It is difficult to ascertain Kierkegaard’s influence on the early Wittgenstein. Aside from Wittgenstein having published only one book (with the exception of an article and a book review), his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus remains largely, literally, solemnly and intentionally silent on questions of religion, aesthetics, psychology and the most exciting — the poetical and prosaic — aspects of philosophy; something which Kierkegaard discussed at length. With the exception of several cryptic statements that ironically throw the whole book into the realm of the mystical, further frustrating the reader with the stubborn refusal of metaphysical speculation, this is arguably the most dreary and tedious treatise on logic, science and mathematics ever written. The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is quite literally alienating, if not altogether hysterical in its minimalist and implicational style of exposition. At the same time, the greatest logician of all time, Gottlob Frege, described it as a work of art, rather than a scientific treatise. In terms of content, he claimed, the book has nothing new to say. But it does shed new and interesting light on what is — or should be — already well known. Its form speaks volumes, its content claims to be empty and its purpose remains a mystery.
From a strictly Tractarian point of view, everything Kierkegaard has written is an example of nonsense; a mere attempt at articulating the unsayable and giving voice to that which can only be shown. But the later Wittgenstein turned out to be a great admirer of Kierkegaard and some scholars even argue that the early Wittgenstein was heavily influenced by the Danish theologian. He would refer to Kierkegaard as “a saint” and “a profound thinker.” Yet, there is no more than a handful of philosophers that Wittgenstein had not dismissed off-hand or downright insulted through the course of his philosophical career. Figures such as Hegel, Bertrand Russell, Karl Popper and, to some extent, even Einstein were simply — at best! — ignored. Needless to say, it takes a particular habitus to appeal to Wittgenstein. All the while, Wittgenstein’s reading list would remain as eclectic as one could imagine: William James, Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, St. Augustine, Tolstoy…
The realm of the ethical is a philosophical region that the early Wittgenstein relegated to the domain of silence, drawing a rigid fact/value distinction between “what can be stated clearly” and “whereof one must remain silent” (Wittgenstein, 2023). Silence is clearly of an extraordinary variety since all of the reader’s attention is actively directed towards it. To quote: “my work consists of two parts: of the one which is here, and of everything which I have not written. And precisely this second part is the important one” (Monk, 1991), wrote Wittgenstein in a letter to his publisher. A closer reading, however, demonstrates that Wittgenstein had very little interest in the things that can be stated clearly (propositions of science included). It is the things that are “made manifest” and that cannot be articulated (i.e. ethics) that interested him the most; above all, it was his ethical self that Wittgenstein was looking to cultivate.
Philosophy as a way of life, the philosopher as a person who is true to his own discourse and whose writing reflects life, in contrast with the scholar who lays down only systems and treatises. This is the motif that cuts through the writings and the lives of both Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard. This is the meaning behind that “profundity” which Wittgenstein ascribed to Kierkegaard; it does not consist in the complexity or sublimity of the text independently of the writer, but just in the very fact of the text “radiating,” so to speak, with the concrete life of the writer: the writer remains true to what is said and that the gap between what was written and what was done is annulled.
The later Wittgenstein, like the early Wittgenstein in his private notebooks and diaries, is much more verbose in this sense, given the tendency to give voice to matters of ethics (and according to him, aesthetics), as well as the admiration for Kierkegaard’s views on religion and ethical self-cultivation. “My conscience is tormenting me and is preventing me from working. I have been reading Kierkegaard’s writings and this has made me even more anxious than I was already,” [1] as he wrote. Wittgenstein seemed to have taken up Kierkegaard as the ultimate measure of ethico-religious self-formation, not to mention the excuse for self-abuse and compulsive confessional re-writing of the self.
“Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard agree that ‘objective’ or speculative thought (‘wisdom’) is incapable of solving ‘the problem of life’, because what is needed here is something that ‘takes hold of you’, something that engages you ethically as an individual” (Schönbaumsfeld, 2007, p. 31). Here, what Schönbaumsfeld refers to as “speculative thought” or “wisdom” is referred to as “didactic knowledge” (what “takes hold of” one as an individual, instead, is the “dietetics of wisdom”). Without being affected by a philosophical text which arguably removes the text from the realm of logic and places it squarely into the domain of poetry, art, literature and aesthetics, the work is obsolete in every ethical sense of the word. Therefore, the subject must be receptive to such affectation. If the philosophical work or the reader are incapable of affecting/being affected, while at the same time looking for a shelter in the propositions of science, logic and mathematics, we can stipulate a philosophical diagnosis of a sickness unto reason.
Drawing on Kierkegaard’s The Sickness unto Death, we can thus classify this peculiar type of malady under the more general symptomatology of “Inauthentic Despair,” where the subject is “not even anxious” so to speak, but absolutely unaware of her own despair. It is a situation encountered frequently in psychoanalytic practice, where anxiety is itself an object of repression. “… it is an infinite merit to be able to despair,” Kierkegaard wrote, referring to the first stage of salvation; the realization that one is sick with despair. By assenting to her will to anxiousness, our patient thereby takes the first decisive swing at the limits of her own language/world. Merely by entertaining the idea that the logic of our private language may be fundamentally defective, we begin to notice the cracks and the fissures of the very discourse responsible for postponing our despair. The realization is not cognitive but affective — “I become anxious”; often without even realizing it.
But in my state of despair, there is a chance to become ethical. By recognizing the impossibility of viewing the world sub specie aeternitatis, I drop the absolutist tendencies of the solipsist, the skeptic and the system-builder. The fact/value distinction begins to crumble and I am forced to accept my own limited perspective, the inevitability of human error in both action and scientific endeavor. I cannot, even as a scientist, bracket my life and section myself off from my work. Ironically, the “confession of a fallibilist” is what guarantees the pragmatic efficacy of the scientific method. Without it, according to both Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard, we will only be — far less than Gods, not even scientists — but no more than very strict and rigorous comedians. Not to condemn the comedian of course! Dandyism is no doubt one of the most “effective” ways of affecting and being affected, but this is not the attitude of the skeptic. The essence of skepticism is a metaphysical conspiracy. In lieu of mustering the courage to defend an imperfect truth, the skeptic scratches at the surface of the scientific method declaring great and terrible things to come, where everyone but him will be proven wrong. The skeptic takes herself seriously, that’s the fundamental distinction between her and the comedian. Nothing is quite as morbid as a clown who takes himself seriously.
It seems by way of exposing the radical skeptic [2] for a metaphysical conspiracy theorist, we have, through sheer accident, laid down a compelling characterization of fascism. At least in the psychological sense, it would not be too far off the mark to say, a fascist is a clown that takes himself seriously. But more importantly, the attitude of the serious clown or the skeptic points towards a common human tendency: “the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior” [3] (Deleuze and Guattari, 2009) as noticed by Foucault. The tendency towards epistemic cowardice. Connecting the dots further, we can now continue to unravel the sickness unto reason as a variety of epistemic angst. The failure to assume a clear philosophical position and defend it, despite the inherent human limitations of all truth-seeking activities, is what determines the skeptic as an ethical failure who lacks the courage for truth.
Let us expand on the skeptical compulsion and trace the emergence of the ethical failure out of epistemic cowardice and hubris. The absolutist tendency of the radical skeptic is the same as the insistent system-building of the logical rationalist. “All or None!” This fundamental epistemic stance drives our conspiracy theorist. “What evidence do we have to believe anything at all?” — she asks. “If I can be wrong in a particular case, what prevents me from being wrong in all cases?” There are several problems with this view. But the general diagnosis, once again, is the inability to accept one’s finitude; the addictive tendency to neglect what Kierkegaard refers to as the “existence-sphere” and what Wittgenstein calls “forms of life” (Schönbaumsfeld, 2007). That is, the situated nature of all knowledge, the fact that knowledge is only as good as one’s way of life, once again, the fact/value distinction falling to pieces. Schönbaumsfeld (2007) claims (correctly, I argue), that the ethical failure of the skeptic lies in his futile attempt to achieve “a view from nowhere” (Nagel, 1989) by trying to disregard his own material conditions for reflective activity. This move, despite being attractive or (again) even addictive, is justified neither ethically nor epistemically. It constitutes and presents itself as the underlying reason for what Kierkegaard refers to as epistemic angst, despair and intellectual cowardice.
According to Kierkegaard, skepticism is just a variety of despair. Pretty much in agreement with our analysis, the sickness unto logic can manifest cognitively in the form of a skeptical attitude, the direct counterpart, the “flip side” of rational dogmatism. The skeptic is like a child searching for a parent, an absolute authority that will do the thinking (and the fighting) for her while offering a shortcut to the stockpiled set of ready-made propositions. Many people attend (and leave) philosophical lectures for the same reason. Importantly, both Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard agree that the skeptic is making a category mistake by seeking rational justification for what is fundamentally a problem of faith. Religious or other, faith is what founds the foundation itself. One’s ethical life is what provides the foundation for knowledge, but faith is what supports life itself. This is precisely what the skeptic attempts to doubt and it is precisely where the linguistic confusion becomes evident. Confusion between two entirely different language games of doubting (and knowing).
In his book On Certainty, Wittgenstein helps us see the murky, and yet very real, boundary that separates the skeptic’s “radical” doubt — where one doubts the very foundations of one’s way of life — from the “normal” variety of doubt employed at the level of knowledge. Here the underlying practices that make doubt itself possible are (and must be) taken for granted. Doubting whether one has two hands under usual circumstances (assuming one has not lost a limb under WWI and forgotten the whole thing under a psychedelic spell, and so on) is a doubt, and it belongs to a very special variety of doubting. Yet, this is not something one could verify through standard procedures of observation. If one doubts something as basic as having a hand, one may as well doubt his own powers of observation: the whole apparatus, so to speak, breaks down. If I doubt the existence of my own hand, then I can hardly say that taking another look at my hands would resolve the problem. Something is fundamentally wrong under such circumstances. “What we can ask is whether it can make sense to doubt it”: this is Wittgenstein’s swift response to the skeptic. Similarly, Wittgenstein distinguishes two different senses of knowing. Each corresponds to the different language games of doubting. Knowing that one has a hand, or that one knows how to take a seat, that one has not forgotten how to scratch one’s nose and so on, these are very different kinds of certainties, compared to knowing that it will rain, for example. “We just do not see how very specialized the use of ‘I know’ is” continues Wittgenstein, “suppose now I say ‘I am incapable of being wrong about this: that is a book’ while I point to an object. What would a mistake here be like? And have I any clear idea of it?” And this is precisely the difference. There are instances of knowing where a proposition, observation, state of affairs or facts, etc., can be imagined otherwise, i.e. there is a possibility to falsify it. And we can form a “clear idea” of it not being the case. We can picture how, under what circumstances, our doubt is justified.
The skeptic is therefore playing a nonsensical language game. Conflating art with science while being held captive by a picture of absolute certainty, frustrated, she falls into absolute uncertainty. Imagining unimaginable scenarios where language “goes on holiday,” smashing against the limits of the world she conjures up a self-undermining “technique” of doubt. Under this light radical skepticism seems more like a trauma-response, an escape rather than a critical mindset. Which is precisely Kierkegaard’s point. It is only out of extreme despair that one could begin to doubt the undoubtable and attempt to say the unsayable, especially if this occurs through the bad faith of (pseudo) rational argumentation. There are more affective ways to “display” [4] the limits of language, this domain belongs to art and aesthetics. And let’s not forget our faithful comedian, who unlike the skeptic does not attempt to offer a rational picture of that which lies beyond, nor does she expect didacticism where performance is needed, she only wants to move us through a joke. And a joke can take us much further than a formal system.
Jokes, prose, art and aesthetics, these domains belong to the sphere of “useful” nonsense which, unlike the skeptic’s inquiries, are instances of elucidatory nonsense; helpful nonsense which allows us to get in touch with something at the limit of our language. The Tractatus draws these boundaries “from within” logical discourse and places an emphasis on everything that is intentionally not covered by the propositions of logic. It seems that here we have a case of simulated despair, but the anguish is also induced into the reader. Indeed, Wittgenstein is well aware that what we think we find clear and meaningful is, in fact, symptomatic of a scientistic age, as opposed to an age of science, or an age that uses science instead of “believing in science.” We must not let the scientific attitude exceed its proper bounds i.e. when it enters the domain of ethics. In our anxiety concerning the finitude of human reason, the fallibility of the scientific method and the limitations of didacticism, we fall into epistemic angst, which manifests as either an overdose of reason or a skeptical withdrawal. And so we are tricked by the propositions and the strict architectonic layout of the Tractatus which, at first seductive and inviting; promising clarity, certainty and transparency, ends up exposing itself as a prison of nonsense (alienating and suffocating). As an expert diagnostician, Wittgenstein (like Nietzsche) sets the right diagnosis. But nothing is less effective, than telling the patient directly what the problem is. Instead, whoever is sick needs to be influenced, guided, and manipulated out of her anguish; she needs to be affected — untrained. The Tractatus is therefore an affective operations manual for the soul, a technology of the self, which can do precisely what we asked of it in the beginning: to take us by the hand and show us the way out of the fly bottle, no matter how terrifying this may turn out to be.
In his article Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, and Nonsense, James Conant cautions us against the tendency of reading the two authors through the typical analytical fashion of the Anglo-Saxon tradition: “Skip the rhetoric and extract the arguments!” What we have termed an all too reasonable and therefore desperate reading would, according to Conant, do grave injustice to these thinkers. There is an important reason why the authors have chosen the respective forms to express their thoughts. As previously stated, the affinity between Kierkegaard and the later Wittgenstein is quite strong; however, Conant continues to argue that Kierkegaard had a profound influence on Wittgenstein’s early work as well. He draws parallels between the contents of the Tractatus and Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Conant cites two passages, one from each text: “what can be indirectly communicated, cannot be directly communicated,” from the Postscript and “what can be shown cannot be said” (Conant, 1993), from the Tractatus. Conant notes that the two texts bear great similarities to one another, even if he rejects the idea that either of them argues for the existence of something “ineffable” or unsayable; something “higher” at the limits of language and so on. One of the similarities, according to Conant, is that both authors share the goal of delimiting that which is expressible and preventing us from falling into nonsense. The difference is that nonsense remains nonsense in all cases i.e. there does not exist for Conant, a realm of “meaningful nonsense.”
Conant, like Schönbaumsfeld and myself, prefers to engage in what is termed a holistic reading of Wittgenstein’s work, meaning, we prefer to focus on the continuity between the early and the later Wittgenstein, rather than the differences. Conant’s as well as Schönbaumsfeld’s decision to bring the Tractarian Wittgenstein into dialogue with Kierkegaard, given that the affinities between Kierkegaard and the Wittgenstein of the Philosophical Investigations have already been initiated with figures such as Stanley Cavell [5], brings the holistic view into a sharper focus through a crafty comparative analysis. This seems to be “more or less precisely” what Conant has in mind: “If Cavell’s remarks turn out to apply equally well to what I have to say about that connection [between (the early) Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard] — and if that, in turn, seems to suggest a stronger continuity between early and later Wittgenstein than it is presently fashionable to suppose — that, as far as I am concerned, is all to the good” (Conant, 1993). Which is an academic’s way of saying, “that’s exactly what I’m doing.”
According to Conant, the most interesting commonality between the Postscript and the Tractatus is the gesture of “revocation.” Without understanding this move, Conant argues, we will not be able to grasp the meaning of these books. “My propositions are elucidatory 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)” (Wittgenstein, as cited in Conant, 1993). The Tractarian revocation of its own propositions as a case of nonsense has been an object of intense scholarly debate for some time and we will not enter these discussions for the moment. Kierkegaard’s revocation carries a slightly different spirit touching upon the complex question of authorship. Kierkegaard, known to write philosophy in a literary style under various pseudonyms had famously claimed that his admitting to being the author of his own oeuvre is of an entirely bureaucratic nature. It is purely incidental that the fictional characters converge onto the person of Kierkegaard, a “truth” that, in a significant way was only legally imposed on him. “In the pseudonymous works there is not a single word which is mine, I have … not the remotest private relation to them” (Kierkegaard, as cited in Conant, 1993). In fact, Kierkegaard took this point to its utmost seriousness, demanding in addition that his reader cites the pseudonymous authors, instead of using Kierkegaard’s name. The above citation should therefore read: “(Johannes Climacus, as cited in Conant, 1993).” Is this any less bizarre, than one of the greatest logicians of the 20th century saying that the culmination of their work is “nonsense”?
More importantly, there is an almost direct connection: Climacus undermines the authority of his own work. “The book is superfluous” he writes, “let no one therefore take the pains to appeal to it as an authority; for he who thus appeals to it has eo ipso misunderstood it” (Climacus, cited in Conant, 1993). The underlying sentiment seems to be the contention that “to write a book and revoke it” (Conant, 1993) is an entirely different gesture than not writing it at all. We can speak here of multiple forms of withdrawal, multiple techniques which help the author and even the text disappear, to recede into the background and leave the reader alone with herself. This is the text as the technology of the self, an apparatus used to trigger a spiritual transformation. A device used to lure the reader in and force him into isolation, a confrontation with the self — into an Outside. A space of resistance. This is the ethical task of writing; the cure for the sickness unto logic. The distortion that separates the writer from the work can be cleared up by the very same textual dispositif that the reader uses to confront his own hypocrisy. Both reading and writing are techniques of the self — if properly performed. As the writer remains true to her life, the reader is given the opportunity to exorcise her own shortcomings of (in)sincerity. The hypocrisy of the skeptic, as well as the dogmatic, is simple enough, they say one thing and they do another. The skeptic may say he doubts the existence of his own two hands, nonetheless, his behaviour shows that he has a pretty good grasp of their presence, the system-builder says he has constructed a perfect model of reality, yet the fact that he cannot predict (something as basic as) our response to his declaration, shows that the model is not even in the same domain of what affects him the most.
What brings the Tractatus and the Postscript together is their alluring, transparent surface effect, which “assures” us of a concise and final answer to all of our intellectual and spiritual concerns: “A bunch of facts!” Where the first promises to solve the problems of philosophy, the other promises to solve the problem of religion — once and forever; in a rational manner. Both appeal to the sickness unto logic, our craving for clarity and definitive answers. They abuse our addiction to reason and exploit this compulsion with the intention of offering us “another fix,” but then locking us up into a room that opens only inwards. Now that we are inside and trapped, the only way out is to understand their work, but the work is revoked! So we keep pushing. We cannot understand their work if we keep pushing the door when all we need to do is to pull inwards. This means seeing things (our own self) in a new light, reducing our endless intake of “information” and “facts,” so that we are able to digest what little we have salvaged and properly understood. The simplest ethical truths about ourselves, our character flaws, insecurities, shortcomings, etc.; the emotional baggage responsible for the philosophical addiction in the first place. Oftentimes Wittgenstein does sound like a psycho-typical addict, but precisely in relation to philosophy: “The real discovery is the one that enables me to break off philosophizing when I want to” (Wittgenstein, 2001, §133).
Similarly, Kierkegaard offers an example of a man whose mouth is already filled with food, he cannot even chew the food, but he is asking for more. It’s painful to admit that a significant portion of academia is now full of intellectual drug dealers, so to speak, who keep giving the compulsive learner what she asks (more food), as opposed to what she needs: to take some of the food away from her, so that she can begin to chew. This is what Kierkegaard/Climacus means when saying that proper communication is not about giving something (i.e. information etc.), but about taking something away: “The art of communication at last becomes the art of taking away … when a man has his mouth so full of food that he is prevented from eating … does giving him food consist in stuffing still more of it in his mouth, or does it consist in taking some of it away, so that he can begin to eat?” (as cited in, Conant 1993). This is how Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard are master pharmacists and rehabilitation experts. They can feign the very thing that is causing our (repressed) despair while taking “our stash” of one-sided rationalizations away from us, allowing real thoughts to take their place. This involves understanding the “emotional baggage” behind our ethical failure; the cause of our epistemic cowardice in the face of a simple yet neglected truth about ourselves.
Let us look at Stanley Cavell’s Existentialism and Analytic Philosophy. If Conant was our go-to for a comparison between Concluding Unscientific Postscript and the Tractatus, Cavell offers a similar comparative analysis between Concluding Unscientific Postscript and Philosophical Investigations [6]. Cavell begins by drawing up some rough sketches of the distinction between the analytic school of philosophy and its existentialist counterpart. It would seem what we identified earlier as the “rational compulsion,” can be given a new kind of reading (Cavell would definitely not go this far), as the tendency towards a professionalization of philosophy and the transformation of all philosophical problems into technical, rather than ethical, problems. Contrast to existentialism, which could very roughly be equated with a type of philosophical humanism that seeks to offer a more accessible path towards philosophical activity. In other words, one does not need to be a specialist or an expert to read (at least most) about existentialist literature, whereas most analytic philosophers would prefer not to engage with those who have not had a similar technical training in rigorous argumentation. “The existentialist has not relinquished philosophy’s traditional audience, namely, everybody, regardless of any technical competence, philosophical or other; but his entire animus is against the idea that what philosophy has to say can be told, not, as for the analyst, because philosophy has no content of its own, but because the very content of his philosophy is that significant content cannot cognitively or discursively be articulated, but must be communicated, if at all, in some other way” (Cavell, 1964).
Immediately, multiple lines of communication can be established between what we have covered so far and this small yet very dense paragraph. Aside from the point mentioned above, that the existentialist writes for “everybody” [7] and the analytic thinker reserves himself for his colleagues, Cavell makes an illuminating point, which to my mind separates both Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard from the analytic tradition and places them into the existentialist/continental camp, but with the added qualification that Wittgenstein acts as a chameleon, posing as a logician who subverts the analytic enterprise from within and makes the most complicated logico-mathematical formalisms (at least in their foundation) accessible to the lay reader [8]. First line of communication: both Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard argue that the content of philosophy cannot be communicated directly. Second, unlike analytic philosophers [9], they both think that there is a significant content to be communicated (although Wittgenstein is outrageously good at hiding this).
Unlike myself, Cavell does justice to both schools of thought. In fact, Cavell argues that both the analytic and the existentialist camps had the same purpose in mind: “to purify philosophy of the … fool’s gold in its tradition – the tendency to issue in speculative systems” (Cavell, 1964, p. 4). My position is more critical of the analytic tradition; I believe that formal argumentation is much more prone to (or symptomatic of) the rational compulsion to “issue in metaphysical systems,” than its continental complement. And I do believe that some things can be shown or made manifest. Through looming silences, artistic practices, or what have you. It is no surprise then that my favorite readings of the Tractatus are usually the ones that are most despised by most Anglo-Saxon readers: “The Mystica,” “The Ineffable,” whatever points to “The Limits of Language” and so on. Although Russel’s Theory of Descriptions and its formal descendants may be effective tools in removing useless non-sense from our ordinary conversational language, they have the tendency of throwing the baby out with the bathwater by getting rid of the useful nonsense as well: The ethical dimension of our lives and various forms of indirect communication that make our lives worth the while.
But this is not exactly the useful nonsense of the later Wittgenstein. As Cavell points out, early developments in the analytic tradition run parallel to the propositions of the Tractatus, just like the introduction of the Oxford Ordinary Language Philosophy later in the 20th century would follow the movements of Philosophical Investigations. I do not quite agree with Cavell, that Philosophical Investigations was just an instance of bringing abstract philosophical speculation down to the level of everyday speech because Wittgenstein discusses some very strange instances of “uses,” in fact, many of his examples are quite bizarre and there is little “ordinary” about these language-games. Nonetheless, if the later Wittgenstein sought clarity through the Investigations, it was a clarity of a very different order, as far as the style of the work was concerned. The intensity of the Tractatus is missing “on both sides” of the philosophical spectrum. What is shown in Philosophical Investigations and to a significant extent in On Certainty, is no longer the “sublime ineffable,” but simply a set of pragmatic background beliefs about the world; the discursive practices that make knowing and doubting, in the ordinary sense of these words — possible. It is no longer the case that we cannot doubt something because it is overwhelming and terrifying, but simply because it does not make sense to do so. In fact, the sharp boundary between saying and showing drawn in most parts of Tractatus collapses into a harmless clutter of language games some of which are “more like showing” and others “more like saying” with plenty of peripheral cases in-between. As noted by Cavell, this mirrors the general trend in post-WWI analytic philosophy.
The tendency of bringing the reader down from abstraction to the concrete humdrum or “the rough ground” of everyday life is common to both the later Wittgenstein as well as Kierkegaard. But this is also prevalent in the Tractatus! [10] Maybe the difference could be drawn up in the following manner: Where the Tractatus burns our wings and sends us spiraling down, smashing into the concrete existential reality of our ethical failures, the Philosophical Investigations offers us a gradual descent and the slow cure of steady psychic integration. Conversely, it is probable that we will encounter both techniques of desubjectification (Tractatus) and resubjectification (Philosophical Investigations) in Kierkegaard. Both thinkers, according to Cavell, share the common objective of removing an illusion and disenchanting the reader. In Kierkegaard’s case, the illusion lies in the possibility of a comfortable, rational expression of Christian devotion, with Wittgenstein, we are held captive by an illusion of “completeness” through logic, language and mathematics (Cavell, 1964). In both cases, we are unable to see what’s in front of our eyes, and we take shelter in various “flights of reason.” The cure, in this case, is to return to the lives of ordinary people and engage in ordinary discussions and human practices.
If one decides to build an ethical machine, such that would shape her into an ethical person, does this not imply that she has absolutely no faith in herself? Similarly, could one use the propositions of logic and mathematics to climb the Tractarian ladder straight out of language to the smooth liminal surface of the Outside and “see the world aright” (6.54), but without the need for courage? The question — whether the path to salvation can be embarked on through mechanical rules (“proofs,” as it were) and self-imposed discipline, or if one must attain the state of “feeling absolutely safe” in one fell swoop — is the very same question that separates the Stoic from the Christian. We are faced then with a dilemma, which may or may not seem only apparent: Are we divided between vice and virtue? Or must we find our way about through sin and faith instead? The answer will remain decisive as to which techniques of self-formation we will employ in finding our way out of the ethico-epistemic fly bottle. The purpose here will be to show, or at least to entertain the idea, that rationality is a kind of illness preventing us from engaging with the world in a meaningful and satisfying manner; that the purpose of philosophy is not a didactics of knowledge, but something more along the lines of a dietetics of wisdom. Can we “treat” logic as an unwelcome infection or a disease? As a sickness of “spirit” (to quote Kierkegaard)? A false serenity that hides a constant state of anguish? The state of anxiety, on the other hand, could be an indicator of health; a pathology that sets humans apart from nature, hinting at a radical and dreadful form of freedom to recreate oneself any way one (dis)pleases. It is maybe the normalizing force of reason that one should instead fear and avoid?
Such is our immersion in reason; the formal statements of scientific research (their truth and accuracy, not always-not-withstanding) could be after all that which often bears witness to our heightened state of despair. The “spiritlessness” of the age, as Kierkegaard would have it; manifests in what Wittgenstein called a “one-sided diet” [11] of “facticity” [12]. The anxiety is doubled over in its denial. “He who has not suffered under human bestiality will not become spirit” (Kierkegaard, 1989). Common sense is the most comfortable shelter against the persistent absence of a stable self and the radical sense of responsibility that comes with it.
For all its worth, I would discourage the reader from attempting to build a perfect ethical machine or try to articulate the unsayable through deductive methods of argumentation. Let us render unto Caesar what belongs to Caesar and keep rational argumentation within its own proper boundaries, along with the propositions of science and mathematics. With the hope of untangling the paradox of saying vs. showing and writing vs. doing we attempted to tackle the radical skeptic (along with the dogmatic system-builders) and expose them as rigorous comedians, serious clowns and, perhaps, even fascists. Most importantly, we have identified skepticism and the tendency towards conspiracy thinking, as a form of intellectual cowardice. We have discussed the sickness onto logic as one of the prominent diseases of the soul in the 20th and perhaps the 21st centuries, and we have offered several remedies: The shock therapy of the Tractatus, the cognitive behavioral therapy of Philosophical Investigations and the mixed approach of Kierkegaard’s (Climacus’) Concluding Unscientific Postscript. I hope that this text has served its purpose, not the purpose of teaching the reader something new about philosophy, nor the purpose of giving the reader more information about “a bunch of facts,” but to have induced a change in their life.
“I don’t try to make you believe something you don’t believe, but to make you do something you won’t do.”
— Ludwig Wittgenstein
References
Cavell, S. (1964). Existentialism and Analytical Philosophy. Daedalus, 946-974.
Conant, J. (1993). Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein and Nonsense. Pursuits of Reason: Essays in Honor of Stanley Cavell, 195-224.
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (2009). Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Penguin.
Hadot, P. (1995). Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault. Wiley-Blackwell.
Heidegger, M. (2010). Being and Time. SUNY Press.
Kierkegaard, S. (1989). The Sickness unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening. Penguin Classics.
Kierkegaard, S. (2014). The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Oriented Deliberation in View of the Dogmatic Problem of Hereditary Sin. W.W. Norton & Company.
Kierkegaard, S. (2019). Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Princeton University Press.
Monk, R. (1991). Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius. Penguin Books.
Nagel, T. (1989). The View from Nowhere. Oxford University Press.
Rollefson, R. G. (2014). Thinking with Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein: The Philosophical Theology of Paul L. Holmer. Wipf and Stock Publishers.
Schönbaumsfeld, G. (2007). A Confusion of the Spheres: Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein on Philosophy and Religion. OUP Oxford.
Schönbaumsfeld, G. (2016). The Illusion of Doubt. Oxford University Press.
Wittgenstein, L., Anscombe, G. E. M., & von, W. G. H. (1972). On Certainty. Harper Torchbooks.
Wittgenstein, L. (2001). Philosophical Investigations. Blackwell.
Wittgenstein, L. (2023). Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Oxford University Press.
[1] Cited in A Confusion of the Spheres: Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein on Philosophy and Religion by Schönbaumsfeld.
[2] Obviously, we are taking a somewhat superficial approach to the notion of skepticism and considering the least generous interpretation of the term. It would take a systematic technical analysis to disprove an entrenched epistemological system i.e. Cartesian skepticism etc. See Schönbaumsfeld’s “The Illusion of Doubt” for a more thorough interrogation of the skeptical position.
[3] See the Preface to Anti-Oedipus by Deleuze and Guattari.
[4] As opposed to proving or demonstrating.
[5] See Existentialism and Analytic Philosophy by Cavell.
[6] Also worth noting is that Schönbaumsfeld’s The Confusion of the Spheres is by far probably the most comprehensive treatment of the works of Kierkegaard and (both the early and the later) Wittgenstein.
[7] Heidegger being an exception in this case is qualified by Cavell in several ways, see Cavell (notes section 1).
[8] Almost as if Wittgenstein puts a human face on logic and gives us “a feel” of what it’s like to study formal systems, an initiation into whatever the compulsive rationalist is addicted to…
[9] I.e. “philosophy is always about something else, it is a philosophy of something, it has no content of its own,” etc.
[10] Shouldn’t be too surprising, since we favor holistic reading, but nonetheless, the differences cannot simply be washed away.
[11] Granted that Wittgenstein meant something different when speaking of a one-sided diet of examples in philosophical argumentation, but my purpose here is similar: to draw the reader’s attention to the importance of concrete (in this case spiritual) human experience, as opposed to abstract scientific theories and factual constructions.
[12] The word used by Heidegger in Being and Time.
Giorgi Vachnadze is a philosopher specializing in Foucault and Wittgenstein studies. He graduated with a Master’s Degree from the University of Louvain. Former editor and peer-reviewer for the Graduate Student Journal of philosophy “The Apricot” and guest speaker at an addiction and rehabilitation centre in Tbilisi (Georgia), he now teaches English and takes part in some of the activities of the Lawn Chair Philosophy Foundation, working in parallel on various topics in Media Archaeology, Game Studies, American Pragmatism, Educational Policy and the philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard.
Blue Labyrinths 