Wittgenstein’s Ladder©
September 17, 2000
Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Midland
Jane Thickstun, Celebrant

  I want to share with you a story I got from an essay by my colleague Bill Schultz:

An old Zen teaching tale recalls the time an Emperor once sent for the Wise One to explain the Diamond Sutra. On the appointed day the Wise One appeared at the palace, mounted a platform before the Emperor, rapped once on the table, and then, still not speaking, descended the platform and left. The Emperor sat motionless for a few moments whereupon one of the servants made bold to speak: "Excuse me, inquired the servant, "may I ask whether you understood?" The Emperor sadly shook his head. "What a pity!" the servant exclaimed. "The Wise One has never been more eloquent." (from Mirrors Never Lie? The Existential Dimensions of Preaching by William Schultz)

(Rap once on the pulpit, descend the platform, and take a seat. After an appropriate pause, get back up and continue.)

The deepest truths cannot be communicated through words. And yet if I were to give you the gift of silence on Sunday mornings, I would probably not last long as your minister! You expect words, and you expect words that will open up new worlds of understanding. At least that is what I expect of myself as a preacher, and may I be forgiven if I sometimes fall short!

My undergraduate degree is in Linguistics. I have always been fascinated by the way language works. In particular, what drew me to the study of linguistics was the feeling that in learning a new language I was exposed to whole new ways of seeing the world. I studied German from ninth grade on, and it was in studying this foreign language that is so much like English that I realized the metaphorical nature of words and phrases. Something that in English is just mundane words would be expressed in German in a way that showed a relationship to something else. Or at least it struck me that way because the German words were all new to me. Maybe I could see it better in English if I were not a native speaker. Or maybe the mixture of the Latin/French with the Germanic base makes it harder to see it in English than in German which has descended without much outside influence from its Germanic roots.

Metaphor is, according to Webster, "a figure of speech in which a word or phrase literally denoting one kind of object or idea is used in place of another to suggest a likeness or analogy between them (as in the ship plows the sea)." It is commonly used in poetry, and is best known as a poetic device. With metaphor we can express new concepts by means of already existing words, and we can express abstract concepts by means of concrete ones.

What I experienced in my German class, I can say in retrospect, was an understanding of the metaphoric nature of all language, not just poetic language. I could see the way the words had developed because the concrete terms were still there in the bigger, more abstract words and phrases. I now understand that English has developed this way too, as do all languages. I own an Etymological dictionary, and it is fascinating to look up the origins of words. It can give a new insight into a concept to discover its metaphorical source. Amazingly, even some of the most concrete words ultimately have their source in a metaphorical extension of another word.

So we form new concepts by comparing them to things we already know about. The most difficult concepts to talk about are those religion tries to talk about. Whatever we call it: the mystical, the divine, the sacred–there is a sense among people the world over, in all times, that there is something beyond our everyday experience. We have this sense because we experience it, though rarely. When we do experience it, we know it is important, it gives meaning to our lives–and we want to talk about it.

But how do we talk about it? This is what has been called "ineffable," it is what we are unable to be put into words. Mircea Eliade, the noted historian and philosopher of religion, says, "The sacred always manifests itself as a reality of a wholly different order from "natural" realities. It is true that language naively expresses the tremendum, or the majestas, or the mysterium fascinans by terms borrowed from the world of nature or from ... secular life. But we know that this analogical terminology is due precisely to human inability to express the ganz andere [the totally different]; all that goes beyond [humanity’s] natural experience, language is reduced to suggesting by terms taken from that experience." (The Sacred and the Profane, p. 10)

Ludwig Wittgenstein is an important philosopher of the 20^th century. It is he who is primarily responsible for the "linguistic turn" in American and British philosophy in this just past century. Wittgenstein looked at the classic problems of philosophy, the issues of ethics and metaphysics that had been pondered since at least the time of the ancient Greeks, and figured there’s got to be something wrong with the way we’re going about this. We’re no closer to any answers now than they were all those thousands of years ago. Think about it: when you study a science today, you would probably consider a twenty-year-old textbook to be obsolete, yet when you study philosophy, you had better read Plato and Aristotle, who wrote in the fourth and fifth centuries B.C. Philosophy is the rational study of questions of ultimate concern - using logical reasoning to approach the same issues that are dealt with in other ways in religion. Metaphysics, a branch of philosophy, attempts to understand the nature of reality as a whole, ethics deals with questions of human behavior, or "why be good?" and aesthetics wants to develop some objective criteria for determining beauty. In effect, all the sciences we know today have branched off from what was originally philosophy, as they have developed techniques that work and one by one accumulated understanding of a given part of reality. The most recent to branch off are the social sciences, like sociology and psychology. So when questions can be answered, they fall under the realm of a science, and only the unanswerable questions get left to philosophy.

Wittgenstein’s first and, I believe, most famous work, the Tractatus Locigo-Philosophicus, is an attempt to show how the problems of philosophy disappear when you look at the way language works. He painstakingly shows that language has limits, and because of the limits of language we can’t go there, where philosophy has tried to go.

He says, "We feel that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched. Of course there are then no questions left, and this itself is the answer." (6.52) He also says, "When the answer cannot be put into words, neither can the question be put into words. The riddle does not exist. If a question can be framed at all, it is also possible to answer it." (6.5) "Scepticism is not irrefutable, but obviously nonsensical, when it tries to raise doubts where no questions can be asked. For doubt can exist only where a question exists, a question only where an answer exists, and an answer only where something can be said." (6.51)

For Wittgenstein, something can be said about things in the realms of science and everyday life, but not about the "problems of life" that philosophy has attempted to deal with. He says, "The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of the problem. (Is not this the reason why those who have found after a long period of doubt that the sense of life became clear to them have then been unable to say what constituted that sense?)" (6.521) And I continue to quote: "There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical." (6.522)

What is mystical, for Wittgenstein, can be shown but not said. "What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence." (7) It is just like the Zen master I imitated at the beginning of the service. Buddhist masters understand that you can’t talk about the most important stuff. They use other methods to get at it. But our way, the western way--and especially the Unitarian Universalist way–is to talk. So what are we to do? Do we never speak of these matters again? Do we do science and leave it at that, and keep forever silent on the questions that science can’t answer?

The book ends with these lines: "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." (6.54) If you actually understand the propositions in the Tractatus, and are able to transcend them, throwing the ladder away at the end of the book, what is left? Silence? For a long time after finishing this work, Wittgenstein wrote no more philosophy. But guess what -- he eventually went on to write many more books, all still trying to get at that same ineffable, elusive stuff. We can’t keep silent.

But Wittgenstein was right - we can’t get at the problems of life through rational analysis. We can talk around it, and around it, and get a little insight here and there. But the most direct way to talk about it is the indirect way, the way of metaphor and symbolism.

And so in addition to the philosophers, others from all walks of life are attempting to build ladders - using words that will hopefully point somehow to a view of reality that is redemptive. Inspirational books abound, the authors all trying to address those problems of life. And most of us will keep coming back here week after week, sharing more words, trying to get at that stuff. And people down the street in all their different churches will share many words, trying to get at it. And everyone will use the metaphoric language and symbolism that is understood in his or her own context.

In trying to read Christian mystics of times past, I have come to the realization that the mystical experience gets expressed in the local idiom. Even though it gets at that which is, in Eliade’s words, "ganz andere" or wholly other, even though a mystical experience takes you out of your normal realm of perception and gives you a perspective on reality that somehow makes sense of existence as a whole–yet as soon as we try to get hold of it–with words–it is interpreted. It is already an interpretation the minute we try to speak of it. And though we may want a whole new language to describe that view of reality which is so different, we use what we have. If we travel in Christian circles, we will most likely use Christian symbolism, if we hang out with scientists we’re more likely to use symbolism and metaphors drawn from the natural world.

So we can appreciate the way others do religion as just other attempts to express the inexpressible. So many attempts to construct ladders like Wittgenstein’s. No matter how bizarre or even wrong some of them seem on the surface, if we make a real attempt to understand--to learn that language, so to speak–we can see that "we share a common quest."

Often religion gives up entirely on language, at least discursive language. It relies on metaphor, symbolism, and ritual. Religion is closer to poetry than to science.

"Two girls discover the secret of life in a sudden line of poetry. No doubt by now, more than a week later, they have forgotten the secret, the line, the name of the poem." We have to love them, as does the poet, for finding it, for loving it, and for forgetting it. We have to love them as we have to love ourselves for forgetting the secret of life so that a thousand times, and in a thousand different ways, we may discover it again, in other lines in other happenings. And for wanting to know it, for assuming there is such a secret, yes, for that most of all.

The Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Midland is recognized by the Unitarian Universalist Association as a Welcoming Congregation. We welcome, affirm, promote and celebrate the full participation of all persons in all of our activities without regard to age, gender, sexual orientation, race or any other such category of exclusion.

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