Armstrong’s Wittgenstein
More of Armstrong playing at Grown Up Scholarship. On page 279 she lays down the law about Wittgenstein for almost the whole page.
In his later years, Wittgenstein changed his mind. He no longer believed that language should merely state facts but acknowledged that words also issued commands, made promises, and expressed emotion. Turning his back on the early modern ambition to establish a single method of arrivingat truth, Wittgenstein now maintained that there were an infinite number of social discourses. So it was a grave mistake “to make religious belief a matter of evidence in the way that science is a matter of evidence”
And there we have our first reference: it is to “Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief, ed. Cecil Barrett, Oxford 1966′ – so not something Wittgenstein himself published, but a posthumous compilation. Armstrong goes on for the rest of the long paragraph, making Wittgenstein say much what she says on the subject; the next reference is to the same book, the six after that are to ‘Maurice Drury, “Conversations With Wittgenstein,” in Ludgwig Wittgenstein: Personal Recollections, and the final one is to Ray Monk’s biography.
Not primary core Wittgenstein, in other words, but peripheral, compiled Wittgenstein, and chat, and a biography. One suspects cherry-picking, and one also suspects superficiality. One is not impressed.
Even if she had cited him directly (of course she didn’t), and it had been publication that Wittgenstein authorized (the source of that quote wasn’t), it probably wouldn’t have meant much. Wittgenstein interpretation is a bit of a cottage industry. He had an irritatingly oracular style.
But keeping in mind that interpreting Ludwig is a mug’s game, here’s a telling paragraph:
“But I would ridicule [superstitious religious belief], not by saying it is based on insufficient evidence. I would say: here is a man who is cheating himself. You can say: this man is ridiculous because he believes, and bases it on weak reasons.” (59)
Gah! What tripe!
Having actually wrestled with Wittgenstein, albeit to a limited degree, I felt compelled to use some language to express emotion, as Armstrong (incorrectly) cites. It is simply not true that Wittgenstein ever thought that “language should merely state facts,” and later changed his mind about it. Rather, his views were always much more interesting and nuanced than such a shoddy, amateur caricature. For example, Wittgenstein never made the normative claim that language should only express facts, but rather asserted that linguistic utterances are only meaningful when used to express facts – and even that assertion was qualified within a very precise and carefully delimited conception of ‘meaning’ and ‘fact.’ What he later changed his mind about is even more subtle, and is utterly missed by the breezy nonsense Armstrong trots out.
If she makes such an utter hash of science and philosophy, I have to wonder how badly she twists and distorts the theology she cites – not that I’d care to delve deeply enough into the intellectual cesspool that is theology to find out.
Apart from the Tractatus and a few very minor articles, Wittgenstein himself never published anything. Presumably you think that’s all the “primary core Wittgenstein” there is.
No, one is not impressed, but the vital point is that all this superficial breezing over historical details is to make a very large claim about the nature of religion and religious ‘belief’ as a whole which simply cannot stand.
And it is significant that no high profile religious authority, whether of the ecclesiastical or the theological establishments, has come out and said something to the effect that, no, Karen Armstrong hasn’t got this quite right. They’ve been willing to trail along behind her, holding onto her popular coat-tails, and they’re okay with letting her work be a kind of public flagship for the forces of God. Oddly enough, some of the front line theological forces, like John Millbank in his Theology and Social Theory, tends to use evidence in a similar way, as though quoting, even from a primary source, was enough to make his point. Hard slogging.
As for Wittgenstein’s published work, there is plenty of evidence that he was working up various texts for publication, though he was never satisfied with them. So Philosophical Investigations and some of his work on mathematics certainly belong to the core Wittgenstein. And since he was so oracular, he’s achieved, especially with his more speculative ideas in religion and aesthetics, almost cult status amongst philosophers of religion, beginning with Rush Rhees and D.Z. Phillips, not all, it seems to me, to the benefit of the philosophical side of philosophy of religion.
But to skim along the surface of anything, let alone Wittgenstein, as Armstrong does, is just asking for trouble. But, don’t forget, the Tractatus already contains more than enough for Armstrong’s thesis, (i) that “not how the world is, is the mystical, but how it is.” (6.44), and then, of course, (ii) “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof must one be silent.” (7) And this follows simply from his theory of meaning. And, in some sense, though his theory of meaning shifted, this problem of speaking beyond the bounds of language remained.
But it is simply wrong to say that Wittgenstein allowed for an infinite number of “social discourses.” Especially if On Certainty retains something of the core Wittgenstein, he still had the sense of coming, at the end of a trail of meaning, to a place where questions ended, in other words, to a fairly stable something that hooked meaning onto the world. That aspect of the Tractatus theory of meaning seems never to have been abandoned. (I suspect, though I haven’t enough to base it on, that Plantinga’s idea of a ‘properly basic’ belief is based on this idea of meaning. Perhaps someone could help me out here.)
Again, thanks to Ophelia and others for a close reading of Armstrong’s text. I find her such hard going, and so marginal as a ‘thinker’, that it never seemed worthwhile, especially as her major claims are certainly simply all wrong.
Why does it matter anyway what Wittgenstein might have thought?
Why does it matter anyway what Wittgenstein might have thought?
I suspect the reason it matters to Armstrong to say something about what Wittgenstein might have thought is that he is a kind of Sign for Deep Thought – rather like Armstrong’s version of God, in fact. In short I think she deployed him in order to make herself appear au fait with even the most difficult philosophy.
Eric, well one religious authority has said Armstrong is all wrong – though I don’t know how high profile he is. That Baptist fella who replied to her Wall St Journal article by saying she’s an atheist herself.
In a way a close reading isn’t worthwhile, because it’s all so shoddy, and obviously so. But in another way it is, because she sure as hell is influential. Also there’s something interesting about the gulf between her popular reputation and her actual ‘scholarship.’
Now I have to try to figure out why Simon Blackburn gave the book such a good review…
Oh, and Josh – right – I did think of doing that, but also quailed at the sheer volume of dreck there. But maybe I will. It is hair-raising, isn’t it.
I can’t do it. I can’t stomach it long enough to do a post on it. They’re so lost up their own backsides…
Russell did an excellent comment there – number 84. Thrown away on them, of course.
Has anyone ever claimed that Karen Armstrong is a serious scholar? She’s more on the level of books like Wittgenstein’s Poker, isn’t she?
That is, she writes books which summarize religious or philosophical themes for a mass audience which doesn’t want to do the hard work of reading scholarly books like Monk’s book on Wittgenstein and which has even less interest in reading Wittgenstein himself. She’s more of a pop journalist than a deep thinker
Not like Wittgenstein’s Poker, which used the incident of the poker to address the very real disagreement between Wittgenstein and Popper, and, as I recall, did it very well. Armstrong is a bit down market even for those who might have found Wittgenstein’s Poker interesting.
Yes, I did wonder why Blackburn was so positive in his review. He even calls her eloquent, if I remember aright, and aside from his dig about writing 15 books about the need to enter the unknowing silence, was far more complimentary than I could be. One half notices the mistakes as they whiz by, but it never seems worthwhile to check what exactly is wrong, since the details are irrelevant, mostly. And though one Southern Baptist took note of Armstrong’s deception, she is almost universally known as something of an authority, not just as a pop journalist – which shows the current deplorable state of theology.
Of course, Wittgenstein is very “deep”, so to be able to refer to him knowingly is to pretend to deepness oneself, which is a quite different use of Wittgenstein than that made by Wittgenstein’s Poker. And Monk’s book, for all its scholarship, rather overdid the deep part, das Mystische. I came away from it thinking that Wittgenstein was as mad as a hatter.
Ian, if she were in the business of using Wittgenstein as a religious authority, then she fails! As I point out in above, Wittgenstein adds that the religious man is “cheating himself” and is worthy of ridicule. Like Canute, no doubt.
However, Wittgenstein (in the students’ notes that make up the cited volume) can only be interpreted as being in her corner in saying that religion is not the sort of thing that involves looking at evidence. In this sense, Wittgenstein and Armstrong contrast with Dawkins, who thinks with the God Hypothesis that it can be. (I agree with Dawkins on this, fwiw.) This is a point about the content of the words, not the states of affairs in the world or the rationality of the believer. For Wittgenstein, the uses of words and their role in the lives of people was based on evidence of a sort, the experience of teaching in between the publication of Tractatus and Philosophical Investigations. (Also, by reading what was already there in Russell; people sometimes look over the fact that Russell recognised the importance of usage much earlier than Wittgenstein, even if it had a different role in his philosophy of language.)
amos, yes indeed, Armstrong is routinely referred to as a scholar by journalists and similar, though I believe not by actual scholars (and I’m sure not by scholars of religion). She is taken very seriously. She lectured Congress on Islam after 9/11. She’s on some UN body. She is taken very seriously.
Eric: Wittgenstein’s Poker, as I recall, while quite readable, depicts the differences between Ludwig and Popper as having a lot to do with the different neighborhoods in which they grew up in Vienna, with the distance of social class between them, all of which may be true on some level and which is very entertaining to read, but is hardly an exhaustive account of the real philosophical differences between the two. I enjoyed the book immensely, but it is the light or pop version of Wittgenstein and of Popper. I’m sure that you know more about this than I do, but I always thought that Wittgenstein, in the Tractatus and elsewhere, by removing religion from the category of things about which something can be said, was very cleverly trying to protect religion from empirical scrutiny.
OB: I had no idea that Armstrong had lectured Congress on Islam. I read some of her stuff about what she calls the Axial Age, and it’s pop history, history for people who want all of ancient history digested in 100 pages, with big print.
amos, yes…she talks about it in the intro to this book, and there’s a long (and frankly boastful) ‘Note About the Author’ at the end that goes on and on about how important she is and all the people who want to talk to her and yak yak yak. The more closely one reads her, the more annoying all that becomes. Pop history is indeed what she writes.
Who can blame you? I was really, truly, literally stunned to read it. I didn’t think such a strain of thought existed anymore – it was like a parody of the very worst pomo relativism from the 80s and 90s. Then I got very angry indeed; these people are acting as *enemies* to human rights and they can’t even see it.
Fantastic comment by Russell, as you said.
There’s no doubt that she’s noted in theology, but not as well as you’d expect. I can find 33 references to her in peer reviewed journals. There are more than four times that number in other publications that Scholar’s Portal searches (159). That probably tells us something about the limitations of the database, but it’s somewhere to start.
FWIW, many reviews seem favorable, if that’s our criterion for seriousness. “Karen Armstrong must be one of the world’s most popular exegetes.” (Alan Strathern, The Heythrop Journal, 2009; in a review and argument on The Case for God; so far the only one in a peer reviewed journal). History of God is called “masterful” by one reviewer who otherwise seems a bit glib (Theological Studies, vol 66). Many of the social sciences (i.e., in peace and conflict studies and international relations) mention her, probably for historical insight. Also, our good friend Steve Fuller cites her, probably accurately, in the context of one of his bafflingly absurd paragraphs about epistemology.
Not all reviews are glowing. One concludes his review by arguing that “although Armstrong tackles important issues in The Battle for God, the book is weakened by her failure to substantiate her assertions as well as by her failure to distinguish the radically different social historical contexts that have spawned the various movements she discusses.” (Henry Munson, “Religion”, 2000)
“Now I have to try to figure out why Simon Blackburn gave the book such a good review…”
I don’t think he did. I haven’t got it in front of me but I remember the review as being a super-dry panning. All the positives were thoroughly double edged. I doubt Armstrong thinks it was a favourable review.
“one of the world’s most popular exegetes”
That’s not exactly “favorable”! I would say that too, then quickly follow up with regret and reasons for the regret.
Interesting, John M – I remember it the other way – remarkably favorable overall but with the dry remark about silence in the shape of 15 books.
Must look it up.
True, but it seemed to be intended as a compliment in the context of the article. The fact that the book (The Great Transformation, not The Case for God as I erroneously said earlier) is not scholarly is not seen as a mark against it.
But he is critical. Strathern worries that her views are unusual and possibly unpalatable to “ordinary people of faith”. Also, it seems to go against received opinion in a minor cottage industry of scholars like Karl Jaspers who view the Axial Age as a function of “the transcendentalist breakthrough” (whatever that means).
And then he cleans up after her in taking an “analytical approach”, because he claims that though the work is laudable as “cognitive digestion” which achieves some “comparative frisson”, it doesn’t succeed at getting to the whys and wherefores of the Axial Age. In particular, he objects that her sense of “transcendence” is terribly weak, and threatens to encompass folks like Socrates and the secular humanists.
Here is a nice quote on the subject of her reverent silence (which is fun to lift from context): “If the transcendent is dumb, people will itch to speak for it”.
Ah, you’re right. I remembered the opening sentence better than the review as a whole. Mind you, the extended poker-faced exegesis does give the impression that he takes it seriously – but then he gets into the super-dry part.
The religious state is exactly that of Alice after hearing the nonsense poem “Jabberwocky”: “Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas – only I don’t exactly know what they are.” If Alice puts on a dog collar, she will be at one with the tradition.
Cross-post! The above was in reply to John M, about Blackburn’s review.
Interesting about the review. The trouble with The Case for God is that it’s not just non-scholarly, it’s anti-scholarly. At least that’s how it strikes me. Anti partly because her claims are highly tendentious and she makes it impossible to check most of her sources. That’s a bad combination. It’s fundamentally unfair.