S.E.Arnold
08-06-2010, 07:08 AM
Review: “Waking to Wonder: Wittgenstein’s existential investigations,” Gordon C. F. Bearn, 1997, SUNY Press.
To the anxious existential question: what is the meaning of life? Bearn writes in the preface of “Waking to Wonder” that Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, “Aim to ease our existential cares, waking us to the wonder of existence, the wonder of human communication, the wonder of human satisfaction.” The earthly peace each offers (by showing the way rather than the where), however, is fragile, but ever renewable. “Waking to Wonder” is a “Nietzschean reading of Wittgenstein;” and Bearn’s overlay of Nietzsche’s “Birth of Tragedy,” published in 1872 and the 1886 publication of the “Seven Prefaces” on Wittgenstein’s “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus” published in 1921 and the 1953 publication of the “Philosophical Investigations” exposes the existential aspects of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy as well as the metaphysical to existential turns taken by both philosophers.
But there is yet a second question; and that is: from out of where is one “waking to wonder”? The epigraph on the title page that cites Wittgenstein’s “Culture and Value” clues an answer.
“Man has to awaken in wonder—and so perhaps do peoples. Science is a way of sending him to sleep again.” In “Waking to Wonder,” Bearn shows that both Nietzsche and Wittgenstein in their mature philosophies reject the “lulling charities” of the sleep, whether brought by the poppies of physics or metaphysics, of reductive, soul killing once-and-for-all answers.
Chapter One, titled “Superficial—Out of Profundity,” reminds us of Nietzsche’s tragic vision; where by Apollo’s order reason meets sensuality in the particulars of art and shields us from the Dionysian terror of inexplicable Chance. Yet, for Nietzsche, we can find existential refuge from this meaning erasing terror in the Primordial Unity (that world stabilizing metaphysical space where there are no particulars to disrupt), which our engagement with music rather than philosophy makes accessible. By 1886, however, Nietzsche had rejected both the positive “metaphysical comfort” of the Primordial Unity and the negative “metaphysical comfort” of nihilism. He had instead embraced the abyss and found that the “very groundlessness of the things nearest to us renders them wonderful…. The wonder of the world is not diminished, but preserved by the brute groundlessness of our judgments that this is what I care about. A fragile, precarious peace can still be ours, not thanks to the metaphysical substance of the world, but thanks to nothing.” “The value of existence” lives in our engagement with the “little things nearest to us.”
Chapter Two, titled “The Sublime Scaffold of Logic and Life,” traces four receptions of the “Tractatus” and shows how the most recent view of its ethical, logical, and mystical aspects work in existential application. For Wittgenstein, the term ‘ethical’ meant the ‘meaning of life.’ Wittgenstein, however, refuses a prescriptive description of either a meaningful life or the meaning of life. Nevertheless, the Tractatus teaches that a sublime scaffold of logic supports the sense of this world and the meaning the life. And meaningfulness can not be said, because the logic of its support is sublime- that is, it exists in a metaphysical space beyond the language of our quotidian understanding; it can only be lived (shown). We as humans are “facts” rather than “objects” in this world and can not, thereby, ever step outside of our language, hence our sensibilities, to check the structural bits of the Sublime Scaffold to see if our lives are “really” meaningful. Put differently, we can never get outside of our math to see if there “really” is a concept of 1, a concept of plus, a concept of equals, and a concept of 2. However, as we take for granted that 1+1=2 manifests a piece of the Sublime Scaffolding and as that Sublime Scaffolding can take care of itself, then it is likewise possible to identify examples of persons whose “lives are at one with the world,” that is that their lives also (mystically) manifest the same sublime sanction that stands behind 1+1=2. Oedipus, for one, immediately comes to mind and if one hears “a life at one with the world” as “if the shoe fits,” then Cinderella is another. Alas, the intellectual commitments, the peace of fitness that counts on the Primordial Unity and the Sublime Scaffold to guarantee the meaning of 1+1=2, for example, still eludes the peace of fitness on the “meaning of life” and existential “disquietudes” remain.
Chapters 3, titled Wittgenstein’s “Turn from the Sublime,” chapter 4, titled “Don’t Take It for Granted,” and the final chapter, number 5, titled “Wittgenstein’s Daybreak,” collectively argue that, “The impulse to sublime delivers us not to peace but to hell.” (Wittgenstein’s “Culture and Value,” 1937) So, to eat the fruit of the Subliming Tree expels us from the peaceful garden of a “meaningful life.” (One’s use of the story of the Fall and “original sin” alludes to Stephen Mulhall’s “Philosophical Myths of the Fall,” Princeton U. P., 2005.) And speaking of temptations, one will fall and endure the groans brought by the obvious pun on the aesthetic use of ‘sublime’ and chemistry’s verb ‘to sublime.’
Speaker One: Can’t you see how sublime this poetry is?
Speaker Two: No, but I can smell its vapors.
One took this chance, however, to note the aesthetic aptness of Wittgenstein’s use of ‘to sublime’- a solid passing without liquefaction directly to a gas- to picture the vaporous aspect of a Primordial Unity or a Sublime Scaffolding and other reductive once and for all explanations.
As Bearn points out the “the grammatical joke” of the pun manifests the contingency of contingency and the contingency of the difference between contingency and necessity- and hence, the contingency of language. But still, this suggests that “meanings” somehow float loose from what they mean. To re-anchor signified to sign all one needs to know is what “meaning” consists in- “what,” for example, “is the meaning of meaning?” This question is the way to hell, for it takes a word/world divide as obvious: meanings must consist in pictures or rules that come before our “eyes” or into our “mind” to match or confirm their correctness or not. Reasoning, then, of some description will bridge the gap between word and world and guarantee an uninterrupted flow from the realm of ‘meanings’ to the existential realm of language speakers. In this way, the logical must of meanings guarantees the meanings of what we say; and one can hear Hell’s gates rising. What, for example, is the benzene ring of ‘disquietude’ or the “do not go pass GO” of ‘satisfaction’? The indeterminate application of either pictures or rules obviates their sublimed usefulness as meaning’s bankers. But rather than suffer the angst, the dread brought by a debt to bankrupt meaning, Wittgenstein tells us to “awaken to the wonder” that humans communicate at all.
“Explanations must come to an end.” (“Philosophical Investigations,” #109) Sublimed justifications for linguistic/existential meaning are groundless; but “It is the groundlessness of our lives,” Bearn writes, “That makes it possible to find our lives wonderful, significant. But that very groundlessness also makes the wonder of our lives impermanent, fragile. This wonder is doubled-cracked [cracks through which light passes]- for simultaneously we would recognize the abyss and accept the surface [the near and nearest, the present at hand]: [I]superficial, out of profundity. (Nietzsche, Gay Science, preface, 1886)”
In “Waking to Wonder,” an answer to the existential question, “what is the meaning of life?” might simply be, “This is what I do.” The meaning of our lives depends on nothing. Be grateful.
To the anxious existential question: what is the meaning of life? Bearn writes in the preface of “Waking to Wonder” that Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, “Aim to ease our existential cares, waking us to the wonder of existence, the wonder of human communication, the wonder of human satisfaction.” The earthly peace each offers (by showing the way rather than the where), however, is fragile, but ever renewable. “Waking to Wonder” is a “Nietzschean reading of Wittgenstein;” and Bearn’s overlay of Nietzsche’s “Birth of Tragedy,” published in 1872 and the 1886 publication of the “Seven Prefaces” on Wittgenstein’s “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus” published in 1921 and the 1953 publication of the “Philosophical Investigations” exposes the existential aspects of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy as well as the metaphysical to existential turns taken by both philosophers.
But there is yet a second question; and that is: from out of where is one “waking to wonder”? The epigraph on the title page that cites Wittgenstein’s “Culture and Value” clues an answer.
“Man has to awaken in wonder—and so perhaps do peoples. Science is a way of sending him to sleep again.” In “Waking to Wonder,” Bearn shows that both Nietzsche and Wittgenstein in their mature philosophies reject the “lulling charities” of the sleep, whether brought by the poppies of physics or metaphysics, of reductive, soul killing once-and-for-all answers.
Chapter One, titled “Superficial—Out of Profundity,” reminds us of Nietzsche’s tragic vision; where by Apollo’s order reason meets sensuality in the particulars of art and shields us from the Dionysian terror of inexplicable Chance. Yet, for Nietzsche, we can find existential refuge from this meaning erasing terror in the Primordial Unity (that world stabilizing metaphysical space where there are no particulars to disrupt), which our engagement with music rather than philosophy makes accessible. By 1886, however, Nietzsche had rejected both the positive “metaphysical comfort” of the Primordial Unity and the negative “metaphysical comfort” of nihilism. He had instead embraced the abyss and found that the “very groundlessness of the things nearest to us renders them wonderful…. The wonder of the world is not diminished, but preserved by the brute groundlessness of our judgments that this is what I care about. A fragile, precarious peace can still be ours, not thanks to the metaphysical substance of the world, but thanks to nothing.” “The value of existence” lives in our engagement with the “little things nearest to us.”
Chapter Two, titled “The Sublime Scaffold of Logic and Life,” traces four receptions of the “Tractatus” and shows how the most recent view of its ethical, logical, and mystical aspects work in existential application. For Wittgenstein, the term ‘ethical’ meant the ‘meaning of life.’ Wittgenstein, however, refuses a prescriptive description of either a meaningful life or the meaning of life. Nevertheless, the Tractatus teaches that a sublime scaffold of logic supports the sense of this world and the meaning the life. And meaningfulness can not be said, because the logic of its support is sublime- that is, it exists in a metaphysical space beyond the language of our quotidian understanding; it can only be lived (shown). We as humans are “facts” rather than “objects” in this world and can not, thereby, ever step outside of our language, hence our sensibilities, to check the structural bits of the Sublime Scaffold to see if our lives are “really” meaningful. Put differently, we can never get outside of our math to see if there “really” is a concept of 1, a concept of plus, a concept of equals, and a concept of 2. However, as we take for granted that 1+1=2 manifests a piece of the Sublime Scaffolding and as that Sublime Scaffolding can take care of itself, then it is likewise possible to identify examples of persons whose “lives are at one with the world,” that is that their lives also (mystically) manifest the same sublime sanction that stands behind 1+1=2. Oedipus, for one, immediately comes to mind and if one hears “a life at one with the world” as “if the shoe fits,” then Cinderella is another. Alas, the intellectual commitments, the peace of fitness that counts on the Primordial Unity and the Sublime Scaffold to guarantee the meaning of 1+1=2, for example, still eludes the peace of fitness on the “meaning of life” and existential “disquietudes” remain.
Chapters 3, titled Wittgenstein’s “Turn from the Sublime,” chapter 4, titled “Don’t Take It for Granted,” and the final chapter, number 5, titled “Wittgenstein’s Daybreak,” collectively argue that, “The impulse to sublime delivers us not to peace but to hell.” (Wittgenstein’s “Culture and Value,” 1937) So, to eat the fruit of the Subliming Tree expels us from the peaceful garden of a “meaningful life.” (One’s use of the story of the Fall and “original sin” alludes to Stephen Mulhall’s “Philosophical Myths of the Fall,” Princeton U. P., 2005.) And speaking of temptations, one will fall and endure the groans brought by the obvious pun on the aesthetic use of ‘sublime’ and chemistry’s verb ‘to sublime.’
Speaker One: Can’t you see how sublime this poetry is?
Speaker Two: No, but I can smell its vapors.
One took this chance, however, to note the aesthetic aptness of Wittgenstein’s use of ‘to sublime’- a solid passing without liquefaction directly to a gas- to picture the vaporous aspect of a Primordial Unity or a Sublime Scaffolding and other reductive once and for all explanations.
As Bearn points out the “the grammatical joke” of the pun manifests the contingency of contingency and the contingency of the difference between contingency and necessity- and hence, the contingency of language. But still, this suggests that “meanings” somehow float loose from what they mean. To re-anchor signified to sign all one needs to know is what “meaning” consists in- “what,” for example, “is the meaning of meaning?” This question is the way to hell, for it takes a word/world divide as obvious: meanings must consist in pictures or rules that come before our “eyes” or into our “mind” to match or confirm their correctness or not. Reasoning, then, of some description will bridge the gap between word and world and guarantee an uninterrupted flow from the realm of ‘meanings’ to the existential realm of language speakers. In this way, the logical must of meanings guarantees the meanings of what we say; and one can hear Hell’s gates rising. What, for example, is the benzene ring of ‘disquietude’ or the “do not go pass GO” of ‘satisfaction’? The indeterminate application of either pictures or rules obviates their sublimed usefulness as meaning’s bankers. But rather than suffer the angst, the dread brought by a debt to bankrupt meaning, Wittgenstein tells us to “awaken to the wonder” that humans communicate at all.
“Explanations must come to an end.” (“Philosophical Investigations,” #109) Sublimed justifications for linguistic/existential meaning are groundless; but “It is the groundlessness of our lives,” Bearn writes, “That makes it possible to find our lives wonderful, significant. But that very groundlessness also makes the wonder of our lives impermanent, fragile. This wonder is doubled-cracked [cracks through which light passes]- for simultaneously we would recognize the abyss and accept the surface [the near and nearest, the present at hand]: [I]superficial, out of profundity. (Nietzsche, Gay Science, preface, 1886)”
In “Waking to Wonder,” an answer to the existential question, “what is the meaning of life?” might simply be, “This is what I do.” The meaning of our lives depends on nothing. Be grateful.