being in touch with the ordinary people and appreciating their presence in our lives. What is important, Wittgenstein writes,

is to live in the world in which you are, not to think or dream about the world you

would like to be in. Look at people’s sufferings, physical and mental, you have them

close at hand, and this ought to be a good remedy for your troubles. . . . Look at your

patients more closely as human beings in trouble and enjoy the opportunity you have to

say ‘good night’ to so many people. This alone is a gift from heaven which many

people would envy you. And this sort of thing ought to heal your frayed soul, I believe.

It won’t rest it; but when you are healthily tired you can just take a rest. I think in some

sense you don’t look at people’s faces closely enough (ibid: 95-96).

Wittgenstein here alludes to the significance of one’s attitudes in day-to-day life. Saying ‘good

night’ to a patient sounds very mundane and only a part of common courtesy but to an

intellectual who realizes that he has lost the human touch, it could be seen as something with a

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healing effect. It seems that any theory of great meaning brushes aside these moments, by

calling them ordinary, and is bound to provide an overgeneralized account of meaning of life –

cut-off from the way people experience meaning in their lives. In other words, I want to

suggest that the great meaning can also be experienced in what Goethe once called ‘the demand of the day’.27 It seems that exclusivists want to, as it were, redeem us by highlighting

what is interesting and admirable in us (artistic creation, moral heroism, scientific discovery)

and, thus, a Wittgensteinian approach toward the meaning of life seems unsatisfactory to them.

Wittgenstein was thinking of a similar problem, I think, when he wrote:

Where does our investigation get its importance from, since it seems only to destroy

everything interesting, that is, all that is great and important? . . . What we are

destroying is nothing but houses of cards and we are clearing up the ground of language

on which they stand (Wittgenstein 1958: § 118).

A Wittgensteinian approach might not lead to a ‘great’ or ‘superlative’ achievement in its

enquiry into the meaning of life, but it gets its strength and satisfaction from a humble

observation of those human details in that ‘extraordinary thing called ordinary life’.

Conclusion

In this chapter, I tried to pose some questions to some theories of great meaning. To do so, I

first examined Marquard’s criticisms of some exaggerated conceptions of expectancies of life’s

meaning, which directly aim at meaning and provide sensational accounts of the meaning of

27 See Rosenzweig 1999:18. Chapter Five is in a sense on ‘the demand of the day’ from a Wittgensteinian perspective.

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life. Marquard’s solution to the problem of immoderateness of our expectation of meaning is,

in a nutshell, to appreciate the ordinary. This view bears some resemblance to that of

Wittgenstein in his later works. Wittgenstein also emphasizes the significance of what belong to the common life of people and the centrality of ordinary discourse. According to

Wittgenstein, we should not brush aside the ordinary discourse when we investigate a concept, because precisely those uses and functions in the everyday life show its meaning. Philosophers’ descriptions of concepts should be in conformity with the language of ordinary life. The world they discuss must be the world where ordinary people live and interact (Wolgast 2004). Thus, a

Wittgensteinian approach toward the meaning of life ‘leaves everything as it is’ (Wittgenstein

1958: § 124), that is, it doesn’t try to justify and defend one proposed theory against its rivals.

Therefore, criticizing the current exclusivist theories of great meaning does not imply that we stand in need of another theory. A Wittgensteinian approach discards the very assumption that we need a theory of great meaning whatsoever. Even though it acknowledges the difference between great and ordinary meaning, it criticizes the tendency to theorize it.

I argued that theories of great meaning are most vulnerable when it comes to particularism and ordinary life. The pervasive tendency among the scholars in the literature to idealize or to aggrandize the meaning of life is mostly blinded by what Marquard and Wittgenstein would designate as a ‘one-sided diet’, which mainly brushes aside the ordinary life by considering it insignificant. I discussed some cases to show the significance of the particular in our understanding of great meaning (the photographer, the scientist and Gauguin’s decision). More specifically, Levy’s work theory, which suggests that the pursuit of open-ended activities confer ‘superlative meaning’ on life was discussed and I argued that his theory is based on misleading assumptions and works on a preferential conception of great meaning. Likewise, I

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showed that the particularity of life poses some problems for Metz’s unified account of great

meaning of life. Furthermore, I showed that what both Metz and Levy overlook is the

significance of attitude in one’s conception of the great meaning.

A Wittgensteinian approach toward meaning in life only tries to clarify the existent theories

and show their possible incoherence and confusion; it doesn’t try to build a new theory. That is

to say, it doesn’t try to create new buildings to replace those that have been destroyed. ‘All that

philosophy can do’, Wittgenstein writes, ‘is to destroy idols. And that means not creating a new

one – say in the “absence of an idol”’ (2005: 305).

What does remain after destroying idols? Life itself, one might say. We see that long before

contemplating the meaning of life most of us have mastered ways of living. There is a certainty

that usually runs through our ways of life. We usually don’t check if the copies of newspaper are the same, if the sun rises from the same direction that it did yesterday, if we have two hands or three hands, if our child comes back home after school or decides to find another house, etc.

In short, we live and ‘swallow’ meaning with it. However, skeptics beg to differ. To their differences, I will attend next.

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Chapter Five

On Detachment or Why the Shopkeeper Does Not Investigate His

Apples

Introduction

Let me start with a brief outline of what I have discussed so far. In Chapters One and Two I discussed some Tractarian ideas, including the inexpressibility of value and the limits of our language and examined some theories of life’s meaning from a Tractarian view. I also criticized the Tractatus’ ‘autistic’ conceptions of life and value, and I argued that one of the reasons for Wittgenstein’s revision of his philosophy was a result of the dawning of the social and communal aspect of life on him. In Chapter Three, I discussed the centrality of aspect- seeing and attitude in one’s understanding of the meaning of life and indicated that the possibility of change in one’s life, i.e., in one’s ‘way of seeing the world’ is more a matter of aspect-changing and aspect-dawning. Since I find the concept of the ordinary to be crucial in a

Wittgensteinian approach toward life’s meaning, I decided to dedicate the last three chapters of this thesis to a discussion of some of the important implications of this view for the way we approach life’s meaning. Thus, in Chapter Four, I criticized the way most theorists in the

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literature approach the great/ordinary dichotomy and the pervasive tendency among some

commentators to theorize the great meaning. In this chapter, I shall focus on the role of

certainty in our ordinary life and criticize some skeptical theories in the literature on life’s

meaning. Finally, in Chapter Six, viewing the quest for life’s meaning as a confessional

activity in the stream of life, I propose that expressing one’s understanding of the meaning of

life is usually an activity in which one shares, i.e., confesses one’s way of being and seeing in the world.

Whether we believe the question of the meaning of life is ‘one of the most important questions’

(Klemke 2008: 2) or ‘the fundamental question of philosophy’ (Camus 2008: 72), there is indeed something puzzling in the question: Most of us search for the meaning of life when, in

fact, we do nothing but living. One might say there is nothing puzzling about this fact because we have a unique capacity to ‘step back’ and examine life as a whole. It is true, they say, that we are living, but we want to find out what the ‘point’ and ‘purpose’ of life is. Some philosophers believe though it is true that human beings are engaged with and committed to countless things in their lives, they have ‘special capacity to step back and survey themselves,

and the lives to which they are committed, with that detached amazement which comes from

watching an ant struggle up a heap of sand’ (Nagel 2008: 146). Thus, detachment from life is

seen as the key factor in contemplating the meaning of life. More specifically, the notion of

detachment is of high significance among skeptics and nihilists in the literature. For

Schopenhauer, Camus, Nagel, Benatar, Martin, and Murphy, the only way to arrive at the

truthfulness of nihilism is through detaching oneself from one’s ‘insignificant’ concerns and

viewing life as a whole.

In this chapter, my aim is to view the notion of detachment from a perspective different from

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that of most skeptics about meaning. I shall mainly focus on Thomas Nagel’s account of ‘the absurd’ as I think his thoughts on this topic are exemplary of skeptical approaches to the meaning of life. My response to Nagel will take its cue from Wittgenstein’s last text, On

Certainty, as it is mainly concerned with the problem of skepticism, the solutions to it, and the significance of ‘certainty’ in our life. I also briefly discuss Richard Taylor’s influential subjectivist theory of life’s meaning by highlighting the pessimist background against which

Taylor arrives at his subjectivist theory of life’s meaning.

Furthermore, in a section of this chapter I discuss the implications of On Certainty for the ways most naturalists and supernaturalists in the literature approach the question of life’s meaning.

Recall that in Chapter Two I criticized some supernaturalist and naturalist theories of life’s meaning based on a Tractarian view. In this chapter, I shall bring up the naturalism/supernaturalism debate again. Whereas in Chapter Two I addressed the limits of theorization and justification, in this chapter I critically examine the debate from a new perspective by focusing on some implications of the discussions of On Certainty for naturalist and supernaturalist accounts of life’s meaning. Some of the issues that have not received due attention in the literature are: 1) The centrality of one’s ‘world-picture’ in one’s conception of life’s meaning, 2) The role of trust in the constitution of meaning, 3) Conversion from one

‘world-picture’ to another and the role of persuasion. In a sense, this chapter is on seeing the literature through the eyes of On Certainty. I believe this task is of importance, especially considering the fact that, to my knowledge, so far those few philosophers who have written on

Wittgenstein’s account of meaning in life have not addressed the book at all.

1 Furthermore, in what follows I propose that On Certainty can shift the way we think of the

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meaning in life since it offers a way of approaching the question and weighing it in the context

of our day to day that is different from the current approaches in the literature.

In the last section of this chapter, making a distinction between philosophical and existential

skepticism, I shall discuss three accounts of the difference between the two. So I will discuss

Stanley Cavell’s distinction between ‘knowledge’ and ‘acknowledgement’, Franz

Rosenzweig’s distinction between the ‘sick’ and the ‘healthy’ mind and Wittgenstein’s allusion

to ‘indifference’ as the main cause of philosophical skepticism. I argue that whereas

philosophical skepticism might seem of interest only to philosophers, the ‘arrest of life’ is an

existential experience that is categorically different from philosophical skepticism of the kind

Wittgenstein describes in On Certainty.

Doubt in the Stream of Life

Wittgenstein’s last notebooks were written in the final year and a half of his life. They mainly

consist of Wittgenstein’s comments on some propositions stated by G. E. Moore in two papers,

namely, ‘A Defence of Common Sense’ (1994a) and ‘Proof of the External World’ (1994b),

originally published in 1925 and 1939, respectively. In the first article, Moore lists some

1 For example, Lurie (2006) is only focused on the early Wittgenstein’s approach toward the ‘problem of life, and Kishik (2008) in his stimulating paper tries to show the way our ‘language meshes with life’ by focusing on Wittgenstein’s central ideas in his later works concerning the interwoven connection between words, life and meaning and comparing them with Augustine and Tolstoy’s Confessions. See also Thomas (1999), Thompson (2000), and Arnswald (2009). In general, most works written on Wittgenstein’s views of value and the meaning of life, except Kishik (2008), heavily rely on the early Wittgenstein’s writings on ethics and the nature of value. However, one of my goals in my research is to extract some elements from Wittgenstein’s later works and apply them to the literature on life’s meaning. I also work to evaluate how defensible some of his positions and claims are.

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propositions that he knows with ‘certainty’. Propositions such as ‘A living body exists now, which is my body’; or ‘I have been continuously on earth since my birth’; or ‘The earth existed

many years before my birth’. In the second article Moore claims that he can prove that the

world exists by holding up his two hands and saying, as he makes a certain gesture with the

right hand, ‘Here is one hand’, and adding, as he makes the same gesture with the left hand,

‘Here is another’.

On Certainty is, basically, Wittgenstein’s comments and concerns about these apparently

simple propositions. The main question is under what circumstances we begin to doubt the

existence of the external world, so that we stand, then, in need of a set of propositions like

those of Moore to prove the existence of the external world. What is the relation between doubt

and certainty? How is the language-game of doubt played? What are the implications of doubt

for our everyday lives? These questions, I believe, are pertinent to skepticism about the

meaning of life and unpacking the main arguments of the text helps to show their relations.

Wittgenstein’s main objection to Moore’s anti-skeptical approach is that it has a confused conception of the language-game of ‘knowing’. For, to ‘know’ something entails that one can offer justification, including evidence and reasons, for that claim, but when Moore starts all his propositions by saying that ‘he knows…’, and uses it to prove the things that do not stand in need of justification (my hands, the earth, etc.), he begins to go astray. The interesting thing about Moore’s propositions, Wittgenstein observes, is that we do not arrive at any of them ‘as a

result of investigation’ (Wittgenstein 1975: § 137-8). That is to say, Moore’s propositions

cannot be doubted in ordinary circumstances. This is why Moore concludes from this that he

knows these propositions ‘to be true’ (Moore 1994a: 48). However, Wittgenstein suggests, the

epistemic status of these types of propositions is more fundamental than usual knowledge-

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claims. These propositions are the background against which we come to know the world; and

they ‘stand fast’ for us (Wittgenstein 1975: § 151). They are not about epistemic certitude;

rather, the whole epistemology is built upon these propositions. Fundamental propositions

cannot be the subject of doubt; rather, they act like the ‘hinges’ on which the door of our

epistemic enquiries turn (ibid: § 341). This is why the fundamental propositions are also

referred to as ‘hinge propositions’ (Moyal-Sharrock 2004: 33). Wittgenstein goes so far as to

say, ‘the game of doubting itself presupposes certainty’ (ibid: § 115):

How does someone judge which is his right and which his left hand? How do I know

that my judgment will agree with someone else’s? How do I know that this colour is

blue? If I don’t trust myself here, why should I trust anyone else’s judgments? Is there a

why? Must I not begin to trust somewhere? That is to say: somewhere I must begin

with not-doubting; and that is not, so to speak, hasty but excusable: it is part of judging

(ibid: § 150).

In other words, the language-game of doubt is played after learning the language-game of certainty and ‘trust’. ‘Doubt comes after belief’ (ibid: § 160). Imagine someone who doubts whether his hands are really his hands. As Wittgenstein says, the fact that he uses the word

‘hand’ without a second thought, that he should ‘stand before the abyss’ if he wanted so much as to try doubting every word he uses, shows that ‘absence of doubt belongs to the essence of the language-game’ (ibid: § 370). Everyone’s ‘world-picture’ (ibid: § 162) is founded upon this fundamental trust.2 In Bob Plant’s words, ‘without trusting in something and someone (that I have a body; that the world is not a figment of my imagination; that, as a rule, people do not try

2 Wittgenstein also refers to world-picture as ‘our frame of reference’ (1975: § 83), a ‘whole system of propositions’ (ibid: § 141), and a ‘totality of judgments’ (ibid: § 140).

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to deceive me) one’s orientation around the natural and social world would become hopeless’

(Plant 2005: 50-51). It is based on this fundamental trust that ‘[m]y life consists in my being

content to accept many things’ (Wittgenstein 1975: § 344). I accept that history books do not

lie when they say Mussolini was an Italian leader, or that a scientific theory is true even though

I didn’t investigate it personally, or that my birthday is exactly the same as the one in my

Identity Card. Normally, I do not investigate any of these. I simply believe them. ‘What we believe depends on what we learn’ (ibid: § 286) and we learn countless things as we grow. No child in this world arrives at the conclusion that the earth is round by investigation.3 A child

who questions every single statement of the teacher has not yet learnt the language-game of

investigation. According to Wittgenstein, the problem of skepticism is exactly its failure to understand that its very skeptical claims are based on trust and certainty with regard to something. For example, consider Cartesian skepticism. What is queer about Descartes’ method is that as he doubts the existence of the external world or himself as a body, he takes for granted that his words point at something, that the ‘I’ refers to something, that I don’t need to check every time I use the word ‘I’ whether it really refers to ‘I’ or someone else, etc. Doubt comes after certainty. Why didn’t Descartes doubt that the ‘I’ in his writings refers to him and not his neighbor? Why didn’t he doubt whether his words on the paper would disappear when he would turned the page? Would he check that his writings on skepticism hadn’t vanished in the middle of the night? The answer is no, because hinge propositions are not usually the

subjects of doubt, because the skeptic’s investigations wouldn’t develop if he were to literally

doubt everything.

Wittgenstein arrived at two important conclusions based on the conceptual clarifications of

3 Cf. Wittgenstein 1975: § 160.

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Moore’s propositions that I have discussed so far:

(1) ‘Groundlessness of belief’. According to Wittgenstein, one acquires a belief-system based on trust: ‘The schoolboy believes his teachers and his schoolbooks’ (ibid: § 263). The teacher says, for example, that Everest is in Asia and she doesn’t give a ground for it, because, the pupil doesn’t need a ground for his belief as yet. If he doubts the existence of Mussolini he might only end up failing to learn about Italy’s history. One continues learning based on trust until one acquires the language-game of giving grounds and justification. Note that

Wittgenstein refers to ‘giving grounds’ and ‘justification’ as a language-game alongside other possible language-games. That is to say, there are people who do not acquire it or have a different conception of ‘giving grounds’. (Consider what supernaturalists and naturalists present as the grounds of their beliefs.) Wittgenstein writes, ‘You must bear in mind, that the language-game is so to say something unpredictable. I mean: it is not based on grounds. It is not reasonable (or unreasonable). It is there – like our life’ (ibid: § 559). One related point is that justifications and giving grounds reach an end somewhere, ‘not in the realm of theory but in human action’ (Plant 2005: 51). In Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein alludes to this issue when he writes,

If I have exhausted the justifications then I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned.

Then I am inclined to say, ‘this is simply what I do’ (1958: § 217).

It would not be an exaggeration to say the literature is saturated with various attempts to give grounds and to justify different world-pictures. In general, the body of texts concerning the meaning of life can plausibly be considered as a true example of the exhaustion of justifications, as I mentioned in Chapter Two. While supernaturalists claim that life without a transcendental Being would be worthless or of limited value, naturalists retort that the value of

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one’s life is not dependent on an eternal life. (Just because one loves a fading rose doesn’t

mean it is valueless; rather, the finality of love even makes it more precious.) Yet again, the former would respond, for life to be meaningful at all it must be comprehensively meaningful

(Hepburn 1966; Craig 2013). One might say, the problem with the main approaches in the literature, from a Wittgensteinian perspective, is they treat their disagreement as if it is only a matter of disagreement over some arguments.

(2) Acknowledging the varieties of world-pictures. Usually, as one grows one realizes that there are various world-pictures, which sometimes are opposing. For example, one might learn at one’s home that God created the world out of nothing. However, at school one might learn about Darwin and evolution. In Wittgenstein’s words, ‘I believe that every human being has two human parents; but Catholics believe Jesus only had a human mother’ (1975: § 239). In this situation, one’s ‘frame of reference’ or ‘world-picture’ is exposed to something fundamentally different. I can give countless reasons to prove my belief (human sexual life, human anatomy, biology, self-experience, etc.) but Catholics might also say they have reasons to believe the way they do. The reason most of us feel rather bewildered when we encounter people with opposing beliefs is not necessarily due to the queerness of what they believe in, but because we realize that the whole foundation of our belief-system can be put into question. A nonbeliever might find it unreasonable to say, ‘under certain circumstances wine transforms into blood’; he might say, if I accept this I might as well deny everything that I have learnt so far. On the other hand, history shows that what people consider ‘reasonable or unreasonable’

(ibid: § 336) changes. Seventy years ago, it was unreasonable to talk of man on the moon.

Twenty years later it was not. ‘But’, Wittgenstein wonders, ‘is there no objective character here?’ (ibid.) How is it possible that some ‘very intelligent and well-educated people’ (ibid.)

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who are well informed about evolution and the origins of humankind come to accept the story

of creation in the Bible? Though Wittgenstein provides several examples of incommensurable world-pictures, their function, I think, is to highlight the central claim of the book that our lives consist of our ‘being content to accept many things’ (ibid: § 344), and that the ‘stream of life’ is based on an absolute trust in what is ‘given’ (Wittgenstein 1958: 226), i.e., ‘forms of life’.

This suggests that there is only one basic point—noting that there is a variety of world pictures is a derivative point to illuminate our basic inability to question everything. Consider, for example, the following two judgments from two world-pictures:

Men have judged that a king can make rain; we say this contradicts all experience.

Today they judge that aeroplanes and the radio etc. are means for the closer contact of

peoples and the spread of culture (Wittgenstein 1975: § 132).

Obviously, we have enough reasons to find the first judgment unreasonable. Experience proves

it. But what is reasonable about the second judgment and what are the grounds for it? What

kind of experience can make people like Wittgenstein doubt that people are now closer to one

another thanks to technology? In a sense, Wittgenstein here refers to three judgments and the

third judgment is his own view; he implicitly questions the assumption that technology leads to

closer human contacts. As with regard to the first judgment, i.e., the king’s power to make rain,

Wittgenstein would say ‘these people do not know a lot that we know’ (ibid: 298) and that ‘if

we compare our system of knowledge with theirs then theirs is evidently the poorer one by far’

(ibid.). Here Wittgenstein is far from being a relativist.4

4 It is beyond the scope of my topic to discuss whether On Certainty defends relativism or not. Though most commentators are in favor of a relativistic reading of On Certainty, there are others who argue against a relativistic reading of the text. For a conservative/relativist reading of On Certainty, see Rorty (1979); Nyíri (1982); Bloor

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Furthermore, conversion happens. One should read ‘conversion’ here as a change in one’s world-picture, a change in one’s ‘whole way of seeing’ (ibid: § 291) the world. We all ‘stick’ to the opinion that, for example, ‘the earth is round’ because it is part of our ‘hinge propositions’ and we will not change it until our whole way of seeing nature changes. In other words, Wittgenstein wants to say, some opinions and beliefs will never change unless one’s whole conception of the world collapses. Doubting the fundamental ‘framework’ of my knowledge ‘would seem to drag everything with it and plunges it into chaos’ (ibid: § 613).

Nothing major will happen, for example, if I doubt whether the results of a scientific experiment are well founded (there might be a mistake in calculation, or another variable involved, etc.), but I’m not sure what it would be like to doubt 2×2= 4. My language-game of investigation and doubt would reach its limit if I did so. However, conversion from one language-game to another happens. Experiences ‘of various sorts’ (Wittgenstein 1980: 86) in life might lead me to a new language-game. As Wittgenstein says,

Certain events would put me into a position in which I could not go on with the old

language-game any further. In which I was torn away from the sureness of the game.

Indeed, doesn’t it seem obvious that the possibility of a language-game is conditioned

by certain facts? (1975: § 617)

For example, if someone grew up with an unshakable belief that God shall shelter her if she

cries His name in hours of desperation, and she does so for a long time without obtaining what

she wishes, there is a possibility that either she ultimately abandons her belief in God or

transcends her conception of God to one that is more like God and less like Spiderman. We

(1983); Boghossian (2006). For an anti-relativistic reading of On Certainty, see Plant (2005); Crary (2005). Peter Winch inspired many relativist interpretations of Wittgenstein; see Winch (1972).

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then say, ‘sufferings of various sorts’ (Wittgenstein 1980: 86) educate her to a different belief in God.

This kind of conversion happens of my accord. On the other hand, we might encounter people of other world-pictures and try to encourage them to see the world the way we do. However, in doing so, we use our own language-game to defeat theirs. Wittgenstein’s view is worth quoting at length:

Is it wrong for me to be guided in my actions by the propositions of physics? Am I to

say I have no good ground for doing so? Isn’t precisely this what we call a ‘good

ground’? . . . Supposing we met people who did not regard that as a telling reason.

Now, how do we imagine this? Instead of the physicist, they consult an oracle. (And for

that we consider them primitive.) Is it wrong for them to consult an oracle and be

guided by it? − If we call this ‘wrong’ aren’t we using our language-game as a base

from which to combat theirs? . . . And are we wrong or right to combat it? Of course

there are all sorts of slogans which will be used to support our proceedings. . . . Where

two principles really do meet which cannot be reconciled with one another, then each

man declares the other a fool and heretic. . . . I said I would ‘combat’ the other man, −

but wouldn’t I give him reasons? Certainly; but how far do they go? At the end of

reasons comes persuasion. (Think what happens when missionaries convert natives.)

(1975: §608-612).

By persuasion Wittgenstein means sharing or displaying or even imposing one’s world-picture to the other with non-coercive measures. In other words, one’s opinion is not enough to make

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the other change her world-picture.5 Some principles cannot be reconciled with one another

because they embody opposing world-pictures. That is to say, these principles are arrived at by

different criteria of right and wrong or reasonable or unreasonable (cf. ibid: §559). In this

situation, according to Plant, ‘the prospect for non-coercive, non-combative communication looks bleak, as one is forced to use increasingly rhetorical means’ (Plant 2005: 60). And it seems that Wittgenstein himself is also of the same opinion. However, I submit, this opinion is biased. People with opposing principles do encounter each other and they do try to convince

the other to see the world the way they do; but this does not necessarily require that they take

an offensive approach. I might find someone’s world-picture ‘primitive’ or ‘unintelligible’ but

it does not imply that I would declare him a ‘fool and heretic’. Tolerance was certainly not one

of Wittgenstein’s big virtues, the man who participated in two World Wars and was famous for

his intolerance toward whatever he would deem as morally indecent. Furthermore, it is quite

possible to face a world-picture and find it extremely profound and yet opposed to ours. (Isn’t

this one of the reasons we find Werner Herzog’s movies fascinating?6)

5 Cf. Wittgenstein 1967: 57; 1975: § 262; 1980: 85. 6In fact, some of Herzog’s movies have been considered as paradigm cases in the analysis of incommensurable situations. See, for example the movie, Where the Green Ants Dream (1984). The movie portrays a dispute between Aborigines and a local mining company with regard to land ownership. One of the most moving scenes of the movie is when Aborigines present as ‘evidence’ some wooden objects that to them are sacred. These sacred objects, buried in the land, were the evidence that the land belongs to them. B. Readings, in a philosophical engagement with the movie analyses both parties’ world-pictures and the ‘injustices’ that are done in this incommensurable situation. The fact that Aborigines do not have any conception of ‘common law’ or ‘universal rights’ or even ‘evidence’ silenced them. They have to combat the mining companies with a completely different language-game which is the language-game of modern justice system. The land for them is the sacred land, ‘where green ants dwell’. In Reading’s words, ‘there is no possibility of even a thought of separation or abstraction. They can’t be transplanted, immigrate elsewhere. They have no abstract human nature that would survive in another place, anywhere else (Readings 1992: 183).

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In the next section, I argue that the conflict between opposing views of the meaning of life

might stem from a failure to understand the fundamental impact that various world-pictures

have on one’s conception of the meaning of life, and I show how most commentators rely on reasoning where it has least effects, i.e., when they are dealing with world-pictures. This, in turn, explains why even when I find an account of the meaning of life reasonable, it is less likely ‘to make me change my whole life’ (Wittgenstein 1967: 57).

On Certainty and the Meaning of Life

If we accept Wittgenstein’s prima facie attractive view of the fundamentality of world-pictures in shaping our way of seeing the world, the question arises what the relation between one’s

world-picture and one’s conception of the meaning of life is. Consider, for example, the

disagreement between supernaturalists and most objectivists in the literature over the ultimate

source of meaning. While most objectivists believe there are some objective values that confer

meaning on our lives, some supernaturalists doubt that the intrinsic and objective value of

some of our ‘dispositions’ would be enough to make life meaningful. They might agree with objectivists that our judgments of what makes a life virtuous or good are based on elements whose worth we can recognize in human terms, without any need for God’s approval.

However, religion gives our strives for the good a character of depth; it transcends our tendency toward the good to something more than just a human disposition. Thus, Cottingham writes,

The morally good life is indeed one which enables us to fulfill our human nature. But

what the religious dimension adds is a framework within which that nature is revealed

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as more than just a set of characteristics that a certain species happens intermittently to

possess, but instead as pointing to the condition that a Being of the utmost benevolence

and care that we can conceive of desires us to achieve. . . . To act in the light of such an

attitude is to act in the faith that our struggles mean something beyond the local

expression of a contingently evolving genetic lottery (Cottingham 2003: 72-73).

Whereas an objectivist might be certain of the self-justificatory nature of intrinsic values, a supernaturalist might view them as the necessary but not sufficient conditions of a meaningful life. An objectivist might say, human beings are able to make rational decisions and thus can ascertain what the elements of a good life are. The power of human compassion combined with a collective effort to improve the human condition, can result in far greater results than what all the religions have achieved so far in history. On the other hand, sympathizing with all this, a believer might raise other concerns. For example, Cottingham suggests that this outlook, significant as it is, cannot remove the ‘most fundamental aspect of the human condition’, namely, our mortality and finitude. ‘Many philosophers’, Cottingham writes, ‘show a strange tendency to conceal this bleak reality from themselves by adopting, almost unconsciously, a kind of jaunty optimism about the powers of human reason’ (ibid: 76-77). For most supernaturalists, religion, unlike the secular moral outlook, provides an answer for the most fundamental fact of human life, i.e., her vulnerability. It gives an attitude, a certain orientation, to our moral life that a naturalist outlook fails to provide.

Now, mightn’t we say this attitude is the same as the believer’s world-picture? Mightn’t we say the believer tries to defend a world-picture that, in Cottingham’s words again, ‘is hard to describe in purely cognitive terms’ (2003: 74)? It seems that the argument between the objectivist and the believer over the ultimate source of value is an instance of a situation

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‘where two principles really do meet which cannot be reconciled with one another’

(Wittgenstein 1975: § 610)? In this dispute the ‘grounds’ of the objectivist’s claim is ‘well

known’ (ibid: § 336) to the believer and yet she is not ready to ‘give up’ her world-picture.

The believer says ‘he has proof’ and he might be willing to risk ‘things on account of it which

he would not do on things which are by far better established for him’ (Wittgenstein 1967: 54).

But is risking one’s life for one’s belief a good reason? From an objectivist’s perspective, the supernaturalist’s belief in God is ‘groundless’, but, from a Wittgensteinian perspective, so is the objectivist’s trust that every copy of the newspaper is the same, or his trust in history books

Wittgenstein alludes to the role of trust in our life, which makes any investigation unnecessary:

If the shopkeeper wanted to investigate each of his apples without any reason, for the

sake of being certain about everything, why doesn’t he have to investigate the

investigation? And can one talk of belief here (I mean belief as in ‘religious belief’, not

surmise)? (1975: § 459)

In ordinary circumstances the shopkeeper, if he is not a skeptic, does not need to investigate every single item in his shop; the wholesalers haven’t cheated him so far by selling him rotten apples. The language-game of doubt is unnecessary here. And thus his life shows that he is

‘content to accept so many things’ as ‘given’. Analogously, the believer stands fast in his belief and ‘nothing in the world will convince [him] of the opposite. [. . . ] He shall give up other things but not this’ (ibid: § 380). Most naturalists would raise an objection by saying that the believer is ‘in the grip of a delusion now’ (ibid: § 658) and that he will find this out if he thinks more objectively. The claims of naturalism, they suggest, are so well-founded that no

philosophy that rejects them can hope to survive. In Russell’s words,

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That man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were

achieving; that his origins, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are

but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism [. . .] can

preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labors of the ages [. . .] all the

noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the

solar system, [. . .] all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain

that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand (Russell 2008: 56).

So, a naturalist not only believes in her world-picture but is also most probably certain that it is in conformity with the objective reality. In fact, even subjectivists in the literature consider the above claims about the nature of reality as objectively true. Russell’s above point is that the naturalized world is altogether different from the world of believers. However, it would be odd,

I submit, to think that the whole conflict between believers and non-believers is over evidence.

What is at stake in the conflict is a whole way of seeing the world and living in it. From a naturalist perspective, conversion to supernaturalism might be similar to questioning the incontrovertibility of ‘multiplication tables’ (Wittgenstein 1975: § 658) because the truth of naturalism is ‘quite beyond dispute’ (Russell 2008: 56) while supernaturalists believe in something the existence of which is ‘disputable’. Therefore, as long as the dispute between the

two is over evidence there would be a bleak chance of conversion. However, the recent

attention in the literature to the significance of ‘praxis’ and non-theoretical aspects of religion,

especially thanks to Cottingham’s contribution, is precisely the result of an awareness with regard to the limits of rationalization. Cottingham writes, in a Wittgensteinian tone,7 that

‘belief, in the sense of subscribing to a set of theological propositions, is not in fact central to

7 Cf. Wittgenstein 1980: 28.

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what it is to be religious’ (2003: 88). Rather, what is central is the adoption of ‘a framework of

understanding and praxis’ (ibid: 90). This approach to religion is in sharp contrast with the

majority of supernaturalist accounts of life’s meaning, which, threatened by the authority of

scientific criteria of proof and evidence, claim that their belief is highly logical and based on proofs. But more often, the result is less like a theory and more like a ‘sigh’ (Wittgenstein

1980: 30). Pojman’s assuring argument is a good example.

‘If theism is true and there is a benevolent supreme being governing the universe’, he writes, the following eight theses are true:

1. We have a satisfying explanation of the origins and sustenance of the universe. [. . . ]

2. . . . The universe is suffused in goodness [. . .] 3. God loves and cares for us. [. . . ] 4.

Theists have an answer to the question why be moral. [. . . ] 5. Cosmic justice reigns in

the universe. [. . . ] 6. All persons are of equal worth. [. . . ] 7. [There exists] grace and

forgiveness – a happy ending for all. [. . . ] 8. There is life after death (Pojman 2008:

27-29).

One might wonder how belief in a ‘happy ending for all’ can be a thesis. How would I convince a war survivor that the world is ‘suffused in goodness’? Pojman hasn’t acquired the

language-game of doubting his world-picture but ‘certain events’ might put him in a position in

which he cannot go on with the old language-game (Wittgenstein 1975: 617). Only then the naturalist world-picture might begin to dawn on him. Consequently, he might be able to find his feet with a naturalist when the latter questions the belief that the world is ‘suffused in goodness’: 8

8 Cf. Wittgenstein 1958: 223.

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Suppose you found yourself at school or university in a dormitory. Things are not too

good. The roof leaks, there are rats about, the food is almost inedible, some students in

fact starve to death. There is a closed door, behind which is the management, but the

management never comes out. You get to speculate what the management must be like.

Can you inform from the dormitory as you find it that the management, first, knows

exactly what conditions are like, second, cares intensely for your welfare, and third,

possesses unlimited resources for fixing things? The inference is crazy. You would be

almost certain to infer that either the management doesn’t know, doesn’t care, or cannot

do anything about it (Blackburn 1999: 170).9

In short, the disagreements between supernaturalists and naturalists in the literature seem

categorical and not hypothetical and thus the chance of their arguments having an effect is low.

The thrust of objectivists’ claim is that with or without God there are some intrinsic values in

human life, which confer meaning on our life. It is, they hold, against one’s intellectual integrity to accept the claims of supernaturalism. On the other hand, a supernaturalist might say

what needs to be saved is our ‘soul’ and not our ‘speculative intelligence’.10

9 Cottingham refers to this passage as well in discussing the idea that believers rely on an ‘implausible inference’. See Cottingham 2005: 20. 10 That is to say, a genuine believer is ready to give up everything, even her intellectual integrity but not her ‘certainty’. The following from Wittgenstein’s diaries is highly illuminating: What inclines even 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 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 what is needed by my heart, my soul, not my speculative intelligence. For it is my soul

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Wittgenstein summarized his views about the fundamentality of world-pictures when he wrote,

‘You can fight, hope, and even believe without believing scientifically’ (Wittgenstein 1980:

60). The varieties of world-pictures, in this view, are ‘modes of this complicated form of life’

(Wittgenstein 1958: 174). What On Certainty tries to highlight is the fact that our world-

pictures are meshed with our lives and, thus, questioning them would be to question our whole

way of seeing and living in the world. It wants to show the limits of theory and, in

Cottingham’s words, the ‘primacy of praxis’. As D. Z. Phillips suggests, ‘one of the achievements of On Certainty, is to get us to look at our world in a new way; a way which is often impeded by our philosophizings’ (Phillips 2005: 16). Long before our search for an intellectual answer for the meaning of life we acquire a way of living and assessing the world.

To put it in Wittgensteinian terms, we live and swallow meaning down together with the act of living.11 Life, that is to say, does not stand in need of meaning unless ‘certain events’ make us

realize that we can no longer go on with our old way of seeing the world. Shopkeepers open

their shops in the morning; children come back from school; we all gather around the fire when

it’s cold; we respond to people’s pain; and most of us take care of our children like the way all

elephants do, and, if we are not ‘doing philosophy’ (Wittgenstein 1975: § 476), for none of

these activities do we need a conception of a meaningful life. While Moore was busy hard

proving that there was a tree over there, other people were taking a nap under its shade or

climbing it to steal some juicy fruits. Wittgenstein’s question is that as long as we enjoy its

shade and its fruits what difference does it make to know whether it is real? That is,

Wittgenstein asks, under what circumstances might we possibly stand in need of Moore’s

with its passions, as it were, with its flesh and blood, that has to be saved, not my abstract mind (Wittgenstein 1980:33). 11 In the next chapter, I discuss this idea in more details.

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propositions to assure us that the earth exists or that I have two hands. And mightn’t we say the

same thing applies to commentators who scrutinize the conditions of a meaningful life?

Philosophers who detach themselves from the stream of life, as Plant says, ‘engage in all

manner of conceptual acrobatics’ (2005: 84) but will ultimately return to the ‘dear and

ordinary’ (Wittgenstein 1975: § 347) life because ‘justification comes to an end’ (ibid: § 192)

somewhere.12

In a sense, On Certainty might be seen as a text on the pathology of philosophical detachment

from the ordinary. It shows that how our world-picture, our whole way of seeing the world meshes with our life and that a fundamental trust runs through most actions that we usually undertake. Any account of life’s meaning, which overlooks or trivialize the ‘givenness’ of life, fails to the same extent to go right to the foundations; it fails to ‘put the question marks deep enough down’ (Wittgenstein 1980: 62). In the next section, I show that Nagel’s solution to the problem of the absurdity of life is one such account. Nagel claims that in the face of the absurd the best possible option is neither heroism nor despair but ‘irony’ and I argue that there are other options available for a nihilist that Nagel hasn’t addressed.

Nagel, Irony and Its Limits

According to most nihilists, there are strong reasons to believe that the world fails to confer

meaning on our life, and thus it is absurd to even think of the meaning of life considering what

each person has to go through in the course of her life. In Schopenhauer’s words,

12 See also Wittgenstein 1975: § 204 (‘Giving grounds . . . justifying the evidence comes to an end’), § 563; 1978: 342 (‘Interpretation comes to an end’); 1990: § 301, 404 (‘The chain of reasons comes to an end’).

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Unless suffering is the direct and immediate object of life, our existence must entirely

fail of its aim. It is absurd to look upon the enormous amount of pain that abounds

everywhere in the world, and originates in needs and necessitates inseparable from life

itself, as serving no purpose at all and the result of mere chance. Each separate

misfortune, as it comes, seems, no doubt, to be something exceptional; but misfortune

in general is the rule (Schopenhauer 2008: 45).

While Schopenhauer and others like Benatar (2006) lean more toward the tragic sense of life, there are others like Thomas Nagel who believe life is absurd because from a bird’s eye view everything is ‘comic’ and ‘futile’. Nagel makes a distinction between ‘the absurd’ and

‘meaninglessness’ and suggests that the sense of the absurd arises because we see the

meaninglessness of life from an objective point of view and the meaningfulness that our

subjective attraction ascribes to it (Nagel 1986: 216, 218; 1987: 101).

Human beings, according to Nagel, have the capacity to step back and contemplate life as a

whole, and when we do so, we realize that all our efforts are insignificant. We might try to

orient all our life to something bigger than us, like ‘justice’ or the ‘glory of God’ or the

‘advance of science’. However,

[A]ny such larger purpose can be put in doubt in the same way that the aims of an

individual life can be, and for the same reasons. . . . If we can step back from the

purposes of the individual life and doubt their point, we can step back also from the

progress of human history, or of science, or the success of a society, or the kingdom,

power, and glory of God, and put all these things into question (Nagel 2008: 147).

Nagel goes so far as to claim that in every ‘conceivable’ world that contains us these

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‘unsettlable doubts’ will ultimately arise (ibid: 148).

What separates Nagel from most nihilists, however, is his Woody Allenian attitude toward the absurd. The absurdity of life, Nagel has it, does not present us with a problem, to which some

‘solution’ must be found. What Nagel advises with regard to the absurd is, unlike most nihilists, neither heroism nor despair but ‘irony’ (ibid: 152). Having the capacity to step back and see the insignificance of life, one realizes that nothing is as serious as it appears, and even the fact that nothing matters is not very serious: ‘It does not matter now that in a million years nothing we do now will matter’ (ibid: 143). In a sense, the ironist views the hurly-burly of life and the way people sweat over insignificant things, and suggests that we develop a sense of humor and sarcasm in life. (‘Isn’t it ironic that as he was being knighted, his pants fell down?’ the ironist would say.)13

Therefore, in Nagel’s account, realizing the absurdity of life leads only to a change of attitude and anything else remains the same. The ironist continues living her everyday life but with a touch of irony. No matter what we believe in, Nagel has it, we continue taking our lives and day-to-day strives seriously, ‘as we must’. Something, which is more fundamental than reason, keeps us going. Our life cannot be entirely relied on reason, because in that case ‘our lives and beliefs would collapse’ (ibid: 150). This is

[A] form of madness that may actually occur if the inertial force of taking the world and

life for granted is somehow lost. If we lose our grip on that, reason will not give it back

to us (ibid.).

Nagel’s emphasis on the precedence of life over reason is strikingly similar to Wittgenstein’s

13 Cf. Nagel’s examples of absurd situations, Nagel 2008: 145.

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views in On Certainty. However, for Nagel, we still have the capacity to come out of the grip of life’s ‘inertial force’ and view it and its contingencies from above. This unique capacity

enables us to see the ‘groundlessness’ of our beliefs.14 In other words, our capacity to detach

ourselves from our everyday lives enables us to see the ‘fundamentally correct’ (Nagel 2008:

144) position of nihilism: The key to nihilism is detachment. That is, as long as one is involved

in the course of everyday life one fails to see the insignificance of one’s concerns and

commitments from a broader perspective, i.e., ‘sub specie aeternitatis’ (ibid: 146). In other words, we should become the observer of (our) life to see the absurdity of human endeavors since we fail to give a justificatory reason for our actions, but act from a subjective standpoint as though everything is well justified.

So, Nagel assumes that we all acquire the language-game of doubt one day. But is that really so? More specifically, one might ask to whom he refers to when he talks about ‘we’ throughout his work. Does it refer to ‘we’ the philosophers, ‘we’ the educated people, ‘we’ the people grown up in an individualistic culture, or ‘we’ human beings? Obviously, most of us have seen people who live as if they don’t have the capacity to detach themselves from life, people to whom life seems ‘transparent’ (Wittgenstein 1958: 223). Genuine believers are also certain about the purpose of life and when they view their life as a whole they usually see the hands of

God not the heart of ‘the absurd’. Nagel might respond that by ‘we’ he means anyone who

14 Ironically, when Nagel criticizes the ‘standard arguments for absurdity’ (Nagel 2008: 144), to then present his own, he appeals to Wittgenstein’s idea of the limits of justifications. One of the standard arguments for the absurdity of life is that because we are going to die, whatever we do in life is ultimately absurd. To this Nagel replies, ‘chains of justification come repeatedly to an end within life, and whether the process as a whole can be justified has no bearing on the finality of these end-points. No further justification is needed to make it reasonable to take aspirin for a headache’ (Nagel 2008: 144). This certainly is very similar to On Certainty’s recurrent theme, namely, the limits of justifications. See Wittgenstein 1975: §§ 192, 204, 563.

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steps outside of his life and views it objectively, that is, by stepping back and viewing oneself

‘as one member of an enormous class, say, as one sentient inhabitant of the universe among countless others’ (Metz 2002: 810-811). But a believer might also claim that his belief is precisely the result of viewing life sub specie aeternitatis and seeing the trace of God in everything.

If, as Nagel claims, ‘it does not matter now that in a million years nothing we do now will matter’ (2008: 143), we could go a step forward and ask whether it really matters now that some people believe in God and some in the absurd. In Nagel’s view, in a million years both the ignorant and the enlightened to the truth of life will have had the same destiny. If the

‘fundamentally correct’ view is that life in general is absurd, then, by the same token, this fundamental truth, as a part of life, should be absurd as well. My question is what would I be missing if I lived with certainty and not doubt? It seems that Nagel’s answer is that one would remain blind to the ultimate truth of human life. The truth, for Nagel, is that human beings are on a journey and they have been told that there is a glorious carnival at the destination.

However, if they step back and view the road from above they will realize that there is no destination, no carnival; the whole ‘journey fever’ is a sham and the road of life only leads them to a dead-end. There is no journey; there are only people on the road. The person who is enlightened by this truth will still be on the same road with other people. The only difference,

Nagel might say, is that now she has an attitude toward people’s sweating and struggling on the road (‘irony’). One does not need to create new destinations to make one’s life meaningful

(‘heroism’), or annihilate oneself to put an end to the journey (despair). In Nagel’s words,

‘Philosophical skepticism does not cause us to abandon our ordinary beliefs, but it lends them a peculiar flavor’ (ibid: 149), that is, ‘irony’.

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Interestingly, it seems that in Nagel’s skepticism there are certain things that are exempt from

doubt and he is in a sense certain about them: 1) He doesn’t doubt that there is a way to

understand the ultimate nature of reality, 2) that the truth of his philosophical doubts can be

expressed meaningfully and that people can understand it, 3) that irony is preferred over

heroism or despair, 4) that he is indeed proposing a world-picture which has to be lived with

certainty, etc. In other words, Nagel’s skepticism is indeed defending a whole way of seeing

the world and living in it: Living with irony. In other words, his language-game of doubt begins with certainty. Wittgenstein writes, ‘I really want to say that a language-game is only possible if one trusts something (I did not say “can trust something”)’ (1975: 509). However,

Nagel thinks we can doubt everything and that there is a correlation between epistemic skepticism and the absurd. He writes,

Both epistemological skepticism and a sense of the absurd can be reached via initial

doubts posed within systems of evidence and justifications that we accept, and can be

stated without violence to our ordinary concepts. We can ask not only why we should

believe there is a floor under us, but also why we should believe the evidence of our

senses at all – and at some point the framable questions will have outlasted the answers.

Similarly, we can ask not only why we should take aspirin, but why we should take

trouble over our own comfort at all (Nagel 2008: 149).

In other words, we all have the capacity to ask not only why something is important, but also why our reasons and justifications for its importance are enough to assure us of its importance.

And when we do so we realize that we cannot move without circularity or begging the

question. Nagel’s point is that we cannot provide enough reasons to justify our beliefs, but, one

might ask, how often do we attend to this justifying game in everyday life? Or, if the absurdity

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of our situation depends on our recognition that we fail to provide enough justifications for

what we deem important, then, in Michael Smith’s words, ‘does it follow that individuals who

do not realize that their beliefs require such a justification have beliefs that are nonabsurd?’

(Smith 2006: 96) As far as Nagel is concerned, the answer is that it does not follow. For Nagel,

it is the absence of justificatory reason for certainty that is the key and not one’s recognition

that the justificatory reasons are absent. In his account the absurd arises as a result of a clash of

subjective and objective perspectives and this itself needs our recognition. Thus, we might say,

some people fail to recognize the absence of justificatory reasons for our actions.

Thus, whereas Wittgenstein highlights the ‘groundlessness of our believing’ (1975: § 166) to

show the priority of praxis over theory and the fact that life equips us with a ‘definite world- picture’ (ibid:§ 167), Nagel uses it as a premise to prove that the chain of justifications for our beliefs comes to an end and we realize that our whole system of justification ‘rests on responses and habits that we never question, that we should not know how to defend without circularity, and to which we shall continue to adhere even after they are called into question’

(Nagel 2008: 146). For Nagel the starting point of skepticism is the fact that the things we do and the things we want are not justified by reason – that is, when we detach ourselves from the locality of our lives we see that our beliefs and our actions are groundless. The absurdity of life lies in the fact that realizing the arbitrariness of our beliefs does not ‘disengage us from life’

(ibid.).

How are we to respond to the absurd? Philosophers have given two types of response to this question. I call these responses ‘inflationary’ and ‘deflationary’. ‘Inflationary’ responses are those responses that ask for extreme measures to solve or at least mitigate the problem of the absurd. Schopenhauer’s ‘negation of the will’ (1966), Nietzsche’s ‘amor fati’ (1974), Camus’

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‘heroism’ (2008), and Benatar’s ‘anti-natalism’ (2006) are among the inflationary responses to

the problem of the absurd. ‘Deflationary’ response to the absurd, on the other hand, are not

concerned with ‘romantic’ and ‘self-pitying’ solutions to the problem of the absurd and believe

the absurd ‘need not be a matter for agony unless we make it so’ (Nagel 2008: 152). Smith’s

‘suspension of belief’ (2006: 98-100), Feinberg’s ‘self-fulfillment’ (2008) and Nagel’s ‘irony’

are examples of a deflationary approach.

Whereas Benatar and Schopenhauer passionately defend the idea of withdrawal from ordinary

forms of life and Camus invites us to act like a hero in the face of the absurd, Nagel

acknowledges the ‘givenness’ of life and the significance of appreciating the ordinary (Nagel

2008: 150). In fact, I should add, there are recurrent Wittgensteinian themes in Nagel’s work,

which he twists and applies to his own theory.15 Nagel invites us to keep living our everyday life but he wants us to add an attitude to it, which helps us bear the absurd as we continue

living. However, I submit, here lies a paradox which is overlooked in Nagel’s account. If, as

Nagel says, after encountering the absurd we return to the ordinary life, we, then, should be

able to live the ordinary life with certainty. It is really weird imagining someone thinking, ‘It is

absurd but let me brush my teeth’, or ‘It is absurd but let me buy this soap’. Now the problem

is how can I live my ordinary life with certainty and at the same time give an ironic taste to

everything I do? No one in this world can brush her teeth with irony. No one fell in love with

irony. The language-game of expressing one’s love is played by betraying one’s vulnerability;

irony tries to hide it. How can we respond to human pain with irony? We didn’t seek shelter

and warmth with irony. Is there any mother who gives milk to her child with irony? I don’t

think so. What Wittgenstein calls ‘primitive behaviour’ (1958: § 99) or ‘natural history of

15 For example, the inertial force of life and the limits of justifications are both discussed in On Certainty.

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human beings’ (ibid: § 415), precisely refer to these kinds of behaviours that I just mentioned.

These behaviours do not stand in need of justifications because they are neither rational nor irrational; they are, rather, ‘pre-rational’ (Wittgenstein 1967: 58). This view is in sharp contrast to Nagel’s view that we are able to find an Archimedean point from which we can see the irrationality of life as a whole. What is puzzling about Nagel’s theory is that he is well aware of the limits of justification and reasoning. He warns us that we cannot rely entirely on reason and that if we did so ‘our lives and beliefs would collapse – a form of madness that may actually occur if the inertial force of taking the world and life for granted is somehow lost’ (Nagel

2008: 150). But, isn’t this exactly what Nagel is doing when he conditions the meaningfulness of life on finding a rational justification for our beliefs and actions? I might contemplate whether it is worth it to change my car or house but do I really need a justificatory reason when

I am searching for a name for my baby? If these behaviours and countless others are usually performed with certainty, and if none of these behaviours stand in need of justification, then, when do I actually need irony? The answer is, as I discussed earlier, when we detach ourselves from the contingencies of our lives and view the world sub specie aeternitatis.

Nagel’s objection to heroism and despair is that they both take the world seriously while, viewing the world from a broader perspective, one realizes that nothing is as serious as it first appears to be. In Nagel’s view, absurdity is nothing to be ashamed of or feel distressed about.

Rather, ‘at the risk of falling into romanticism by a different route’, he would argue that

‘absurdity is one of the most human things about us: a manifestation of our most advanced and interesting characteristics’ (ibid: 152). Likewise, it seems that ‘irony’, for Nagel, is an advanced and interesting characteristic of people who are done with the sensationalism of

‘masochists of meaning’ (Marquard 1991: 46). Irony, thus, is seen as a cool way of

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approaching life, without betraying our vulnerabilities and ‘longing for the transcendent’

(Wittgenstein 1980: 15). We should gradually learn how to move away from the tragic sense of life and see the comic side of the human condition since, after all, what Nagel wants to say is that there is no tragedy in life – there is a correlation between tragedy and one’s conception of the significance of life.

In Nagel’s account, irony acts more like an alternative to other extreme measures like heroism or despair. However, even if we agree with him on discarding inflationary approaches, one might still ask why we should limit ourselves to his favorite alternative. Another alternative, for example, is that it is quite possible to imagine someone who denies the availability of meaning in life from an objective standpoint, and yet her approach is that of wonder and awe at the existence of the world as a whole. We can transcend ourselves and view the world from above, as Nagel suggests, but instead of seeing the absurd we might experience awe and wonder at seeing life itself without any supernatural feelings attached to it. Wittgenstein refers to the same feeling when he writes,

Nothing could be more remarkable than seeing a man alone in a room, walking up and

down, lighting a cigarette, sitting down, etc. so that we are suddenly observing a human

being from outside in a way that ordinarily we can never observe ourselves; it would be

like watching a chapter of biography with our own eyes, – surely this would be uncanny

and wonderful at the same time. We should be observing something more wonderful

than a playwright could arrange to be acted or spoken on the stage: life itself. – But then

we do see this every day without its making the slightest impression on us! True

enough, but we do not see it from that point of view. [. . .] only an artist can so

represent an individual thing as to make it appear to us like a work of art. [. . .] But it

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seems to me too that there is a way of capturing the world sub specie aeterni other than

through the work of artist. Thought has such a way – so I believe – it is as though it

flies above the world and leaves it as it is – observing it from above, in flight (1980: 4-

5).

In other words, it is possible to view the world objectively from above and see the

insignificance of our life as a whole and yet ‘leave it as it is’ without trying to add an ironic flavor to it. One might wonder at a world in which irony and tragedy meet under the same sun.

Therefore, I think that seeing irony as the best viable option to face the absurd is premature and

that Nagel has not exhausted other possibilities. Moreover, what is interesting in Nagel’s

account is that he is indeed advertising a way of seeing and living in the world and to that

extent he is far from being a philosophical skeptic. In Stanley Cavell’s striking words,

‘Skepticism and solutions to skepticism . . . make their way in the world mostly as lessons in hypocrisy: providing solutions one does not believe to problems one has not felt’ (Cavell 1979:

393).

There is another influential theory in the literature, which mostly feeds on the same assumptions that Nagel’s theory of the absurd does. I am referring to Richard Taylor’s subjectivist theory of life’s meaning. Recall that in Chapter Two I talked of the hedgehogs and the foxes in the literature. Interestingly, as I explain below, Taylor enquires about the meaning

of life the way a hedgehog would do, but he ends up with a foxian answer to the problem of

life. That is, he starts off with claiming that life as a whole, ‘from a distant’ (Taylor 2008: 139)

is devoid of meaning. He appeals to a dozen pictures of life to portray vividly life’s

meaninglessness. One major picture, one that is discussed the most in the literature, is the picture of life as the story of Sisyphus and his rolling stone. For Taylor, life is not short of

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illuminating pictures that lead one ‘to wonder what the point of it all is’ (ibid:138). Here is

another picture of life: two groups of prisoners; one group digging a hole that is ‘no sooner

finished than it is filled in again by the other group’ and so on and so forth (ibid.). Taylor, like

his comrade Nagel, claims that we all have the capacity to step outside the hurly-burly of life

and realize the pointlessness of everything that once we would consider as the symbol of order

and purpose in life. Think of all the poor birds that ‘span an entire side of the globe each year

and then return, only to insure that others may follow the same incredibly long path again and

again’ (ibid.). As a principle, Taylor has it, ‘all living things present essentially the same

[meaningless] spectacle’ (ibid.).

There are some striking resemblances between Taylor’s perspective, and that of the Iranian

poet, Omar Khayyam (1048-1131). It is interesting that in both we notice an over-emphasis on

how time wipes out everything. In both thinkers, there is a sincere tragic element. In both there

is a burning urge to movingly portray the absence of meaning in all the celebrated phenomena

of life. Khayyam writes,

ﺁﻭﺭﺩ ﺑﻪ ﺍﺿﻄﺮﺍﺭﻡ ﺍﻭﻝ ﺑﻪ ﻭﺟﻮﺩ ﺟﺰ ﺣﻴﺮﺗﻢ ﺍﺯ ﺣﻴﺎﺕ ﭼﻴﺰی ﻧﻔﺰﻭﺩ ﺭﻓﺘﻴﻢ ﺑﻪ ﺍﮐﺮﺍﻩ ﻭ ﻧﺪﺍﻧﻴﻢ ﭼﻪ ﺑﻮﺩ 16 ﺯﻳﻦ ﺁﻣﺪﻥ ﻭ ﺑﻮﺩﻥ ﻭ ﺭﻓﺘﻦ 104Fﻣﻘﺼﻮﺩ

Khayyam and Taylor search for the meaning of life in its ‘cosmic sense’ (Edwards 2008: 124).

That is, they want to find out ‘what is the point of it all’ as mentioned by both thinkers. And the

more they search the less they see any over-arching point and purpose that could give a sense of

direction to our lives. We are like some sparrows over a raging sea, facing storms and our wings

are bound to break sooner or later. In both thinkers there is an over emphasis on our

16 A rough translation of the poem would be as follow: ‘I was brought into existence with no choice/ And life only made me more perplexed/ We parted from the world with reluctance/ and we shan’t get what was the point of it all.

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insignificance sub specie aeternitatis. Words disappear and, in Kafka’s dark words, our ‘written

kisses never reach their destination; the ghosts drink them up along the way’.17

However, whereas Khayyam’s solution to the problem of life can be summarized pithily in the

principle of ‘Carpe diem’, Taylor’s suggestion is that the point of life is nothing but living and if

one has the ‘interest’, ‘passion’, and ‘the will’ to live life to the same extent his life will be

meaningful. ‘The meaning of life’, Taylor suggests, ‘is from within us, it is not bestowed from

without’ (Taylor 2008:142). In other words, from an objective point of view, one fails to find a

cosmic meaning and purpose for life, but from an individual point of view one’s activities in life

can be meaningful as long as and to the extent that there is a level of engagement, commitment,

and strong desire to undertake them. From a cosmic point of view, Sisyphus’ life and his eternal

stone rolling is the epitome of a meaningless life, but from the point of view of Sisyphus himself

as long as he is interested in doing so, he is living a meaningful life. Note that here Taylor refers

to meaning in the particular sense. For Taylor, one’s activities in life can be meaningful but I

think this meaning is more like an anesthetic, something that, at least temporarily, keeps you

away from the ultimate truth of life, which is its meaninglesness from an objective view.

Taylor’s view reminds one of Hans Schnier, the main character in Heinrich Boll’s The Clown,

where he writes of different solutions to the problem of his life: ‘There is one temporarily effective remedy: alcohol; there could be a permanent cure: Marie. Marie has left me’ (Boll

2002: 2). Likewise, Taylor wants to say there is not any permanent remedy and solution for life;

all that there is, is temporary. Marie is gone, hold unto alcohol, to temporary solutions like being

passionate and having a ‘strong desire’ about something.

17 Quoted from Corngold & Wagner 2011:3.

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It is interesting that most scholars in the literature downplay or ignore the background against

which Taylor arrives at his subjectivist theory of life’s meaning.18 If Taylor is right when he

claims that from an objective point of view life is pointless, then, one might wonder how viable

his subjective solution is. Here most of the objections that I raised against Nagel’s account of the

absurd are applicable to Taylor’s view of the meaninglessness of life as well. Taylor, like Nagel,

believes that for life to be meaningful in the cosmic sense there must be an over-arching

justificatory reason for it. However, what Taylor fails to address is so many ways in life we act

with certainty and without any need for justificatory reasons.

The difference between Taylor and Nagel is mostly in their solution to the problem of the absurd.

Whereas Nagel advocates a kind of attitude toward life as a whole and he doesn’t see any reason

for being distressed about the absurdity of life, Taylor’s motto is that ‘the point of any living

thing’s life is, evidently, nothing but life itself’ (2008: 138). Birds migrate every year, because ‘it

is the doing that counts for them, and not what they hope to win by it’ (ibid: 141). By the same

token, most humans grow up, marry, make some children, build, retire, and die because ‘it is the

doing that counts for them’, because they have a will and passion and desire to do all these things

and that would give their lives meaning and purpose. In other words, as long as one is

subjectively committed to life, it doesn’t matter that objectively life lacks meaning.

Taylor’s theory can also be criticized apart from its pessimistic background, and as a subjectivist

theory. One puzzling feature of this theory is that based on this view the more I show

commitment to something the more meaningful my life becomes. However, I am not sure

whether my life will become more meaningful if I commit myself to any random thing, say,

18 It seems to me that we can make a distinction between two types of subjectivism: pessimist subjectivism like Taylor (2008) and optimist subjectivism like Frankfurt (2004).

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computer games. As Cooper suggests, ‘No one concerned whether his or her purposes mattered

could be persuaded by being told “See how much you’ve invested in them!”’ (Cooper 2005:

128). The idea that life’s meaning is a function of one’s subjective desires and passions is

incoherent since it is based on some principles that are not subjective at all. Let me explain it. A

subjectivist claims that the source of life’s meaning cannot be supernatural or based on some

features of natural world, which are objectively valuable, and that when someone judges her life

to be meaningful, what we see in her life is nothing but the presence of some commitments and

interest in something. Now, think of an agnostic who comes to accept Pascal’s wager and

decides to regulate his life as though God as the ultimate source of meaning exists. That is, he

finds meaning not in his subjective attraction to the idea of betting over the existence of God, but

in virtue of a desperate leap of faith. In this situation, if the subjectivist is right, the agnostic’s

‘passionate commitment’ to the idea of living in accordance to the will of assumed God should

naturally confer meaning on his life. However, it seems that if the subjectivist accepts that the

agnostic’s life is meaningful, he denies one of the premises of his argument for subjectivism of

meaning, which states that the source of meaning is not supernatural. On the other hand, if he

claims that the agnostic’s life is meaningless, he undermines his own claim that meaning is

subjective.

So much for Nagel’s irony and Taylor’s subjectivism. Now, I want to draw a distinction between two kinds of doubts. Philosophical skepticism might seem of interest only to philosophers, but losing one’s certainty in life and doubting the meaning of life is not an anomaly. Some people are indeed prone, albeit provisionally, to what Tolstoy calls ‘the arrest of life’ (2008: 7). We might sometimes feel that we are on the verge of losing our touch with reality, with what happens around us. We all might go through experiences that affect the way

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we evaluate things and correspond to them. ‘Experience’, James Joyce writes, ‘had embittered his heart against the world’ (Joyce 1995: 53). That is to say, certain experiences might put us in a situation in which we cease to trust the world. Consequently, we ‘cannot go on with the old language-game any further’ (Wittgenstein 1975: § 617). I think this type of doubt is categorically different from the philosophical skepticism that Wittgenstein criticizes in On

Certainty. In the next and final section, I examine three views about the source of philosophical skepticism discussed by three philosophers, Wittgenstein, Franz Rosenzweig, and Cavell. I think Wittgenstein’s idea of ‘indifference’, Rosenzweig’s notions of the ‘sick’ and the

‘healthy’ mind and ‘fear to live’, and Cavell’s distinction between ‘knowledge’ and

‘acknowledgment’, provide fresh insights into the nature of philosophical skepticism and thus enable us to distinguish it from existential doubts.

Indifference, Fear, and Failure: Wittgenstein, Rosenzweig, and Cavell on Philosophical Skepticism

In A Treatise of Human Nature, David Hume describes, at the end of his discussion of what justifies belief, his own experiences in dealing with the effects of skepticism on his life. The similarity between Hume and Wittgenstein on the significance of the ordinary life is striking.19

Hume writes,

Most fortunately it happens, that since reason is incapable of dispelling these clouds,

nature herself suffices to that purpose, and cures me of this philosophical melancholy

19 Cf. Drury 1984: 95-96.

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and delirium, either by relaxing this bent of mind, or by some avocation, and lively

impression of my senses, which obliterates all these chimeras. I dine, I play a game of

backgammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends; and when after three or four

hours amusement, I would return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and

strained, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any farther

(Hume 1968: Book I, part 4: § 7).

Philosophical skepticism is seen here as an illness that can only be cured in the ‘stream of life’.

Intellectually, Hume feels that he needs to find a foundation for his beliefs, otherwise his belief

would be groundless. However, as soon as he returns to his day-to-day life all the ‘urge’

(Wittgenstein 1958:§ 109), ‘disquietude’ (ibid:§ 111), and ‘mental cramp’ (Wittgenstein 1969:

1) to do philosophy and find a foundation for our beliefs disappears. In other words, in ordinary

circumstances his attitude toward life is of certainty and not doubt. Or, to be precise, in

ordinary life ‘absence of doubt belongs to the essence of the language-game’ (Wittgenstein

1975: § 370).

Likewise, as I said earlier, Wittgenstein believes our forms of expressions and the way we

interact in life do not stand in need of any justification; they are there ‘like our life’

(Wittgenstein 1975: § 559). In a sense, doubt is seen as an anomaly in the stream of life.

Humans, for Wittgenstein, are not skeptical animals; they are ‘primitive beings’ to whom one

‘grants instinct but not ratiocination’ (ibid: § 475). On Certainty provides a naturalistic account

of life and meaning. By ‘naturalistic’, I mean the idea that we naturally lead our lives with a certainty and trust that is so fundamental that no ‘ratiocination’ can undermine it. In

Wittgenstein’s words, ‘The squirrel does not infer by induction that it is going to need stores next winter as well. And no more do we need a law of induction to justify our actions or our

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predictions’ (ibid: § 287). It is from this perspective that Wittgenstein criticizes skepticism,

especially with regard to our interactions with others, as something ‘foreign’ (Wittgenstein

1990: § 566) or ‘perverse’ (1975: § 524). We do not need proof or an act of inference to attend

to someone’s pain; we simply react. As Wittgenstein says, ‘It is a help here to remember that it

is a primitive reaction to tend, to treat, the part that hurts when someone else is in pain; and not

merely when oneself is’ (1990: § 540). One might wonder what would be more perverse than

watching someone writhing in pain and merely contemplating whether their pain is identical

with the kind one feels oneself. In specific circumstances, like when a doctor asks whether one is in pain to make sure the anesthetic is working, doubt makes sense.

But the philosophical question whether someone else is in pain is completely different;

it is not doubt about each individual in a particular case. [. . .] Do we encounter this

doubt in everyday life? No. But maybe something which is remotely related:

indifference toward other people’s expression of pain (Wittgenstein 1998a: §§239-40).

A skeptic’s statement that ‘his pains are hidden from me’ is as awkward as saying that ‘these sounds are hidden from my eyes’ (ibid: § 888). Wittgenstein’s point is that skepticism might emerge as a result of ‘indifference’ toward human suffering. In this view, we might say, the problem of skepticism has less to do with the ‘intellect’ and more with ‘the will’ (Wittgenstein

1980: 17). The above remarks are highly pertinent to the question of life’s meaning because they refer to a mode of being in the world, or, rather, a mode of failing to appreciate the world.

However, even a skeptic hopes, fights, believes or seeks shelter without thinking that ‘they stand in need of justification’. In other words, the certainty of life is there; the skeptic only tries

to give an attitude to it by adopting a ‘way of speaking’ (Wittgenstein 1975: §524). That is, even a skeptic’s or nihilist’s life consists in his ‘being content to accept many things’ (ibid: §

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344) even though he is not willing to acknowledge it. Most of us might find a skeptical position

‘queer’ or incomprehensible, but it wouldn’t remain so when we realize that skepticism relies heavily on a picture of the world and feeds on it. I am referring to the picture of viewing life from above that even Wittgenstein himself in his earlier philosophy could not resist, to the extent that he founded his whole Tractarian ethics based on the ideal of viewing the world ‘sub specie aeternitatis’. This picture holds nihilists captive and forces a way of seeing that seems irresistible. Viewing life as a whole, a nihilist cannot help seeing the ultimate death, suffering, injustice, and flaws that characterize humanity but the more he searches the less he sees any purpose or point. He becomes convinced that the vicissitudes of life happen without any

‘rhyme or reason’ (Nielsen 2005: 147) and that the whole feast of life is absurd. Thus, as he is philosophizing, he realizes that the inertial force of everyday life, his certainty in life, is fading away because he can’t help seeing that things are not as they appear and that behind a sensible order stands the chaos of life.

On the other hand, a person who is not ‘in the grip’ of this picture of the world might find these

‘speculations’ very melancholic. To use Hume’s expressions quoted above, an ordinary person would react to not only ‘philosophical melancholy’ of the skeptic or nihilist but also to the anti- skeptic’s ‘strained’ and ‘ridiculous’ way of arguing against skepticism. Wittgenstein alludes to this when he writes,

I am sitting with a philosopher in the garden; he says again and again ‘I know that that’s

a tree’, pointing to a tree that is near us. Someone else arrives and hears this, and I tell

him: ‘This fellow isn’t insane. We are only doing philosophy . . .’ (Wittgenstein 1975: §

467).

In ordinary circumstances this kind of philosophizing stands in need of justification because in

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everyday life we don’t see the point of doing philosophy the way it is described above and we

feel that, in Rosenzweig’s words, in these situations ‘common sense is crippled by a stroke’

(Rosenzweig 1999: 42).

Franz Rosenzweig’s little book, Understanding the Sick and the Healthy, provides an account

of philosophical confusions and skepticism which is strikingly similar to Wittgenstein’s later

philosophy.20 Rosenzweig starts by making a distinction between ‘common sense’ and

‘philosophy’ and views philosophy as a deviation from ‘common sense’. Most of us, for

Rosenzweig, every now and again wonder at life as a whole but our wonder is ‘finally

enveloped in the stream of time’ and ‘it vanishes as naturally as it appeared’ (Rosenzweig

1999: 40). To wonder, we have to ‘pause’. But we can’t remain ‘still’; we are ‘adrift on the

‘river Life’. We wonder at the world but afterwards we go on living and hence the ‘numbness’

(ibid.) caused by our wonder passes.

However, while most people go on with the ‘stream of life’, the philosopher ‘is unwilling to

accept the process of life and the passing of the numbness that wonder has brought’ and ‘he

insists on a solution immediately. . . . He separates his experience of wonder from the

continuous stream of life’ (ibid.). In other words, he doesn’t ‘permit’ his wonder to vanish into

the flow of life and tries to continue viewing the world as a whole as if from above. Therefore,

the whole world becomes the object of a thinking subject that is the philosopher. It is from this stance that the philosopher asks ‘What then actually is?’ In a passage similar to Wittgenstein’s

20 Rosenzweig published his book in 1921, one year before the Tractatus was published. The first philosopher who drew attentions to the affinity between the two philosophers, to my knowledge, was Hilary Putnam in his introduction to Rosenzweig’s book. What is surprising is that both philosophers appeal to very similar wordings and arguments to attack ‘essentialism’; notions such as the ‘stream of life’, ‘therapy’, philosophy as an ‘illness’, the significance of ‘the ordinary’ and ‘everyday life’, etc. However, no biographical document shows that Wittgenstein had read Rosenzweig.

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view in Philosophical Investigations, Rosenzweig writes,

A thing receives a character of its own only within the flow of life. The question, ‘what

is this actually?’, detached from time, deprived of it, quickly passes through the

intermediary stage of the general terms and comes into the pale region of the mere

thing. Thus emerges the concept of the one and only substance, the ‘essential’ nature of

things (ibid: 41).

But no one in everyday life, according to Rosenzweig, talks about essence – when things are serious, even the philosopher refrains from asking it. The philosopher ‘does not court his beloved in proper terms of essence’ because ‘terms of life are not “essential” but “real”; they concern not “essence” but “fact”’ (ibid: 42). But in spite of this the philosopher’s main concern is still finding the essence. This is exactly where the philosopher ‘parts company’ with the ordinary ‘common sense’:

The philosopher, suspicious, retreats from the flow of reality into the protected circle of

his wonder; slowly he submerges to the depths, to the reign of essences. Nothing can

disturb him here. He is safe. Why should he concern himself with the crowd of ‘non-

essences?’ (ibid.).

Rosenzweig warns us of the philosophical tendencies that we all might have and says we all might ‘trip over’ ourselves and follow the trial of philosophy. ‘No man is so healthy’,

Rosenzweig has it, ‘as to be immune from an attack of this disease’ (ibid.). In other words, I might say, every man’s ‘common sense’ can be crippled by the stroke of doing philosophy.

Rosenzweig compares the philosopher who is struck by essential questions with a ‘bedridden patient’ who is unable to attend to the necessities of life. ‘What happened to him?’ Rosenzweig

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asks. Yesterday he was walking and enjoying the fruit of the tree that lined his way,

‘exchanging friendly words with comrades on his journey’ (ibid: 43). Then suddenly

bewilderment seized him. The pace of life lost its rhythm and the philosopher began to

question every aspect of life and doubt ‘life’s purpose’ (ibid: 45).

However, in ordinary circumstances, according to Rosenzweig, the tendency to doubt is rare. It

is even less frequent in the processes of ‘cognition’, that is, ‘in cognitive acts of everyday life’.

In fact, in ‘practical life no one gives up his intention to buy butter merely because he is unable

to prove that the butter he wishes to buy and the butter on sale are identical. The single

exception to this is the philosopher, but even he carefully restricts his meditations to theory’

(ibid: 52-3). This is similar to Wittgenstein’s emphasis on the certainty with which we act in

everyday life without feeling that it needs justification.

The affinity between Wittgenstein and Rosenzweig is striking when the latter discusses the

methods of providing a ‘therapy’ to ‘cure’ the sick skeptic who is crippled by the force of his philosophical hankering after essence.21 Wittgenstein’s therapy consists in attention to ordinary

language and searching for the grammar of propositions in everyday life, and, likewise,

Rosenzweig suggests we should return to ‘common sense’ and the ordinary. However, both

philosophers insist that their therapy cannot be forced. As Rosenzweig says, if we want the

therapy ‘to be effective, it must be part of living experience’ (ibid: 56). According to both

philosophers, ‘everyday life [. . .] cannot possibly be ignored; one cannot exist entirely in the

sublime realm of theory, no matter how “essential” it may seem when compared to dull,

tedious reality’ (ibid.).

21 Cf. Wittgenstein 1958: § 133.

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Rosenzweig makes it clear that his target is not only skepticism but also any theory that assumes that ‘it’s possible for something to exist beyond reality. Reality, matter, nature, are all terms denoting ‘essence’ and are just as unacceptable as “spirit” or “idea”’ (ibid: 57), because all claim to be either reality itself or the essence of reality and all abstract from the stream of life. Philosophers, in Rosenzweig’s view, have sought an imaginary position, a standpoint outside the stream and flow of life. Our tendency to seek for a view of the world and life from

above, as if we are only a spectator and not a participant of it, according to Rosenzweig, stems

from a ‘fear to live’. In Rosenzweig’s striking words,

We have wrestled with the fear to live, with the desire to step outside of the current;

now we may discover that reason’s illness was merely an attempt to elude death. Man,

chilled in the full current of life, sees, like that famous Indian Prince, death waiting for

him. So he steps outside of life. If living means dying, he prefers not to live (ibid: 102).

A therapeutic philosophy like that of Rosenzweig can only release the skeptic from his

paralysis, but it is ‘unable to prevent his death’. Thus, teaching him to live is indeed equal to

teaching him to move toward death. Anyone who ‘withdraws from life’ might think that he has

renounced death or has avoided it. But by doing so one has only ‘foregone life’. And ‘death, instead of being avoided, closes from all sides and creeps into one’s very heart, a petrified heart’ (ibid: 103). Therefore, the only way to restore life is to recognize the ‘sovereignty of death’ and yet to have the strength to meet the ‘small things’ that Goethe once called the

‘demand of the day’ (ibid: 18), which reminds us of Marquard’s ‘little delaying factors’

(1991:44).

What is interesting in Rosenzweig’s account of skepticism is his acknowledgment of the limits of his therapeutic method. As long as fear of death is the source of skepticism, no philosophy

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can bring the skeptic back to the path of life. So, for Rosenzweig, and arguably for

Wittgenstein, the problem of skepticism and withdrawal from the ordinary life is a problem of the ‘will’ and not merely the intellect. Rosenzweig thought the fear of death could be overcome by the love of God and this is why his suggestion concerning acknowledging the presence of

death is of a religious nature. In a sense, Rosenzweig’s philosophy might be seen as a

combination of Tolstoy and Wittgenstein.22 Thus, faith in God and trust in the ordinary

becomes the key element of Rosenzweig’s therapy for the skeptics who are paralyzed, i.e.,

‘bewitched’ (Wittgenstein 1958: § 109) by the claims of their reason.

Rosenzweig’s book, as he also mentions, is not written for philosophers and some of the claims of the book are unjustifiably strong. In a sense, it seems that he provides a simple, or rather one-sided, description of the nature of philosophy and our tendency to find an answer for its questions. However, his emphasis on the ordinariness of life and the limits of theory is very

illuminating and strikingly similar to some key Wittgensteinian ideas that I have been developing so far. Moreover, his emphasis on the appreciation of our ordinary life tasks, and the connections that he makes between skepticism and inability to live highlight the difference between existential doubts and philosophical skepticism, and, interestingly, reminds one of

Marquard. I now attend to Stanley Cavell’s views on skepticism.

In his groundwork, The Claim of Reason, Stanley Cavell provides a different insight into epistemic skepticism and its implications for one’s way of living in the world. According to

Cavell, the truth of skeptical claims concerning the existence of the world and of the other

22 Not that Rosenzweig was under the influence of Wittgenstein. Rosenzweig died in 1929 and by then Wittgenstein was in his Tractarian conception of the world. This fact rules out any possibility of their influence upon each other while Rosenzweig was alive.

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minds cannot be denied. However, this is not because we actually ‘don’t know’, for example,

that the external world exists or that someone is in pain. In everyday life, Cavell has it, our

relation to other people and to the surrounding circumstances of our lives is not about

‘knowing’ or ‘not knowing’. Rather, in everyday life we simply ‘acknowledge’ other people

and the world. Our duty is not to provide some arguments or theories, as Moore does, to prove

the existence of other minds or the world, but simply to acknowledge them in the way we live.

And this acknowledgment has something to do with our ‘will’ and not merely our ‘intellect’; it

is not something one can systemize. It is a way of seeing the world; it is a matter of aspect-

seeing as I discussed in Chapter Three. Therefore, the skeptic is suffering from a grave aspect- blindness toward the other’s existence and not from an epistemic lacuna. Cavell follows

Wittgenstein by asserting that skepticism might be the function of ‘indifference’ toward the

existence of the other.

The block to my vision of the other is not the other’s body but my incapacity or

unwillingness to interpret or to judge it accurately, to draw the right connection. The

suggestion is: I suffer a kind of blindness, but I avoid the issue by projecting this

darkness upon the other (Cavell 1979: 369).

This kind of blindness is indeed a case of ‘soul-blindness’ (ibid: 378), or a kind of ‘illiteracy’

(ibid: 369). The skeptic fails to acknowledge and to see an aspect of human life because he

hasn’t acquired the necessary ‘education’ for it:

Aspect-blindness is something in me failing to dawn. It is a fixation. In terms of the

myth of reading the physiognomy, this would be thought of as a kind of illiteracy; a

lack of education (ibid.).

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Likewise, the skeptic is indeed alluding to a truth when he claims that ‘nothing matters’ (Hare

1981: 242, Nagel 2008: 143). However, in our everyday life what is called for is not knowing the truth of skepticism but acknowledging the presence of the world and the other. The man who is writhing in pain needs us to attend to his pain and thus to acknowledge it; mere viewing the world sub specie aeternitatis would not help. The problem of skepticism and the consequent paralysis of life is that it doubts our knowledge of the world where the only thing that matters is the acknowledgment of it.

The skeptic might retort that, after all, maybe Cavell is aspect-blind to the truth of skepticism and, so, the question arises of why should we think Cavell’s way of seeing should be preferred to that of the skeptic. One answer would be to suggest that in fact Cavell accepts the ‘truth’ of skepticism but his point is that our modes of being in the world and living with others are not merely based on ‘knowledge’. Rather, we usually acknowledge the existence of the world by our actions. Cavell’s claim is that the skeptic is aspect-blind to this fundamental aspect of human life.

Rosenzweig compares skepticism to ‘paralysis’ and Cavell compares it to ‘fixation’ and by these comparisons they both try to highlight something crucial about skepticism, that skepticism only interrupts the course of everyday life where ‘actuality’ and ‘trust’ meet. Cavell alludes to this when he writes, ‘When myth and actuality cannot live together happily – when you keep wondering too much, say, about where rules come from, then you have stopped living the myth’ (Cavell 1979: 366). By the same token, when a skeptic keeps doubting and wondering and searching for the ultimate answers he stops displaying a fundamental trust in life.

As we see now, one can find some overlapping similarities between these three philosophers

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that I discussed in this section. All of these philosophers, that is, Rosenzweig, Wittgenstein,

and Cavell, show what could be at stake when one philosophizes. In Cavell’s words,

‘philosophers, being human beings, fail to recognize the bits of madness or emptiness they are

subject to under the pressure of taking thought’ (ibid: 336). Whether skepticism is a result of

‘indifference’ (Wittgenstein), ‘fear to live’ (Rosenzweig), or ‘incapacity’ to acknowledge the

other (Cavell), there is a point that all three philosophers try to highlight, namely that there is a

fundamental connection between cutting ourselves from the stream of life and leaning toward a

skeptical attitude. This, in turn, shows in an important sense the difference between

philosophical skepticism and existential doubts. We should keep in mind that not all types of

doubts are philosophical. ‘Sufferings of various sorts’ (Wittgenstein 1980: 86) can lead one to

a position in which one ceases to trust in the world; and there are such people who are shattered

by the vicissitudes of life, and yet struggle to keep their world-pictures intact. But, certainly,

their doubts are not concerned with the existence of the external world or other minds; rather,

what is at stake in their doubts is their world-pictures. If a person constantly fails in his romantic relationships, no matter how much he tries, he might come to a belief, á la Virginia

Woolf, that ‘human experiences are incommunicable and that’s the reason for human

loneliness’, but it is unlikely of him to doubt whether the other’s pain is as genuine as his. Or, a

war survivor might doubt whether the world is a safe place to raise a child but it is unlikely of

him to become an anti-natalist.

Conclusion

In this chapter, I critically examined some skeptical theories of life’s meaning by appealing to,

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mainly, Wittgenstein’s On Certainty. I argued that Nagel’s nihilism feeds on the assumption that we can step outside of life and see it, as it were, from above. But what he fails to address is the implications of such a view for one’s relation with others in life. If I have the capacity to realize that life as a whole is ‘insignificant’, by the same token, I should have the capacity to believe the other’s suffering is, after all, insignificant, a position that I find morally repugnant.

As Cavell says, ‘if it makes sense to speak of seeing human beings as human beings, then it makes sense to imagine that a human being may lack the capacity to see human beings as human beings’ (1979: 378).

Nagel’s account of the meaning of life suffers from the same naive idealism that Wittgenstein once suffered from in his Tractarian philosophy: The assumption that human beings can ‘trip over’ (Rosenzweig 1999: 42) themselves and view life from above and then throw away the ladder with which they have climbed up to the ideal position. Nagel might object that in his view we return to the ordinary life after seeing the world aright; but the question remains how can one take an ironic stance toward life and yet return genuinely to the stream of life?

From a Wittgensteinian perspective, there is a ‘home’ (Wittgenstein 1958: § 116) for the question of life’s meaning. That is, no one asks it out of the blue: the question ‘What can confer meaning on life?’ emerges in the midst of life. When someone writes about his

‘frustrated longing’ (Wittgenstein 1980: 44), when a young girl feels that ‘all the seas of the world tumbled about her heart’ (Joyce 1995: 37), or when a believer confesses, ‘Our hearts are restless till they find rest in Thee’ (Augustine 1991: 32), they all, in a sense, think of the meaning of life in its ‘original home’, which is ‘everyday’ life. In the next chapter, I propose an alternative to the current approaches in the literature. I draw attention to ‘the human voice’

(Cavell 1994: 58), an aspect that is missing in the literature. By this, I mean I want to move

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away from the ‘metaphysical voice’ (ibid: 59) and return to our ‘dear and ordinary’

(Wittgenstein 1975: § 347) voice. I will attend next to these people and their voices when they think of the meaning of life.

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Chapter Six

The Human Voice: Confession as the Grammar of the Question of

Life’s Meaning

‘In the same town were two men, one rich, the other poor. The rich man had flocks and herds in great abundance; the poor man had nothing but a ewe lamb, only a single little one, which he had bought. He fostered it and it grew up with him and his children, eating his bread, drinking from his cup, sleeping in his arms; it was like a daughter to him. When a traveller came to stay, the rich man would not take anything from his own flock or herd to provide for the wayfarer who had come to him. Instead, he took the poor man’s lamb and prepared that for his guest’.

2 Samuel, 12: 1-5

Introduction

So far I have addressed a range of topics. In the first two chapters, I discussed the Tractarian fact/value dichotomy and its implications for one’s understanding of the meaning of life. The

Tractarian view draws the limits of ‘what can be said’ to highlight what we must ‘pass over in silence’ (Wittgenstein 1966: § 7). It warns us against any attempt to theorize our understanding of the meaning of life and claims that to theorize value is to misunderstand, first, the nature of our language and, second, the nature of value. I suggested that, ironically, the Tractatus itself

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misunderstand the logic of our language and the way it ‘meshes with life’ and I argued that the

Tractarian view, in an important sense, is aspect-blind to the communal nature of human life and the ways we use propositions of value in our everyday life. In Chapter Three, I argued that the notions of ‘aspect-seeing’ and ‘aspect-blindness’ have far reaching implications for one’s understanding of the meaning of life. The conventional theories of the meaning of life most often fail to change my conception of life’s meaning because first, they do not lead to the dawning of new aspects on me and, consequently, I fail to see those aspects. The difference between an objectivist and a supernaturalist is not only in the former’s belief in some meaning- conferring values independent of God. Rather, the difference lies in a whole ‘way of seeing the world’. And as I suggested in Chapter Five, this whole ‘way of seeing the world’ might be called ‘world-picture’, which, in turn, suggests that one’s conception of life’s meaning is far more fundamental than what is perceived among most scholars in the literature. Furthermore, I elaborated some specific themes related to the notion of the ordinary in the next chapters. So, in Chapter Four, I analyzed some exclusivist theories of ‘great meaning’ in life and I argued that these theories are based on a ‘one-sided diet’ and that the boundaries between ‘great’ and

‘ordinary’ are hard to define. And in Chapter Five, I highlighted some key elements of

Wittgenstein’s On Certainty and applied them mainly to the literature on Nihilism. The significance of certainty in our life is an issue that has not received due attention in the literature. By discussing the notions of ‘trust’, ‘world-pictures’ and ‘groundlessness of our believing’ I tried to show how a fundamental ‘trust’ runs through our ordinary life and that the phenomenon of life and the phenomenon of meaning are not two separate things; rather, we live and swallow meaning down together with the act of living. This view is in sharp contrast to the skeptical views in the literature that believe the act of living needs justification and since

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we fail to justify our actions, life is meaningless (Nagel).

In a sense, my discussions have been some variations on a single theme: The limits of theory.

So far, the common, underlying theme has been the non-theoretical nature of a Wittgensteinian approach toward the question of life’s meaning. The absence of Wittgenstein in the literature has to do with the nature of his philosophy: Wittgenstein’s philosophy does not offer a general theory of life’s meaning. It only proposes alternative ways of approaching the question. In this regard, a Wittgensteinian approach toward the conventional theories of the meaning of life is negative in that it does not try to dispute those theories by providing yet another theory. Rather, the objective is to bring about a change in our ‘way of looking at things’ (Wittgenstein 1958: §

144). Wittgenstein’s ideas, according to Shotter,

are written in the form of ‘striking similes’ and ‘arresting moments’ – they have a

‘poetic quality’, their function is to change our ‘way of looking at things’ (Shotter 1997:

1).

Similarly, in this chapter my aim is to draw attention to what I think is a significant aspect of our enquiry into the meaning of life, and to suggest a change in our ‘way of looking’ when we

address the nature of life’s meaning. I argue that a Wittgensteinian approach toward the

meaning of life is concerned with ‘the grammar’ of the meaning of life and I suggest that in our

everyday life the grammar of the question of life’s meaning is most often confessional. In the

next section, I discuss this idea in more detail by referring to various texts. Afterwards, I address possible objections to my suggestion. Next, I shall discuss two examples of a confessional approach, that is, Joyce’s description of the life of Mr Chandler in one of his short stories in Dubliners and Wittgenstein’s ‘private conversations’ with himself. Furthermore, I show that only a confessional approach can provide a convincing account of the apparent

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inconsistency in Wittgenstein’s reflections on the meaning of life in his diaries.

The Grammar of the Question

In Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein writes of the ordinary life as the benchmark by which we are to evaluate concepts and words. ‘When philosophers use a word’, Wittgenstein writes, ‘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?’ (1958: § 116). In this view, the ‘original home’ of words is their ‘everyday use’ (ibid.) and not their

‘metaphysical’ applications. What Wittgenstein calls the ‘grammar’ of language-game, refers to the applications and uses of them in ordinary language and everyday life. Therefore, from a

Wittgensteinian perspective, the main question with regard to the meaning of life should be:

What is (are) the grammar(s) of the question of life’s meaning? In what circumstances do we appeal to the term ‘meaning of life’? Wittgenstein, obviously, undermines any attempt to provide any theory of the meaning of life in that it fails to provide a ‘perspicuous’ understanding of the relation between life and meaning. However, this is not to deny that people do talk about the meaning of life in the course of their lives. The mere emergence of the question of life’s meaning is not a sign of philosophical confusion. Rather, one’s approach to finding an answer defines whether one is philosophically confused or not.

In what follows, I propose that in our everyday life the grammar of the question of life’s meaning is mostly confessional. To be clear, by ‘confessional’ I do not want to attach any religious connotations to the meaning of the word. I take confession here to be any type of declaration that is meant to express one’s attitude toward (one’s) life. That is, it is an activity in

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which one shares or describes one’s understanding of life, whether it is directed at life as a whole or only an aspect of it. So, to be clear, I try to describe the confessionality of our enquiry into the meaning of life and my aim is not to explain the conditions of a meaningful life.

In Philosophical Grammar Wittgenstein writes, ‘The use of a word in the language is its meaning. Grammar describes the use of words in the language. So it has somewhat the same relation to the language as the description of a game, the rules of a game, have to the game’

(1974: 60). In fact, in Wittgenstein’s later works the main aim of the conceptual analysis of any given word is to find its grammar. Grammar determines the meaning of a word. The significance of the concept of grammar in Wittgenstein’s later philosophy is to the extent that he writes, ‘Essence is expressed by grammar’ (1958: § 371), though he rejects any kind of essentialism with regard to meaning. One of the main sources of our philosophical confusions,

Wittgenstein has it, is that we don’t have a clear view of the grammar of our language. And philosophical problems will be solved not by providing new theories but by a ‘perspicuous representation’ of the grammar of our language-games. ‘Grammar is the account books of language. They must show the actual transactions of language’ (1974: 87). Wittgenstein even goes as far as to say that ‘Grammar tells what kind of object anything is. (Theology as grammar)’ (1958: § 373).

Now, how are we to understand the grammar of the question of life’s meaning? From a

Wittgensteinian perspective, the answer is straightforward: ‘Look and see’ (ibid: § 66) how the phrase ‘the meaning of life’ is used in everyday life. In other words, I propose that the essence of the meaning of life lies in its grammar and a ‘perspicuous representation’ of the contexts in which we contemplate the meaning of life, reveals the grammar of the meaning of life.

Therefore, the question is: What do we observe when we examine the contexts in which we

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reflect the meaning of life or talk about it in everyday life? What are the ‘family resemblances’

(ibid: § 67) between people’s construal of the meaning of life? To answer these questions I turn

to various texts including Wittgenstein’s diaries, which I think provide insight into the nature

of our quest for the meaning of life.

One recurrent theme in Wittgenstein’s diaries is the relation between one’s way of living and

the meaning ascribed to it. Even though he is more concerned with the religious solution to the

problem of life and its implications for his life, his contemplations are indeed an instance of a

human’s struggle to give a sense to his life and, thus, they are pertinent to the discussion of

life’s meaning.1 As he writes,

A religious question is either a question of life or it is (empty) chatter, this language

game – one could say – gets played only with questions of life. Much like the word

“ouch” does not have any meaning – except as a scream of pain. I want to say: if

eternal bliss means nothing for my life, my way of life, then I don’t have to rack my

brain about it; if I am to rightfully think about it, then what I think must stand in a

precise relation to my life (Wittgenstein 2003: 211).

Another pervasive element in Wittgenstein’s Koder diaries is the interlocking relation between

the question of religion and the question of life. In other words, religious utterances and

tendencies get their meaning from their connections to the believer’s life. Throughout his life,

Wittgenstein kept his fundamental idea that philosophy is not a ‘body of doctrine’

1 In this chapter, I mostly refer to the so-called Koder diaries from the 1930s. The importance of Wittgenstein’s diaries lies in the intimate connections between his philosophical thoughts and his life. Wittgenstein writes, ‘The movement of thought in my philosophizing should be discernible also in the history of my mind, of its moral concepts and in the understanding of my situation’ (Wittgenstein 2003: 133). For more on the Koder diaries see James C. Klagge’s and Alfred Nordmann’s preface in Wittgenstein 2003: 3-7.

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(Wittgenstein 1966: § 4.112) or of theses. It should only free us from confusions of thought, which deprive us from appreciation of life. It should free us from our intellectual ‘prisons’ or bewitchment. ‘The aim of philosophy’, Wittgenstein writes, ‘is to shew the fly the way out of the fly-bottle’ (1958: § 309). As with regard to religious questions, he constantly maintained the idea that an ‘anthropological’ philosophy only tries to ‘describe’ human forms of life and does not ‘explain’ them. For example, consider Kierkegaard’s philosophy. One way to approach his philosophy is to argue that his philosophy is based on some ‘incoherent’ and speculative arguments, which fail to provide any proof for their claims and thus it is nonsense.

According to Wittgenstein, however, characterizing his ‘longing for the transcendent’

(Wittgenstein 1980: 15) as incoherent or nonsensical is to misunderstand the entire point because his philosophy represents a way of ‘looking at things’, a way of living, and our approach should aim at understanding his life. That is, if we are to understand his beliefs, we have to understand his life. As James Conant writes, ‘whether someone’s belief is (properly termed) religious will show up in the way it informs the entire character of that individual’s life’ (Conant 1995: 266). The life of the believer, in this view, is considered as the key to understand his belief:

To be an apostle is a life. In part it expresses itself in what he says, but not in that it is

true but in that he says it. Suffering for the idea defines him but here, too, it holds that

the meaning of the sentence ‘this one is an apostle’ lies in the mode of its verification.

To describe an apostle is to describe a life (Wittgenstein 2003: 81-3).

That is, the life of the believer defines her belief. Wittgenstein raises a similar point when he comments on Kierkegaard’s philosophy: ‘On Kierkegaard: I represent a life for you and now see how you relate to it, whether it tempts (urges) you to live like that as well, or what other

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relation to it you attain’ (ibid.).2 The believer might seem to provide some arguments for her

beliefs but in fact she is offering a ‘solution’ to the problem of life as she lives it. The duty of

the philosopher is to search for the grammar of these beliefs in the believer’s life, which are the

applications of these beliefs on the believer’s life. Her beliefs are incoherent and nonsensical

when they are cut off from the context of her life; the duty of the philosopher is to track them

in their original context, i.e., their ‘original home’ (Wittgenstein 1958: § 115). And religious

belief, in its original home, is seen as a way of approaching life, a way of expressing oneself.

This shows the connection between one’s understanding of the meaning of life and its effects

on one’s way of living:

How can I know what I would envision as the only acceptable image of a world order if

I lived differently. I can’t judge that. After all, another life shifts completely different

images into the foreground, necessitates completely different images. Just like trouble

teaches prayer. That does not mean that through the other life one will necessarily

change one’s opinions. But if one lives differently, one speaks differently. With a new

life one learns new language games (Wittgenstein 2003: 169).

Note that in none of the above remarks by Wittgenstein is he concerned with the incoherence

of the arguments for religious claims. He only focuses on their bearings on the lives of the

believers, since this is the only way one can have a clear view of the grammar of religious

beliefs. A genuine believer says, ‘this is how I see the world’, ‘this is how I found the world’.

Interestingly, all the thinkers who had an influence on Wittgenstein’s views of religion take

similar approaches toward the question of religion and the question of life. I submit they were

2 For more on the relation between one’s belief and one’s life, see also Wittgenstein 2003: 155, 212-13, 217, 223, 241.

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all confessional thinkers. That is, they are not apologetic philosophers who think beliefs stand

in need of justification. Augustine, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and William James share a similar

confessional attitude toward religious beliefs. In a sense, the most important influence of these

thinkers on Wittgenstein’s understanding of religion was not necessarily their world-pictures

but, rather, the confessional method of their presentation. Wittgenstein found the confessional

method enormously attractive and despite his own incapacity to live like a genuine believer, so

I suggest, he acquired their method and applied it to his philosophy.3

A number of philosophers have addressed the affinity between Philosophical Investigations

and the confessional tradition.4 While Thompson (2000) tries to highlight the affinities between Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations and Augustine’s Confessions in terms of their methods, M. W. Rowe links Wittgenstein’s later philosophy to the confessional aspects of

‘German Romanticism’ (Rowe 1994: 327). Moreover, I think Cavell (1976, 1979) was the first philosopher who drew attention to the confessional dimension of Investigations. What is common in these readings is that they both take confession to be a matter of describing and sharing one’s way of life. In Thompson’s reading of Cavell’s reading of Wittgenstein, ‘in talking about ordinary language, in talking about what we say, I am inevitably saying something about myself, about what I say’ (Thompson 2000: 3). Likewise, Rowe suggests, ‘a confession is not [. . .] a work of reasoning, but of memory, self-scrutiny and interpretation’

3 I think Wittgenstein’s famous remark to Drury should be viewed from this perspective. Wittgenstein said to Drury: ‘I am not a religious man but I cannot help seeing every problem from a religious point of view’ (Drury 1984:91). Wittgenstein acknowledges his incapacity to enter into a religious life but as a philosopher he can’t help noticing that the believer’s method of seeing the world is highly different from a ‘scientific’ view. For more on this, see Malcolm 2002; Wolgast 2004; Plant 2005: 31-35; Labron 2009. 4 For example, Thompson defends and expands the Cavellian idea that ‘what drives Wittgenstein to the confessional form in the Investigations is analogous to what drives Augustine to the confessional form in his Confessions’ (Thompson 2000: 4).

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(Rowe 1994: 328) and this is what Philosophical Investigations is about. The purpose of confession is not to justify one’s belief but to describe one’s own particular way of seeing the world. ‘Inquietum est cor nostrum’, Augustine writes. The restlessness of our hearts is not an explanation; it is a description of the believer’s life. In Cavell’s words,

In confessing you do not explain and justify, but describe how it is with you. And

confession, unlike dogma, is not to be believed but tested, and accepted or rejected. Nor

is it the occasion for accusation, except of yourself, and, by implication, those who find

themselves in you. There is exhortation [. . .] not to belief, but to self-scrutiny. And that

is why there is virtually nothing in the Investigations which we should ordinarily call

reasoning (Cavell 1976: 71).

Thus, the grammar of confession is to ‘describe’ one’s deeds and one’s beliefs. Likewise, the grammar of the question of life’s meaning, I suggest, is confessional. That is, the confessionality of our enquiry into the meaning of life entails that we describe our lives, and scrutinize our words and deeds. To be clear, I am not referring only to religious believers. I suggest that in everyday life believers and non-believers alike think of the meaning of life in a confessional manner. Augustine’s Confessions, John Stuart Mill’s Autobiography, Rousseau’s

The Confessions, Tolstoy’s A Confession are some examples of this approach toward the meaning of life.

When I suggest that our enquiry into life’s meaning is mostly confessional, I am referring to neither Christian nor Freudian conception of confession. Freud, for example, talks of the

‘curative effect’ of confession and the way it ‘brings to an end the operative force of the idea which was not abreacted in the first instance, by allowing its strangulated effect to find a way out through speech’ (Freud & Breuer 1974: 68). Likewise, there are others like Erik Berggren

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who refer to the ‘cathartic element’ involved in confession and suggest that this element has

been the forcing power behind ‘all literary confessions since Saint Augustine’s confession’

(Berggren 1975: 3). These views of confession, mainly consider it to be a way of coming to

terms with oneself (cf. Brown 1967: 165). That is, in both Christian and Freudian conceptions,

one resolves a conflict either in the soul or in the psychological self.

In the Christian sense of confession, guilt plays a central role. That is, in this view no one

confesses that she has a great and prosperous life filled with love and surrounded with

grandchildren. In the Christian tradition one confesses one’s sins, frailty, shortcomings and

guilt and, as a result, submits oneself to the will of God: Confess and the problem will

disappear! Wittgenstein, for example, alludes to this conception of confession when he writes,

Anyone . . . who has the gift of opening his heart, rather than contracting it, accepts the

means of salvation in his heart. . . . Someone who in this way penitently opens his heart

to God in confession lays it open for other men too. In doing this he loses the dignity

that goes with his personal prestige and becomes like a child. That means without

official position, dignity, or disparity from others. A man can bare himself before others

only out of a particular kind of love. A love which acknowledges, as it were, that we are

all wicked children (1980: 46)

From this perspective, one might say, confession is akin to psychoanalysis.5 Both would lead to the disappearance of the problem. However, by suggesting that contemplating the meaning of life is mostly confessional, I neither claim that there is necessary a cathartic element, spiritually or psychologically, involved, nor suggest that the aim of our confessional enquiry is

5 For the relation between psychoanalytic practices and Christian confession see, Foucault (1980). For an in- depth philosophical study on confession, see Taylor (2009).

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the disappearance of the problem.

I agree that using religiously loaded concepts such as confession might be risky but I accept the

risk of doing so. It is risky because it might imply that one is appealing to religious concepts

without committing oneself to the metaphysical strings attached to them. However, I think it is

prima facie plausible to use the concept of confession because in confession, whether it is

religious or non-religious, one shares how things are with oneself. So, I am primarily

concerned with confession as a sharing activity. This conception of confession neither

presupposes a sense of guilt nor takes it to be only an interpersonal phenomenon. One might

contemplate the meaning of one’s life in one’s diaries, through an artwork or during everyday

activities. In these situations, one usually enters into a dialogue with oneself.

One might object here that we have taken the ‘easy way out’ (Wittgenstein 1958: § 65), that we

talk about all sorts of things but refuse to address the main question, which is the question of

the conditions of life’s meaningfulness. The particular is not the main concern of philosophy since it deals with the universal, and even if we attend to the particular, the aim is to gain knowledge of the universal. So, the main question should be this: ‘What, if anything, can confer meaning on life?’. Moreover, if the grammar of the question of life’s meaning is confessional, then we should accept that all sorts of people can claim that they are indeed describing their way of living. Yellow pages write about the meaning of life; movie stars feel entitled to lecture people about the meaning of life; people write bestseller books on the meaning of life, which simplify the meaning of life for lay people (optimism, exercise, yoga, love, etc.), and none of these have to do with a revealing approach toward the problem of life.

A response to the second objection is to highlight the distinction between dogmatic and properly confessional approaches toward the meaning of life. The fact is that nothing is more

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‘tempting’ than yielding to simplifications, classifications, exclusivism, and self-congratulatory

claims of dogmatic accounts of the meaning of life. While a confessional writer suggests ‘this

is how I live’, a dogmatic writer claims ‘this is how in reality things are’. While a dogmatic approach claims that there is one definite answer to the question of life’s meaning, a confessional approach says, ‘This is how I live with the answer that I’ve found’. A dogmatic approach claims, whereas a confessional approach shares.

We might also say that just because someone is confessing, doesn’t mean its content is any

good. Most dogmatic writers don’t even consider giving the benefit of the doubt to their

readers. ‘There is’, Camus writes, ‘but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is

suicide’ (Camus 2008: 72). Compare Camus’ approach with that of Augustine,

Charity believes all things – all things, that is, which are spoken by those who are

joined as one in charity – and for this reason I, too, O Lord, make my confession aloud

in the hearing of men. For although I cannot prove to them that my confessions are true,

at least I shall be believed by those whose ears are opened to me by charity (Augustine

1966: Book X: III).

That is, the context of confession and the context of dogma differ. Whereas the former, to use

Augustine’s words, relies on trust and ‘charity’, the latter is based on the authority and force of

reasoning and argument. When, for example, Baier rejects God’s purpose theory by arguing

that fulfilling the purpose of God reduces us to some tools and that ‘it is degrading for a man to

be regarded as merely serving a purpose’ (Baier 2008: 101), his argument takes its strength

from the authority of reason. On the other hand, when a person feels she no longer sees the

world religiously and ‘the eternal silence of these infinite spaces’ begins to terrify her, as it did

Pascal once, she arrives at a different understanding of God’s purpose. That is, they arrive at

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the same conclusion from two different routes. The point that I am trying to raise is that in the

course of our lives we have these confessional experiences and that awareness of meaning

arises from them. As if some experiences in life force a picture of the world on us and we narrate it. It emerges from within; we do not even think of proving it. Put differently, I submit, no confessional approach toward the meaning of life can be apologetic. ‘But man exists in this world, where things break, slide about, cause every imaginable mischief. And of course he is one such thing himself’ (Wittgenstein 1980: 71). Things break in this world: bicycles, bones, branches, bonds, and wings, among others; and it is in these contexts that people think of the meaning of life. Or, it is in the context of a family, a reunion, a healing wound, a benevolent heart, a commitment, an open arm and an open door that people think of the value and the meaning of life. That is, the act of life forces meaning upon us.

Wittgenstein writes, ‘Children do not learn that books exist, that armchairs exist, etc. etc., – they learn to fetch books, sit in armchairs, etc. etc.’ (Wittgenstein 1975: § 476). By the same token, I suggest, we don’t learn the meaning of life in theory; we simply live and ‘swallow’ the meaning down, together with living.6 We simply confess and share our lives’ meanings. Of

course philosophers think of a lot of complications related to the question of life’s meaning, but

that doesn’t stop non-philosophers from sharing their meaning of life. James Joyce in his short

story, ‘Two Gallants’, describes the lives of two young men on the streets of Dublin, one of

whom thinks of his life:

He was tired of knocking about, of pulling the devil by the tail, of shifts and intrigues.

He would be thirty-one in November. Would he never get a good job? Would he never

have a home of his own? He thought how pleasant it would be to have a warm fire to sit

6 Cf. Wittgenstein 1975: 143.

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by and a good dinner to sit down to. He had walked the streets long enough with friends

and with girls. He knew what those friends were worth: he knew the girls too.

Experience had embittered his heart against the world (Joyce 1995: 53).

Lenehan, in Joyce’s story, is indeed contemplating his life as a whole and he is describing where he stands in life. He is completely aware of ‘his own poverty of purse and spirit’ (ibid.).

What is interesting in Joyce’s story is that the way he presents Lenehan’s contemplations on his life is precisely the way most of us think of the meaning of our life, namely, through a dialogue with ourselves. In Cavell’s words, it is a dialogue between the ‘voice of temptation’ and the ‘voice of correctness’ (1976: 71). While Lenehan acknowledges that experience has

‘embittered his heart against the world’ (voice of correctness), he still fancies he ‘might yet be able to settle down in some snug corner and live happily if he could only come across some good simple-minded girl with a little of the ready’7 (voice of temptation). We think of what is at stake in living the way we do, of our dignity, and of what we have lost and what we have gained. Memories and experiences: These are the materials with which, for which, we contemplate the meaning of life. ‘One by one,’ Joyce writes, ‘they were all becoming shades.

Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age’ (ibid: 213). These remarks, as they stand in the context of a specific life, do not need any justification, because they are not meant to be some philosophical claims about life. The grounds of these remarks are in the lives masterly described by Joyce, which we read with ‘charity’. When Mr Duffy in another Joyce’s story felt that ‘he was outcast from life’s feast’ (ibid: 109) we understand his point easily as if we have lived him. Anyone who thinks these remarks are metaphorical and artistic and thus devoid of any truth-judgments is among

7 Joyce 1995: 53.

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those ‘people . . . [who] think that scientists exist to instruct them, poets, musicians etc., to give

them pleasure. The idea that these have something to teach them – That does not occur to

them’ (Wittgenstein 1980: 36).

Thus far, I have discussed three aspects of a confessional approach toward the meaning of life,

namely, description instead of explanation, trusting instead of reasoning, and sharing instead of

claiming. I submit the presence of these elements in a confessional approach resonates with

aesthetics. When Cavell describes Philosophical Investigations as a confessional work,

therefore, one might say, it might be viewed as a work with an essential aesthetic dimension as

well. Note that I do not mean that the book is meant to be an artwork; rather, my point is that

the, so to speak, ‘spirit’ of the book is confessional and aesthetic at the same time. I suspect

this was Wittgenstein’s point when he wrote, ‘I think I summed up my attitude to philosophy

when I said: philosophy ought really to be written only as a poetic composition’ (1980: 24).

Wittgenstein’s remark is highly misleading but I think it helps if we put it next to his other

definitions of philosophy.8 ‘In philosophy’, Wittgenstein writes, ‘we do not draw conclusions .

. . Philosophy only states what everyone admits’ (1958: § 599). Likewise, in an aesthetic work,

we view any attempt to impose any definitive conclusion on the reader as a sign of affectation,

superficiality, and pretentiousness. An artwork shows the world to us and leaves the conclusion

to us. That is, we draw conclusions of our own ‘accord’ (Wittgenstein 1980: 64).

So, I think it is clear that when I say a confessional approach toward the meaning of life has affinities with aesthetics, I refer to their methodological affinities. Granted that, I want to draw

8 See, for example, Wittgenstein 1980: 16 (‘Working in philosophy . . . is really more a working on oneself’), 86; Wittgenstein 1958: §§ 109, 124, 126 (‘Philosophy simply puts everything before us, and neither explains nor deduces. – Since everything lies open to view there is nothing to explain. For what is hidden, for example, is of no interest to us’), 128, 133, 309,

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attention to the fact that most artistic works take a confessional stance toward the meaning of life, which are largely absent in the literature on the meaning of life. Ironically, some academic books and papers on the meaning of life begin by enigmatic and moving statements from artists, but one can hardly see any trace of them in the body of philosophers’ works. As if artists have managed to point at something deep about life but from here they should leave it to philosophers to scrutinize and decipher the truth-claims behind symbolic words. An epigraph is usually a sensitive matter for a writer; it indeed betrays the writer’s taste, style, and intellectual orientation. Mottos and epigraphs show something about a book that sometimes a whole book might fail to convey.9 Philosophers who quote artists in their epigraphs must naturally have

seen something significant and illuminating in their words. What is it? An aesthetic epigraph, I

submit, describes what the philosopher tries to justify and explain in her arguments. An

aesthetic epigraph, usually, shares a way of seeing the world that philosophers try to theorize. It is indeed true that sometimes, ‘A poet’s words can pierce us’ (Wittgenstein 1990: § 155).10

One might also object that a philosophical work is categorically different in nature from an

artistic one and the comparison between the two is irrelevant. While the former deals with

reason and providing arguments for one’s claims, the latter is concerned with style and rhetoric

9 Interestingly, searching for an epigraph for his Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein seriously considered using a quotation from King Lear: ‘I’ll teach you differences’. See Monk (1990). However, his final decision was a line taken from Act IV, scene 10 of Nestroy’s play The Protégé. David Stern’s translation of the motto is: ‘Anyway, the thing about progress is that it looks much greater than it really is’ (Stern 2004:58). For an insightful discussion of the significance of Wittgenstein’s motto and its relevance to the book’s content see ibid: 56-71. 10 Wittgenstein writes, ‘A poet’s words can pierce us. And that is of course causally connected with the use that they have in our life. And it is also connected with the way in which, conformably to this use, we let our thoughts roam up and down in the familiar surroundings of the words’ (1990: § 155). These piercing words make our imaginations roam up and down around the words in an attempt to find a way to the words. Our imaginations, then, in the event of penetrating into the words feel at home with words. To put it another way, our thoughts, then, dwell in piercing words.

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and neither the philosopher nor the artist needs to imitate each other. Therefore, a philosophical

work on the meaning of life does not need necessarily to be confessional-aesthetic. A philosophical approach toward the meaning of life is to enquire about the ‘conditions’, or the

‘common element(s) between all meaningful lives. In other words, it is an enquiry about the

‘universal’ not the ‘particular’. As Metz suggests, the aim of philosophers in the literature is to

‘elucidate the sense of claims about the meaning of life and [. . .] to provide theoretical answers to the question of what makes a life meaningful’ (Metz 2002: 782).

Interestingly, even some Wittgensteinian scholars cannot resist the temptation of discovering the underlying and hidden essence of a meaningful life. For example, James C. Klagge holds that the ‘Teleological’ views of the meaning of life, which suggest life has meaning when it is lived ‘in the service of some greater cause’ has fallen into disrepute in recent centuries. For various reasons, Klagge suggests, we have come to believe that there is no such a thing as the meaning of life in the teleological sense and this itself has provoked some reactions. One reaction is ‘nihilism’ and the other is ‘existentialism’, namely, the idea that a human being can create meaning for herself (this is the same as subjectivism in the literature). He rejects both reactions to ‘Teleologism’ and claims that life can have meaning and this meaning has some objective sense. A life can have some sort of objective meaning ‘without falling into

Teleologism’ (Klagge 1985: 2); a view he calls ‘Quasi-objectivism’. A quasi-objectivistic theory is a pluralistic, non-voluntaristic, and non-platonic theory. By non-voluntaristic he means a meaningful life is not a matter of volition or force; by non-platonic he means that the meaning of life is not built into the nature of things. Rather, ‘meaningfulness arises because of the human condition’ (ibid: 3). The pluralism condition also implies that the question, ‘what is the meaning of life?’ is a misleading question and we have to replace it with ‘What kinds of

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lives have meaning?’

According to Klagge, meaningful lives consist of ‘three normative conditions’, which are as

follows:

1. ‘Enough activities must be engaged in for their own sake, or as an ends in themselves’

(ibid: 7).

2. ‘The life must make enough contribution to something outside of itself’ (ibid.).

3. ‘The life must have enough intentional structure’ (ibid: 8).

According to Klagge, these three conditions are the ‘necessary’ and ‘sufficient’ conditions for a meaningful life. These conditions are presented in a ‘vague’ manner to cover a wide range of lives because what people consider as ‘enough’ in the above conditions vary. The consequence of this theory, Klagge has it, is that many lives can be meaningful. He then applies his theory to several examples and tries to see whether his theory can explain why they are meaningless. For example, a mother who sacrifices her life for the sake of her family, and gets no joy from her life, may fail to satisfy the first condition. The child of a doctor who goes to college and

becomes a doctor like his father without giving a thought whether this is the life he wants may

fail to meet the third condition, because his life’s plan is not intentional and self-imposed.

Klagge tries to provide a pluralistic account of meaning that is devoid of any moral or religious

attachment. As he writes, ‘we should try to keep moral assessment separate from assessments

of meaningfulness’ (ibid: 17).

He refers to a mother who sacrifices her life for her family but she doesn’t enjoy her life and

thus lacks a necessary condition of a meaningful life. One might wonder whether this is an

accurate description of the mother’s life. That is, I think the surrounding circumstances of her

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life have not received due attention. The only thing we know about her life is that she doesn’t

enjoy her life and that she sacrifices her life for her family. The background against which she

chooses, or happens, to be a sacrificing mother is simply neglected. One might wonder how a

person can sacrifice her needs and preferences for the sake of something else, and yet enjoy

it.11 On the other hand, a perspicuous representation of her life might bring about an

understanding ‘which consists precisely in the fact that we see the connections. Hence the

importance of finding connecting links’ (Wittgenstein 1996: 89).

In the mother’s case, the main concern in a confessional approach, then, would be to find the

‘connecting links’ between the mother’s self-sacrifice and her life. A confessional approach

does not dispute Klagge’s theory, or any theory for that matter, but only asks what this theory

can tell us about the particular aspects of a life. We need the particular aspects of a life to

understand clearly the meaning of that life. Wouldn’t it make a difference if we knew that the

mother is doing so because she wants to compensate her shortcomings in the past? Wouldn’t it

be different if we knew that she does so because her husband is in war and she has to keep the

family together? In a theoretical approach, even if it has a Wittgensteinian touch to it like that

of Klagge, the distinctive particularity of a life is not of central significance because the aim is

to find the universal condition(s) of the meaningful lives.

One might see the difference between a confessional and a theoretical approach toward the

meaning of life in a remark Wittgenstein once said to his sister, Hermine. In a conversation,

she expresses her inability to comprehend why a person like Wittgenstein, with an

incomparable talent in philosophy, would prefer to work as a teacher or a gardener rather than

11 In Wittgenstein’s words, ‘If you offer a sacrifice and are pleased with yourself about it, both you and your sacrifice will be cursed’ (Wittgenstein 1980: 26).

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as a philosophy professor. As she recalls, ‘Wittgenstein replied with an analogy that reduced me to silence. He said, “You remind me of somebody who is looking out through a closed window and cannot explain to himself the strange movements of a passer-by. He cannot tell what kind of storm is raging out there or that this person might only be managing with difficulty to stay on his feet”. Then I understood the state of mind he was in’ (Wittgenstein

1984: 4). Hermine was of the opinion that her brother had exceptional talents in philosophy,

and that anyone who has so, should, naturally, pursue a philosophical career so as to flourish this talent. But Wittgenstein’s analogy shows the difference between two ways of appraising a human life, a view that is attentive to the particularity of a life and a view that is detached from it. I suggest any theoretical perspective probably remains blind to the storms that are raging out in the particularity of every person’s life. Klagge sees a mother through a closed window and concludes that she does not meet the requirements of a meaningful life and he does not bother to entertain the other side of the story.

A confessional approach, on the other hand, accommodates precisely those aspects that a theoretical approach fails to address. That is, in a confessional approach the surrounding circumstances of a life are crucial in determining the meaningfulness of that life or lack thereof. In other words, the surrounding circumstances of one’s life provide what Wittgenstein calls ‘imponderable evidence’. As he writes,

Imponderable evidence includes subtleties of glance, of gesture, of tone. I may

recognize a genuine loving look, distinguish it from a pretended one (and here there

can, of course, be a ‘ponderable’ confirmation of my judgment). But I may be quite

incapable of describing the difference. And this is not because the languages I know

have no words for it (1958: 228).

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Wittgenstein here is asking ‘is there such a thing as expert judgment about genuineness’ of our behaviors? His answer is that, yes it is possible to have such a knowledge and this knowledge is mostly based on ‘imponderable evidence’. Think of this: What do you see when you see hypocrisy or bravery in someone’s face and how could you prove it? The next question is if we could learn this knowledge and Wittgenstein’s answer is ‘yes; some can’. However, not ‘by taking a course in it, but through ‘experience’’ (ibid: 227). So, what does the imponderable evidence have to do with a confessional approach toward life’s meaning?

I would like to suggest that a confessional approach, in virtue of accommodating the particular aspects of a life, is more likely to provide us with some ‘imponderable evidence’ for our judgment of that life. As I said, a confessional approach sheds light precisely on those aspects of a life that I think are crucial in our judgment of that life’s meaning. For example, based on

Klagge’s ‘quasi-objective’ account of life’s meaning, a man who is obsessively and

destructively addicted to gambling to the extent that he pawns all the jewelry of his pregnant

wife is in fact living a meaningless life because his life does not meet Klagge’s second and the third condition of meaningfulness. Firstly, his life does not contribute to anything outside itself, and, secondly, his addiction to gambling is not intentional and self-imposed. Therefore, it seems safe to say, this man’s life is indeed meaningless (how can he be so cruel to his pregnant wife and take her jewelry and spend them on his addiction?).

However, here is some more information that might change our way of looking at the person’s

way of life. This person is not fictional. His name was Feodor Dostoyevsky and he used to do

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exactly so in 1867, the same year he wrote The Idiot.12 Now, Klagge might suggest that

Dostoyevsky’s life was meaningless to the extent that he wasted it on gambling and destructive

behavior and that he attained a meaningful life when he came back home and started working on his novel. However, I think these kinds of divisions are problematic. Dostoyevsky was

Dostoyevsky all the way down; the same person who wrote The Gambler used to be addicted to gambling. I wonder how someone can write so meticulously on gamblers’ unconscious desire for losing, for self-annihilation, without having gone through these kinds of experiences. In everyday life, I think, we do not have a segregating view of people’s life; that is, we view their lives holistically. We do not ask, for example, whether Dostoyevsky’s life was meaningful when he was making tea for himself in the samovar after long hours of writing. Or, was his life meaningful when he was living with illiterate criminals in Siberia?

As another example, consider the life of Travis Bickle in the movie Taxi Driver (1976). From a third-person perspective, one might say, Travis is an emotionally unstable person who is driven by morbid thoughts and a delusional perception of the external world. But these abstract words, truthful as they are, fail to give us the same insight into Travis’ life as his diaries do. Travis writes, at the beginning of his diaries, ‘All my life needed was a sense of direction, a sense of someplace to go. I do not believe one should devote his life to morbid self-attention, but should become a person like other people’ (Scorsese 1976). And after failing dismally in his brief relationship with Betsy: ‘My life has taken another turn again’ (ibid.), but the last note in his diary, on the verge of his mental breakdown is most revealing:

My whole life has pointed in one direction. I see that now. There never has been any

12 For more on Dostoyevsky’s addiction to gambling see Dostoyevsky: The Miraculous Years 1865-1871 (Frank 1995: 426-427).

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choice for me. Loneliness has followed me all my life. The life of loneliness pursues me

wherever I go; in bars, cars, coffee shops, theatres, stores, side-walks. There is no

escape. I am God’s lonely man (ibid.).

Certainly, we may call these notes delusional. However, it seems that by calling his notes delusional, we deprive ourselves from an insight into his way of seeing the world. One might even suggest that even if they are delusional, they provide a significant view to a delusional way of seeing the world. Moreover, the notion of ‘error’ (Wittgenstein 1996: 83) does not apply here. Travis’ interpretation of his life would have been erroneous only if he had ‘set forth a theory’ (ibid: 82) about his perception of life. Are we in error, Wittgenstein asks, when we kiss our beloved’s photo, when we kick a stone out of anger, when we feel the overwhelming urge of love, or when we wonder at the existence of the world? Likewise, ‘Was Augustine in error, then, when he called upon God on every page of the Confessions?’ (ibid.) Was Travis in error when he felt that he was ‘God’s lonely man’?13 Wittgenstein writes,

It can indeed happen, and often does today, that a person will give up a practice after he

has recognized an error on which it was based. But this happens only when calling

someone’s attention to his error is enough to turn him from his way of behaving. But

this is not the case with the religious practices of a people and therefore there is no

question of an error (Wittgenstein 1996: 83).

Likewise, when naturalists and nihilists reject the supernaturalist’s claim that the meaning of

life is founded upon the existence of God, they are right, I submit, only to the extent that they

13 Apparently, this phrase is taken from the title of Thomas Wolfe’s famous essay, ‘God’s Lonely Man’. Wolfe writes, ‘The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence’ (quoted from Burnett 1958: 20).

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discard an opinion or a justificatory argument. However, a genuine belief in God, a religious

way of experiencing the world, is not a matter of opinion; it is an attitude toward the world.

‘No opinion’, Wittgenstein writes, ‘serves as the foundation for a religious symbol. And only

an opinion can involve an error’ (ibid: 85).14 Wittgenstein’s harsh criticisms of Frazer stem

from his frustration at seeing that how a ‘hypothetical explanation’ (ibid: 84) of human rituals

can deprive us from a perspicuous understanding of human’s forms of life.15 That is why

Wittgenstein believes Frazer’s explanations of ‘primitive practices are much cruder than the meaning of these practices themselves’ (ibid: 89).

So much for the distinction between a confessional and a theoretical approach toward the question of life’s meaning. While in a theoretical approach the main concern is to enquire about the essential condition(s) of a meaningful life or lack thereof, the aim of a confessional approach is not to ‘set forth’ a theory of life’s meaning but to ‘look and see’ the surrounding circumstances in which the meaning of life is talked or thought with regard to a specific person. I also argued that in everyday life the force of the question of life’s meaning can be felt best in its confessionality. Long before starting to question the meaning of life Tolstoy had lost his faith, but the meaning of life wasn’t a major issue for him. The distinction between the two approaches that I discussed so far can explain this. For Tolstoy, I think, the question of the meaning of life was a theoretical question and he managed to live for ‘fifteen years’ (2008: 7) without distress. But when Tolstoy describes his struggle to find his feet on the ground during the ‘arrests of life’ (Tolstoy 2008: 7) we know that he is confessing, i.e., living the same claims that once he could stay aloof from by living in the stream of life. Likewise, about a person who

14 See also Wittgenstein 1996: 90. 15 Cf. ibid: 88-9.

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denies the availability of meaning in life and yet is always worried about his children’s health,

loves his family, calls his grandmother every Sunday, and is an official fan of a football club,

we might as well say that he has a good talent in keeping his philosophy in a theoretical

package.

Objections and Clarifications

In this section, I address some important objections that might be raised against a confessional approach and try to clarify some misunderstandings. The first objection questions the very distinction that I make, claiming it to be dubious and that, just like theorists of life’s meaning, I am also putting forward a theory about the meaning of life and to that extent my confessional approach is an instance of a theoretical approach too. Moreover, one might say, I have been contemplating the meaning of life the whole time without confessing anything, and thus, if I can do that, why cannot other philosophers.

In response to this objection, I would like to draw attention, once more, to what I have been trying to highlight in the last three chapters and that is the significance of the particular especially from a Wittgensteinian perspective. What essentially separates a confessional approach from a theoretical approach is defined by the emphasis of the former on the particular. Moreover, these two approaches are different in that while a theoretical approach tries to set forth a theory to capture the essential elements of a meaningful life, a confessional approach does not have a theory of its own to refute other theories. A confessional approach does not compete with other theories; it doesn’t deny them either. It only tries to understand their applications in everyday life. Therefore, and concerning the theoretical aspect of the

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confessional approach, I provide a meta-theory about life’s meaning and not a theory.

Another objection is that a confessional approach doesn’t add anything to our knowledge of the

meaning of life, whereas the conventional theories of life’s meaning, limited as they are,

provide great insight into the common elements between all the particular meaningful lives.

For example, consider values like benevolence, creativity, and promoting justice. Many people’s lives are meaningful in virtue of the presence of these values in their lives and it is safe to say that there are some universal values that confer meaning on our lives provided that we orient our lives toward them. Moreover, if we agree that there are some meaningful lives, then the enquiry should focus on finding the underlying element(s) between them. We want to know in virtue of what, if anything, we consider the lives of some people more meaningful than others. A confessional approach, on the other hand, remains silent about this and doesn’t address the whole story of our enquiry into the meaning of life.

In response, I would suggest that attention to the particularity of a person’s life gives sense to rather lifeless concepts. If at least one of the main purposes of the question of the meaning of life is to get to know oneself, then why should we drive the attention away from the particular lives as they are lived? Philosophical theories, Cavell writes, try to ‘escape those human forms

of life which alone provide the coherence of our expression’ (1976: 61). Likewise, most

theories of the meaning of life avoid the ordinary expressions of life’s meaning. On the other

hand, a confessional approach emphasizes the ordinary expressions of life’s meaning and takes

our quest for the meaning of life to be, in Mathew Arnold’s words, ‘a dialogue of the mind

with itself’ (Arnold 1987: 654), and, in Wittgenstein’s words, ‘private conversations’ (1980:

77) with oneself in the stream of life. Furthermore, whereas the aim of a theoretical approach is

to explain the meaning of life and provide a systematized account of it (affirmatively or

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negatively), the aim of a confessional approach is clarity; clarity in understanding one’s life is an end in itself. The aim is not to build a theory but to have a clear view of it. In a confessional approach, ‘clarity, perspicuity, are valuable in themselves’. We are not ‘interested in constructing a building, so much as in having a perspicuous view of the foundations of possible buildings’ (ibid: 7).

Note that, as I said earlier, there are no strings attached to a confessional approach toward the meaning of life, i.e., I do not want to give it a quasi-religious tone. In a confessional approach, one might confess one’s sins, but one might as well confess one’s awe and wonder, loneliness, happiness, content, sufferings, and, in short, vicissitudes of one’s life. This way of describing one’s life leads to a knowledge of human life that is different from that of a general theoretical approach. A confessional approach, to use Wittgenstein’s words, ‘leads to a piece of knowledge in life outside the laboratory’ (Wittgenstein 2005: 95). It leads to a knowledge of human life that consists in ‘seeing connections’ (Wittgenstein 1958: 175) between life and meaning. A confessional approach tries to step ‘outside the laboratory’ or the ‘seminar room’ to reach an understanding of life’s meaning, which is different from what a theoretical approach might provide. It aims at a ‘holistic’ understanding of life, to use Cottingham’s terms:

Here it is worth stepping outside the seminar room for a moment, and remembering that

in our ordinary human life and experience, the characteristic way in which we normally

achieve understanding within the domain of meaning,. . . is not analytically but

holistically: not by taking things apart but by reaching across and outwards. The

significance of thoughts and desires and beliefs and intentions is typically revealed

when they are located within a wider network, connecting up, both synchronically and

diachronically, with the current actions and the continuing lives both of individual

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human beings and of the groups of which they are necessarily a part (Cottingham

2009b: 11).

In the next two sections, I discuss two different cases in which two different persons think of

the meaning of their lives. The first one, Mr Chandler, is a fictional character and the second one, Wittgenstein, is real. However, both cases provide enough material with which we can see the connection between their lives and the meanings ascribed to them. I also discuss briefly

Susan Wolf’s influential theory of life’s meaning and show its limit when we apply it to Mr

Chandler’s life. These case studies, in turn, highlight the difference between a confessional approach and a theoretical approach in a more vivid way.

A Case Study: Mr Chandler and the Meaning of Life

Joyce’s stories in Dubliners have a third-person narrator, that is, people’s contemplations on the meaning of their lives are narrated by a third-person who acts like an invisible observer of a life. However, and this is what makes the stories pertinent to our discussion, Joyce furnishes us with enough ‘imponderable’ evidence to see the connections between the characters’ lives and the meanings they ascribe to them. The characters’ reflections on the meaning of life usually come after a detailed description of their lives. Eveline, Mr Duffy, Lenehan, Little Chandler,

Maria, and Gabriel have completely different lives, but the similar thing between them is they all reflect upon their lives; they try to give a sense to it. However, in this section, I only focus on Mr Chandler and his struggle to find a meaning for his life in one of Dubliners’ short stories, ‘A Little Cloud’.

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‘Little Chandler’, an ordinary journalist, is about to meet an old friend, Ignatius Gallaher, who has just come from London to pay a visit to Dublin. Before and after his meeting, Chandler compares his own quiet life with the successful and wild life of his friend. Gallaher tells him about the life outside Ireland and Chandler compares it with his own ‘inartistic sober’ life.

Eight years have passed since the two old friends last met, and now Chandler has nothing to share with Gallaher except telling him that he is married and that he has a child. He has nothing interesting to share and thus he would rather be a listener in that ‘brief space’ that the two meet. Chandler invites him to his place so that he meets his wife and child but Gallaher refuses the invitation because he has to meet another friend. Joyce narrates,

The adventure of meeting Gallaher after eight years . . . of listening to Gallaher’s stories

and of sharing for a brief space Gallaher’s vagrant and triumphant life, upset the

equipoise of his sensitive nature. He felt acutely the contrast between his own life and

his friend’s and it seemed to him unjust. . . . He was sure that he could do something

better than his friend had ever done . . . if he only got the chance. What was it that stood

in his way? His unfortunate timidity he wished to vindicate himself in some way, to

assert his manhood. He saw behind Gallaher’s refusal of his invitation. Gallaher was

only patronising him by his friendliness just as he was patronising Ireland by his visit

(Joyce 1995: 74-75).

They part and Chandler returns home. He forgets to buy ‘a parcel of coffee’ and this upsets his wife. She decides to go and buy a ‘quarter of a pound of tea and two pounds of sugar’. She gives him the child and warns him not to wake him up. With the child in his arms Chandler walks around the room, looks at the photograph of his wife and he realizes that there is

‘something mean’ in her eyes and he asks himself, ‘Why had he married those eyes in the

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photograph?’:

A dull resentment against his life awoke within him. Could he not escape from his little

house? Was it too late for him to try to live bravely like Gallaher? Could he go to

London? There was the furniture still to be paid for. . . . The child woke up and began

to cry. He . . . tried to hush it: but it would not be hushed. . . . It was useless . . . He

couldn’t do anything. The wailing of the child pierced the drum of his ear. It was

useless, useless! He was a prisoner for life. His arms trembled with anger and suddenly

bending to the child’s face he shouted: ‘Stop!’ (ibid: 77-78).

Chandler’s reflection on his life is set against the background of some imponderable evidence for the misery of a life. That is, what gives life to his reflections is the details or what

Wittgenstein calls ‘fine shades of behaviour’ (1958: 204): his excitement at going to a famous

restaurant for the first time, his reservations when Gallaher talks to him, his sensitive nature that can be upset by a cigar and a glass of whiskey, his weakness, his timidity, the outburst of anger at his little child, his remorseful tears, his alien wife and her ‘thin tight lips’, etc. The

point that I want to raise is that if someone wants to say that we are ‘prisoner for life’, as some

nihilists do, he has to first show the prison.

Wittgenstein writes, ‘An inner process stands in need of outward criteria’ (1958: § 580).

Throughout Joyce’s story there is a parallel between an ‘inner process’ and ‘outward criteria’

and the latter betrays the former. If we consider reflection upon the meaning of life as an inner

process then we all need ‘outward criteria’ to find a sense for our contemplations. A

confessional approach acknowledges the interconnection between the two and thus differs from

a theoretical approach.

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Consider, for example, Susan Wolf’s interesting theory of meaning in life. According to Wolf,

meaning in life is a matter of loving objects worthy of love and engaging with them in a

positive way. What is distinctive in Wolf’s theory is that ‘it involves subjective and objective

elements, suitably and inextricably linked’ (Wolf 2010: 9). So, in this view, ‘meaning arises

when subjective attraction meets objective attractiveness’ (ibid.). Someone, for example, might

be passionately interested in solving puzzles but his subjective interest in puzzle solving does

not meet the objective attractiveness’s requirement, and, thus, his life would be of no

significant meaning.

Now, as far as Wolf’s theory is concerned, Chandler’s life doesn’t seem like an interesting

case. Apparently, his life lacks the element of ‘depth’ (ibid: 7) and ‘subjective attraction’. His

life consists of a constant remembrance of his crippling situation, of a constant realization of

the gap between what he needs and what he gains in actual life. That is, the element of ‘love’,

i.e., subjective attraction is missing in his life. Thus, Chandler’s life lacks meaning. Now, one might ask, is that all there is to Mr Chandler’s life? Since, after all, Chandler has a ‘poet’s soul’ and usually goes through a ‘poetic mood’.16 He is a constant observer of his own inner life. As

a habit, he usually tries to ‘weigh his soul to see if it was a poet’s soul. Melancholy was the

dominant note of his temperament, . . . but it was a melancholy tempered by recurrences of

16 Wittgenstein suggests having a ‘poetic mood’ is one thing and being able to produce a good artwork is another. Chandler is fully aware of his poetic mood but he is also aware of the fact that so far he hasn’t produced anything worthwhile. Wittgenstein refers to Schiller’s letter to (apparently) Goethe in which he writes of a ‘poetic mood’, and comments, I think I know what he means, I believe I am familiar with it myself. It is a mood of receptivity to nature in which one’s thoughts seem as vivid as nature itself. but it is strange that Schiller himself did not produce anything better (or so it seems to me) and so I am not entirely convinced that what I produce in such a mood is really worth anything (Wittgenstein 1980: 65-66).

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faith and resignation and simple joy’ (Joyce 1995: 68). In a sense, Chandler is indeed

subjectively interested in the life of art, which I assume is of objective worth in Wolf’s

account. But we are still reluctant to call his life meaningful because it seems that there are more elements, which play a significant role in our judgment than mere ‘subjective attraction’

and ‘objective worth’. Chandler lives in an alien world, and he painstakingly realizes that he is

too timid and too weak to come out of his surrounding circumstances in Ireland. In a sense, he

is a loser, though he has a job and a family. In Henry James’s striking words, ‘He had perhaps

not had more losses than most men, but he had counted his losses more’ (James 1993: 2). So,

we might arrive at the conclusion that his life is indeed meaningless but it is not merely due to

the fact that his ‘subjective attraction’ does not meet an ‘objective worth’.

Wolf acknowledges that in offering a conception of meaningfulness, she doesn’t want to insist

that ‘the term is always used in the same way’ (Wolf 2010: 8). However, Wolf writes, ‘whether

or not my idea of meaningfulness captures what others mean when they use the term, it is an

idea of philosophical interest, for it is an idea of a significant way in which a life can be good’

(ibid.). Ironically, based on Wolf’s account, Gallaher’s life meets all the requirements of a

meaningful life. He is a successful journalist on the ‘London Press’, a player who cherishes life

to the fullest. However, it seems that we are more willing to call his life ‘happy’ or ‘a life of

pleasure’ than meaningful. The problem with Wolf’s account, I think, is that it overlooks the

significance of attitude.17 Gallaher’s subjective attraction to journalism and the objective worth of it confers meaning on his life, but what we see in the story is not only Gallaher the journalist

– we see his mean attitude, his outspokenness when he trivializes marriage, his vulgarity. In

fact, Gallaher is not concerned about the meaning of life at all, and yet, in Wolf’s account, the

17 In Chapter Three, I raised the same problem with regard to Singer’s account of ‘ethical life’.

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meaningfulness probably goes to the opportunist and arrogant Gallaher and not melancholic

Chandler who sincerely suffers to give a sense to his life that is falling apart.18

In sum, Wolf provides a general account of the constitutive elements of a meaningful life.

However, if we were to appraise Mr Chandler’s life based on her account, we would see that it

fails to address certain aspects of his life, which I think are crucial in our understanding of his

life. On the other hand, a confessional approach focuses precisely on those aspects that matter

the most if we are to provide a ‘perspicuous representation’ of Mr Chandler’s life.

Wittgenstein’s Private Conversations

Wittgenstein once wrote in his diaries that nearly all his writings are ‘private conversations’

with himself: ‘Things that I say to myself tête-á-tête’ (1980: 77). Throughout his philosophical

career, the medium to record these private conversations was mainly his diaries. The Tractatus

was born from Wittgenstein’s diaries during World War I. It is beyond the scope of my topic to

discuss Wittgenstein’s emphasis on the personal nature of his philosophy.19 So, in this section,

I focus only on some of Wittgenstein’s notes on the ‘problem of life’ and his contemplations on

his own moral life. My aim is not to defend or to justify his statements. I only view them as

another case study pertinent to what I discussed so far in this chapter. My aim is to say by the

end of this section: This is how a person thought of the meaning of his life.

18 Wolf’s book includes a separate section on comments and responses by other philosophers to her account and, further, Wolf’s response to those comments and criticisms. See Wolf 2010: 67-92. See also Cahn (2008: 236-238). 19 For an insightful study of the personal nature of Wittgenstein’s philosophy, see Cavell (1976); Klagge (ed.) (2001).

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There are some recurrent themes in Wittgenstein’s diaries that show his involvement and

‘struggle’ with specific moral issues that are of key significance in Wittgenstein’s way of

dealing with the problem of life. His interest in moral and religious issues is only to the extent

that they have a bearing on his own life. He would reject, for example, the traditional solutions

to the problem of life, but he asks what the implications of this are for his understanding of the

meaning of life. In Wittgenstein’s words, ‘I may well reject the Christian solution to the

problem of life (salvation, resurrection, judgment, hell, heaven) but this does not solve the problem of my life, for I am not good and not happy. I am not saved’ (Wittgenstein 2003: 169).

Wittgenstein’s reflection on his relation to the religious solution goes like this: There is a religious solution to the problem of life. Some people genuinely believe in this solution and thus the problem of life disappears to them. I may reject this solution but this does not change the fact that the problem of my life remains unsolved. My wisdom cannot save me: ‘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 what is needed by my heart, my soul, not my speculative intelligence’ (Wittgenstein 1980: 33).

As A. M. S. Christensen noted, ‘the fact that Wittgenstein thinks the problem of life could be given a Christian solution shows that he sees an intimate connection between the ethical and the religious’ (Christensen 2011: 209). In fact in Wittgenstein’s diaries both religious and ethical questions refer to a similar concern: The problem of life or how we are to live. Thus, we read, ‘A religious question is either a question of life or it is (empty) chatter’ (Wittgenstein

2003: 211). That is, by asking religious questions, one searches for a solution for the problem of one’s own life. The Christian tradition offers a solution to the problem of life that

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Wittgenstein is unable to find his feet with:20

Let me confess this: After a very difficult day for me I kneeled during dinner today and

prayed and suddenly said kneeling and looking up above: “There is no one here.” That

made me feel at ease as if I had been enlightened in an important matter. But what it

really means I do not know yet. I feel relieved. But that does not mean, for example: I

had previously been in error (Wittgenstein 2003: 193).

And further on,

Now I often tell myself in doubtful times: ‘There is no one here’ and look around (ibid:

207).

However, the striking realization that no one is listening to his prayer doesn’t stop Wittgenstein

to ‘buzz around the New Testament’ (ibid: 177) like an ‘insect’. Wittgenstein sometimes

accuses himself of not being ‘serious’ enough to deal with the problem of life. He reminds

himself that life is ‘frightfully serious’ (ibid: 175). The solutions that religious traditions

provide, Wittgenstein thinks, are not to be evaluated by one’s opinions. He can easily reject the

religious solution (say, like Frazer) but what is difficult is to understand what it is about. ‘Don’t criticize’, Wittgenstein commands himself, ‘what serious people have written seriously, for you don’t know what you are criticizing. Why should you form an opinion about everything’ (ibid:

235). Wittgenstein’s point here seems puzzling because if there is something to criticize in

what serious people have written, why should we avoid doing so? Maybe it should be read as a

rhetorical statement. Wittgenstein is convincing himself that he should leave aside his opinions

20 Cf. Wittgenstein 1958: 223.

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and contemplate whole-heartedly the religious thinkers’ thoughts and beliefs. He does not want

to brush aside a religious solution to the problem of his life just because he is of the opinion

that it is incoherent. There is a strong urge in Wittgenstein to understand the language-game of belief, because as he confessed on another occasion, ‘Only religion would have the power to destroy vanity and penetrate all the nooks and crannies’ (Wittgenstein 1980: 48). That is, he longs to understand what it is in religion that changes one’s whole way of being in the world.

Consider the following:

I believe: I understand that the state of mind of believing can make the human being

blissful. For when people believe, wholeheartedly believe, that the perfect one has

sacrificed himself for them, that he has therefore – from the beginning – reconciled

them with God, so that from now on you shall simply live in a way that is worthy of

this sacrifice, – then this must refine the whole person, elevate him to nobility, so to

speak. I understand – I want to say – that this is a movement of the soul toward bliss

(Wittgenstein 2003: 227).

A believer would say someone has suffered for you, and this fact alone has to change the way

you relate to that suffering, i.e., you should ‘change the way you live’ (Wittgenstein 1980: 27).

If I believe in providence, Wittgenstein asks, if I believe everything that has happened in my

whole life has already been decided, what effects would it have on my life? How does it change the way I live now? What would happen to my life if I knew that a human being has sacrificed his life for me? In Wittgenstein’s words, ‘Mustn’t this fact then be of “decisive significance” for you? I mean: mustn’t it then have implications for your life, commit you to something? I mean: mustn’t you enter into an ethical relation with him?’ (Wittgenstein 2003:

223). He, then, asks himself whether he feels any duty toward this belief and he replies: ‘My

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faith is too weak, I mean my belief in providence, my feeling: “everything happens through the

will of God.” And this is no opinion – also not a conviction, but an attitude toward the things

and what is happening’ (ibid: 225). In a sense, in all these remarks Wittgenstein is trying to

find his own stance toward the Christian solution. He is not a religious man but ironically, he

‘cannot help seeing every problem from a religious point of view’ (Drury 1984: 91).

So, in Wittgenstein’s confessional approach toward the problem of life, the bearings of a

religious belief on one’s way of life is deemed more significant than its theological claims like

incarnation or providence. An alternative to this approach is to suggest that claims of theism

cannot be verified and thus these claims are irrational and should be either discarded or

considered as some metaphorical utterances lacking any truth-value.21 In this approach it is

against one’s intellectual integrity to accept and believe the truth of something the existence of

which cannot be rationally proved. But Wittgenstein doubts that a theological claim per se has

the power to regulate one’s whole life. According to Wittgenstein, discarding a religious dogma does not amount to discarding a way of seeing and being in the world:

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

(1980: 64).

21 Wittgenstein also speaks of the ‘irritation of the intellect’ when words, in religious contexts, are used inappropriately: I believe: the word ‘believing’ has wrought horrible havoc in religion. All the knotty thoughts about the ‘paradox’ of the eternal meaning of a historical fact and the like. But if instead of ‘belief in Christ’ you would say: ‘love of Christ,’ the paradox vanishes, that is, the irritation of the intellect. What does religion have to do with such a tickling of the intellect? (Wittgenstein 2003: 247)

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Consider, for example, a religious text, like the New Testament. One might simply dispute it by

objecting how it is possible that God assigns four people to write about the life of his

incarnated Son and yet they write four different and even inconsistent texts. However, refuting

the scripture in virtue of its inconsistency can only undermine the ‘letter’ of the scripture, and

not its ‘spirit’. Wittgenstein wonders, ‘But might we not say: it is important that this narrative

should not be more than quite averagely historically plausible just so that this should not be

taken as the essential, decisive thing? So that the letter should not be believed more strongly

than is proper and the spirit may receive its due’ (ibid: 31). In other words, discarding the

‘letter’ of the New Testament does not destroy its spirit. The spirit of a religion is its way of

‘assessing life’;22 the solution that it offers to the problem of life. Christianity, Wittgenstein has

it, offers a solution to the problem of life by portraying a way of living in which the problem is

solved; it presents a role model and says, ‘Now, live like this, and the problem will be

vanished!’ However, the question is how one can adjust oneself to such a way of living:

The horrible instant in an unblessed death must be the thought: ‘Oh if only I had . . .

Now it’s too late.’ Oh if only I had lived right! And the blessed instant must be: ‘Now it

is accomplished![23] – But how must one have lived in order to tell oneself this? I think

there must be degrees here, too. But, I myself, where am I? How far from the good and

how close to the lower end! (Wittgenstein 2003: 185)

Wittgenstein’s personal conversations with himself lead to the point that he has to make a

decision. Christianity offers a solution and if he wants to accept it he has to change the way he

22 We might say another aspect of a confessional approach is that it views our enquiry into the meaning of life as a way of ‘assessing life’. 23 It refers to Christ’s last words. See John 19: 30.

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lives: ‘The demand is high’ (ibid: 175). He might doubt about everything but one thing cannot

be doubted: ‘That in order to live right I would have to live completely differently from what

suits me’ (ibid.). One might say, Wittgenstein’s reflections on the New Testament are in fact a search for the dawning of an aspect on his life. He confesses his inability to see those aspects in his life. In his diaries he looks but he can’t see those aspects24: ‘In my soul there is winter

(now) like all around me. Everything is snowed in, nothing turns green and blossoms. But I

should therefore patiently await whether I am destined to see a spring’ (ibid: 205).

Whether one is a believer or a non-believer, whether one is naturalist or nihilist, the question is:

‘How do you go through this life?’ (ibid: 217). One major point of Wittgenstein’s struggles to

come to terms with his self-confessed inability,25 one that is pertinent to the literature on the meaning of life, is that scrutinizing the ‘letter’ of the meaning of life, enquiring about the

conditions of a meaningful life is probably of little help when we have to go through life.

According to Christensen, Wittgenstein’s diaries highlight an essential link between ‘self-

assessment and normative obligation’ (Christensen 2011: 212). Wittgenstein’s ethical

reflections on the solutions to the problem of life call for a reflection on his own position with

regard to these solutions. There are some demands that Wittgenstein needs to meet: ‘I will

either meet the demand or suffer from not meeting it, for I cannot prescribe it to myself and not

suffer from not living up to it’ (Wittgenstein 2003: 175). Thus, an ethical self-assessment has

to lead to ethical self-improvement. According to Christensen, Wittgenstein’s reflections

involve two normative demands. The first demand ‘arises because we in ethical reflection must

24 Wittgenstein’s inability to participate in a religious life is captured in Wittgenstein 2003: 219: ‘Kneeling means that one is a slave. (Religion might consist in this.) Lord, if only I knew that I am a slave! 25 Cf. Wittgenstein 2003: 233, 247

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attempt to achieve a true view of our place in the world. [. . .] The second demand embedded in

Wittgenstein’s view of ethical reflection is the simple requirement to try to do better’

(Christensen 2011: 212) in life. Therefore, to contemplate the meaning of life, in

Wittgenstein’s view, is to contemplate the ways of moral improvement. Whereas in the

literature a distinction is made between moral theories and theories of meaningfulness (Metz

2002, Wolf 2010), Wittgenstein’s reflections portray a life in which living morally and living

meaningfully are identical.26 Wittgenstein’s moral life, however, is not concerned with

conventional theories of morality because Wittgenstein’s morality is concerned only with the

ideals of authenticity and living without vanity. A recurrent theme in Wittgenstein’s personal

notes in his diaries revolves around a self-conscious evaluation of his ‘vanity’ and his difficulty

in overcoming it.27

Before going to the next section, let me briefly discuss the heated issue of the relation between

meaningfulness and morality in the literature in order to highlight the difference between

Wittgenstein’s view of the relation between meaningfulness and morality and that of most scholars in the literature. The question is ‘are all meaningful lives ultimately moral lives or can there be meaningfulness without morality?’. There are some opposing views in the literature about the relation of the two. Supernaturalists tend to believe that meaningful life is ultimately a moral life and for there to be an objective foundation for morality we need God to secure the objectivity, necessity, and universality of morality and, consequently, meaningfulness of life

(Cottingham 2003, Pojman 2008, Craig 2013).

26 For an insightful discussion on the relation between meaning and morality, see Wolf 2010: 53-63 27 Cf. Wittgenstein 2003: 23, 93, 97, 113, 139, 193, 207, and 213. For an analysis of Wittgenstein’s obsession with perfectionism and authenticity, see Sass 2001: 98-155.

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On the other hand, subjectivists and objectivists in the naturalism camp often attack this view

based on different reasons. For example, Frankfurt as a subjectivist claims that ‘morality can provide at most only a severely limited and insufficient answer to the question of how a person should live’ (Frankfurt 2004: 7). Moreover, Frankfurt has it, ‘modes of normativity’ are not limited only to morality or ‘self-interest’. When we say someone’s life is meaningful based on

non-moral reasons, it doesn’t necessarily mean that he is a self-centered arrogant schmuck.

‘There are modes of normativity’, Frankfurt claims, ‘that are quite properly compelling but that

are grounded neither in moral nor in egoistic considerations’ (ibid: 8).

Sympathetic to Cottingham’s view of the necessity of having an objective morality for a

meaningful life, Metz agrees that ‘at least a necessary condition of a meaningful life is the

existence of a suitably non-arbitrary moral system’ (Metz 2013b). However, Metz has it, a

moral life is only one source of a meaningful life among others. One might think of intellectual

reflection and artistic creativity as other compelling sources of a meaningful life. Wolf also

shares a similar idea and suggests that at least some parts of what we do and pursue in life is

not guided by our moral concerns (Wolf 2010: 3). Enjoying cooking, friendly gatherings,

sewing scarf for one’s loved one or learning Russian to read Dostoyevsky in his native

language are not moral actions and yet they can plausibly contribute more or less to the

meaningfulness of one’s life. These are what we might do because we are attracted to them and

judge them to merit attraction. They make us feel good and yet make our lives meaningful, that

is, our subjective attraction to them meets the objective worth of doing them, unlike other activities like caring about a Goldfish, typing Tolstoy’s War and Peace, and solving Sudoku that are devoid of objective value and worth.

I am currently not in a position to judge whether a meaningful life is necessarily and

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sufficiently a moral life, but, I think, a conceptual clarification of the term ‘morality’ might be

of help here. Traditionally, morality is considered as something that has to do with our actions

with regard to others. Morality, Frankfurt suggests, ‘is more particularly concerned with how

our attitudes and our actions should take into account the needs the desires, and the entitlement

of other people’ (Frankfurt 2004: 7). I wonder, however, whether that is the case. Frankfurt and

others treat morality and meaningfulness as if there is a clear distinguishing line between the

two. It appears to me that sometimes one might do something out of the reasons of morality

and at other times one might do the same thing out of reasons of meaningfulness. In other

words, actions do not necessarily define their nature. Think of the following examples: a man

who buys flower for his wife, in a sense, does this out of considering the needs of another

person, and at the same time his actions toward his wife is regulated by reasons of love and not

morality. He has found a way to make her smile. Now, is buying flowers a moral or non-moral

action? Is having a sense of humor and making people enjoy your company moral or non-

moral? The answer for these questions is, I think, it depends on the context. Flowers that are

bought as a sign of peace offering do not smell the same as the flowers that are bought out of

habit because you know your wife likes them and, more importantly, they match with the

Persian carpet in the dining room. A physicist’s life, according to those who believe in non- moral meaningfulness, would be meaningful in virtue of his intellectual engagement with

‘projects of worth’. However, when we think of Robert Oppenheimer we usually think of the

Manhattan Project and his ‘necessary evil’ and not merely his intellectual activity during the

1930s.

It seems to me that one major problem of most accounts of the relation between morality and meaningfulness is that they offer, and appeal to, what I call a ‘static picture of life’. Scholars

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like Frankfurt and Wolf come to believe that not everything that confers meaning on life is

moral and they appeal to some activities in life that are epitome of non-moral but meaningful

activities (loving someone, creating artworks, friendship, reading, travel, healthy adventures,

etc.). Take the example of reading as a non-moral activity that can contribute to the

meaningfulness of one’s life. For a desperate housewife and a prisoner, discovering

Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy and engaging with their works could be of high significance; their

works give them fresh insights into the nature of life and they would find reading them very

fulfilling. The prisoner might contemplate the life of Raskolnikov and associate with him;

Dostoyevsky might give the prisoner a reason to find his ‘Sonia’. But for a person who

believes ‘from life one can extract many books, but from books, so little, so very little, life’,

reading wouldn’t be seen as fulfilling as for our prisoner. That is, the background against

which an action takes place can affect our judgment of its meaning-conferring role in a

person’s life. This is where a confessional approach can play a central role.

A confessional approach, as opposed to a theoretical one, is precisely sensitive to the

transitions and criss-crosses in a person’s life and aims at providing a ‘dynamic picture of a

life’. One interesting feature of Wittgenstein’s diaries is that here we are dealing with a

dynamic picture of a life. We see Wittgenstein as a person and not merely as a philosopher; we

see his fears, his struggles with his vanity, his take on the events of the day, his openness to

both considering the Christian solution to the problem of life and rejecting it, etc. It is in virtue

of these details that we can tell for Wittgenstein a meaningful life was a moral life- though the moral life for him was seen as a life devoid of vanity.

As we have seen thus far, Wittgenstein’s private conversations do not provide a general account of meaning in life and they are not meant to do so. Not surprisingly, the style of these

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conversations is similar to Wittgenstein’s style in Philosophical Investigations. In both cases,

Wittgenstein describes, in Cavell’s words, ‘how things are’ with him in the world. Wittgenstein

himself gives the best description of this way of thinking when he compares his Philosophical

Investigations to ‘a number of sketches of landscapes which were made in the course of these

long and involved journeyings’ (1958: viii). By the same token, Wittgenstein’s contemplations

on the problem of life can be seen as various sketches of a landscape: A human life. A life in

which there was a ‘glorious sun’ and a ‘bad person’ who couldn’t help staring at it; a life in

which the values of modesty and ‘living in agreement with the world’ (Wittgenstein 1979a: 75) were equal and this identity had an ‘absolute value’. He writes, ‘God, what a blessing it is to be able to live without horrible problems!’ (2003: 229). His confessions describe how a human being deals with the problems of life but the value of those confessions, beyond its idiosyncratic nature, lies in the fact that they show how far an enduring soul can go down into

‘the abyss in the human heart’ (ibid: 183) to discover the source of its ‘disquietudes’.

Into the Abyss of Life

In the morning of 9/11 when the second plane hit the World Trade Centre people who were

trapped in higher floors, after some desperate attempts to escape, realized that they couldn’t

make it. So, they started calling their families and significant others. These last human

contacts,28 however, were not made to inform them of their incoming death, but to assure them

of their love. In those moments, those people expressed an important sense of their lives: that

even death cannot put an end to their love. The sovereignty of love on that day didn’t stand in

28 One might wonder how many times in the course of our lives we use the phrase, ‘last human contact’.

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need of justification. Life does not stand in need of justification. Here is a baby who brings peace to a broken family; here is the man who buzzes around the New Testament; here is a mother with numerous kids; here is Little Chandler; here are men without women and here is a cat who comes back home. Here is the glorious sun and here is a philosophy student. These are all manifestations of modes of ‘this complicated form of life’ (Wittgenstein 1958: 174). These modes can all criss-cross and overlap and integrate together in an inseparable way. The man without a woman might cry for his cat; and the thief might be the philosopher. The phenomenon of living and the phenomenon of meaning are intertwined. When I think of the meaning of life I must be, necessarily, in either one of the situations mentioned above or in one of other countless situations that, following William James, we might call the varieties of life experience. The question is how can one think of the meaning of life without taking into considerations, first and foremost, these experiences. A thief who comes to the conclusion that he is an outcast from the feast of life, might arrive at a different understanding of the grace of

God than that of a theorist of God’s purpose. God speaks to the thief differently, that is, in a way the theorist wouldn’t, or rather couldn’t hear. After all, ‘You can’t hear God speak to someone else, you can hear him only if you are being addressed’ (Wittgenstein 1990: §717).

Conclusion

In this chapter, I argued that in our everyday life the ‘grammar’ of the question of life’s meaning is confessional. I took confession to be any type of declaration or reflection that is meant to express one’s understanding of (one’s) life as a whole. I argued that a confessional approach can best provide a ‘perspicuous representation’ of our forms of expression with

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regard to the meaning of life. The three important elements of a confessional approach, namely, description instead of explanation, trust instead of reasoning, and sharing instead of claiming were discussed, and I suggested that these three elements distinguish a confessional approach from a theoretical approach. I examined Klagge’s ‘quasi-objectivism’ and Wolf’s theory that ‘meaning arises when subjective attraction meets objective attractiveness’ (Wolf

2010: 9) and I showed their limits when we apply them to everyday situations compared to a confessional mode. Furthermore, I discussed some of the characters in Dubliners, and

Wittgenstein’s own diaries, as two examples of a confessional approach toward the question of life’s meaning.

A confessional approach, as an alternative way of approaching the question of life’s meaning, is open to the endless varieties of human life; it is open to the way meaning ‘meshes with our life’ (Wittgenstein 1974: § 29). That is, it is not ‘bewitched’ (Wittgenstein 1958: § 109) by the

‘conditions’ and ‘concepts’ of the meaning of life. If, for example, a believer says his belief in

God is the source of meaning in his life, a confessional approach does not bother enquiring whether God could be the sufficient and necessary source of meaning. Instead, the question would be ‘what are the effects of his belief in his actual life?’ It is not concerned with objective values of benevolence and compassion; it is concerned with the manifestations of benevolence and compassion in a particular life. Since the aim of a confessional approach is to understand a life, all these concepts are at the service of a ‘perspicuous representation’ of that life. In other words, a confessional approach invests in the particular to gain something about our ‘forms of life’ (Wittgenstein 1958: 241). Thus, it is indeed a method, a way of seeing, and not a theory.

In this view, a confessional approach is not opposed to the theoretical approach; it only tries to

have a clear view of its concepts. Wittgenstein says, ‘Every sign by itself seems dead. What

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gives it life? – in use it is alive’ (ibid: § 432). Likewise, confession, rightly understood, gives life to all the concepts that are dead in themselves. Confession, as it were, breathes fire into the concepts and makes a life for them to describe.

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Chapter Seven

Conclusion

In the preface of Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein writes about his ‘several unsuccessful attempts’ to bring all his ideas in a book with ‘natural order and without breaks’

(1958: ix). He is alluding here to the difficulty to impose an over-all system or structure to the

‘movements of his thoughts’. This difficulty alludes to the core of his philosophy, which revolves around a resistance against theorization and systematization. Thus, one might be tempted to say, paradoxically, his philosophy aims at negating philosophy. He writes,

The real discovery is the one that makes me capable of stopping doing philosophy

when I want to. – The one that gives philosophy peace, so that it is no longer tormented

by questions which bring itself in question. – Instead we now demonstrate a method, by

examples; and the series of examples can be broken off. – Problems are solved

(difficulties eliminated), not a single problem (ibid: § 133).

The difficulty with which Wittgenstein was struggling was the difficulty to establish a method of doing philosophy, which brings about a ‘perspicuous’ understanding of things; that is, a method that would bring about a change in our ‘way of looking at things’. Wittgenstein firmly

believed that philosophical problems can be solved if we ‘command a clear view’ of things.

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This he thought is possible by attention to the use of words in our everyday language, which is their ‘original home’ (ibid: § 116). In a sense, Wittgenstein’s philosophy is an invitation to rediscover and, thus, to recognize the significance of the ordinary: The ordinary uses of words, the ordinary life, the ordinary people, the ordinary rules and the way we follow them, and the ordinary certainty of our world-pictures. He tried to show how extraordinary and ‘mystical’ it is that we wonder at the ordinary. One of the main reasons for Wittgenstein’s dismissal of theorizing and systematizing in philosophy was his firm belief that there is a limit to what theory can capture and convey, that theory imposes a ‘picture’ on us and that picture ‘held us captive’ (ibid: § 115).

Likewise, the difficulty with which I was struggling throughout my research was the struggle to find a correct method of expression for a Wittgensteinian approach toward life’s meaning.

As I said earlier, a Wittgensteinian approach toward the question of life’s meaning doesn’t furnish us with a set of ideas and theories about the ‘ultimate constituents’ of a meaningful life.

Rather, it is a method, a way of looking at the question in its every day circumstances. The

‘essence’ of the meaning of life is of ‘no interest’ to a Wittgensteinian approach. When someone, for example, says the meaning of life is a matter of transcending oneself, a

Wittgensteinian approach tries to ‘look and see’ the ways in which the word ‘transcendence’ are understood in everyday use. On various occasions in my thesis, thus, I would discuss a theory of life’s meaning and then I would try to find the connections between the theory and our everyday life. That is, I was trying to find the implications of various theories for our usual ways of approaching the question of life’s meaning. Furthermore, by providing several counter examples to a theory I was trying to show, first, the limits of that theory in providing a

‘perspicuous representation’ of states of affairs and, second, the significance of various ways in

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which people arrive at a conception of the meaning of life.

Though sometimes my research would overlap and criss-cross with the other works that have

been done by Wittgensteinian scholars, it would mainly go beyond what they have said about various topics. For example, while Lurie’s contribution only deals with the Tractarian approach towards the ‘problem of life’, I tried to extract some ideas from Wittgenstein’s later works and apply them to critically examine the literature. In this regard, there is a similarity between my work and Kishik’s paper, which appeals to Wittgenstein’s later works to conceptually analyse the relation between life, meaning, and words. However, my initial idea was that there are more facets of Wittgenstein’s philosophy that can be applied to examine the literature on life’s meaning. So, for example, in Chapter Four I critically examined the exclusionary accounts of life’s meaning and in Chapter Five I explored the implications of On Certainty for the way we

approach the issue of life’s meaning.

It was in a sense against the background of this key idea, i.e., the limits of theory that I structured the chapters of my thesis. Thus, in Chapters One and Two I briefly discussed the

Tractarian account of life’s meaning and elaborated some objections that a Tractarian view would probably raise against theories in the literature. Identifying ethics with our ‘enquiry into the meaning of life’, the Tractarian view claims that propositions of ethics are inexpressible and any attempt to theorize value or the meaning of life amounts to destroying it.

Wittgenstein’s criticisms of any attempt to theorize value was compared with the recent developments among some commentators in the literature who emphasize the ‘primacy of praxis’ in the constitution of meaning (Cottingham 2003, 2005). I think attention to the praxis

of life is one of the elements that is present throughout Wittgenstein’s philosophical career and can contribute to the literature. I also criticized and rejected Wittgenstein’s conception of life in

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his Tractarian stage and his aspect-blindness with regard to the communal dimension of human

life. I argued that the Tractarian ethics aims at reaching a kind of ‘reflective equilibrium’

through the experience of the mystical. In this view, the mystical takes the place of ethics. In

other words, the meaning of life was found in the experience of the mystical. Wittgenstein was

of the conviction that our ‘tendency’ to search for ‘the ultimate meaning of life’ should be

replaced by the process of living meaningfully, which, for him, was a life that was not

distracted or disturbed by the ultimate questions. For some years he found the process of

meaningful life in living the Tolstoyan ideal of ‘simple life’. However, paradoxically, his view

of that simple life was not simple at all. In fact, for seven years he tried to live an idea; the idea

that a life that is not disturbed by philosophical and moral problems, is a cure for intellectual and, one might add, spiritual maladies.

One might say, the Tractarian view imposed an autistic ‘picture’ of life-world and Wittgenstein

was held captive by it so much so that he became oblivious to the life of others, i.e., our

communal life. However, it took 10 years for Wittgenstein to realize that his own conception of

the limits of meaningful language is based on wrong assumptions. He realized that our

language has some functions that are not descriptive of facts at all, and he recognized that the

endless varieties of human experiences can be conveyed through language and that it doesn’t

need to be factual to make sense. Interestingly, the Tractarian view is the epitome of those

tendencies and delusions that Wittgenstein, in his later works, would severely criticize, e.g., the

delusions of perfect language, perfect subject who sees the world aright, and perfect

explanation of everything. Wittgenstein realized that his ‘grave mistakes’ were the result of his

conviction that there is a clear-cut way of explaining and categorizing everything. In fact,

Wittgenstein’s movement from his Tractarian philosophy to what Rhees once called an

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‘anthropological’ philosophy can be viewed as an instantiation of aspect-dawning.

To discuss the relevance and significance of aspect-seeing and aspect-dawning I dedicated a

chapter to this topic. So, in Chapter Three I drew attention to the intimate connection between

the meaning of life and aspect-seeing and discussed the implications of this view for our

understanding of the meaning of life, in general, and religious beliefs, in particular. Seeing the

world as a ‘limited whole’, seeing the world as a ‘friendly home’ (to use Pojman’s words), seeing life as ‘a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing’, seeing the vicissitudes of one’s life as the grace of God, etc., are some examples of aspect-seeing. Most supernaturalist accounts of meaning in life fail to pay due attention to the significance of one’s attitude and one’s ‘way of seeing’ (Wittgenstein 1958: § 461) and, thus, are unlikely to bring about a change in one’s way of seeing the world. That is, they fail to bring about the dawning of religious aspects on the non-believer. Thus, a supernaturalist who argues that life would be meaningless without believing in God and making a connection with him would be successful in bringing about a change in the non-believer’s way of seeing the world only if, and to the extent that, his arguments make the non-believer see the world religiously. A theoretical discussion of the conditions of meaningfulness is unlikely to lead to a change of aspect. I might accept the believer’s argument for the existence of God and yet remain unable to see the world religiously. I further argued that the growing attention to the ‘praxis’ of life and one’s way of seeing the world is indeed the result of taking the limitations of a merely theoretical approach toward the question of life’s meaning seriously (Cottingham 2003, 2005, 2009b).

Challenging what I called the ‘exclusionary’ approaches in the literature was the next topic in

Chapter Four. Exclusionary theories of life’s meaning make a distinction between the great and the ordinary and claim that there is a way to theorize the ways of achieving the great meaning.

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Levy’s ‘work theory’ (2005) as a paradigm case of an exclusionary approach was discussed

alongside some other theories and I argued that these theories are based on ‘a one-sided diet’,

i.e. one-sided examples that overlook the loose boundaries between the great and the ordinary.

I argued that what is lacking in the exclusionary accounts of life’s meaning is particularism and

I suggested that attention to the surrounding circumstances of a life might lead to a more

perspicuous understanding of the significance we ascribe to that life.

In Chapter Five, I critically examined some skeptical theories of life’s meaning, especially

Nagel’s account of ‘the absurd’, by appealing to some arguments that I drew from On

Certainty. Whereas most skeptical accounts of life’s meaning rely heavily on the notion of detachment to prove the ‘fundamentally correct’ position of nihilism, Wittgenstein draws attention to the certainty with which we lead our lives and actions. I argued that this view indicates that skeptics account of life’s meaning are incoherent. Making a distinction between what I call the ‘inflationary’ and ‘deflationary’ responses to the absurd, I argued that though

Nagel’s reasons for discarding inflationary responses like Schopenhauer’s ‘negation of the will’, Nietzsche’s ‘amor fati’, Camus’ ‘heroism’, and Benatar’s ‘anti-natalism’ are convincing, his own alterative solution, i.e. ‘irony’ is also problematic. Nagel argues that the sense of the absurd arises when we see the insignificance of life from an objective point of view and the significance we attach to it subjectively. However, the absurd is nothing to be ashamed of or feel distressed about. ‘It need not be a matter for agony unless we make it so. Nor need it evoke a defiant contempt of fate that allows us to feel brave or proud’ (Nagel 2008: 152). According to Nagel, we don’t need such ‘dramatics’ and we can approach our lives with irony instead of

‘heroism or despair’. The problem with this suggestion, I argued, is that while Nagel invites us to keep living our ordinary lives after encountering the absurd but with a flavor of irony, there

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are countless modes of our ‘complicated forms of life’ that are ‘pre-rational’ and, thus, usually cannot be performed by ironic attitude, such as pain-behavior, expressions of love, etc.

And finally, Chapter Six was in a sense an attempt to bring all the elements that I have been trying to discuss and defend from Chapter Three onwards. Thus, I argued that in our everyday life the ‘grammar’ of the question of life’s meaning is confessional. I suggested that by discussing or thinking of the meaning of life we usually share the way we live in the world. I also drew a distinction between a ‘theoretical’ approach and a ‘confessional’ approach and argued that the latter distinguishes itself from the former in three ways: description instead of explanation, trusting instead of reasoning, and sharing instead of claiming. The notion of confessionality of our enquiry into life’s meaning should be viewed against the background of elements such as aspect-seeing, ordinariness, particularity and inclusivism discussed in previous chapters. A confessional approach to the question of life’s meaning does not furnish us with a theory to refute other theories; rather, it provides us with a method to obtain a

‘perspicuous representation’ of the states of affairs when people engage with the question. A theorist might not find this method very satisfying because it doesn’t tell anything about the essence of the meaning of life, but, one might say, in a Wittgensteinian approach having a clear view of a theory is more significant than the theory itself. As Wittgenstein says:

Clarity, perspicuity are valuable in themselves. I am not interested in constructing a

building, so much as in having a perspicuous view of the foundation of possible

buildings (1980:7).

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The Way Forward

As I mentioned in the introduction, Wittgenstein is almost an absent figure in the literature on

life’s meaning. I think by now we know one reason for his absence: A Wittgensteinian method

of approaching the question of life’s meaning seems unsatisfactory because it doesn’t lead to

an answer to the question. There is a misconception that a Wittgensteinian method of

approaching the question is like a nagging police officer who wants to scrutinize all the

theories and answers and to pose questions and show the loopholes and lacunae of any given

theory of life’s meaning without providing an alternative answer of its own. However, my aim

in this research was to challenge this misconception by engaging actively and positively with

the literature, by highlighting those accounts of life’s meaning that take the ‘praxis of life’ and

the limits of theory seriously, and by defending those ideas that respect particularism and

ordinariness of life. The aim of a Wittgensteinian approach is ‘to do justice to what there is’

and this is precisely what makes a Wittgensteinian approach toward the question relevant and even important. However, in my research, I managed to address only a few ideas that I found important and pertinent to the literature on life’s meaning. I think there are more elements in

Wittgenstein’s philosophy that can provide promising answers to some of the questions of the

literature and, thus, are worth exploring in future researches.

A further study of Wittgenstein’s texts, on the one hand, and exploring those views expounded

by Wittgensteinian scholars, on the other hand, are worth pursuing. For example, it would be

interesting to explore the probable implications of Diamond’s and Conant’s ‘resolute’ reading of the Tractatus for our understanding of the question of life’s meaning based on a Tractarian

account. Diamond and Conant claim that the traditional reading of the Tractatus is problematic

since it assumes that Wittgenstein is offering a ‘two-world’ metaphysics, the world of facts and

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the world of all the things that cannot be said. In this view, we shouldn’t infer from the last proposition of the Tractatus that there are some ‘important’ things that cannot be said and thus we have to be silent about them. Wittgenstein’s allusion to silence refers to nothing; it doesn’t allude to some ‘infallible truths’. I think this view has far-reaching implications for the

Tractarian conception of life’s meaning, and thus it is worth exploring.

The other issue that I think is worth exploring is an in-depth study of the relation between two separate sets of claims about the meaning of life. Recall that in the literature there are some who suggest that a person’s life can be meaningful in virtue of her engagement with, and attraction to, some activities and projects, which either have objective value or is subjectively satisfying for that person. On the other hand, most supernaturalists and nihilists believe that for life to be meaningful it must have a general purpose and point, which, in return, makes our very existence on earth purposive and meaningful. So, here is the question: Is it justified to talk of meaning in the first sense if meaning in the second sense is not granted? In other words, can an individual life be meaningful if life as a whole lacks meaning? (cf. Cooper 2005; Wong

2008.) On some occasions in my research I alluded to this tension but I didn’t explore it extensively. For example, I think my discussion of aspect-seeing and its related issues might shed light on a better understanding of the tension. As I discussed in Chapter Three, sometimes a particular aspect of my life might dawn on me. For example, I might change the way I treat my children as a result of dawning an aspect of life on me. On the other hand, there are times one sees life as a whole and takes an attitudinal stance toward it (think of the picture of the world as a ‘friendly home’, life as a prison, seeing the vicissitudes of one’s life as the will of

God, etc.). So, it seems worth exploring whether the discussion of aspect-seeing can offer a way of reconciling these two sets of claims together.

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In general, I believe the level of engagement with the literature on life’s meaning will be deeper if we include the exegetical works on Wittgenstein in the discussion. However, as I said in the introduction, my work was only a fresh start, alongside other works done by Thomas

(1995, 1997, 1999), Thompson (1997, 2000), Lurie (2006), Kishik (2008), and Arnswald (2009

(ed.)) to address the question of life’s meaning from a Wittgensteinian perspective, but my approach is different from them in that I have engaged actively with the current debates in the literature on life’s meaning, whereas their scope is mostly limited to Wittgenstein’s texts. I hope this attempt, poor as it stands, leads to a response from the scholars in the literature on life’s meaning. Usually, this is how a conversation begins.

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