Miracles, Hinges, and Grammar in Wittgenstein's on Certainty

Miracles, Hinges, and Grammar in Wittgenstein’s On Certainty

Luigi Perissinotto Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy [email protected]

Abstract

In §513 of On Certainty Wittgenstein asks “What if something really unheard-of happened?” But with this question he is not asking us to make a forecast, a prediction, or some sort of empirico-psychological prophecy about our possible reactions. As I will attempt to show, the question regarding the unheard-of is part of Wittgenstein’s philosophical method—which is to say, it is one of the instruments with which he combats what he sees as the principal source of the confusions of philosophy: mistaking the grammatical for the empirical or, as he also says, the conceptual for the factual. In this sense the question regarding the unheard-of can shed some light on the grammatical status of what he calls “hinges.”

Keywords miracle – hinges – grammar – Moore – philosophical method – experience – mistake

1 Introduction

The prominence of ‘miracles’ has varied in the course of western philosophy. While, for example, the theme of the miracle played a leading role in the first centuries of the modern age,1 in the course of the contemporary epoch it has

1 Suffice it to recall here Chapter xxxvii (“Of Miracles and Their Use”) of Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651) (Hobbes 1994); Chapter vi (“De miraculis”) of Spinoza’s Tractatus teologico-politicus (1670) (Spinoza 1989); Chapter 10 (“Of Miracles”) of Hume’s An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding (1748) (Hume 1999).

Miracles, Hinges, And Grammar In Wittgenstein’s On Certainty 73 progressively withdrawn into the background.2 Obviously, it is not always easy to establish what was meant at various times by the noun ‘miracle,’ the adjec- tive ‘miraculous’ or the adverb ‘miraculously.’ Consequently, it is often difficult to compare one philosopher’s view on the subject with that of another philosopher. This should not surprise us. The answers a philosopher can give to questions such as “What do we mean by ‘miracle’?” or “Is it reasonable to believe that miracles occur?”3 are answers that, as Robert Fogelin observed apropos of Hume, depend on—or are indistinguishable from—“his most fundamental philosophical commitments.”4 In Wittgenstein we find the theme of the miracle (and of the miraculous) on several occasions. It makes its first appearance in the Notebooks 1914–1916, in a remark of 20 October 1916: “aesthetically, the miracle [Wunder] is that the world exists. That there is what there is” (Wittgenstein 1979: 86);5 it recurs, with some important variations, in various texts of the following decades. Here I shall quote two6 of these instances because, as we shall see, they ap- pear to be closely connected with some of the most characteristic themes of On Certainty (oc) (Wittgenstein 1974b)—in particular with that question which, seemingly unexpected, we find at the beginning of oc 513: “What if something really unheard-of [etwas wirklich Unerhörtes] happened?” The first instance is in the Lecture on Ethics (1929) (now in Wittgenstein 1993); while the second appears in his diaries, in a long remark7 dedicated to the miracle of the

2 Not only the theological but also the philosophical literature on miracles is extremely vast. Here I limit myself to mentioning two studies, Burns (1981) and Brown (1984), that I have particularly kept in mind. 3 Taylor (2007: 611) calls the first question “semantic,” distinguishing it from the second, which he calls “epistemological.” Taylor adds: “Moreover, since philosophers agree that part of the answer to the semantic question is ‘an event caused by God,’ the epistemological question is closely tied to a cluster of metaphysical questions, most fundamentally, […] ‘Does God exist?.’” 4 Fogelin (2003: 55) writes: “Hume’s attitude toward miracles is of a piece with some of his most fundamental philosophical commitments.” There is little doubt that what Fogelin says regarding Hume can safely be extended to every philosopher who has written about and discussed miracles. 5 This remark is not taken up again as such in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Wittgenstein 1974a), but it is clearly referred to in proposition 6.44 on the mystical, where Wittgenstein writes that “it is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists.” 6 One may object that the instances are from texts (a lecture and a private diary) that Witt- genstein himself never published or intended to publish. This is unquestionably true, but, as Wittgenstein scholars know very well, the difference between his published and his unpub- lished texts is less clear and more difficult to trace than is the case with other philosophers. 7 Wittgenstein (2003): 90–93 (remark dated 6 May 1931).