16.        Analytic Philosophy:

       Positivism and Ordinary Language

 

 

 

by Stephen Palmquist (stevepq@hkbu.edu.hk)

 

          Having now examined three ways of applying the logical distinc­tion between "analysis" and "synthesis", and having explored in some detail its application to the Geometry of Logic, our remaining task here in Part Two is to consider how an over-emphasis on either analysis or synthesis has shaped the way some philosophers have developed their ideas. Back in Lecture 1 I contrasted two opposing movements that have dominated western philosophy during most of the twentieth century: linguistic analysis and existentialism (see Figure 1.2). Most versions of the former have emphasized the importance of analysis, and most versions of the latter, synthesis, so much as to neglect or even explicitly reject the significance of the opposing trend. Yet as we have come to expect, given the complementary relationship between analysis and syn­thesis, the continued existence of each trend depends on that of the other, for they are complementary poles of a single movement. Hence it should come as no surprise to find that, toward the end of the century, both trends began passing away together, and being replaced gradually by other ways of thinking, the most important being hermeneutic philosophy. Interestingly, these three major approaches to philosophy all emphasize a common theme: the centrality of language to the philosopher's quest. So this week we shall devote one lecture to each.

 

          Today we shall discuss the main elements of the philosophical movement that dominated English-speaking philosophy throughout the past century, known as "linguistic analysis". The same way of philoso­phizing also goes by such names as "analytic philosophy", "linguistic philosophy", or "philosophy of language", depending on the preference of the philosopher in question. But in general we can characterize this approach as one that regards the analysis of language as the philosopher's fundamental task. The precise way language ought to be analyzed, the exact definition of what analysis is, and even the proper delimitation of what counts as language, are all issues of open debate among members of this school. But amidst all their differences, linguistic analysts are united by their common belief that philosophical issues must be approached, first and foremost (if not exclusively) from the point of view of their roots in human language. Some believe that in upholding this belief they are the true heirs of Kant's great limitation of human knowledge-to the extent that the notion of a "transcendental turn" in philosophizing is thought by many philosophers today to be identical to a "linguistic turn".

 

          The roots of linguistic analysis are planted in ground prepared by a mathematician named Gottlob Frege (1848-1925). Frege instituted a revolution in (analytic) logic, the implications of which are still in the process of being worked out by contemporary philosophers. He regarded logic as virtually reducible to mathematics, and believed proofs should always be exhibited in the form of clearly expressed, deductive steps. More importantly, he believed logic could perform tasks far beyond anything envisioned by Aristotle, provided logicians could develop ways of expressing linguistic meaning entirely in terms of logical symbols. One of his most influential ideas was to distinguish between the "sense" of a proposition and its "reference", arguing that a proposition has "meaning" only if it has both a sense and a reference. (This idea bears a striking resemblance, incidentally, to Kant's claim that knowledge arises only out of the synthesis of concepts and intuitions.) Frege also devel­oped a new notation enabling "quantifiers" (words such as "all", "some", etc.) to be expressed in terms of symbols. He hoped philosophers could use this notation to perfect the logical form of their arguments, thus making it possible to come far closer than ever before to the ideal of making philosophy into a rigorous science.

 

          One of the first philosophers to recognize the profound impor­tance of Frege's new discoveries in logic was Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)-probably the best known English philosopher in this century. Russell, together with A.N. Whitehead, applied many of Frege's insights in writing what must be one of the most important, yet least read, philos­ophy books written during the twentieth century, Principia Mathematica. Russell developed many interesting and influential ideas on a vast array of subjects during his long career. Unfortunately, on a number of occasions he changed his views, arguing in one text against a position he himself had defended in previous writings. Since he never developed a single, consistent system of philosophy, it would be too difficult to examine his vast array of ideas here. However, the case is quite different for a younger contemporary of Russell's, who began his career in philosophy as one of Russell's students. After studying engineering for several years in Manchester, this German-speaking philosopher sent an essay to Russell in Cambridge, telling him he wanted to study philosophy under Russell's guidance-either that, or he would pursue further studies in the field of aeronautics. Fortunately for the philosophical world, Russell invited this young man to become his student in Cambridge.

 

          If Frege can be viewed as the "father" of linguistic analysis, then its greatest "son" was, undoubtedly, Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951). Not long after coming to Cambridge, Wittgenstein launched out on his own, to become one of this century's two or three most influential philosophers. The bulk of his influence came through his lectures and tutorials, and through the students and other philosophers who shared in these discussions with him. For Wittgenstein himself published only one book during his lifetime, written while he was still a young man. When he died, however, he left the manuscript for a second book, eventually published two years after his death. Each of these books laid the founda­tion for a major new version of linguistic analysis. For the remainder of today's lecture, let's take a look at these two trends in turn.

 

          Wittgenstein's book, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), came to be treated as a manifesto for one of the earliest versions of linguistic analysis: "logical positivism". It begins by defining the limits of the lin­guistic world in terms of the following set of foundational propositions:

 

1                The world is all that is the case.

1.1 The world is the totality of facts, not things.

1.11           The world is determined by the facts, and by their being all the facts.

1.12           For the totality of facts determines what is the case, and also whatever is not the case.

1.13           The facts in logical space are the world.

1.2 The world divides into facts.

1.21           Each item can be the case or not the case while everything else remains the same.

 

 

Throughout the book Wittgenstein follows the same rigorous, mathemat­ical form used in this introductory passage, numbering each successive paragraph in hierarchical order. This logical form reflects the overall aim of the book: to construct a set of analytic propositions that can be used as a framework for understanding all "facts" (i.e., meaningful pro­positions) about the world. The analytic focus of Wittgenstein's concern is evident when, for example, he states that each of these facts "can be the case" (+) "or not the case" (-).

 

          After setting up a fixed boundary line between what counts as "the world" and what does not-i.e., between "facts" and "things"-Wittgenstein weaves an intricate web of logical propositions in sections 2-6 of his book. These propositions are supposed to establish a philosophical framework for understanding any legitimate fact that the "world" (i.e., the set of all meaningful propositions) presents to us. He then concludes with a passage that is worth quoting at length:

 

6.522         There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.

6.53           The correct method in philosophy would really be the following: to say nothing except what can be said, i.e. propositions of natural science-i.e. something that has nothing to do with philosophy-and then, whenever someone else wanted to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had failed to give a meaning to certain signs in his propositions. Although it would not be satisfying to the other person-he would not have the feeling that we were teaching him philosophy-this method would be the only strictly correct one.

6.54           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.

7                What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.

 

 

          Analytic philosophers have debated long and hard over the proper interpretation of the enigmas in this surprise ending to Wittgenstein's Tractatus. But if we keep in mind the distinction between analytic and synthetic logic, then the meaning of these claims can be seen quite clearly. Relating the distinction between "facts" and "things" to the distinction between analytic and synthetic logic, especially as depicted in Figure IV.6, suggests the following way of picturing the main structure of Wittgenstein's argument in the above passage:

 

   

 

Figure VI.1: Wittgenstein's "Ladder"

 

 

Wittgenstein's view was that any philosophy based solely on the rigorous foundations of analytic logic must limit its scope of inquiry to questions arising within the resulting "world of facts", even though this requires us to treat many traditional philosophical questions as if they do not exist. He quite rightly recognized that this metaphysical realm (i.e., the realm of "things" outside of analytic logic) is a mystical realm. For synthetic logic has always been a favorite tool of mystics. However, because of his firm belief in the universal and exclusive validity of analytic logic, Wittgenstein was forced to conclude that the proper response to this mystical realm is to remain silent. If he was correct when he said talking about such "things" is not a proper part of the philosopher's task, then much of the philosophy I am teaching you in this course is not actually philosophy at all, but merely disguised nonsense.

 

          As we shall discover in Part Four, silence is actually a very proper way of responding to a mystical experience. Nevertheless, as word-using animals, we humans inevitably try to describe such experiences in words. Wittgenstein was describing this attempt when he referred to those who use analytic propositions as a "ladder" in hopes of climbing beyond facts to a direct apprehension of things. He was quite right if he meant to say that in such cases analytic logic turns out to be "nonsensical"; as such, his advice, that such a person should "throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it", is quite appropriate. He was also entirely correct to insist that we must "transcend these propositions" in order to "see the world aright", for mystics are interested far more in changing the way we see the world than in changing the way we describe it. What Wittgenstein failed to take into consideration, however, is that this realm of vision might have its own kind of logic, whereby words that would otherwise be nonsense can make sense after all: propositions using synthetic logic make sense because they shock us into seeing the world in a new way!

 

          Unfortunately, the philosophers who first followed Wittgenstein's lead were not interested in exploring the implications of his enigmatic references to "things" that somehow "manifest themselves". Rather, they were intrigued by his idea of constructing an analytic foundation that would enable philosophy to become, for the first time, truly scientific. The most influential of his followers was A.J. Ayer (1910-1989), who, at the age of 26, wrote the book, Language, Truth, and Logic, populariz­ing a positivist interpretation of Wittgenstein's ideas. Far from leaving open a space for silent appreciation of "mystical things", Ayer argued that the nonsensical character of mystical experiences, together with all metaphysical ideas, should lead us to discard them as utterly useless. Thus, near the beginning of the first chapter, called "The Elimination of Metaphysics", he writes:

 

 

For we shall maintain that no statement which refers to a "reality" transcending the limits of all possible sense-perception can possibly have any literal significance; from which it must follow that the labours of those who have striven to describe such a reality have all been devoted to the production of nonsense. (LTL 34)

 

 

          The knife Ayer used to cut away all such illusions came in the form of what he called the "verification" principle. He described this principle in the form of a question we are supposed to ask about any proposition put forward as a possible "fact" about the world: "Would any observations be relevant to the determination of its truth or falsehood?" (LTL 38). If the answer is "no", reasoned Ayer, then there is no way to verify the truth or falsity of the proposition in question; and in any such situation, the proposition must be literally meaningless. So, if I were trying to defend the truth of a proposition such as "God exists", Ayer would require me to describe some potential empirical situation that would cause me to give up my belief in God. For example, if I said I would give up my belief in God if my mother were to die a tragic death, then he would admit that my belief has some meaningful content; but it is now primarily a belief about my mother, not a belief about God. A per­son who claimed to have an unshakable faith would simply be regarded as believing utter nonsense. Ayer argues along these lines in the remain­der of his book, employing the knife of verification to carve away most of what have traditionally been regarded as the most important areas of philosophical inquiry. Not only metaphysical propositions as such, but also most of the nearest and dearest propositions of moral, religious, and aesthetic value are also explained away as, at best, a mere expression of a person's emotional state (and hence, as irrational).

 

          However, there is a serious problem with Ayer's program, as with any such attempt to establish on logical grounds a set of so-called "positive" limits to philosophical inquiry. The problem is that the very principle this whole school of thought is based on cannot pass the test of verification. In other words, if Ayer were here today and we asked him to point to some observation-any observation-that would count as evidence against the principle of verification, he would be unable to do so! Why? Because this principle is not merely a "logical tool", as Ayer thought; it is itself a metaphysical belief every bit as much as those he tried to discard as nonsense. This means either the principle is true, in which case the principle itself is meaningless, or else the principle is false, in which case the very foundation of logical positivism falls to pieces. We can express the self-contradictory character of the verifica­tion principle in a more rigorous form as follows (assuming "VP" stands for "verification principle" and "-v" stands for "a proposition not verifiable by some observation"):

 

 

All -v's are meaningless. (= VP)

VP is a -v.

 \ VP (if true) is meaningless.

 

 

The form of this argument should look familiar to you; it is the in­famous problem of "self-reference", exposed as a fallacy in Lecture 10.

 

          Although logical positivism did experience a period of hopeful support among many philosophers, mainly during the 1930s and 1940s, it was not long before the self-contradictory nature of its basic claims became undeniably evident. Indeed, it became so evident that Ayer him­self eventually stopped trying to defend such an extreme, positivist position. The lesson we can learn from the relatively brief life of this philosophical experiment is that presuppositions of some sort are essential for any philosophical endeavor, and that such presuppositions, like the myths we encountered in Part One, always transcend the realm of the knowledge they serve to define. Such a transcendent principle generally must be accepted on faith, since it cannot be proved from within the system it supports; yet without it, there would be no boundary line in the system, and hence no knowledge at all. In other words, logical positivism may have succeeded, in a sense, in making philosophy into a science; but the price it had to pay was to affirm the basic incoherence that plagues so much of modern science: the belief that knowledge can be gained without being rooted in some underlying myth. Once we recog­nize the futility of such a belief, we can see that Wittgenstein's "things" are just as important as his "facts": without the former we could not even speak about the latter!

 

          One of the most interesting contrasts in the history of twentieth-century philosophy was between the first and second of Wittgenstein's two great books. No sooner had he developed the framework for a positivist philosophy than he began working toward quite a different way of conceiving the philosophical task. He set out his new views in Philosophical Investigations (1953), a posthumously published book that has come to be treated as a manifesto for another version of linguistic analysis, called "ordinary language philosophy". The different character of these two books is evident even in their titles: whereas his Tractatus is rigorously logical and utterly analytic, Wittgenstein's Investigations is written in a much looser, more synthetic, style-not unlike a detective story. The foundation-stone of ordinary language philosophy (replacing logical positivism's verification principle) is the principle that the meaning of a word or proposition is determined by its use. Armed with this principle, analytic philosophers turned their attention to the task of examining the way words are used in ordinary language, in the belief that all metaphysical problems can ultimately be traced back to a misuse of some of the key words involved.

 

          In addition to the principle of use determining meaning, Wittgen­stein suggested a number of other guidelines for how ordinary language ought to be investigated by philosophers. Two of these should be mentioned here before we conclude our discussion of linguistic analysis. The first is that words get their meaning by participating in a particular "language-game". Just as different games have different rules, yet all can be called "games", so also different ways of using language have differ­ent rules, yet meaning can arise within all of them. This means that science, the only admissible realm of knowledge for the logical posi­tivist, is now regarded as just one of many possible language-games. The words we use in non-scientific contexts, such as in moral reasoning, in forming aesthetic judgments, and even in constructing systems of religious belief, can be regarded as having legitimate meanings after all. In each case, though, we cannot understand such meanings from the outside, but must participate in the game in order to appreciate what is going on. For this reason, understanding the concept of a "game" is crucial for ordinary language philosophers. Indeed, while I was studying in Oxford, I once attended a series of lectures by a philosopher who had been one of Wittgenstein's students. Believe it or not, he spent the entire term discussing with us the question "What is a game?"-yet we never came up with a set of defining principles that could apply to all games!

 

          Another guideline introduced by Wittgenstein was again based on an analogy-namely, that groups of words sometimes bear "family relationships" to each other and to other groups of words. By tracing these relationships and becoming aware of the intricate patterns exhibited in ordinary language, he believed philosophers could avoid repeating many of the mistakes committed by past philosophers. To try to use a word as if it were a member of a family it is not related to in ordinary language is to break the rules of language-games; so it is no wonder seemingly irresolvable problems arise as a result. Using these and other guidelines, Wittgenstein detected numerous errors in the way philosophers tend to treat words. Although such detective work sometimes ends with conclusions not unlike those of the logical cogitations of Tractatus (e.g., that philosophical problems are due to a misuse of language), its open and flexible tone is a far cry from the rigidity of the work of his youth.

 

          If logical positivism tried to make philosophy into a science, ordinary language philosophy tried to make it into an art. In this way linguistic analysis in some of its forms has actually come to appreciate more fully the importance of synthesis-though still treating analysis, of course, as having priority. This emphasis on analysis has had the benefit of calling to the attention of philosophers the importance of clarifying language. One of the most serious problems with this whole movement, however, is that in many cases analytic philosophers who claim to be saying "we are just trying to help clarify what you are already doing when you use language", are actually implying another, quite different claim as well. Some analytic philosophers do philosophy with the attitude that, in fact, "we know what was wrong with the whole tradition, and we don't need it any more!" And this, of course, is always a dangerous thing to say, since philosophical traditions constitute the very soil from which the metaphysical roots of our philosophical tree draw their nourishment.

 

 

17.  Synthetic Philosophy:

            Existentialism and God Talk

 

 

 

          An over-emphasis on analytic logic in philosophy often gives rise, as we have seen, to a position that ignores all myth in the quest for a scientific system. The extent to which philosophers allow mythical ways of thinking to play a legitimate role in their philosophizing is likely to be directly proportional to the extent to which they recognize some form of synthetic logic as the legitimate complement of analytic logic. As I mentioned in Lecture 16, today's focus will be on existentialism, a school of philosophy whose proponents tend to emphasize synthetic logic more than analytic logic. This movement exercised a dominant influence in so-called "Continental" (i.e., non-English European) philosophy, especially during the first half of the twentieth century. Actually, much of the fourth part of this course will deal with issues raised primarily by exis­tentialist philosophers in their attempts to apply philosophical thinking to improve our understanding of concrete, human experiences. So today we can limit our attention to an issue related more directly to logic-namely, the problem of how religious language, and "God talk" in particular, gets its meaning. (Of course, analytic philosophers have also devoted much attention to this issue; but we will focus here on the way existentialists tend to deal with it.) This topic serves as an appropriate contrast to linguistic analysis because language about God, far from excluding myth, is regarded by some as the "language of myth".

 

          Religious language at its best, like myth, often uses synthetic logic to help us cope with our ignorance of ultimate reality. In other words, it is essentially an attempt to speak about the unspeakable. In most religions, this "unspeakable reality" is referred to as "God"-hence the phrase "God talk". But many philosophers prefer to use less presumptuous terms; a good example of such usage is "Being". Long before existentialism came into its own as a distinct philosophical movement, many philosophers and theologians adopted the convention of distinguishing between humans (and all other things that exist in our ordinary world), as "beings", and the ultimate reality that underlies all existence, as "Being". John Macquarrie, a contemporary existentialist theologian who was strongly influenced by Heidegger's existentialist philosophy, describes this distinction in his book, Principles of Christian Theology (PCT 138):

 

... there could be no beings without the Being that lets them be; but Being is present and manifest in the beings, and apart from the beings, Being would become indistinguishable from nothing. Hence Being and the beings, though neither can be assimilated to the other, cannot be separated from each other either.

 

 

This distinction between Being and beings serves as the primary starting-point for many existentialists, though philosophers who are not so theologically-minded often prefer to start from the even more basic distinction between Being (and/or beings) and nothing.

 

          The primary existentialist distinction (in whichever version we take it) corresponds in its basic form to Kant's distinction between the realms of possible knowledge and necessary ignorance. Although the two distinctions are not identical, and so are often applied in vastly different ways, we can picture this existential distinction by using the same, circu­lar map in the now familiar way (cf. Figures III.5 and VI.2). One advan­tage of using the same root word to refer to both levels of reality is that

this suggests that-as anyone who has ever had a religious experience will testify-Being reveals itself in beings. But this raises a problem: given the radical difference between beings and Being, how can we ever speak mean­ingfully about this Being that manifests itself in beings yet transcends them all? This is the central problem of reli-

 

 

 

 

Figure VI.2: The Primary Existential Distinction

 

 

 

gious language; and there have traditionally been two ways of solving it.

 

          The first kind of solution can be called the "way of negation". Those who take this approach insist that any words used to describe Being must be literally true-i.e., true in the same way they would be if we applied the same words to beings. The result is that this way of approaching language about God gives rise either to extremely austere descriptions of ultimate reality, or to no description at all. We have already come across several typical representatives of this approach. The long passage quoted in Lecture 12 from Pseudo-Dionysius is one of the earliest and best examples. As we saw, his propositions are limiting to the point of being virtually empty if we interpret them solely in terms of analytic logic, though they can point to deeper meanings if we interpret them in terms of synthetic logic. Kant's theory of knowledge, outlined in Lecture 8, is also frequently interpreted as implying a strict limitation of language to the realm of beings. And, of course, Wittgenstein's Tractatus ends with an explicit recommendation that we remain silent when it comes to the "mystical things" that "manifest themselves" to us, beyond the "world of facts".

 

          The second approach to explaining how words can be used to construct meaningful expressions concerning some ultimate "Being" has been called the "way of affirmation". Interestingly, each of the above-mentioned philosophers proposed, at some point, not only a negative "way", but also a complementary affirmative "way"-evidence suggest­ing they all deserve to be called "good" philosophers. Wittgenstein's Investigations can be regarded as his attempt to forge an affirmative way. Kant's moral philosophy, to be examined in Lecture 22, was purposefully constructed as an affirmative complement to the negative restrictions established by his epistemology. And Pseudo-Dionysius himself was actually the philosopher who first named these two "ways"; his elaboration of an affirmative way is, in fact, surprisingly rich, given the extreme austerity of his negative theology.

 

          Philosophers and theologians who employ the way of affirmation often develop such an approach by utilizing what is called the "analogy of being". This analogy states, quite simply, that in certain cases "Being" is to "beings" as "being x" is to "being y". Or we can express the same idea in the form of a mathematical equation, as follows:

 

 

 

This analogy does not imply that every relationship between two beings is somehow similar to the relationship between Being and all beings, but only that in certain instances such a similarity comes to our minds as an appropriate way of using words to explain our experience of Being. For example, Jesus experienced the relation of Being to beings in a way that reminded him of the relation between a father and a son, so he taught his followers to pray to their "heavenly father". The analogy here is:

 

 

where "father" refers, of course, to the ideal of perfect fatherhood.

 

          The analogy of being enables us to resolve an interesting paradox that arises from the primary existential distinction between Being and beings. Paul Tillich (1886-1971), a German existentialist who lived most of his life in the USA, has argued that if we regard God as "being-itself" or the "ground of being"-i.e., if we think of God as Being rather than as one of the "beings" existing around us-then it is really not appropri­ate to say God "exists" at all! One of my teachers once said such claims indicate that Tillich was really an atheist. Such an interpretation, however, completely misses the point of Tillich's position. A better interpretation suggests itself once we recognize that existentialists of all types are fond of pointing out that the word "exist" originates from the Latin words ex ("out") and sistere ("to stand"); so this means, as theologically-minded existentialists are quick to add, that in order for a being to exist, it must stand out from the Being it is rooted in.

 

          We will look more closely at some of Tillich's ideas in Part Four of this course; but for now it will suffice merely to point out that, when Tillich insists we should not, strictly speaking, say "God exists", since God simply is the Being from which existing beings stand out, he is adopting the "negative way". If we look at the same problem from the more "affirmative" point of view of the analogy of being, then we can say that God's mode of existence (or perhaps we can say God's reality) is to our human mode of existence (or reality) as the mountain-tops are to the valleys below, or as the sun is to the moon, or as any other higher or primary power we know about is to its corresponding lower or derivative power. Such comparisons do not give us knowledge of God, but they do give us a way of using words to express our belief about how our experience of God can best be described. In other words, the distinction between Being and beings does not imply that God is not real, but that God's reality is of a fundamentally different kind than that of any other beings we know about. Whereas Tillich would say that, strictly speaking, it is not correct to say either "God exists" or "God does not exist", I would add that, from the more flexible point of view of synthetic logic, we are better off saying both of these propositions are true and meaningful, each in its own way. For God is not merely the greatest of all existing beings: we beings have existence; God is existence -or, as Macquarrie puts it, God "lets-be" (PCT 141). This is surely the main point of Tillich's claim that God does not literally "exist".

 

          The analogy of being, like virtually any metaphorical use of lan­guage, derives its meaning from synthetic logic. For whenever we use a known relationship to describe an unknown relationship, we are drawing an equivalence between two opposites in a way that analytic logic can never justify. If we try to understand the proposition "God is my father" solely in terms of analytic logic, we will be forced to conclude that the proposition is nonsensical. For a "father" is a male individual who helps produce a child by having sexual relations with a female individual. If God were merely a "great being", then this might be possible; and some religious people who view God in this way do not find it difficult to think of God as (for example) a wise old man who (in some supernatural way) had sex with the Virgin Mary to produce the baby Jesus. But if God transcends the limited realm of beings, then such a conception of God as a father, interpreted with analytic rigidity, is absurd. Nevertheless, if we accept synthetic logic as a legitimate tool for constructing meaningful propositions, then we can recognize that the notion of the fatherhood of God is intended not as a literal description of God, but as a way of shocking us into gaining deeper insight with respect to our experience of God. Christians nowadays tend to forget what a shock it must have been for the Jews who first heard Jesus exclaim "God is our father!" Today some people try to shock traditional Christians in the same way by exclaiming "God is our mother!" Such a suggestion is likely to offend those who accept analytic logic alone: for how could God be both our father and our mother? Yet synthetic logic shows how both claims could be true in their own way, each fostering legitimate insights into the nature of Being.

 

          Macquarrie (who was, by the way, my supervisor at Oxford) has provided a helpful discussion of the meaningfulness of religious language in general and God talk in particular in his book, Principles of Christian Theology. He argues that God talk does not merely express some abstract analogy, but arises out of a person's existential response to some kind of concrete experience of being-itself (PCT 139). For example, if a person has an experience of feeling humbled and struck down by reverent awe, as if in the presence of some greater or higher power that is infinitely beyond any previously experienced power, then, Macquarrie assures us, that person is expressing a meaningful proposition whenever he or she refers to the mysterious source of this experience (i.e., God) as "Most High", or as the "Highest Being". Even for people who no longer believe God lives in a place that is literally "high up in the sky", this metaphor of "highness" can appropriately express the response they have had (namely, a sense of lowness) when in the presence of God.

 

          Such God talk is often regarded not as referring merely to an individual's private experience of Being, but as doctrine that ought to be affirmed by everyone. This dogmatic use of religious language can also have a legitimate meaning, provided the language reflects an existential response to a shared experience of the disclosure of Being in a given religious community. In a passage affirming Wittgenstein's later philoso­phy, Macquarrie reminds us that the meaning of a doctrine or dogma is ultimately determined by its use in a religious community (PCT 124-125). If the words used to express a dogma are no longer relevant to the kind of existential response to Being experienced by the members of a given religious community, then the dogma has lost its meaning, and ought to be discarded or expressed in a fresh form. In other words, religious believers should view their beliefs not as containing fixed, analytic meanings, equally meaningful in all times and all places, but as expressions of flexible, synthetic meaning, directly related to the ever-new and ever-changing realities of life.

 

          Macquarrie also notes that God talk has its historical roots in the language of myths (PCT 130-134). He describes the view of some existentialists, that myth is a form of narrative attempting to answer a basically subjective question, "Who am I?", in an objectified form. But he warns that myths also have a properly objective aspect (134): "The myth talks indeed of our human existence, but it talks of this existence in relation to Being, in so far as Being has disclosed itself." In other words, the experience is an experience of something objective, even though the knowledge it reveals is primarily about the situation of the person having the experience. Although today we "live in a post-mythical age" (132), understanding the nature of mythological language is important because of its close relationship to religious language: both types of language depend heavily on the use of symbols.

 

          In Part Four of this course, we will consider in some detail how certain symbols function in such a way as to enable us to cope with our ignorance of ultimate reality. So it will be helpful here to give a brief, preliminary account of how symbols function in religious language. A symbol, according to Macquarrie, is anything in the realm of beings that discloses and thereby points our attention toward the realm of Being. He calls attention to the synthetic character of symbols when he notes that they inevitably involve "paradox" (PCT 145): "Just because symbols are symbols, that is to say, they both stand for what they symbolize and yet fall short of it, they must be at once affirmed and denied." Macquarrie also alludes on several occasions (e.g., 135-136) to the definition of sym­bols suggested by Tillich. As we shall see in Lecture 31, Tillich defines a symbol as a sign that participates in the reality to which it points. In other words, the symbol in once sense is the reality itself (A), even though in another sense, as a merely empirical object, it is not the reality (-A). Accordingly, some writers refer to the law of contradiction as the law of "participation", governing situations where "A participates in -A."

 

          The difference between mythological language and religious language is that a mythological understanding remains unaware of the symbolic nature of its words, whereas a genuinely religious understanding recognizes a symbol as a symbol. Macquarrie compares the former to the activity of dreaming and the latter to the activity of interpreting a dream (PCT 134). He then goes on to discuss a number of important characteristics of symbols. He observes, for instance, that symbols normally operate only "within a more or less restricted group of people" (136). As a result, there are probably "no private symbols", as well as no "universal symbols", since the same object often has different symbolic meanings in different cultures. Furthermore, Macquarrie claims that, "although Being is present and therefore potentially manifest in every particular being, some manifest it more fully than others" (143). That is, there is a "range of participation in Being", from impersonal objects that tend to participate less, to personal beings that participate more. The reason personal symbols are so common in religious language, then, is that they have "the widest range of participation in Being and so [are] best able to symbolize it." We know this is true because personal beings "not only are, but let-be" (144). For human beings in particular do not just exist, like the rocks; they also create. And this is one of the primary characteristics of the religious conception of the role of being-itself.

 

          Before concluding this lecture, I should remind you that synthetic philosophies, such as existentialism, are sometimes presented in a form that is just as exclusive and one-sided as analytic philosophy typically is. In reality, both of these schools of thought make use of both analytic and synthetic logic: just as linguistic analysis has its logical positivists and its ordinary language philosophers, so also existentialism has its proponents of the negative and the affirmative "ways". Nevertheless, while analytic philosophers tend to over-emphasize analytic logic, existentialists tend to over-emphasize synthetic logic. The latter sometimes results in an approach that says, as it were, "Only the subjective experience really matters; the philosophical tradition, to the extent that it ignores this experience, can be discarded." But as I mentioned at the end of Lecture 16, the tradition is the soil that feeds that very experience, and cannot be discarded without rendering the experience itself inexplicable.

 

 

18.        Hermeneutic Philosophy:

       Insight and the Return to Myth

 

 

 

          In ancient Greek mythology one character frequently appears who stands out among the others as more symbolically significant than any other in helping us understand the nature and purpose of logic. Hermes was the illegitimate son of tryst between Zeus and Maia, the eldest of the so-called "Pleiades" (the seven daughters of Atlas and Pleione). Maia gave birth to him while hiding in a cave; but after growing almost immediately to the size of a small child, he snuck away at night, stole fifty of Apollo's cattle, and hid them in another cave. To confuse any pursuers, he covered their hoofs with shoes carved so that the tracks appeared to be going in the opposite direction. In the cave he invented fire, then cut two cows into twelve pieces, sacrificing each to one of the gods. Using a tortoise shell and skin from the two cows, he made the first lyre. When Apollo finally found the hiding-place, he was so enthralled by the sound of Hermes' lute that he gave him the entire herd in exchange for the instrument, and the two became best friends. To soothe himself with music while tending his cattle, Hermes made the first shepherd's pipe and began to learn the forbidden art of divination. Zeus eventually became so impressed with Hermes' divination skills that he appointed him messenger of the immor­tal gods-one of his chief duties being to give dreams to mortals.

 

          Unlike most Greek gods, who were regarded as governing only one or two aspects of life, Hermes was associated with a wide variety of attributes. Because of his initial act, he became the god of thieves and the trickster god, with cunning being one of his chief characteristics. But he was also honored as the god of musicians, shepherds, traders, and crafts­men, as well as the god of love-making and magic (especially spells to be used in attracting one's beloved). Of all his traits, the ones that defined his role among the gods more than any other was his job as the messenger. (Interestingly, the Greek term for "angel" also literally means "messenger of God".) As one of the few gods who was allowed to travel freely between the human and divine realms, Hermes can be regarded as the god of boundaries-a title whose suitability is evident in Figure VI.3.

 

          The third major school of philos­ophy in the twentieth century draws its name, with good reason, from this mythical character. Just as

Hermes' job was to reveal hidden mes­sages from the gods to humans, so also hermeneutic philosophy seeks to under­stand the most basic issue in a general study of logic or the philosophy of language: how under­standing itself takes place whenever we interpret spoken or written messages. As such, we can regard Hermes as a sym­bolic represen­tation of the philosopher, whose pri­mary task (once we recognize that, as human beings, we are ignorant of ultimate reality) is to interpret the meaning of words.

 

 

 

Figure VI.3: Hermes as

Messenger of the Gods

 

 

          Hermeneutic philosophy has deep roots in western culture. Indeed, Aristotle himself wrote a book entitled Peri Hermeneias (On Interpreta­tion), though it deals more with basic questions of logic than with the issues we now associate with hermeneutics. For Augustine, Aquinas, and the Scholastics, hermeneutics was a significant issue primarily (if not solely) as it related to how the Bible ought to be interpreted. The first work that attempted to lay out objectively applicable principles of inter­pretation as such was Introduction to the Correct Interpretation of Reasonable Discourses and Books (1742), by Johann Chladenius (1710-1759). Defining hermeneutics as the art of attaining a complete under­standing of utterances (whether spoken or written), he proposed three basic principles that must always be followed: (1) the reader must grasp the author's style or "genre"; (2) the unchangeable rules of Aristotelian logic should be used to grasp the meaning of each sentence; and (3) the author's "perspective" or "point of view" must be kept in mind, especial­ly when comparing different accounts of the same event or idea.

 

          During the eighteenth and especially the nineteenth centuries, her­meneutics gradually developed into a standard area of academic study, especially for theologians, because of its significance for assisting in biblical interpretation. Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834) taught her­meneutics as a specific university subject, introducing many new insights and distinctions that are still considered important today. One of his most influential theories is that our ability to understand a text is restricted by the "hermeneutic circle". This refers to the reciprocal relationship that holds between the parts of a text (e.g., the meaning of each word, phrase, etc., considered in light of the original language and its grammar) and the entire text considered as a meaningful whole (often requiring, e.g., an understanding of the author's cultural and psychological background). The paradox is that we must understand the parts in order to grasp the whole; yet we cannot hope to understand the parts without understanding the whole. In practice, this means the interpreter's task is never finished: the more we understand the parts, the more accurate will be our idea of

the whole, and vice versa. I think this never-ending "circle" is even more appropriately regarded as a spiral, with our understanding of the text growing ever wider and wider, with each parts-whole revolution. As suggested by Figure VI.4, this gives us one way of understanding how hermeneutics com­bines synthesis and analysis: synthesis is the process of combining the parts to make a whole; analysis is the reciprocal process of dividing the whole into its parts.

          Many scholars with varying de-

 

Figure VI.4: The Hermeneutic Spiral

 

 

grees of interest in philosophy, such as William Dilthey (1833-1911), contributed further insights to our understanding of hermeneutics; but our main focus this week is on the twentieth century. Such a focus is actually quite appropriate, because hermeneutic philosophy only really came into its own as a way of doing philosophy (as opposed to a set of principles for biblical interpretation) through the work of one of the century's most distinguished philosophers. Let us therefore discuss his ideas in more detail, with a view toward gaining a further understanding of how they constitute a synthesis of analytic philosophy and existential­ism, thereby representing what may well be the closest thing to "good" philosophy in the twentieth century.

 

          Hans Georg Gadamer (1900-) was formatively influenced by the philosophies of Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) and Martin Heidegger (1889-1976). Husserl developed a philosophical method called "phenom­enology", involving a process called "transcendental epoche", whereby the philosopher attempts to reduce phenomena to their most essential characteristics by "bracketing out" anything that is nonessential. Focusing on speech acts, Husserl tried to explain how words point beyond themselves to an objective reality. Heidegger, a student of Husserl's, used his teacher's ideas as a springboard for a new philosophy that regarded hermeneutics as the core philosophical task. In his highly influential book, Being and Time (1927), Heidegger argued that "Dasein" (a term meaning "being-there", but used as the name for the essential core of human nature) has "ontological priority" over all other beings, because humanity has an in-built "openness" toward (or "pre-understanding" of) Being. The problem, Heidegger pointed out, is that through a process of "closure", we "forget" our intimate connection with Being. And as long as Being remains hidden from our view, we are "alienated" from our deepest roots. Such closure happens because most of our speech (i.e., word usage) stems from an "inauthentic" relation to Being. The philoso­pher's task, then, is to overcome this prob­lem through a process of "self-realization" that requires us to recognize, first and foremost, how we are limited by our temporal nature. Unfortunately, Heidegger never wrote the second volume of this book, wherein he had claimed he was going to interpret Being as such.

 

          Gadamer, a student of Heidegger's, was a late bloomer. Like Kant, he was near the age of retirement when he wrote his magnum opus., Truth and Method (1960). This book, sometimes called the "Bible" of modern German hermeneutic philosophy, assesses the historical contrast between the Enlightenment and Romantic periods in philosophy. The former philosophers held the naive view that reason can solve all human problems, provided we learn to discard all presuppositions and view the world from the objective standpoint of universal truth. The latter rejected this "prejudice against prejudice" (TM 240), replacing it with a prejudice for tradition, and along with it, a new respect for myth. Thus the Romantics viewed the world from the subjective standpoint of individual truth. Gadamer argued that by simply saying "no" to the opposing standpoint, this movement committed the same basic mistake as the Enlightenment: philosophers in both traditions tended to remain un­aware of their prejudices. Hermeneutic philosophy goes beyond both movements by claiming that having some prejudices is inevitable. A pre-judgment is bad, Gadamer claims, only when it results from an over-hasty look at the evidence. A prejudice based on trust in a legitimate authority is not only not bad, but is a necessary step in gaining any gen­uine knowledge. The key is to recognize that "authority" comes not from a person's position, but from a person's knowledge. People obey others willingly not when through political force, but through a free recogni­tion that the person knows what he or she is talking about. Gadamer agrees that the tradition is the most frequently reliable source of such authority; but when it conveys genuine knowledge, we should be able to support it with reason as well. Again like Kant, he warns that reason (i.e., logic) alone cannot always be trusted to lead us to the truth.

 

          The paradox of the Romantic period is that, while it awakened humanity's historical con­scious­ness, it failed to recognize that our fini­tude, as beings in time, limits our ability to understand our own history accurately. This at the core of the "hermeneutic problem" (TM 245): "history does not belong to us, but we belong to it." Because the interpreter is in history, the process of interpreting any text's meaning is a never-ending task. Understanding requires us first to overcome the "strangeness" of the text or object under consideration, and we do this by transforming it into something more familiar, something we already understand. This is why prejudice is an inevitable part of the process of understanding, and why becoming aware of our prejudices is so important to the task of interpreting texts-or any aspect of our experience, for that matter. An awareness that the interpreter exists within the same historical continuum as whatever is being interpreted is what Gadamer called the "principle of effective history" (267).

 

          One of Gadamer's central arguments in Truth and Method was that the scientist's "naive faith in scientific method" (268) "leads one to deny one's own historicality." Actually, any attempt to gain truth must be based on some method; and whatever method we choose is paradoxically bound to limit our view of what is true. This is because, as I have stressed at various points throughout this course, we can recognize something as true only when we view it from some perspective. (I shall examine this theme in more detail in Lecture 24.) But the scientific method is particularly dangerous in this regard, because its most vocal proponents tend to treat it as the one and only method of attaining truth; yet by remaining ignorant of their own prejudices (or "myths", as we called them in Part One), such claims end up hiding as much truth as they reveal-if not more. By contrast, a philosophical appreciation for the principle of effective history gives us a "consciousness of the hermeneutical situation" (268).

 

          A "situation", according to Gadamer (TM 269), is "a standpoint that limits the possibility of vision." The limits of our situation is called our "horizon"-a term Gadamer borrowed from Heidegger. The impor­tance of becoming aware of our own personal horizon is that it gives us a sense of perspective regarding everything we can see from our particu­lar standpoint. Without such an awareness, a person tends to care only about what happens to be nearest at the moment. Hermeneutic philosophy solves this problem by providing a sense of historical consciousness-"the horizon of the past" (271)-that enables us to broaden our horizon until it includes within it the situation of the other person (the one whose words we are interpreting). This fusion of horizons happens whenever we interpret another person's words.

 

          In what sense can we say that hermeneutic philosophy, as expressed in its most complete and systematic form by Gadamer, actually synthe­sizes the earlier movements of linguistic analysis and existentialism? One of many ways of defending such a claim would be to consider how each movement tends to view the task of doing philosophy. Whereas linguistic philosophers see themselves as (ideally) scientific analyzers of objective language forms, existentialists see themselves as prophets calling humani­ty to a new appreciation of the meaning (or meaninglessness) of human experience. By regarding philosophy as essentially a conversation to be interpreted, Gadamer combines both the analytic bias of Wittgenstein and the synthetic bias of Heidegger (as interpreted by avowed existential­ists such as Macquarrie): philosophy is and must be both an attempt to analyze and understand linguistic forms of expression and an attempt to synthesize and experience the meaningful push and pull of such forms as they evolve in historically-mediated communities. Indeed, the key lesson hermeneutic philosophy teaches us as we enter the twenty-first century is essentially the same as the lesson we learned in Lecture 10 when we discussed the problem of self-reference: that truth can be "grasped" only to the extent we are willing to recognize and acknowledge our myths.

 

          One way of emphasizing the importance of making room for our own prejudices is to distinguish between "exegesis" (reading the meaning out of a text) and "eisegesis" (reading your own meaning into a text). Most scholars nowadays still regard the former as the only valid ap­proach to interpretation. But Gadamer's philosophy demonstrates that analytically picking apart the meaning of a text (exegesis) and syntheti­cally adding our own insight to the text's possible meanings (eisegesis) are both necessary aspects of the hermeneutic process. A rare example of a scholar who did not share the bias against eisegesis is Kant, who argued that all biblical interpretation that takes place in the context of a religion ought to be given a moral interpretation, even if that is not part of the text's literal meaning-provided it does not contradict that meaning. We shall talk more about Kant's view of religion in Week XI. The point here is that, without some measure of eisegesis, our understanding will be void of insight and so also, void of any deep meaning. Before concluding today's lecture, let us therefore explore in more detail the nature of insight in relation to the distinction between analytic and synthetic logic.

 

          As we conclude this second stage in our exploration of the tree of philosophy, I want to be sure the trunk of the tree, logic, has given you some new insights about how we understand words. In particular, I hope you now see how important it is to recognize the complementary rela­tionship between analysis and synthesis in all their forms. Recall the comparison made in Lecture 12 between this distinction and the sight-insight distinction: whereas analytic logic often provides the best way to describe the surface of what we see and experience, synthetic logic takes us beneath the surface, into the depths of new ideas. But new ideas can­not stand on their own. If we have an insight and then just leave it alone, it will produce no fruit. The synthetic discovery of a new insight must therefore always be followed by an analytic criticism; and the latter can

be done properly only by someone who is thoroughly immersed in the tradition. With a few slight alterations to Figure IV.6, we can picture this way of describ­ing the complementary relationship be­tween analysis and synthesis, sight and insight, criticism and discovery, as shown in Figure VI.5.

          Keeping this map in mind during the third part of this course may prove to be quite helpful in guiding our reflections concerning the nature of wisdom. In preparation for our next session, when we shall discuss the question "What is wisdom?", I would like each of you to

 

 

Figure VI.5: Analysis and Synthesis as Com­plementary Functions

 

 

 

read the short story, Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach. Although the word "wisdom" never appears in that story, I want you to search as you read it for any clues it might hold as to the nature of wisdom. Bach is not a philosopher, so his books are not ordinarily assigned as required reading for philosophy classes; but he is a man who writes with insight, and whose writing can often fire the embers of insight in his readers. My hope, therefore, is that discussing his popular story of a bird who searches for wisdom will provide us with insights that can serve as an appropriate introduction to Part Three.

QUESTIONS FOR FURTHER THOUGHT/DIALOGUE

 

1.  A. Why do mathematical and natural truths so often correspond?

     B. Is the meaning of a word or proposition any different from its use?

 

 

2.  A. What function, if any, does synthesis have in linguistic analysis?

B. Could there ever be a language that was entirely analytic?

 

 

3.  A. Why is there something rather than nothing at all?

     B. Is there a middle way between the ways of negation and affirmation?

 

 

4.  A. Could we ever say anything literally true about God?

     B. Is exegesis or eisegesis more important for good interpretation?

 

 

RECOMMENDED READINGS

 

1. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus2, tr. D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuinness (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974[1961]), §§1, 6.1-3, and 7.

 

2. Alfred Jules Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic2, Ch. One, "The Elimination of Metaphysics" (LTL 33-45).

 

3. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations2, tr. G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1968[1953]), §§1-25.

 

4. Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997[1912]), Ch.15, "The Value of Philosophy", pp.153-161.

 

5. John Macquarrie, Principles of Christian Theology, Chapter 6, "The Language of Theology", (PCT 123-148).

 

6. Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol.1 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1951), especially Part II, "Being and God", pp.163-289.

 

7. "Hermes" (http://web.uvic.ca/grs/bowman/myth/gods/hermes_t.html), maintained by Laurel Bowman.

 

8. Hans Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method2, Second Part, §II.1, "The Elevation of the Historicality of Understanding to the Status of Hermeneutical Principle" (TM 235-274).

 

 

 

 

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