This I Believe: An A to Z of a Life

W — Wittgenstein

I believe in Wittgenstein because he endangers all our fixed ideas, all the truths we have acquired. He forces us to rethink everything, even the things we would rather not reconsider precisely because they constitute such a solid pillar of our mental architecture and moral armor. Whether we like it or not, he is the philosopher of the twentieth century. He goes directly to the heart of language and, consequently, the heart of literature because he is able to admit the unsayable.

The philosopher, traditionally speaking, has tended to emphasize thought and the perception of the senses, transposed onto the throne of reason. Wittgenstein transposes it onto language and within language; he distinguishes two approaches: language as the representation of facts and the measurement of propositions. Or language as the conductor of emotions. Let us distinguish, asks Wittgenstein, the austere, monkish Jew from Vienna, the impoverished millionaire living in a humble shack, without a penny to his name. Let us distinguish, he asks of us from his offensive poverty, his disturbing remoteness, his arrogant humility. Let us avoid confusion. The realm of value and meaning does not depend on the facts and propositions that comprise rational discourse. Value is the domain of paradox and poetry. Let us separate rational discourse from the worlds of ethics and aesthetics so that we may obtain a clear distinction, given that by doing so we will restore the objective rationality of science, so that it may be untrammeled by humanistic illusions or metaphysical disquisitions, and we will understand the subjectivity of ethics/aesthetics, which can only be expressed in an indirect manner, through poetry, fable, myth. From there we may say that only the unsayable has value, understanding the word unsayable to signify all that rational-philosophical can never say. In the world of positivist thought, so paradoxically dominant in a continent of myth and fable like the so-called New World, silence is inconceivable. All that exists is what can and cannot be said. (Or, in a more political sense, what should and should not be said.) But this effectively banishes everything that truly matters — that is, all those things that we cannot express rationally. The silence of reason does not create monsters. It only suggests that what is unsayable in philosophical terms is, in fact, eminently sayable in aesthetic terms.

The writer knows that Wittgenstein is right. The historian, the economist, the jurist, and the man of science are all beholden to a single definition of things. Napoleon invaded Russia in 1812. Bad money expels good money. The case has been judged. Two plus two equals four. For the writer, Napoleon invades Russia every time a reader opens the cover of War and Peace. Gold, in Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens, is a “yellow slave” that “will knit and break religions; bless the accurs’d; / make the hoar leprosy ador’d; place thieves, / and give them title, knee, and approbation.” Justice, warns Francis Bacon, can sometimes be nothing more than cruel vengeance. And for Lewis Carroll, two plus two never equals four. In literature, everything is plurivocal. The multiplicity of signs is what sustains poetry. A rose is a rose is a rose, said Gertrude Stein, poker-faced. But when Carlos Pellicer says, “Aquí no suceden cosas / de mayor importancia que las rosas” (In this place roses are the event / of greatest consequence), the flower becomes transfigured like the one Coleridge dreams of and wakes to find in his hand.

My appreciation of Wittgenstein, rather than precluding my appreciation of other philosophers, transforms it. Nietzsche’s particular style, so famously aphoristic, is a kind of refusal to create a philosophical “system” that, in order to present itself properly to the world, must present unquestionable premises for the thinker’s consideration. For Nietzsche, “systems” of thought are “delectable, though erroneous.” Great systematic constructions do not have the capacity to criticize their own assumptions, and as such their buildings will collapse. Nietzsche sets out to write aphorisms, each of which encompasses everything — or at the very least, illuminates it. The very brevity of the aphorism helps us to see things in a new way and also to break loose from the multiple prisons that philosophical systems create to confine thought. In Die fröhliche Wissenschaft (The Gay Science), he tells us that it is “despicable” not to question things. In a world of exhausted virtues, we have no choice but to take the scalpel to all those things that, in our time, pass themselves off as virtuous. There are more idols than realities in this world of ours, and convictions have a tendency to be prisons. It is almost as if the entire universe was one of Piranesi’s splendid, spacious yet cavernous gray jails. To break out of prison: perhaps this is the action that Nietzsche suggests we take against received truths, against complacency, against the notion of existence as mere accident or carelessness.

Yet the Nietzschean proposal is as difficult as the question he asks, once again, in The Gay Science: “What does your conscience say? You shall become the man you are.” The man you are, revealed or stripped naked in one step, through the movement from negation to difference, from reaction to action, from resentment to sentiment. To be the man you are requires gift, sacrifice, education, values. Of course this is true. But for Nietzsche, skepticism and disenchantment are also required. “There is no preestablished harmony between the development of truth and the good of humanity. ” When a person believes that everything has a purpose, in the end nothing has any purpose. There is no causal relationship between happiness and history. Objective history, in fact, tends to become “furious subjectivity” because while the hero may exhibit his greatness to his fellow man, his fellow man is unable to endure it, and the hero himself will be unable to maintain it. From here emerges the historical violence of the hero who feels he has been misunderstood by the citizens who do not understand him. The hero tyrannizes his fellow man because his fellow man neither comprehends nor appreciates the hero.

With Nietzsche, the Hegelian-Marxist dialectic cannot be optimistic until history can prove it. Few other thinkers — perhaps no other — have been so frequently accused of saying things that they never said, and so frequently dispossessed of the things they did say. Nietzsche racist? “The place where the different races come together is the source of the greatest cultures.” Nietzsche chauvinist? “Greece is original because it did not close itself off from the Orient.” Nietzsche a Germanophile? “The military victories of the Reich do not imply German superiority in any sense. On the contrary, the deification of the German triumph may signify the death of the German spirit.” Nietzsche anti-Semitic? “For me it is a question of honor that it remain absolutely, unequivocally clear that I am opposed to anti-Semitism” (Letter 479 to Franz Over-beck). And while Wagner unabashedly wrote that racial mixing was “ignoble,” that Germany could only achieve purity by “liberating [itself] from the Jews,” and that “the Jewish race is the natural enemy of a pure and noble humanity,” Nietzsche breaks with Wagner, among other things, because the composer “was condescending to the Germans and became a German imperialist.”

I could continue with more of the distortions imposed upon Nietzsche’s thought, most specifically by his sister Elizabeth; Nietzsche would have been thrilled for her to have gotten lost in Paraguay forever but she returned to censure, ban, deform, and invent whatever her prejudices and phobias called for, taking full advantage of the reclusive nature and subsequent death of her brother. “I may be a bad German,” Nietzsche wrote to Over-beck, “but in any event I am a good European.”

There is no way that such a radical thinker, sometimes so contradictory and intolerant, could not incite scandal, opposition, and manipulation. In him I see not only the skeptic that rejects the facile temptations of history but also the living being who celebrates “the joy of affirmation” and who, in an oblique foreshadowing of Wittgenstein, tells us that when logic exhausts hope, a new form of knowledge emerges, one that calls for “the preventive virtue of art.”

According to the classification of Nicolai Hartmann, Nietzsche belongs more to the realm of the philosopher of problems than the philosopher of systems. In this he shares a bond with Plato, another philosopher that Wittgenstein clarified for me. And the problem that Plato elucidates for me is the literary problem of nomination (just like the problem of poetic language as the seashell where one can hear what logic does not utter in Wittgenstein, just like the understanding of art that one acquires when logic is exhausted in Nietzsche). Cratylus is perhaps the first work of literary criticism, and its central concern is a discussion about the meaning of names. Cratylus tells us that all things have their proper name, granted them by nature — that is to say, something inherent to the thing and independent of convention and nothing else. Hermogenes, on the other hand, asserts that names can only be the product of convention: the name that is given to a certain thing is the correct name; if that name is exchanged for a new one, then the new one will be correct. And that is not all: the same thing can be given one name by one person and another name by another person. Nothing is intrinsic to the name. Everything rests on convention.

Socrates supposes that there exists a legislator of names who grants names and distributes them according to the nature of things. But this law allows too many exceptions. The qualities of a human being, for example, may contradict the meaning of his or her name. And if the gods are the ones who give us our names, well, it turns out that we don’t know what the gods are called, or what they call one another. All we know is how we have chosen to name them: Zeus, Cronos, Hera. But all too frequently a name is a mask, most especially when the person who has it is the bearer of a secret. Hermes carries a message, he bears the power of language, he makes language circular, but that language may be true or false: the important thing is that language flows and moves, and that wisdom (sofía) is wise because it touches all that moves, swiftly baptizing all things. The purpose of the name is to indicate the nature of the designated thing in question. But the name belongs, in a broader sense, to the process of language itself — the formation of letters, syllables, nouns, verbs, and sentences. Can it escape nomination by bringing the flow of things into the flow of language? Can we be certain that a given thing has been given the correct name, one that denotes its true nature? Socrates warns that “it is possible to assign names incorrectly” and if this logic is taken a step further, it is also possible to create false sentences, false languages, verbs that disguise.

In the event that this is true, Socrates searches for another, more solid principle by which to name things, and this principle ultimately consists neither of knowing the natural or intrinsic name of a world in flux, nor of surrendering to the whim of nominal convention. Instead, his principle — lucid, human — truly consists of naming things according to the relationship that is established between them. While Socrates may reject Heraclitus’s “runny nose,” immersed in the interminable flow of all things, he also rejects pure nominal convention that is derived from an essence we do not know. It is with great liberty, great veracity, and great reality that Socrates proposes that when we name things, we observe the relationship between them, the manner in which things recognize and act among themselves. This is, in reality, the true name of things: their relationship.

The greatest living Spanish philosopher, Emilio Lledó, very astutely observes how the Platonic dialogues are a continual critique of language. In an earlier section I have alluded to the paradox of language as the expression of silence broken by animal sound — the moo or moan of the cattle whose etymology, as Erich Kahler tells us, is the very same as that of the word myth: moo, mutter, murmur, and mutism. The Greek verb muein comes from the same root, to close, to close the eyes, the same place where mystery and mystique come from. And that is how the process of language takes us from mu to mythos, according to Kahler’s linguistic process, which consists of giving a word its opposite meaning. The Latin mutus (mute) becomes the French mot (which means word), and the onomatopoeic moo, the unarticulated sound, becomes mythos—that is, word. In his New Science of 1725, Giambattista Vico, the philosopher of Neapolitan Spain asserts that we only know what we create, and the first thing we create is language, the basis of all human knowledge. The linguistic dynamic is a process of course and recourse (corsi e ricorsí) that allows us to understand the progression of history, descending from the darkness of its own origins and then, later on, ascending to the light of its own idea, which is its own necessity.

In the same vein, Lledó also sees language as the active, creative link of society, and he bases this notion on four levels of evolution. The first is that of necessity: hunting, fishing, the need for communication as sustenance. Necessity creates language. Language creates images, and images can be reactivated by “all kinds of external and internal stimuli,” as he says in Lenguaje e historia (Language and History). At the second level, the city is the creator of symbols, and language becomes committed to paideia, the formative ideal of the human being, both personal and collective history. At the third level, language not only identifies, it connects, debates, revises. . And finally, in our own time, the homogenization of language returns to the identification between individual and social collective, and the price we pay is that of generating a forest of useless symbols.

From here, once again, we find ourselves before Wittgenstein’s “preventive virtue,” his arduous task of verbal cleansing, of linguistic hygiene. Wittgenstein is eternally aware of the “risk” that living and, therefore, thinking, implies. Most especially in matters of religion, he notes, “the honest thinker. . is like a tightrope walker. He seems to be walking on air. His support is the most fragile imaginable. And yet it is possible to walk upon it.”

This sentence echoes something Pascal once said: despite their best efforts, human beings are like tightrope walkers, forced to assume risk. People can choose to go to sea or stay at home, but nobody escapes risk. Like Wittgenstein and Nietzsche, Pascal is the philosopher of fragments and aphorisms. Like Wittgenstein and Plato, he questions the nature of language. Like Kafka, he condemns part of his work to silence, but unlike Kafka, he wagers that it will be found in a simple inventory of his meager possessions. Pascal’s Pensées were, in fact, found sewn inside an old shirt.

Pascal’s thousand fragments may be, in their aphoristic brevity, an ironic response to his criticism of the philosophical tradition. Montaigne once noted that the one issue that has troubled philosophers more than any other is the question of what constitutes sovereign good for man. Pascal, who constantly reelaborates and sequesters Montaigne’s writing, answers that there are “280 kinds of sovereign good in Montaigne.” Pascalian pessimism with respect to philosophical systems extends, prima facie, to human beings themselves. Man is a sorrowful enigma. The justice he imparts is wrongful. The more wealthy his life is, the more empty it becomes. Vanity—“gaming, hunting, visits, theater, false perpetuity of one’s name”—is the object of the most intense Pascalian disdain. “What a chimera then is man! What a novelty, what monsters! Chaotic, contradictory, prodigious, judging everything, mindless worm of the earth. Storehouse of truth, cesspool of uncertainty and error; glory and reject of the universe!”⁷

Blaise Pascal was, as we know, a practical man. His early renown grew thanks to his scientific ingenuity and his pragmatism. He devised the first public transportation system in France. He invented the adding machine, the pascaline. And he discovered the laws of hydrostatic equilibrium. In addition, however, he may also be the person who turned a corporeal, physical organ — the heart — into the seat of knowledge and emotion. Symbol for love, name for central location, “the heart has its reasons, of which reason does not know,” as Pascal tells us. Skeptical of human reason and human institutions in general, Pascal turns to the heart in the hope of finding a dimension of the human being that reason cannot completely encompass or grasp. Pascal makes reason complete with three reasons that could well be — when seen from a certain perspective — those of Wittgenstein. The heart says those things that cannot be said rationally. That other knowledge tormented Pascal because the young French philosopher believed that there was a void there, an abyss that encroaches upon us in two ways. As the discoverer of hydrostatic equilibrium, Pascal the physicist is aware of the void’s existence. “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me,” he said.

But then Pascal turns the physical void into a void of the soul, and asks himself, “What can fill it, what can balance it?” Pascal is the philosopher who inches precariously — once again, the tightrope walker — between void and plenitude. His thought emerges from the void and inserts itself into society, religion, and history. His perspective could not possibly be more pessimistic. God is hiding from us. Nature is corrupt. “Larceny, incest, infanticide, parricide, have all been accounted virtuous deeds. . Justice, like finery, is dictated by fashion. . Thus opinion is the queen of the world, but might is its tyrant.” And then, in the final analysis, he observes that “might is the sovereign of the world, and not opinion.” And even when opinion prevails over might, opinion itself will become the enforcer of might. At his most pessimistic, he states that this world “is not the land of truth. It wanders unknown among men.”

Pascal does, however, warn us that the political order is supported by physical, not spiritual, realities. And that is a virtue, insofar as corporeal realities are identifiable and can justify obedience. There is an implicit deceit in political life. The majority of people obey because they believe that the legal order of things is just, and would rebel against it if they perceived it to be arbitrary. For that reason, governments prefer to maintain the illusion and, occasionally, even fantasies — the opiate of the people, to make a pre-Marxist allusion. As an observer of politics, Pascal fears “the art of opposition and of revolution” and rejects the idea, pre-Rousseauian as well, that it is possible to return to “the natural and fundamental laws of the State, which an unjust custom has abolished.” The people rise up. Power uses its advantage to further destroy the people. Sometimes it is “necessary to deceive men for their own good.”

It may seem as though I am criticizing the politically reactionary and realistic Pascal — Machiavelli after the fact. I am. But I also feel that I am making an inventory of sorts of the Pascalian skepticisms, which are those that emerge from the void, permeating society and history. Once there, having said all the negative things that can be said of the multitudes, government, power, revolution, and even a hidden God—le Dieu caché—and a corrupt nature, Pascal deposits his thoughts in the human race and conceives of them as a lifelong journey of gains and losses. The quality of this journey will depend upon the quality of the conscience of the person who learns — or does not learn — that “nothing is simple which is presented to the soul” (world, subject, society, politics, history) but that at the same time “the soul never presents itself simply to any object.”

God hidden. Nature corrupt. God forsakes us to blindness— until, that is, the arrival of Christ. All of Pascal’s thought, all his skepticism, all his irony, all his denial, are clearly directed toward an affirmation of Christ. The double path of man, his double passion — path and suffering — on Earth is what, in Pascal’s eyes, brings us all closer to the path of Christ himself on Earth, and through the Passion. I cannot help but feel certain that all the apparatus Pascal puts in place for our role as tightrope walkers is like a bridge that stretches out from the Dieu caché that forsakes not only Jesus but also all of humanity, and from Jesus himself. .

“Thou wouldst not seek me if thou hadst not found me,” says Christ in the disjointed Pascalian packages I continue to cite so copiously. That is to say: Pascal cannot and will not elude the question of faith, the question of the human being who believes. Not because of his allegiance to one or another religion, but because he searches for the most precious thing of all, the thing that he already carries inside him (the heart that knows the reasons that reason does not) and he searches for it, conscious that it begins at one demarcation point (birth) only to end at another (death). What determines the value of life for Pascal is not his probable religious affiliation but rather his faith in its most ample meaning: the conviction that we can be bearers of values that we wish to anchor in the world precisely because we ask ourselves the question “What else is there beyond this?”

Received ideas and the inertia of practice are what Pascal rejects, and for this reason — and many others — he exalts the figure of Christ as active, contentious, demanding with his time, the model that we have already found without knowing it, but that we must pursue so that we may always be conscious of what each of us can be, can exhaust, or can renounce.

“I believe because it is absurd,” was Tertullian’s most sublime reflection on faith, which can be explained not by reason, but by that “heart” which has reasons that reason does not know. Wittgenstein, a Jew who found himself irresistibly drawn to Catholicism, admits that the religious thinker is a “tightrope walker.” And so is he. On the one hand, he tells us that faith is absurd, that Christianity is characterized not by faith but by practice — that is, by living as Jesus did. Yet on the other, he declares that faith is faith in terms of what the heart and soul need, not what “my speculative intelligence” requires. As such, “my soul with its passions. . is what needs saving, not my abstract thought.” From this point the faith-practice contradiction in Wittgenstein’s thought becomes less clear, less apparent, whenever his “soul” and his “passions” subject faith to the practical challenge to live as Jesus did. “Only Christian practice, a life like the life that died on the cross, is Christian. . and even today it is possible.” And then he adds that “for certain men, it is even necessary: genuine, primitive Christianity is possible at every moment.” Christianity appears to Wittgenstein, in the end, as faith that is action — not just “belief” but action. Christianity cannot reduce itself to simply sustaining that one or another thing is true. Christianity is practice, not dogma.

The vast intelligence of Ludwig Wittgenstein leads him to believe that there is no reason why religious faith cannot be part of the cultural heritage “that allows me to distinguish between true and false.” Only a man of this kind of philosophical and moral integrity could say, as he lay dying, “God said to me, I judge you for what has come from your mouth. Your own actions have made you tremble with disgust when you have seen others repeat them.” Because “my soul and its passions, not my abstract intelligence, are what need saving.”

I don’t know if there is any philosophical assertion more valiant or more definitive than this.