Justified True Belief

(●) The philosopher who twice changed how the West thinks about language, and who insisted that the things worth most cannot be said at all. + Most philosophers spend a career defending one system. Ludwig Wittgenstein built two, and the second was an attack on the first. He published one book of philosophy in his lifetime, seventy-five pages of numbered sentences, and a generation of readers took it to have solved every problem of philosophy there was. Then he came back a decade later and spent the rest of his life showing that it had not. For Christian readers he is an odd and important figure. His book was adopted as a weapon by the hardest anti-religious movement of the century, the logical positivists of Vienna, who used it to argue that any sentence about God is not false but meaningless, so much noise. Wittgenstein thought they had misunderstood him completely. What his book actually said is that science can describe every fact in the world and still leave every question a person actually lies awake over untouched: what the world is for, whether a life is well spent, whether there is anything outside it all. He called that region the mystical, and he meant it seriously. He carried Tolstoy’s little edition of the Gospels through four years of war, prayed in his notebooks, and told a friend near the end of his life that he could not help seeing every problem from a religious point of view. One fact about him a reader will remember: he inherited one of the largest fortunes in Europe and gave every shilling of it away, not to the poor, on the argument that money corrupts, but to his already rich brother and sisters, so that it could do no further damage.

(●) 1889 AD: Born in Vienna, the youngest of eight children in one of the richest and unhappiest houses in the empire. + Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein was born on 26 April 1889, in a Vienna that was about to invent the twentieth century. His father Karl had built an iron and steel empire and was, by the time Ludwig arrived, something close to the Austrian Carnegie. The family palace on the Alleegasse held seven grand pianos. Brahms and Mahler gave concerts in its music rooms, Bruno Walter came to dinner and remembered the warmth of the house for the rest of his life, and Gustav Klimt was paid to paint a portrait of Ludwig’s sister Margarete for her wedding. It was also a house under pressure. Karl pushed his sons hard toward the business, and the results were terrible. Ludwig’s eldest brother Hans vanished in 1902, almost certainly a suicide; Rudolf poisoned himself in a Berlin bar in 1904; Kurt shot himself at the end of the First World War as his troops deserted. His brother Paul became a concert pianist, lost his right arm to a Russian bullet in 1914, and went on playing with the left, so well that Ravel and Prokofiev wrote concertos for him. All the children were baptized Catholic, and Ludwig was educated at home until he was fourteen, then sent to a school in Linz. He was a competent engineer before he was anything else, good with his hands all his life, and he could whistle whole symphonic movements from memory.

(●) 1908 AD: He went to Manchester to build aircraft and came out three years later chasing the foundations of logic instead. + He arrived in England as a research student in aeronautics, flying kites at a research station in Derbyshire and then designing a propeller driven by small jets at the tips of the blades, for which he took out a patent in 1911. Airplane design in 1910 meant doing your own mathematics, and the mathematics led him to a question no wind tunnel could settle: what are numbers, and what makes a calculation valid? Someone pointed him to a book by Bertrand Russell, and from Russell to Gottlob Frege, the reclusive German mathematician who had spent his life trying to show that arithmetic is a branch of logic. Wittgenstein went to Jena to see him. Frege, in one of the great acts of academic redirection, told the young man to go to Cambridge and study with Russell. He turned up in Russell’s rooms in October 1911 without an appointment and proceeded to follow him about, arguing. Russell could not decide for a term whether his visitor was a genius or a crank, then settled the question in his own mind and never wavered: this was the most perfect example of genius he had ever known.

(●) 1914 AD: He volunteered for the Austrian army, carried a book of the Gospels through four years of it, and finished his own book on leave in the last summer of the war. + When war broke out he was under no obligation to fight; a hernia exempted him. He enlisted anyway as a private soldier, and asked repeatedly for the most dangerous posts he could get, first on a patrol boat on the Vistula, later as a forward artillery observer on the Russian front, where he was decorated more than once for staying at an exposed observation post under fire. He seems to have gone looking for death as much as for duty. His notebooks from those years have logic on the right-hand pages and prayers on the left. Early in the war, in a bookshop in the Galician town of Tarnów, he found the one book on the shelf: Tolstoy’s The Gospel in Brief, a stripped-down harmony of the four Gospels with the miracles left out. He carried it everywhere, read it until he knew long stretches by heart, and pressed it on anyone who would listen. The other soldiers took to calling him the man with the gospels. Tolstoy’s Christianity was a severe ethical one that set aside the resurrection, and its mark stayed on him: for the rest of his life he took the demand of the Gospels with complete seriousness and the historical evidence for them with very little. He finished the manuscript of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus on leave in the summer of 1918. In November the Italians captured him, and he spent nine months in prison camps, the last of them at Cassino, arranging by post to have his book published and writing to Russell about it from behind the wire.

(●) 1919 AD: Believing philosophy finished, he gave away his fortune and went to teach village children arithmetic. + His father had died in 1913 and left him enormously rich. Home from the camps, he signed the whole inheritance over to his brother Paul and his sisters Helene and Hermine. The lawyer who drew up the papers said it was like watching a kind of financial suicide. His reasoning was not that the poor deserved it; he thought money would only corrupt them as it had corrupted him, and his siblings were already wealthy enough that a little more could do them no harm. He believed the Tractatus had settled the problems of philosophy, so there was nothing left to do but live. He trained as an elementary schoolteacher and spent six years in poor mountain villages south of Vienna: Trattenbach, Puchberg, Otterthal. He was a gifted and exhausting teacher, the kind who built a cat skeleton with his pupils, took them to Vienna at his own expense, and wrote them a spelling dictionary, the only other book published in his lifetime. He was also a harsh one, and that has to be said plainly. He pulled hair and boxed ears, and in April 1926 an eleven-year-old boy named Josef Haidbauer collapsed after two or three blows to the head. Wittgenstein handed in his resignation on 28 April and was gone. The following month he was summoned before the district court at Gloggnitz, where the judge ordered a psychiatric report, and what came of the hearing is not settled even now: William Warren Bartley says it exonerated him, while Alexander Waugh reports that the outcome of the case was never published. A decade later he went back to the village to ask the pupils he had struck to forgive him. One of them was Hermine Piribauer, whose hair he had pulled until it came away in his hand, and she answered him with nothing but a flat "Ja, ja." He worked for a while as a gardener’s assistant at a monastery, and considered becoming a monk. Then his sister Margarete asked him to help design her a house in Vienna, and he gave two years to it, down to the door handles and the radiators, which he sent back to the foundry until they were right.

(●) 1929 AD: He came back to Cambridge, submitted his book as a doctoral thesis, and began taking it apart. + Two things drew him back. Frank Ramsey, the young Cambridge mathematician who had helped C. K. Ogden turn the book into English, had been travelling out to Austria to argue with him about it; and a lecture in Vienna in 1928 by the Dutch mathematician L. E. J. Brouwer set him thinking again about the foundations he thought he had settled. So he came back in January 1929, thirty-nine years old and enrolled as a research student, and submitted the published book as his doctoral dissertation. Russell and G. E. Moore examined him. Moore’s report to the university is one page long and famous: "It is my personal opinion that Mr Wittgenstein’s thesis is a work of genius; but, be that as it may, it is certainly well up to the standard required for the Cambridge degree of Doctor of Philosophy." The blow that did the most damage came later, from an Italian economist. Keynes introduced him to Piero Sraffa a few weeks after he arrived, and the two argued about the Tractatus for years. Wittgenstein held that a sentence must share a logical form with the fact it describes. Norman Malcolm, who had the story from Wittgenstein himself, records that Sraffa brushed his fingertips outward from under his chin, the Neapolitan gesture for disgust or contempt, and asked what the logical form of that was. Whether the story is exact or polished in the retelling, it points at the change: meaning is not a hidden structure mirroring the world, but something people do with each other. His lectures in the 1930s were unlike anyone else’s. He spoke without notes in a bare room, sat in a deck chair, fell into long silences, and sometimes told the class the hour had been stupid and walked out. Students gave up other careers to follow him. He hated what he was creating, and warned them repeatedly not to become professional philosophers.

(●) 1939 AD: He took the Cambridge chair of philosophy, then left it during the war to carry medicines in a London hospital. + He was elected to the professorship in February 1939, succeeding Moore, and thought the post a kind of living death; he told an old Manchester friend that the honour was flattering, and that he might have done better with a job opening and closing railway gates. The date mattered a great deal more than the chair did. Eleven months earlier Germany had annexed Austria, and the race laws now counted his family as Jewish: three of his grandparents had been born Jews, though the family had been Christian since before his father’s time. He took British citizenship in June 1939, and used the new passport in July to travel to Vienna and for a single day to Berlin, where he met an official of the Reichsbank. What was under negotiation in those months was his sisters’ lives. Hermine and Helene survived the war in their own city only because of the bargain that was struck: Margarete led the negotiation, the family’s foreign holdings went to the Reichsbank, and Hitler himself approved the exemption that reclassified them. Paul, safe in America, thought the money should never have been paid, and never spoke to Ludwig again. He could not bear to be a professor while the country was at war. In 1941 he got himself taken on as a dispensary porter at Guy’s Hospital in London, wheeling medicines to the wards, where he was known to advise patients quietly not to take them. In April 1943 he followed the doctors he had been helping to a clinical research unit in Newcastle, worked there as their laboratory assistant on wound shock, the collapse of blood pressure that can kill a badly injured man hours after the injury itself, and built his own apparatus to study how a patient’s breathing moves his blood pressure. He was happier doing that than lecturing. He resigned the chair in 1947 after eight years, most of which he had spent trying to escape it, and went to Ireland to write: a farmhouse in Wicklow, then a cottage on the Connemara coast where he tamed the wild birds, then a Dublin hotel where he wrote in the mornings at the Botanic Gardens.

(●) 1951 AD: He died of cancer in a doctor’s spare room in Cambridge, and his second book came out two years later. + Prostate cancer was diagnosed in late 1949. He refused to die in a hospital, and his physician, Edward Bevan, took him into his own house in Cambridge. He went on working almost to the end; the notes published as On Certainty break off two days before his death. Mrs Bevan told him one evening that his close friends would arrive the next day. "Tell them I’ve had a wonderful life," he said, and lost consciousness. He died on 29 April 1951, three days after his sixty-second birthday. What to do about the funeral was awkward. He had been baptized Catholic and had lived at a sceptical distance from the church, and nobody knew what he would have wanted. His friend Maurice Drury, who had once intended to be ordained and became a psychiatrist at Wittgenstein’s urging instead, decided that Catholic prayers should be said at the graveside, and afterwards was never sure he had chosen rightly. He is buried at the Ascension Parish Burial Ground in Cambridge. The manuscript he had been rewriting since the middle of the 1930s was published in 1953 as Philosophical Investigations, edited by two of his students, Elizabeth Anscombe and Rush Rhees. It has shaped English-speaking philosophy ever since, and behind it stands an archive of about twenty thousand pages that editors are still working through.

What He Taught

(T1) A sentence works like a picture, and that is why there are things it cannot reach. + A Paris lawsuit gave Wittgenstein the idea. Serving on the eastern front in the autumn of 1914, he read a magazine report of a road accident case in which miniature vehicles and dolls had been set out on a table to show what had happened, and on 29 September he wrote in his notebook that a proposition puts a world together in just that experimental way. A proposition is a sentence that says how things stand, and so comes out true or false: the lorry was on the wrong side of the road. The model worked because the arrangement of the little cars and figures on the table matched the arrangement of the real ones in the street. Nobody had to explain the code; you could simply see it. A sentence, he argued in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, is that kind of model. "The cat is on the mat" hangs together in a pattern, and it says something because its pattern can be laid against the world and found to match or not to match. So language can describe any arrangement of things: the whole of natural science, everything that is the case. But notice what the little cars on the table can never model. They cannot model the fact that modelling works. They cannot model whether the accident was anyone’s fault in the deepest sense, or whether the dead man’s life had been worth living. Wittgenstein drew a hard line there. Language pictures facts in the world; it cannot get outside the world to picture the world as a whole, or its value, or the God who might stand behind it. Those things, he said, cannot be said. They can only show themselves. And the final sentence of the book, his most quoted line, is a rule of respect rather than a dismissal: about what you cannot say, keep quiet.

(Q) "The limits of my language mean the limits of my world." + Source: Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 5.6 (Ogden translation, 1922). The sentence is often quoted as though it were about vocabulary, as if learning more words gave a person a bigger world. He meant something stricter: whatever cannot be put into a sentence with a sense cannot be part of the world I can describe at all (T1).

(T2) Science can answer every question it can ask and still leave the problems of life untouched. + Suppose a complete physics arrived tomorrow. Every particle accounted for, every force unified, the whole history of the universe derivable from the equations. Wittgenstein’s claim is that you could hold that finished theory in your hands and find that not one of the questions that keeps you awake has been so much as approached. A man could sit up at two in the morning with the whole of it open on his knees and still be sitting there at three. Why is there anything here at all? Is my life well spent? That is the burden of the last pages of the Tractatus, and it is also where readers discover that the book is not the anti-religious tract they were told it was. Three of his sentences there set the shape. The sense of the world must lie outside the world, because inside it everything simply is as it is, and no fact is a value. God does not reveal himself in the world, that is, God is not one more item among the furniture, to be found by looking harder at the furniture. And the mystical, his word for the thing that stops a person in his tracks, is not how the world is but that it is: the sheer astonishing fact that there is something rather than nothing. Wittgenstein told Ludwig von Ficker, the Innsbruck editor he hoped would print the book, that its point was an ethical one, and that it consisted of two parts, the one he had written and the much more important one he had not. Christian readers will want to press him at exactly this point, and should. He has cleared a space that no scientific advance can ever fill, and then posted a sign on it saying that nothing can be said here. Scripture does not agree that nothing can be said. It reports that the silence was broken from the other side: "And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth" (John 1:14).

(Q) "We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all." + Source: Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 6.52 (Ogden translation, 1922). It comes among the closing remarks of a book finished on army leave in 1918, by a man who had spent four years at the front. Five remarks later it ends: "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent" (7).

(T3) The meaning of a word is not an object behind it but the work it does among people. + This is the later Wittgenstein, and it begins with him admitting that the young man who wrote the Tractatus had been holding a picture of language that was too tidy. Think of a builder on a site calling "Slab!" to his mate, who brings a slab. What did the word mean? Not some mental object floating behind it. It meant what it did there: it got a slab carried over. He called such a stretch of language with its activity a language-game, and the term is meant to remind us that speaking is something people do together, with rules learned in practice, like chess or hopscotch. From this came his best-known argument, the one about family resemblance. Ask what all games have in common. Board games, ball games, a child bouncing a ball against a wall, the Olympics. Some have winners, some do not; some need luck, some skill; some are competitive, some are solitary. There is no single thread running through all of them, only overlapping similarities, the way members of a family share a nose here and a walk there without any one feature appearing in every face. Do not assume the essence is there and hidden, he says. Look and see. He thought a great deal of philosophy was an illness caught from language, and that the cure was to bring words home from their metaphysical holidays. A word goes on holiday when it is lifted out of the ordinary work it does and set to answer questions it was never built for. Know earns its keep when a man says he knows the way to the station; it gets into trouble the moment someone asks whether anyone can really know anything at all. Christian thinkers have found the method genuinely useful, because it exposes how often a modern objection to faith rests on a picture nobody has inspected: that "God exists" must work like "Pluto exists," or that a word like person must mean in the Trinity exactly what it means in a census. But the method has a clear limit, which the church has had to hold on to. How a word is used tells you what people mean by it. It does not tell you whether what they mean is true.

(Q) "The meaning of a word is its use in the language." + Source: Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations §43 (Anscombe translation, 1953). The famous clause is the second half of the sentence, and the first half is usually dropped: for a large class of cases, though not for all, in which we employ the word "meaning", it can be defined thus (T3).

(T4) Religious belief is not a shaky opinion about the facts but a picture a person steers a whole life by. + In a Cambridge lecture room in 1938 he put a case to his students. One man says he believes in a Last Judgement; another says he does not. Are they contradicting each other the way two men contradict each other about tomorrow’s weather? Wittgenstein thought not, and the reason is worth sitting with. The first man is not offering a weak prediction that the second scores as improbable. He has a picture always before his mind, and it is regulating everything: what he is ashamed of, what he hopes, what he will not do for money. Weigh that against a weather forecast and you have already missed what kind of thing it is. So he was fierce against treating faith as a hypothesis, an educated guess held until better evidence arrives. In the same lectures he took up a priest, Father O’Hara, who had defended the faith as reasonable because the evidence pointed that way, and told the class that if that is religious belief then it is all superstition, and that he would ridicule it, though not for resting on insufficient evidence. In his notebooks during the war he had written down where it did have its seriousness: belief in God as understanding that the facts of the world are not the end of the matter, and prayer as thinking about the meaning of life. Two things are worth holding together here. He has seen something the church has always known, that faith is not bare assent but trust that reorders a whole life, closer to a marriage than to a wager on a horse. And he has left out something the church has always insisted on, that this trust is a response to events that actually happened in Judea under Pontius Pilate. Where he went wrong on that second point is where the gospel parts company with him (†3).

(Q) "To believe in a God means to understand the question about the meaning of life." + Source: Wittgenstein, Notebooks 1914-1916, entry for 8 July 1916 (Anscombe translation). Written in a field notebook on the Russian front. The next two lines of the entry continue: to believe in a God means to see that the facts of the world are not the end of the matter, and that life has a meaning.

(Q) "I am not a religious man but I cannot help seeing every problem from a religious point of view." + Source: Wittgenstein in conversation with Maurice Drury, 1949, recorded in Drury’s "Some Notes on Conversations with Wittgenstein," in Rush Rhees, ed., Recollections of Wittgenstein. Drury was a former theology student turned psychiatrist and one of his closest friends, and the remark is the nearest thing to a summary Wittgenstein ever gave of his own position. It is also the sentence that made philosophers go back and read the Tractatus again.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†1) The Vienna Circle read his book as a charter for dismissing religion, and he told them they had it backwards. + Through the 1920s a group of Viennese scientists and philosophers around Moritz Schlick met to read the Tractatus aloud, sentence by sentence, over a whole year. They became the Vienna Circle, and out of them came logical positivism, the doctrine that a sentence has meaning only if it can be verified by observation or is true by definition, the way "every bachelor is unmarried" is true by definition. On that test, "God is good" is not a false claim but no claim at all, like a cough. The young A. J. Ayer brought the doctrine to England in Language, Truth and Logic in 1936, and for twenty years it made philosophy of religion look like a dead subject in English-speaking universities. Wittgenstein met with members of the Circle and disappointed them. Rather than discuss the book, he more than once turned his back on the room and read aloud the mystical poetry of Rabindranath Tagore. To Ludwig von Ficker he had already written that the point of the book was an ethical one, and that the important half was the half he had not written. The Circle had taken his warning that certain things cannot be said as a verdict that there is nothing there; he meant that there is everything there, and that the sayable is the smaller part. Positivism did not last. Its own central rule turned out to fail its own test, since the claim that only the verifiable is meaningful is not itself verifiable by any observation, and by the early 1960s the doctrine was in ruins. The clearing it left behind is where modern Christian philosophy grew up.

(†2) His own students carried his method into Christian philosophy and theology. + The most important of them was Elizabeth Anscombe, who arrived in Cambridge in 1942 at twenty-three, already a Catholic convert, became one of his literary executors, and translated the Philosophical Investigations into the English everyone now quotes. In 1958 she published an essay, "Modern Moral Philosophy," which argued that modern secular ethics goes on using words like obligation and ought in a strong legal sense that only makes sense if there is a lawgiver, and that having dropped the lawgiver it should drop the words. It is a Wittgensteinian move turned on the moral philosophy of her own day: look at how the word is actually being used, and see what it quietly takes for granted. That essay is one of the seeds of the recovery of virtue ethics, the older approach that asks what sort of person an act makes of you rather than which rule it breaks, and it is where the word consequentialism was coined, for the view that an act is to be judged only by the results it brings about. Her husband Peter Geach, a Catholic convert too, sat in his lectures on philosophical psychology after the war and wrote on God, providence and the logic of faith for half a century. Others took him up on the doctrine of God, and three books in particular carried him into theology. Norman Malcolm, his friend and memoirist, argued in Wittgenstein: A Religious Point of View? (1993) that the whole of the work should be read as animated by exactly that. Fergus Kerr’s Theology after Wittgenstein (1986) put the case to theologians that a great deal of modern talk about the inner self, the real person supposedly hidden behind the face and the habits, had been built on a picture of the mind that Wittgenstein had dismantled. And George Lindbeck’s The Nature of Doctrine (1984) treated church doctrines as the grammar of Christian speech, the rules that govern how the words may be used, much as the rules of grammar govern a sentence without themselves being one. That proposal was borrowed openly from him, and it has been vigorously argued over ever since. There is a family likeness worth naming between his method and old Christian instincts. The warning that God is not one more object in the world is what theologians had long meant by saying that God is not a being among beings; and the insistence that ordinary practice comes before theory sits close to the older claim that faith seeks understanding rather than waiting on it.

(†3) Where the gospel parts company with him: a faith cut loose from what happened, and a God who does not show himself. + The honest ledger has a second column, and in his case it is drawn from his own pages. - Faith without history. "Christianity is not based on a historical truth," he wrote in 1937, and he meant that the believer is handed a narrative and told to believe through thick and thin, not to weigh it as one weighs any other report of the past (Culture and Value, p. 32e, Winch translation). The apostles say the opposite, and say it as though everything hangs on it: "And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins" (1 Corinthians 15:17). Luke opens his Gospel by telling Theophilus that he has followed all things closely and written an orderly account so that his reader may have certainty about what he was taught (Luke 1:1-4), and Peter insists that the apostles were not passing on clever stories but were eyewitnesses (2 Peter 1:16). Wittgenstein was right that no one stakes a life on a bare probability. He was wrong to conclude that the evidence is therefore beside the point; the New Testament’s own answer is that the report is true, and that trust grows in the soil of a truth received. - A God who does not show himself. "God does not reveal himself in the world," he wrote in the Tractatus (6.432). If the sentence only denies that God is one more object to be catalogued, Christians agree. As it stands it goes further, and Scripture will not follow: what can be known of God is plain from what has been made, so that no one is without excuse (Romans 1:19-20), and the decisive self-disclosure was not a feeling about the world as a whole but a man in a particular village (John 1:14). - Silence as a rule. His instruction to be silent about what cannot be said is, taken as a policy, a counsel of resignation. The church has never accepted that the choice is between exact description and silence. It speaks of God in analogy, in metaphor, in narrative and in praise, knowing the words are stretched and using them anyway, because the alternative is to leave the most important thing unsaid. - His own conduct. He would not have wanted this left out. He struck children hard enough to injure at least one of them and was less than truthful about it when questioned, and for years he let friends believe his Jewish ancestry was slighter than it was. In 1936 and 1937 he went around to friends and to his old pupils and confessed both, against the advice of nearly everyone, because he thought a life could not be honest while it rested on a false front. Some of the villagers would not forgive him. The episode shows the man at his best and his worst in the same week, and he judged himself more harshly than any biographer has. He is worth the argument. Few thinkers of the last century took the difference between the sayable and the holy as seriously, and fewer still lived as if the answer mattered.