Sunday, August 28, 2011

Neither something nor nothing

I haven't blogged for a few days (apologies to anyone who has visited in that time), partly because the new semester is starting up and partly because I haven't had much to say. Also partly because I have started and then abandoned a couple of 'ambitious' posts, that I might end up posting anyway despite their obscurity and stupidity. Perhaps there is also something true and/or usefully provocative in them too.

Now, though, I see that Jean Kazez has linked approvingly to a good essay by James Wood in The Guardian. I agree with most of what Wood says, so let me focus on the less good bits.

Terry Eagleton and others have rightly argued that, for millions of people, religious "belief" is not a matter of just totting up stable, creedal propositions ("I believe that Jesus is the son of God", "I believe that I will go to heaven when I die", and so on), but a matter of more unconscious, daily practice ("Now it is time to kneel down, face Mecca and pray"). This kind of defence of the deep embeddedness of religious practice has been influenced by Wittgenstein – for whom, say, kissing an icon was a bit like loving one's mother; something that cannot be subjected to an outsider's rational critique. Wittgenstein was obviously right, though this appeal to practice over proposition can also become a rather lazy way, for people like the Catholic Eagleton, of defending orthodox beliefs via the back door – as if a bishop encouraged his flock by saying, in effect: "It doesn't matter what you believe. Religion is not about propositions, but about practices. So stick at those practices: just keep on doing the church flowers and turning up every Sunday."
We know that plenty of people hold religious beliefs that are also propositions – they stand up and recite creeds on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays; they can tell you who will be punished in hell, and how; they believe that Allah is the one God, and so on. Prayer itself is a proposition: it proposes that God exists, and can be communicated with. 
Wood doesn't say that Wittgenstein is wrong, but it might be worth pointing out that the fact that his insight can be used as an excuse for lazy thinking doesn't mean that he is guilty of such thinking, nor that all those who agree with him are. Perhaps more importantly, prayer's proposing that God exists and can be communicated with does not make it a proposition in the relevant sense. Only a prayer that says something like "Oh God, you exist and can be communicated with" is that kind of proposition. Maybe prayer presupposes the existence of God, but that isn't the same thing, and might be not quite rightly put anyway.

Now here are two passages from later in the article:
There is an amusing clip on YouTube, in which Dawkins confronts Rowan Williams. Dawkins asks the archbishop of Canterbury if he really believes in miracles such as the virgin birth and the resurrection, happenings in which the laws of physics and biology are suspended. Well, not literally, says Williams. But, says Dawkins, pouncing, surely Williams believes that these are not just metaphors? No, says the archbishop, they are not just metaphors, they are openings in history, "spaces" when history opens up to its own depths, and something like what we call a "miracle" might occur. Dawkins rightly says that this sounds very nice but is surely nothing more than poetic language. Williams rather shamefacedly agrees. The scene is amusing because both men are so obviously arguing past each other, and are so obviously arguing about language and the role of metaphor. Dawkins comes off as the victor, because he has the easier task, and holds the literalist high ground: either the resurrection happened or it didn't; either these words mean something or they do not. Williams seems awkwardly trapped between a need to turn his words into metaphor and a desire to retain some element of literal content.
Dawkins is dead to metaphor, and tries to annul it by insisting on the literal occurrence, contained in actual words, of the virgin birth and the resurrection. And Williams insists that such literalism misses the target, and instead has recourse to the metaphor of "event", of a "space" opening up in history, an indefinably miraculous aberration. One feels sympathy for both sides – and perhaps simultaneously a plague on both their houses – because Dawkins seems so bullishly literal, and Williams so softly evasive. Contra Dawkins, God should be allowed some metaphorical space; but contra Williams, God's presence in the world, God's intervention, should not surely be only metaphorical. God is not just a metaphor.
I think this is probably right as a commentary on how we feel about the encounter between Dawkins and Williams, although obviously individual reactions will vary. But it seems unfair to Williams to saddle him with the view that God's presence in the world is only metaphorical when Williams explicitly denies that this is what he is saying. The fact that Williams feels he has to resort to metaphors of opening in order to explain his purportedly non-metaphorical use of language does not make that use metaphorical after all.

At the risk of being reductive, I see three possibilities for theists: God is something, God is nothing, or God is neither something nor nothing. The first is the view of fundamentalists (among others), the second is the view of those who believe that God-talk really is ultimately nothing but metaphorical, and the third is, I think, Wittgenstein's view of what the best kind of religious belief amounts to, as well as being the view of many believers.

So what can it mean to say that God is neither something nor nothing? He is not something in the sense that he is not (meant to be) an object, something just like a human being only bigger, stronger, invisible, smarter, etc. He is not a policeman in the sky or one being among others, only greater. He is not just hard to comprehend but impossible to comprehend, essentially a mystery. On the other hand he is not nothing either, not just a metaphorical posit for talk that is all really about love or kindness or whatever. God would not be mysterious if he were just a metaphor. Perhaps the thing to say is that God is something but not a something.

Anyway, I think Wood is better on how Dawkins goes wrong than he is on Williams. And I think there is a parallel or connection between Wittgenstein's thoughts on God and his thoughts on feelings such as pain, but I think I'll leave that for another post.

8 comments:

  1. "Perhaps the thing to say is that God is something but not a something." Not to let the beetle out of the box, but surely (1) the combination of words "a something" is ungrammatical in a quite obvious way, and (2) the fact that you expressly chose the ungrammatical formulation over a grammatically correct one is an indication that the formulation goes against grammar in some deeper, Wittgensteinian respect as well.

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  2. On the "a something" business:

    "What if someone said to me 'I expect three knocks on the door' and I replied 'How do you know three knocks exist?' - Wouldn't that be just like the question 'How do you know six feet exist?' after someone has said 'I believe A is 6 feet high'?" (Philosophical Remarks, §36)

    Peter Winch has suggested ("Meaning and Religious Language", Trying to Make Sense, p. 118) that this is illuminating in relation to the question of "how do you know God exists". I agree.

    This is also related, I think, to the grammar of "believing in" God, as opposed to "believing in the existence of God". Compare: "I believe in Keynesian economics." - "How do you know Keynesian economics exists?" Or: "I believe in forgiveness." - "How do you know forgiveness exists?"

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  3. Thanks, MKR and Tommi.

    MKR: I'm not sure I understand your comment, so please correct me if I respond to something you didn't say or mean. As you suggest, I am thinking not only of Wittgenstein's remarks on religion but also on private language, beetles in boxes, and so on. In Philosophical Investigations 304 he writes of a sensation that, "It's not a Something [kein Etwas], but not a Nothing either!" So my ungrammatical combination of words is actually his, not mine (or not mine originally). I think this is OK. Syntactical and semantic innovation are part of our language, after all, and so are not always wrong. (Of course most deviations from standard grammar are wrong, so I agree that it's reasonable to question proposed innovations.) Plus we have expressions such as "a certain something," which suggests that "a something" is not completely wrong. And since I'm quoting or paraphrasing Wittgenstein, who wrote in German, it's relevant that the parallel expression "a nothing" was used by such masters of the language as Goethe and Schopenhauer. I suppose it's up to the Germans (and Austrians, etc.) whether to allow "ein Nichts" as part of their language, and up to English-users whether to accept "a something." But the option to accept it exists, I think.

    In the part of my post that you quote I end up preferring the more obviously grammatical "something" when I write: "Perhaps the thing to say is that God is something but not a something." So the point is somewhat moot after all.

    I take your main point, though, to be that we should be suspicious of ungrammatical uses of language in philosophy (and maybe theology and elsewhere too). I agree with that, as long as suspicion does not mean automatic rejection.

    Tommi: Thanks for the Winch reference. The grammar of God-talk is easy to misunderstand, I think, which I take to be part of your point. On the other hand, some people talk about God in particular ways precisely because of their theology. That is, it goes both ways. If someone believes in fairies, that means they believe that fairies exist. So when someone says "I believe in God" then one might think they mean "I believe that God exists." And this might be a (subtle) mistake. But there are also fundamentalists, for instance, who deliberately talk about God in the kind of way that a Wittgensteinian might regard as wrong or ungrammatical. There's theology as grammar, but also grammar as theology. I don't think it's possible to simply say "That's ungrammatical" in such cases without taking a stand on theological matters. Maybe one could ask whether that was what the person really meant to say, and point out that it seems ungrammatical (if they talk about God as if he were an object, say, or a well-behaved child, or a policeman in the sky), and if they accept that they have spoken carelessly then you can correct them without yourself taking a stand. But if they don't accept that they have said anything wrong, what can you do?

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  4. And since I'm quoting or paraphrasing Wittgenstein, who wrote in German, it's relevant that the parallel expression "a nothing" was used by such masters of the language as Goethe and Schopenhauer. I suppose it's up to the Germans (and Austrians, etc.) whether to allow "ein Nichts" as part of their language, and up to English-users whether to accept "a something." But the option to accept it exists, I think.

    A problem with this line of argument is that the option does not exist for the speakers of all languages. Finnish, for instance, does not have articles (or German-style capitalisation of nouns), so the language lacks the resources to say, even at the cost of ungrammaticality, the thing the saying of which you're defending. Heikki Nyman, whose classic Finnish translation of PI is as canonical as Anscombe's in the English-speaking world (and for equally good reason), simply has no choice at §304 but to translate "Se ei ole jotakin, mutta ei myöskään ei-mitään" - which would translate into English as simply "It is not something, but neither is it nothing".

    Some local Continental philosophers have half-jokingly suggested the adoption of the noun nyhjä to translate ein Nichts - and there have even been unsubstantiated claims that it was so used briefly sometime in the Hegelian 19th century but died away. Nyhjä is a very obsolete and archaic term that only survives as a verb root in the proverb Tyhjästä on paha nyhjäistä ('You can't make something out of nothing'). Were such a revival succeed, against all odds, it would sound like a neologism, no better than a completely made-up word.

    And there would still be no translation for "ein Etwas"/"a something". I'm a professional translator, and I can't come up with even any candidates for debate, no matter how clunky-sounding, apart from "jotakin" ('something' - incidentally in partitive case, 'a quantity of something', and not nominative, making it even more difficult to use to connote "thingness").

    Maybe one could ask whether that was what the person really meant to say, and point out that it seems ungrammatical (if they talk about God as if he were an object, say, or a well-behaved child, or a policeman in the sky), and if they accept that they have spoken carelessly then you can correct them without yourself taking a stand. But if they don't accept that they have said anything wrong, what can you do?

    There are many different things you can do:

    - pointing out that there are no proofs of the existence of God in the sacred texts of any major religion, including Christianity, and asking whether this does not show that "the existence of God" is precisely the wrong thing to discuss

    - pointing out that the conception of God as a "policeman in the sky" does not cohere with certain beliefs about what count as good and bad justifications of behaviour, beliefs that are extremely widely held and acted on in everyday life by believers and unbelievers alike (D. Z. Phillips's criticism of Peter Geach in Death and Immortality)

    - pointing out that if something can be said to exist, its existence would seem to be something empirical, which would seem to imply that it might possibly not exist and its existence might intelligibly be doubted; but the language of religious praise is always already the language of lack of doubt ("the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning")

    - etc.

    I'm not saying that the discussion won't reach a dead end sometime, but it certainly won't have to reach it yet at this stage.

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  5. A problem with this line of argument is that the option does not exist for the speakers of all languages. Finnish, for instance,...

    I agree that's a problem, but does untranslatability make a concept wrong?

    I'm not saying that the discussion won't reach a dead end sometime, but it certainly won't have to reach it yet at this stage.

    I agree. What I should perhaps have said is that there is no guarantee that you won't reach a dead end. There is nothing you can say that is guaranteed to elicit agreement.

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  6. I agree that's a problem, but does untranslatability make a concept wrong?

    Well, the concept isn't untranslatable in the sense that it is perfectly possible to explain circuitously what the concept is a concept of. But the particular problem with Wittgenstein and his conception of philosophy is his view that "all philosophical difficulties" are such that their solutions "must be homespun [hausbacken, 'home-baked'] and ordinary", and "[a]ll reflections can be carried out in a much more homespun manner than I used to do. And therefore no new words have to be used in philosophy, but rather the old common words of language are sufficient" (Big Typescript, §§88-89).

    And the fact that his own words do not meet this requirement in all languages is... well, problematic. (I take your "I agree that's a problem" to agree on this.) In many languages, the supposedly homespun distinction between nichts and ein Nichts can only be expressed by using language that, even at its best, comes across as technical philosophical language just as much as (say) "eliminative materialism", "rigid designator", or "epistemic closure" - technical language that it would be nearly impossible to imagine surfacing in the genuinely homespun German conversation between the interlocutor and the respondent in PI §304.

    (And somehow, seeming untranslatability always makes me perplexed almost automatically. Perhaps this is rooted in the fact that I'm multilingual and work as a translator - I don't know.)

    I'm not saying that Wittgenstein would not have had anything to say about this, had it been pointed out to him. On the contrary, I'm sure he would have had something interesting to say. But I have to admit that I have practically no idea what it would have been.

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  7. Nor do I. But it probably helps that he says it is not a nothing, and therefore does not commit himself to believing in such things as Nothings and Somethings. And it might be the case that he would only suggest talking about Nothings to someone who had already started talking that way.

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  8. Yes, both of those are good points, and certainly ones that wouldn't have occurred to me.

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