Radical Orthodoxy After The New Wittgenstein I
For laughs and japes, here is my preparatory essay on Radical Orthodoxy and Wittgenstein. A few pointers:
- Since this essay is preparatory, I didn’t explore the full extent of new Wittgenstein scholarship. Consider this approaching a literature review. In particular, my contention that Wittgenstein is not a covert Kantian requires further research – simply, I need to check if the book that provided this argument is correct. I might be dull, but this might be because I am now so sick of it I can’t tell. This might well result in something more substantial later.
- Forgive the lengthy exposition of Radical Orthodoxy. This is the nature of this type of essay. For the outsider, I hope this is at least interesting. Prior knowledge might help, because I can’t say everything they do.
- I didn’t have chance to say as much as I would like about The New Wittgenstein movement as such, for reasons of research time and space. My conclusions are only directions for further research, perhaps.
- Be gentle with me! I don’t really care about spelling and grammatical errors at this point, since it is in.
- If for some nuts reason you want to cite this, drop me an e-mail or comment.
Radical Orthodoxy After The New Wittgenstein
Introduction
This paper attempts to explore the relationship between the central figures of the Radical Orthodoxy movement and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Conor Cunningham’s piece in Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology, ‘Language: Wittgenstein After Theology’, has acquired the status of ex cathedra statement upon Wittgenstein by the major figures of Radical Orthodoxy[1]. Where reference is made to Wittgenstein the reader is directed to Cunningham’s paper. John Milbank and Catherine Pickstock cite this paper as being “crucial”[2] in their work Truth in Aquinas and in a recent address given in Paris, Milbank states that this work is “decisive”, and re-iterates a number of its arguments[3].
This essay surveys current scholarship on Wittgenstein and re-examines Cunningham’s essay in this light. Since the publishing of ‘Language’, the position of Wittgensteinian scholarship has shifted considerably. In particular, a new and controversial interpretation of Wittgenstein has emerged. With the publishing of The New Wittgenstein[4] in 2000, a fresh reading of Wittgenstein has been suggested, beyond yet in continuity with the path of research that Cunningham follows. Since much of Cunningham’s argument depends on his use of what was at the time the most correct scholarship regarding, say, the purpose of philosophy in Wittgenstein’s corpus, we might challenge his understanding by pointing that a better understanding has superseded his own. More specifically, the idea that Wittgenstein’s project is irreducibly or decisively Kantian will be challenged. And it will be suggested that this movement is perhaps a good friend to Radical Orthodoxy.
Reason and Revelation After Scotus
Central to the strategy of RO is the claim that philosophy and philosophical metaphysics that exclude God are nihilistic. Theology must replace philosophy as the central discourse in understanding reality if philosophy is truly to be philosophy and metaphysics metaphysics. This is the primary contention of Cunningham’s paper:
Such an upshot would enable metaphysics to be truly metaphysical and philosophy to be philosophica, viz: purely descriptive. To be so philosophy would have to reposition itself with regard to theology, deferring to the latter’s mode of discourse, yet in doing so opening up a space for its own articulation. Only in this way will there ever be metaphysics and philosophy proper.[5]
Theology should not merely subservient to philosophical concepts and depend upon philosophy for its understanding of the metaphysical, and philosophy should defer to theology to understand metaphysics. This view is most cogently expressed in two essays by John Milbank – ‘Knowledge: The theological critique of Hamann and Jacobi[6]‘ and ‘Only Theology overcomes metaphysics[7]‘ (later followed by it sequel ‘Only Theology Saves Metaphysics’[8]) – and in the co-written introduction to the Radical Orthodoxy collection. Since Cunningham’s argument is a deployment of the critique developed in these papers, Milbank’s argument warrants a brief summary. Since ‘Knowledge’ occupies the same volume as Cunningham’s essay, it seems most sensible to consider the argument here rather than in other, later accounts.
Milbank’s essay begins with an analysis of the relation between philosophy and theology, with regard to the two dominant strands in theology before postmodernism: liberalism and neo-orthodoxy. These two theological accounts allow philosophy autonomy and legitimacy separate from theology. Indeed, both endorse this understanding in different ways and share the same modernist belief that this is the appropriate role of the two disciplines in understanding the essential way things are. Both take it that it is philosophy that defines ontology and epistemology in general and theology that deals with articulating the knowledge of the creating and redeeming God in terms of revelation. For this reason, neither offers a critique of philosophy’s independence from theology, but both attempt to unsuccessfully marry the two disciplines, yet do so in such a way that results in a general privileging of philosophy. In the case of liberal theology, the terms of revelation are articulated through whatever philosophical beliefs are currently in vogue. In the case of neo-orthodoxy, exemplified by Karl Barth, philosophy is articulated in terms of revelation, or used positively to permit revelation. Yet, here, there is also no critique, since theology remains similarly imprisoned within whichever philosophy is currently the norm, all theology does is re-describe its terms its own Christian tenor whilst remaining bound to these very terms in any real discussion.
For Milbank there will be no real post-liberal theology until there is a theological account of being and knowing. Theology in both these opposed forms allows everything, even its account of Christ, is to be created within philosophy and hence defined by it, and not by Christianity. The Christ event should, in actuality, completely “re-organise” our sense of what exists and what we are able to know, rather than be described in whatever atheistic philosophical terms we might find. Here Jacobi and Hamman are introduced. Taken together as “radical pietists”, these two figures provide a theological account of being and knowing, of “knowledge by faith alone”, following their complexly Lutherian heritage. In the manner of the Church Fathers, these two figures return to a situation where the lines between grace/nature and reason/revelation are blurred in such a way that they criticise philosophy for having incomplete reason since it has no faith and that there is literally nothing experienced in the material world without this graced reason and revelation.
This is not a progression as such, but a return to a more patristic and scholastic conception of reason and revelation. The dichotomy between faith and reason can be traced to the bete noir of RO, Duns Scotus[9]. In forgetting to consider the question of being along with the question of whether one was considering a created or creating being, Scotus, by Milbank’s account, eventually established an autonomous secular realm that allowed for the separation of theology from philosophy. Theology becomes through Scotus’ univocal ontology the handmaiden of philosophy. This leads in turn to the slew of modernist attempts to ground philosophy, through empiricism, idealism and rationalism. For Jacobi and Harmann, all these strategies reduce the world to a depthless nothing, barely suspended over the absolute nothing of the void. At this point, the comparison between ‘radical piety’ and ‘radical orthodoxy’ requires no further explanation:
They are the source not of neo-orthodoxy, but of a more genuinely anti-liberal radical orthodoxy, which does not hesitate to argue even with philosophy itself and which, just because it is more mediating, is also less accommodating than the theology of Barth (or even of Bonhoeffer).[10]
Without entering into irrelevant detail, the two moves of Jacobi and Harmann, are:
first, they insisted that no finite thing can be known, not even to any degree, outside its ratio to the infinite; hence they denied the validity of the enterprises of ontology or epistemology as pure philosophical endeavours, or else argued that if they were valid their conclusions would be nihilistic- and indeed it was Jacobi who first thematised the notion of nihilism. Second [...] if the truth of nature lies in its supernatural ordination, then reason is true only to the degree that it seeks or prophesies the theoretical and practical acknowledgement of this ordination which, thanks to the fall, is made possible again only through divine incarnation.
Jacobi and Harmann show:
how theology can outwit nihilism. Not by seeking to reinstate reason, as many opponents of postmodernity would argue. This is absurd, because nihilism is not scepticism, nor relativism. No, as Hamann and Jacobi understood, the rational Enlightenment already in effect taught nihilism. For nihilism is the purest objectivity, since it is possible objectively to conclude that there is only nothing. Indeed, as Catherine Pickstock has argued, only nothing fulfils the conditions for a perfectly inert, controllable and present object. What the radical pietists realised was that to be human means, primarily, that we must reckon with an immense depth behind things. There are only two possible attitudes to this depth: for the first, like Kant, we distinguish what is clear from what is hidden: but then the depth is an abyss, and what appears, as only apparent, will equally induce vertigo. This is why critical philosophy, the attitude of pure reason itself, is also the stance of nihilism. [...] The second possibility is that we trust the depth, and appearance as the gift of depth, and history as the restoration of the loss of this depth in Christ. By comparison with this reason- Christianity- we can see easily the secret identity of all impersonal religions which celebrate fate or the void with the nihilism of modernity.
The End of Metaphysics, The End of Philosophy – The Return of Theology
Cunningham’s paper must be read in conjunction with John Milbank’s, for he makes many of the same points as Jacobi and Harmann and uses them with regard to Wittgenstein. The difference between the two papers is one of exposition and application. Milbank expresses the relation between philosophy and theology and provides a critique of philosophy from a theological perspective. Cunningham demonstrates how a figure traditionally believed to be somehow outside the canon of traditional philosophy and metaphysics still repeats the founding errors of post-Scotist philosophy. Wittgenstein, like any pure philosopher, may be included under the broader problematic of any discourse that does not adequately account for God. Despite his attempts to avoid it, Wittgenstein’s understanding is still imprisoned in the horizons of philosophical discourse and is therefore subject to theology’s critique. The final contention being that there is something intrinsic in the philosophical enterprise insomuch as it remains atheological ensures that it always falls into the same traps, even (and perhaps especially) when one attempts to avoid these traps entirely by proposing something distinct from what might be considered traditional philosophy.
Let us first deal with the moves that are made that make Cunningham’s account similar to Milbank’s critique of philosophy as a whole. Cunningham begins by stating that theology employs three types of “explanation”:
- Explanation that appeals to reality
- Explanation that appeals to ideality
- Explanations that collapse ideality into reality and reality into an ideality
Wittgenstein has no significant difference from other philosophers of the Western Canon, despite his oft-claimed radical nature or place as a non- or anti- philosopher and even his own contention that he is attempting to do away with philosophy as understood by his peers – he does attempt it, he doesn’t manage it. Wittgenstein’s position falls into the 3rd category and is therefore as open to a theological critique as any other philosopher would be. Cunningham’s paper therefore stands or falls on the basis of his ability to prove that this is case. At the root of this contention is Cunningham’s description of Wittgenstein operating in a post-Kantian manner, in so much that Wittgenstein’s project mirrors that of Kant, yet locates the problem of the limit of knowledge differently and utilises different rhetorical tactics. Whereas in Kant, the faculties of the human mind bind the limits of what can be known, in Wittgenstein what can be known is restricted by the limits of what language can reasonably talk of. In Wittgenstein it is language the “goes on holiday” and oversteps what it is able to say in order to create metaphysics, whereas in Kant, in attempting to establish metaphysics, the mind “goes on holiday” and does things beyond what it is epistemologically warranted to do. A priori synthetic judgements play the same role in delimiting what can be known and experienced as Wittgenstein’s grammatical statements. In Wittgenstein, where Kant discovers twelve synthetic a priori truths, he finds multiple language games, each with their own grammatical rules that bound their representation in a similar manner. In effect, Wittgenstein is a subtle more modest linguistic Kantian, who while being modest enough not to know the bounds of all knowledge, says that it can be found with regards to specific types of discourse, language games. If were to consider an imaginary end to philosophy, this end would be an encyclopedia of these rules, that would state what can and cannot be said tout court.
Cunningham also contends that Wittgenstein adopts what he terms a ad hoc transcendentalism, oscillating between transcendental enquiry and folk realism – “What ever categories may be assumed, everyday practice continually relavitises them”. This is similar to Pears’ statement that Wittgenstein attempt to cross [cross his own limit and then,] return to language in its ordinary human setting”[11]. This is something I will seek to contend, for as Williams suggests “There are superficial similarities between Kant and Wittgenstein, but they mask deep differences”[12] . Cunningham’s account is nuanced, and this is not the only string to his bow, yet it would be fair to say that it is a major strut on which the rest of his argument rests. When Wittgenstein is read in such a manner, we discover this oscillation between idealism and realism that creates a unacceptable ‘doubling of existence’, that only the Christian/Platonic tradition can correct, and Cunningham’s ability to place him within the third category, opening him to a standard theological critique. As in Milbank’s critique following Hamman and Jacobi, by remaining philosophical and creating a doubling of existence (‘existence exists’), Wittgenstein loses what is most significant to existence, including the language he supposedly so rigorously assesses as well as everything else that actually matters to human life, an immanent “self-reference [that] reduces to suspension over a void”[13], the ontic is completely filled, transcendence denied, yet the ontic becomes a nothing of any significance. The echoes of Hamman and Jacobi ring loudly.
[1] Hereafter RO.
[2] John Milbank and Catherine Pickstock, Truth in Aquinas, Radical Orthodoxy Series (London: Routledge, 2001). 127[3] John Milbank, Faith, Reason and Imagination: The Study of Theology and Philosophy in the 21st Century, 2007, The Centre For Theology and Philosophy, Available: http://www.theologyphilosophycentre.co.uk/papers.php#milbank, 07/05/07 2007. 7
[4] Alice Marguerite Crary and Rupert J. Read, The New Wittgenstein (London: Routledge, 2000). See the extensions of the thesis therein in Rupert Read, “Throwing Away ‘the Bedrock’,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 105.1 (2004)., Rupert J. Read and Jerry Goodenough, Film as Philosophy : Essays on Cinema after Wittgenstein and Cavell (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005)., Alice Crary, Beyond Moral Judgement (Cambridge, Mass. ; London: Harvard University Press, 2007). And elsewhere. See P. M. S. Hacker, Wittgenstein : Connections and Controversies (Oxford: Clarendon, 2004). for a rebuttal of the new understanding. See the incredibly lengthy debate on ‘nonsense’ in Wittgenstein’s work, or the renewed dialogue between his work and that of Jacques Derrida. See John Gibson and Wolfgang Huemer, The Literary Wittgenstein (London: Routledge, 2004). For political re-evaluations see Cressida J. Heyes, The Grammar of Politics : Wittgenstein and Political Philosophy (Ithaca, N.Y. ; London: Cornell University Press, 2003). and G. N. Kitching and Nigel Pleasants, Marx and Wittgenstein : Knowledge, Morality and Politics (London: Routledge, 2002).
[5] Conor Cunningham, “Language: Wittgenstein after Theology,” Radical Orthodoxy : A New Theology, eds. John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock and Graham Ward (London: Routledge, 1998). 65
[6] John Milbank, “Knowledge: The Theological Critique of Philosophy in Hamann and Jacobi,” Radical Orthodoxy : A New Theology, eds. John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock and Graham Ward (London: Routledge, 1998).
[7] John Milbank, The Word Made Strange : Theology, Language, Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997). 36-55
[8] John Milbank, Only Theology Saves Metaphysics, 2007, The Centre For Theology and Philosophy, Available: http://www.theologyphilosophycentre.co.uk/papers.php#milbank, 07/05/07 2007.
[9] In certain theological circles it is a commonly heard in-joke that when something – anything – goes wrong the instant response should be “Scotus did it!”. And yes, T-shirts will be soon available bearing that very slogan. The blame Scotus drinking game is already hilariously popular.
[10] Milbank, “Knowledge: The Theological Critique of Philosophy in Hamann and Jacobi.” 23
[11] David Francis Pears and Ludwig Wittgenstein, Wittgenstein, (Fontana Modern Masters.) (London: Collins, 1971). 127
[12] Meredith Williams, Wittgenstein, Mind and Meaning : Toward a Social Conception of Mind (London: Routledge, 1999). 60
[13] Cunningham, “Language: Wittgenstein after Theology.” 83
