Concerning Wittgenstein's mysticism.
I read somewhere that Wittgenstein was into mysticism, or rather he believed there is something mystical about the world. It's well known now that human beings have evolved from primitive fish. How do beings such as us get to have a mystical side to the world we live in? Was Wittgenstein wrong about this aspect of his? He's said to have been a genius. Did his world view change during the period which he wrote philosophical investigations? Was he just a creature of his time? Or was he an evolutionary mystic? If so, what is mystical about evolution?
Comments (39)
He said at the end of tractatus that "what one cannot say one shouldn't speak of". This was confused by carnap and the austrian school that he was a logical empiricist. He wasn't saying that though, he was christian after reading cs lewis's famous christianity book about the gospels (which he liked better than the gospels he read after and had to be convinced that the gospels were worthy of cs lewis attributions).
In that I'm not sure what you mean by a mystic unless you mean christian who wasn't very religious.
Newton was into very esoteric spirituality and became a private unitarian after investigating the bible.
I think you are expressing your hypothesis about Wittgenstein's mysticism in a way that is not helpful to make things clear. Wittgenstein was not a metaphysical philosopher, which means, he didn't think of reality as something having an established, autonomous, external existence, distinct from our ideas. Nor he thought that reality is just a product of our mind. So, your hypothesis I quoted doesn't makes much sense in his thought, because you wrote "he believed there is...". Rather that believing in the metaphysical existence of thing, he approached experience in terms of dynamics where language has an essential role. This is my understanding of him and of your question.
Anaximander! I recognize you! Don't eat fish, they're our ancestors.
Wittgenstein, though he thoughtfully warned us of bewitchment of our intelligence by language, was himself a victim of linguistic witchcraft.
Hermes commits seppuku: Trust the guy who warns you that he can't be trusted!
:100: :wink:
It appears that comprehension and communication both are either wholly or significantly, if only in bits and pieces, a function of language. Mystical/religious experiences are such that one can't find words to describe them in a dictionary. Words, as sometimes happens, fail us. Thus, I can only show you the door. What's beyond that is post-language, but mind you, not necessarily pre-language (the wordless infant in Daoism).
If I understood correctly your thoughts, it seems that you mean "we come from fishes and that's it", in the sense that reality is limited to what we can scientifically understand about it; if something cannot be grasped or at list imagined by science, then it doesn't exist. Wittgenstein thought the opposite, but not in a methaphysical way. Being mentally open to the existence of things outside the horizon of science does not mean being open to believe in the existence of supernatural things like spirits, angels, energies, telepathy, reincarnation and so on. Wittgenstein's mysticism does not mean this. Believing in the existence of supernatural things is again metaphysics, but Wittgenstein's mysticism is not metaphysical. The problem of metaphysical mysticism is that it frames the idea of things beyond science still in the frame of existence, things that exist objectively. It is not necessary to believe in the objective existence of supernatural things to be mystical. You can be open to the idea of things beyond science without framing these things into the mental scheme of objective existence. Actually this is the true mental openness towards mysticism, because thinking of supernatural things as framed in the concept of objective existence is actually not really beyond science. This is the real openness to something different, otherwise we are actually still in the mental frame of science, let's say pseudo-science. Wittgenstein was intelligent enough to understand that mysticism practiced as pseudo-science is not a real jump to another level: pseudo-science is in the same mental frame of science, because pseudo-science and science are both based on metaphysics, which is, framing things in the field of objective existence.
— Angelo Cannata
This and your other post. It's all fine and dandy. But it doesn't answer my question. What is wittgenstein's mysticism in the light of mysticism being impossible for an evolutionary realist or to us homo sapiens to whom everything is the "real" and non mystical? I have a knack for expending certain belief in people who are thought to be or have been geniuses.
What's an evolutionary realist? The nature of causation and definition of evolution is still undefined which is partially why it's a theory still. As far as I'm aware it's just an observation and nothing people can do hard science on at least as macro-organisms. Taxonomy is still not a science sorta as a result.
I don't see mysticism qua mysticism in any contradiction with evolution.
I incidentally defined evolutionary realist after the word or.
I'm just seeing this.
Are you saying evolutionary realism is just reality which is non-mystical? Then definitionally that's what it is but there's an issue with soundness there and a conflation of evolutionary theory along with mysticism and the inaddressable, too-general word "real".
This
Quoting Sapien1
What is the essence of what we call life,which makes that procedure possible.
I get what you're trying to say but the way you're wording it makes it seem like you're making evolution equivalent with existence. It's hard to answer your question because the ideas and words are structured in ways that come off as contradictory.
An x realist is one who asserts x is the foundation of reality or, less commonly, is a part of reality (which is pretty trivial unless you don't have a foundation for reality or that foundation contradicts the part of reality).
Anyways I don't know Wittgenstein's views on evolution but anyone can be a mystic or fan of mysticism and contemporaneously be an evolutionist or fan of evolution.
It seems to me that this assumption of yours is what makes you impossible to understand Wittgestein’s mysticism: why should mysticism be impossible for an evolutionary realist?
I think your answer is already in the second part you wrote:
“to us homo sapiens to whom everything is the "real" and non mystical”:
I think you should realize that by saying “everything is the real and non mystical”, you are automatically saying: “what I cannot understand does not exist, cannot exist” which is a kind of faith far from being evolutionary. If evolutionary means that reality is just what is material, like our material origin from fish, by saying that “everything is real”, your are not being connected to reality, because you are just closing yourself inside your idea of what “real” means. So, instead of connecting yourself to reality, that is external to you, you close yourself inside your idea of reality, that is internal to you.
Wittgestein didn’t close himself inside his comprehension of what reality is: he understood that, if reality is to be thought as something external to us, then we need to keep ourselves always open to something that will be always different from how we imagine it. As soon as you think that the only existing world is material reality, you are automatically closing yourself inside your mental comprehension of what reality is, closing your connection to the world external to your mind.
Saying “I don’t know” is one way to keep connection, openness, to external reality. But this kind of connection can be refined. For sure not by saying that reality is the only thing that exists in the world.
:fire:
End of thread.
Blaze of glory :fire:
Bonum & Pulchrum (undefined they remain) out of sync with Verum.
:100: :clap:
I like what you wrote but can you clarify the last 'regarded as mystical'? Was there any nuance provided or explication of what mystical meant? Did it just mean 'nothing further' or was it an open question? The temptation of course is to proffer the transcendental card...
A few quotes from the Tractatus:
From his Notebooks:
From his Lecture on Ethics. In no particular order:
Let me try to answer. I'm not sure what Wittgenstein's take is though. Mysticism is related to not knowing. Evolution is the gradual appearing of a wide spectrum of species. Here and probably the entire universe. Evolution cant be denied. It's demystified by Dawkins and the like. The central dogma of biology underpins the view of selfish genes and memes programming all creatures in order for them to replicate. Now what a view! Sounds like evil religion to me. "The commandments of the central dogma command the genes and memes to replicate by guile and stealth, by programming bodies to achieve this goal". Damned! From this so-called scientific POV on evolution (pseudo-scientific!), all diverging views are just memes with no basis in reality. The new cruscade led by pope Dawkins. I'm sure Wittgenstein didn't like this idea. But what then is the mystique? Consciousness? The miracle of language? Dunno, but the ultimate question that can't be answered is why the heavenly gods, from the virus-gids to the blue whale-gods, got bored with playing the game of love and hate. They created an eternal infinite universe similar to heaven to eternally watch us. They hadn't taken into account the faulty play of the homonid-gods...
Quoting Fooloso4
A theist at the point he was writing this, then?
Quoting Fooloso4
That's for sure.
Maybe, but not in the traditional sense. His notebooks were what he described as "thinking with a pen". Rather than a supreme Being most of this thoughts on God are centered around his relationship to the world.
An article by Ray Monk, Wittgenstein's Forgotten Lesson:
All that said, I don't think Wittgenstein would have ever used the term 'mysticism' in respect of his work even if it may be implied by it. But there is a strong tendency of a lot of people to use that phrase which ends the Tractatus, 'that of which we cannot speak...' in exactly the way the Vienna Circle (mis)intepreted it, as a prohibition against anything of the kind. His was an apophatic silence.
It seems oddly emphatic, but then maybe it is metaphor??
Compare that with a passage from the contemporary Zen teacher, Nishijima Roshi (d. 2012)
(This is why Wittgenstein is sometimes compared with Zen philosophy.)
The way I parse it, is that 'existence' is what 'the transcendent' is transcendent in respect of. So all of the questions about whether [God/transcendent/beyond] 'exist' are empty. But what is beyond existence is not non-existent.
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1. 'The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is, and everything happens as it does happen: in it no value exists—and if it did exist, it would have no value.'
Fuck... if I only smoked hooch, that would be a great three sentence combination to ponder stoned.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes, I've often felt the need to say almost the same thing many times over the years.
Lemme take a stab at it.
Anatta! Buddhism negates itself - it has no essence that we could grasp, that would persist and in that sense jibes with Wittgenstein's philosophy. Buddhism has no purpose beyond its utility as a tool to understand that plain and simple fact. Just like how language performs seppuku (in Wittgenstein's hands), Buddhism self-destructs! Anicca!