tractatus 6.4312: immortality and the riddle of life

Tractatus 6.4312: Immortality and the Riddle of Life

JOHN H. WHITTAKER, Louisiana State Universi ty

When Wittgenstein closed the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus with a series of oracular comments on “higher” matters-questions of value, happiness, and the meaning of life-he was trying to spell out the implications of his logical theory. These puzzling remarks are so far removed from the body of the work that they seem like afterthoughts. Yet they are not mere appendages to the text; they are conclusions. And they are not incidental to Wittgenstein’s thinking; they represent what he took to be the true value of his philosophy. This doesn’t mean that one can skip the logical theory to get a t the important part of the book, but neither can one ignore these higher comments in the interest of doing the logic by itself. Precisely because they are conclusions, one has to interpret the underlying logical theory to make it j t .

T o show what I mean I want to discuss one of the most curious passages in the Tractatus, entry number 6.4312. This is one of several passages which one might use to argue a fine point about Wittgenstein’s logical theory, but it is also extremely suggestive about something of unquestionably higher import-the belief in immortality and its connection with our happiness. Here the same passage which offers a clue to the preceding logical theory provides a useful point of departure for understanding the peculiar logic of religious claims Not that Wittgenstein did understand the logic of these claims; I think that he was wrong in placing religious language outside the limits of propositional sense. But the drift of his thinking is instructive.

(i) At first glance Wittgenstein seems merely to dismiss the belief in

immortality. Yet the way in which he does this raises some criti- cally important questions.

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38 Philosophical Investigations

Not only is there n o guarantee of the temporal immortality of the soul, that is to say of its etefnal survival after death; but, in any case, this assumption completely fails to accomplish the purpose for which it has always been intended. Or is some riddle solved by my surviving forever? Is not this eternal life as much of a riddle as our present life? The solution to the riddle of life lies outside space and time.

(It is certainly not the solution of any problems of natural science that is required.) (Tract. 6.4312)

The more closely one examines this passage the more puzzling it becomes. Clearly, Wittgenstein saw the doctrine of personal immortality as an intended solution to the “riddle of life.” But just what the “riddle of life” is, how the doctrine of immortality is supposed to solve it, and why this belief would fail even if it were true is left to the reader to figure out for himself.

From the point of view of Wittgenstein’s logical theory, however, the most puzzling thing about this entry is not that Wittgenstein dismisses the belief in such a cryptic way but that he treats it as an assumption which might infact be true. Admittedly, he treats this as a purely hypothetical possibility in order to say that the doctrine of immortality would not serve its purpose even if it were true. But by referring to this belief as an unproven assumption, he seems to accept the logical possibility that it could be true, as if it were a claim tofact. And that is what is so remarkable about this passage. In every other passage on higher matters, Wittgen- stein treats moral and religious issues as pseudo-questions having nothing to do with what is in fact the case. He doesn’t regard moral and religious assertions as truth claims at all. Indeed, his “final solution” to all such problems consisted of just this point: the perennial problems of philosophy are inherently insoluble because their would-be solutions cannot be put into words. When one tries to render such a solution in the form of a proposition, the inevitable result is a pseudo-assertion-i.e, something which looks like a proposition but which bears no relation to what is in fact the case.

Yet where again does this leave the doctrine of the soul’s immortality? Is it a pseudo-assertion bearing no dependent relation to facts? O r is it an unproven assumption which would fail to accomplish its purpose even if it did state a fact?

The most plausible thing to say here is that the doctrine of the soul’s immortality is ambiguous. Under one interpretation (e. g. a naturalistic one), it might represent a genuine claim to fact; while

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under another interpretation it might not. Yet if Wittgenstein is right, serious obstacles stand in the way of bclieving it no matter how one interprets it. For if one understands it as a qucstion of fact-and even if it is in fact true-then it loses its religious significance as a solution to the riddle of life. O n the other hand, if one does not construe it as a question of fact, then one can no longer believe in it b y thinking that it is true. This, no doubt, poses an unhappy dilemma for the believer; but I think that it captures thc drift of Wittgen- stein’s thinking.

Even so, this simply brings the larger problems into relief. For we still don’t know why the doctrine of immortality would lose its religious significance if it were construed as a matter of fact, nor do we know just what it would mean to treat it one way or the other. Just what is a factual claim? What counts as a possible fact? And why wouldn’t the doctrine of immortality qualify under a religiously significant interpretation? These are the questions which force us back to the heart of Wittgenstein’s logical theory.

Wittgenstein’s concept of a fact emerges in the principle elements of his logical theory, the “picture theory” of meaning and the allied notion of “logical space”. Both of these doctrines, however, depend on the underlying intuition that every genuine, factually significant, assertion must have a determinate sense. For in order to be a proposition at all, an assertion must be capable of being either true or false; and in order to admit the distinction between its truth and falsity, a proposition must say something sufficiently dejnite about the world to enable its truth or falsity to be told. Otherwise, the true/false distinction could not be applied, and the “assertion” in question couldn’t carry any meaning as a truth claim. The only problem with this is deciding what it takes to make the sense of an assertion sufficiently determinate. But given the picture theory and the doctrine of logical space, Wittgenstein can answer this question. To have a determinate sense an “clementary” proposition must depict a single possibility within logical space, and a complex proposition must depict a specified combination of possibilities. In other words, any meaningful truth claim must either be an elementary proposition or it must be analyzable into a set of elementary propositions whose truth or falsity uniquely determines its truth value. Since logical space comprises all the possible facts which elementary propositions might depict, the limits of logical space thus constitute the limits of propositional sense. Every


genuine proposition, thcrefore, must be a claim to fact; and any assertion whose truth conditions cannot be represented as matters of fact cannot be a truth claim at all.

We can ignore the details of Wittgenstein’s logical theory here, as everything said about the inexpressibility of higher matters in the Tractatus is said in view of this restraint. Yet-and this is the important point-we still don’t know what qualifies as a possible fact. And until we know what to count as a possible fact, the limits of logical space cannot be established. Since the “objects” which combine to form states of affairs in logical space are not physical objects, we cannot identify facts with the arrangement of bodies in physical space. The depiction of physical objects covers only some possible assertions, and presumably there are others. But what these other possibilities are is unclear; and as a result, the notion of logical space by itserf provides no clear boundaries of sense. Some- thing else must be added to it to define the concept of a possible fact.

The absolutely crucial importance of this matter makes it all the more surprising that Wittgenstein did so little to resolve the question. Not that he said nothing at all about it: rather, he simply didn’t argue for the additional assumption which he needed to define the concept of a fact and to give his theory its bite. Instead, his view of facts comes through indirectly. In 6.53, for example, he speaks of “what can be said” as being coterminous with propositions of natural science; and this is as much as to say that all possible facts must be empirical (see also 4.11). This, a t least, seems to be the most natural and most common interpretation; and it is hard to resist.

Moreover, it works fairly well when tested against some of the darker sayings in the Tractatus. Why, for example, did Wittgenstein say that “God does not reveal himself in the world” (6.432)? The answer, apparently, is that God could only reveal himself “in the world” if his existence were a matter of empirical fact. But that cannot be. God wouldn’t be God unless he were some kind of super-natural being, a “spirit” which produces effects in nature but which is not itself a part of nature. So one could never assert the existence of God as an empirical fact. And that means that one could never assert the existence of God as a factual claim at all.

All this seems to make sense if we equate possible facts with empirically discernible facts: and so, as I say, this view passes with

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some plausibility as Wittgenstein’s own. Yet I don’t think that it is quite right. There is a subtle but vital difference between this view and the view which is actually assumed in the Tractatus. This difference is too subtle to come out in 6.432 or in many other concluding passages, but it emerges dramatically in the passage on immortality, 6.4312.

The remarkable thing about this passage is that Wittgenstein takes the doctrine of immortality as a possible truth claim despite the impossibility of verifying it empirically. Like God, the soul is supposed to be a spirit, not to be identified or confused with anything like a physical body. So interpreted, the soul is empirically undetectable, making it impossible to decide any questions about its existence or duration by simple observation and extremely difficult to gather any indirect evidence. Yet again, Wittgenstein pays no attention to this difficulty. Instead of saying that the assertion of the soul’s immortality makes no sense because it is empirically unverifiable, he says that it would fail its intended purpose even if it were true. Perhaps this teaching might be established by some purely specula- tive argument, or confirmed by some sort of revelation. Here Wittgenstein leaves us free to think whatever we like, since the futility of construing immortality as a question of fact rests on entirely different considerations. Indeed, something other than the empirical inadjudicability of this doctrine must underlie his objection to it. And more importantly, something other than empirical testability must define the domain of possible facts.

If I am right about this, then Wittgenstein must have conceived the domain of all possible facts as a larger domain than the class of all possible empirical facts; and the objection which he made to the doctrine of immortality must have depended on the definitive feature of this larger class. O f course, since empirical facts would have to share the definitive feature of facts in general, the same thing which prevents “higher” insights from being articulated in propositions will also prevent them from being articulated in empirical propositions. So some confusion here is understandable. Yet it is still a confusion; empirical adjudicability is not the definitive feature of factually significant propositions.

Contingency is. All facts , empirical or otherwise, must be contingent facts. For whether a state of affairs exists as a mere possibility within logical space or holds as an actual fact is purely a matter of “fate”, a question of something given, something brute. This is the


deeper, unargued, assumption which runs throughout the Tractatus and which gives his logical theory its bite. Indeed, it is the only assumption which we need to make to understand what Wittgen- stein meant by “what is higher”, and why he assigned every higher concern to the region beyond meaningful assertion. Facts for him are always “mere facts,” facts which tell us nothing about value, or meaning, or purpose, or anything else that goes beyond accidental matters of fact.

That is why “ethics cannot be put into words” (6.421). “For all that happens and is the case is accidental” (6.41). Thus, if an ethical judgment is to be put forward as a significant assertion, it must be presented as a contingent question of what happens to be the case-in which case it loses its higher significance as a value judgment.

The passage on immortality represents an exact parallel. For if our souls just happened to be immortal, or if we were simply presented with immortality as a given, the “riddle” of life would remain. The purpose of life, that is, would still be in doubt. “Is not this eternal life as much of a riddle as our present life?” In the face of all that is simply given to us in life, we want to know the raison d’etre of all things, why we should live, and what worthwhile ends we should serve. But when we raise these higher questions of purpose, every contingent fact contributes only to the setting of the problem, not to its solution (6.4321). For “it is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists” (6.44). That is the riddle-the sheer givenness or contingency of all that is. T o speak to it, one must go beyond the facts by making some judgments of purpose; but one cannot possibly do this if all truth claims must be claims about what happens, accidentally, to be the case.

Therefore, if the immortality of the soul were to be established as a fact, this new fact would simply add another happenstance to all the givens which make up the world as we find it. Such a discovery would be stunning but by no means comforting, for what point or purpose is there in a life of unending duration? Both the comfort and the religious significance of this doctrine come from the role which it plays in sustaining judgments of purpose. In effect, it tells us that finite existence has an end beyond mere survival, an end which gives a purpose to existence and makes human life capable of some higher fulfillment. Yet if Wittgenstein is correct, this doctrine would have to be asserted as an accidental fact before there could be

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any question of its truth or falsity. And then it would no longer serve its intended purpose, for it would do more to exacerbate the riddle of life than to solve it.

What are we to make of all this? I think that Wittgenstein is right about one thing: the bare fact of immortality would not explain the point or purpose of human life. But this insight hardly confirms his theory of propositions. It simply shows that he equated matters of fact with contingent questions, and then added this equation to his logical theory in order to give logical space some boundaries. Nothing in the Tractatus, however, justifies this assumption. It does not follow from the insight that propositions must have a determinate sense (nor does it follow from this that every factual assertion must be empirical). The contingency requirement follows only if we already know that the truth or falsity of a proposition is determined by what happens accidentally to be the case. But couldn’t it “happen to be the case” that our lives have purpose? Wittgenstein never gave us an argument for saying no to this question, and therefore never gave us a sufficient reason for thinking that the assertion of such things is logically impossible.

I think that such “higher” assertions are possible, and I think that Wittgenstein himself gives us a reason for thinking so. For in the same passage on immortality he implicitly recognizes more sense in the doctrine than his theory of propositions allows. The difficulty is this: if the doctrine of immortality cannot be meaningfully asserted, then how can Wittgensteain or anyone else know “the purpose for which it has always been intended”? The doctrine must bear some sense as a religious claim; otherwise we would have no way of knowing that it addresses the question of life’s meaning (the “riddle”), and we would have no way of knowing that it would lose its religious significance if it were construed as a contingent question of natural fact. Thus, the assertion of the soul’s immortality must be allowed some sense even outside the limits of logical space. I see no way of getting around this point, and I see nothing in the Tractatus to answer it. The sense which he himself found in higher propositions is something which Wittgenstein never explained.

(ii) How, then, does one explain the higher significance of religious

claims? A doctrine like that of personal immortality provides a warrant for pursuing judgments of purpose and for sustaining hopes

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of fulfilment. It vouches for the meaning of human existence by aassigning it a consummate end, so that the givenness of our lives might be encompassed in some larger teleological perspective. Yet how does it do this-by asserting a “higher fact” about the world?

The usual view goes something like this: religious claims depict supernatural realities, and these supernatural realities surround the natural world in such a way as to assign it (and us) a place in the total order of the cosmos. But again, how can supernatural facts bear any greater import than natural facts? If the supernatural is simply that dimension of cosmic reality which is hidden from us, then how can the addition of supernatural knowledge tell us anything more of purpose than an extension of our knowledge of nature? We tend to think that the only thing which separates the supernatural from the natural is an epistemological barrier, as if the supernatural were simply the empirically unknowable.

Yet there has to be more to the distinction than this. Supernatural claims go beyond assertions of natural fact not simply because they outreach empirical methods of knowing but because they lack the contingency of scientific claims. This is the real reason why “God does not reveal himself in the world” (6.432). God could not possibly reveal himself “in the world” (in Wittgenstein’s sense) without his existence becoming a matter of accidental natural fact. If that were the case, then the existence of God, being itself contingent, would no longer bring the contingent being of all that is into any higher focus. His existence would no longer provide a raison d’etre for the world of nature, so that the givenness of the natural world might be encompassed by thoughts of purpose. Thus, the ‘higher’ significance attached to the belief in God would wither away, and the riddle of sheer contingency would remain. God, therefore, must be a ‘transcendent’ being not because he must be located somewhere beyond the reach of observation, but because his existence would not account for the givenness of the world if he were simply another given entity within it. Or, to put it another way, the ‘supernaturalness’ of God’s existence is required by the supervenience of teleological judgments. The claim that God exists must go beyond the given facts if it is to bear its religious significance, and so the existence of God cannot be claimed as a contingency. This, indeed, is one reason why God is said to be a ‘necessary’ being-simply because it makes no religious sense to assert his existence as a contingent matter of fact.

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Similar considerations apply to every religious or ‘supernatural’ assertion. No supernatural claim is contingent, and no supernatural fact is accidental. For the difference between supernatural (religious) claims and natural (scientific) claims is a difference of logical type. Supernatural assertions belong entirely to a teleological order ofjudgment. The questions which they address are not questions about the natural causes of the world’s phenomena but questions about its reason for being, and the realities to which these claims refer are never simply postulated as givens but postulated by w a y of saying that the world has some meaning or purpose. In effect, religious assertions are judments of purpose. Their teleological import is essential to them, and they cannot be construed as contingent claims without fundamentally altering their meaning.

This means that religious judgments of purpose are not inferred from logically prior religious claims to fact, as if we could deduce the purposefulness of the world from the knowledge that some extra-ordinary transempirical object (God) happened to exist. T o say that there is a God or an afterlife is already to claim some teleological significance for existence. If this were not built into such assertions, it could not be retrieved by establishing their truth. Our higher concerns about the world’s reason of being, as Wittgen- stein said, would remain completely untouched. This may not seem to be the case because we have so many teleologically satur- ated notions packed into the concept of God that the only remain- ing question seems to be ‘does God actually happen to exist?’ We think of God as a personal being, as one who bears good will toward his creatures, as one who acts intentionally according to his plan, and so on. Similarly, we think of the afterlife as a denouement of our present lives, as an outcome in which the moral order of creation is to be vindicated and our present struggles to live in accordance with some higher calling are to be crowned with their fulfillment. As long as these associations are built into the concepts of God and immortality, the claim that such things do in fact exist is equivalent to saying that creaturely existence has some purpose. Such anthropomorphic descriptions are the means of making the teleological point of the corresponding doctrines clear. They tell us that we cannot believe in God without looking upon creation as something endowed with purpose, and that we cannot believe in immortality without believing that our lives have an end which renders them capable of some ultimate fulfillment. These thoughts


of purpose are actually stated in religious claims, not inferred from teleologically neutral descriptions of supernatural pheneomena.

The idea that we might simplify religious claims by setting aside their teleological implications to deal separately with the question of their truth or falsity is therefore a strategical blunder. If the metaphysical underpinnings of religious belief are construed in such a way as to remove them entirely from the domain of teleological judgment, then the resultant metaphysical questions will cease to bear any religious import. At best, that kind of metaphysics can only establish the logical possibility of making further ‘metaphysical’ claims as judgments of purpose. E.g., one might argue that life after death is a metaphysical possibility, but having established that add teleological claims about immortality as an end of human existence in order to re-enter the proper domain of religious belief.

Similarly, if we eliminate all personalistic descriptions of God and speak instead only of a ‘first cause’, then we might argue for the existence of God without implying anything at all about the world’s purpose. This stripped-down God is the ‘God of the phil- osophers’, the God whose existence or non-existence doesn’t seem to matter. It doesn’t matter because the issue of his existence has become another kind of question. Must we assume the existence of a first cause?-this is a question of adding or not adding another entry to the list of all that is. But the addition of this entity to the list would not ground contingent existence in a religiously relevant way. It wouldn’t help us to make any sense out of life. For we could still ask, ‘Why is there anything rather than nothing?’ ‘What is the point or purpose of it all?’ Here grounding the given (nature) in another given (a first cause) brings us no closer to the religiously significant belief that all that is, is good-that all things ultimately have some reason for being. Even if such a first cause must be a self-subsistent being, a necessary being, in that sense, the proof that such a being exists would not insure the meaningfulness of the world.

The ‘God of religion’, on the other hand, does vouch for the meaningful character of existence. And that is because the claim that God exists, as a religious claim, belongs, as I said, to a different order ofjudgment. The ground or reason for being which it offers for the existence of the world is teleological through and through. The doctrine of divine creation doesn’t satisfy a scientific curiosity

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about how the world came into being, nor does it satisfy a metaphysical question about the necessaity of a first cause. It speaks instead to the ‘riddle’ of contingent existence, telling us that we are entitled to look upon the world from the higher perspective of teleological judgment. It tells us that existence calls for some judgments of purpose and that the desire which we have to discover some purpose in life is a desire which can in principle be satisfied. No ‘bare facts’, empirical or otherwise, could warrant this type of judgment. If assertions about the meaning or purpose of life are possible at all, they are possible because they are grounded in prior assertions which assign some reason for being to the contingencies of life. One can call these prior assertions ‘metaphysical’ if he likes (seeing that they supply a ground of sorts); but they are not the kind of metaphysical assertions which can be isolated as indepen- dent, teleologically neutral, questions of fact. So I would rather describe such assertions as ‘religious’, since they are loaded with teleological content from top to bottom.

It may sound strange to suggest that religious claims about God and immortality are really statements about meaning and purpose rather than statements about supernatural realities. But that is not exactly what I am saying. Rather, religious claims postulate teleological grounds for judgment by way of asserting supernatural or transcendent realities; and there is simply no logical way to deal with these claims by taking them in two parts-first the bare question of fact and then the subsequent question of purpose. Judgments of fact and judgments of purpose here go hand in hand. Thus, religious claims to fact are not on a logical par with other claims to fact. They do not assert contingencies of a hidden order, and they do not represent even potential contributions to our scientific or theoretical knowledge of the world. To believe that a religious claim is true requires us to shift our thinking out of that dimension of inquiry in which what happens to be the case is established and to enter a new dimension of judgment altogether.

This, I think, is the real moral of Wittgenstein’s entries on God and immortality in the Tractatus. He realized that the intended meaning of religious claims would be destroyed if they were treated as accidental questions of fact, and he knew that no combination of contingent truths could generate the sense of purpose needed to resolved the ‘riddle of life’. These are both genuine insights; one has to leave the ‘logical space’ in which contingencies


are at issue to enter the realm of the religious. Yet Wittgenstein thought that leave-taking from contingent questions of fact would lead us across the boundaries of meaningful assertion into the region of the unsayable, and here I think that he was wrong. The shift from contingent questions to teleological questions merely takes us from one domain of judgment into another. In this other domain, where questions of meaning and purpose are at issue, there may or may not be truths to be learned. But if there are, then we can just as well say that these truths state facts-facts about pur- poses and reasons for being.

So the answer to the question of how religious claims acquire their ‘higher’ significance is actually fairly simple: they take on their higher significance by assigning a reason for being to contingent things, and they do this by asserting a meaningful ground or ultimate end to all that is. The only alternative to this is to say that judgments of purpose can be inferred from contingent facts; or, to say with Wittgenstein, that religious claims carry no meaning as truth claims at all. But we have to account for the sense of religious claims in some way; and there is nothing in the Tractatus-or rather, nothing but an unargued assumption -to justify the conclusion that they cannot possibly have any propositional sense. Such claims certainly appear to carry some sense as propositions, since they appear to have significant denials. One can deny the whole lot of them simply by saying that the world has no reason for being and that it calls for no judgments of purpose.

Others, perhaps, will discover more compelling reasons for thinking that every meaningful truth claim must deal with contingencies. But until they do, we needn’t let Wittgenstein’s logical theory stand in the way of believing that there might be some ‘higher’ truths, and that these truths might be intelligibly set forth in the teachings of a religion.

Department of Philosophy, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, Louisiana 70803 USA.

tractatus 6.4312: immortality and the riddle of life

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