Recently a friend of mine posted a neat quote by Wittgenstein:
One can imagine an animal angry, fearful, sad, joyful, startled. But hopeful? And why not? A dog believes his master is at the door. But can he also believe that his master will come the day after tomorrow? —And what can he not do here? —How do I do it? — What answer am I supposed to give to this?Can only those hope who can talk? Only those who have mastered the use of language? That is to say, the manifestations of hope are modifications of this complicated form of life. (Ludwig Wittgenstein, “Philosophy of Psychology — a Fragment,” i.)
When my friend posted it, it reminded me of when I read this years ago and pondered its meaning. Wittgenstein is an incredibly complex yet aphoristic thinker who went through at least two phases-- early and late-- in the development of his thought. To make it even more complex, he is someone who greatly struggled with his faith, his sexuality, and his mental health, showing symptoms of what we now know as PTSD. So, I deeply respect his struggle and his insights as he struggled to find hope.
Wittgenstein's thought was also deeply enmeshed in language, and how language forms the very fabric of our reality and the horizons of our thought. His work is responsible for the so-called "linguistic turn" in philosophy and theology, which sees statements about reality not so much as descriptions of an objective external reality "out there", but as descriptions of our own ability to describe and conceptualize reality "within" ourselves and our linguistic communities. For me, the early Wittgenstein seems to hover around questions of how language can represent empirical realities, and whether there are such entities as non-empirical realities, and if language could ever convey them, since they would be literal "non-sense" statements (beyond our empirical senses to directly experience). And the later Wittgenstein seems to be primarily concerned with how language constitutes consciousness and community, since our inner sense of self, and our outer community bonds, seem to be completely dependent on our ability to think and communicate using language to form different kinds of "language games".
Now, this may be a misguided read of Wittgenstein. It has been a few years since I have studied him much. But I think it is accurate enough to note where I think he is helpful, and where I think he may have blind spots or unhelpful categorizations. Overall, I think he does a great service in forcing us to think through how our language shapes and limits what we can say about experience and reality. It helps us the embrace epistemic humility that the world is never fully how we describe it or understand it, and there will always be blind spots and unspeakable truths beyond our linguistic systems. However, when Wittgenstein bumps up against Hope (and other transcendent Realities) I think he falls into some serious limitations:
First, he seems to say hope is a binary-- either you have it or not-- and I think hope is a spectrum. At its base, hope is an intuitive way of being in the world: That what "ought" to happen could in fact happen, and so we act to attain that end. The earliest manifestation of this is found in single celled organisms that "hunt" for food: They ought to be fed, they could be fed, they act to be fed. Granted, this is instinctual behavior without "consciousness", and certainly without language. But all conscious behaviors and experiences-- Love, compassion, justice, knowledge, wisdom, peace, creativity, hope, etc.-- all seem to be rooted in and grow from earlier instinctual antecedents. So, for me, instinctually hopeful behavior and lingustically expressed hope, are two sides of a spectrum of hopefulness in all life.
Moving up the chain of being several million years, the bird flies and chirps, and the wolf prowls and howls, in incipient hope for a mate or a hunt. The domestic dog looks out the window in incipient hope for the postman to drop mail or the master to come home. Moving up the chain of being another few million years, humans are able to deploy entire symbolic systems of language to describe different kinds of hope: Ethical hope that we ought to do the right things; Technological hope that we attain certain ends; Eschatological hope that there is a "Master" who we are awaiting the arrival of beyond this spacetime, who will fulfill our need for transcendent Love.
Second, Wittgenstein places ultimate value in language, and as such I think he is blind to the nature of non-linguistic expressions of a whole bunch of experiences. In this case, he is not willing to accept the "hopeful" nature of pre-linguistic behaviors of non-linguistic lifeforms. I think this is in error, and it can blind us to the evolutionary continuum of all life, as it builds on each stage in increasing complexity and community.
Third, I think Wittgenstein remains agnostic about ultimate transcendent ends and non-linguistic experiences in a way that is not helpful. His dictum from the end of the Tractatus-- "that which cannot be spoken must be passed over in silence"-- is literally impossible to abide by. It is arguable that this aphorism itself, in a strictly empirical sense, is non-sense and non-speakable in the system of the early Wittgenstein. There are dimensions of human experience and dimensions of reality that cannot be fully contained in language. In this case, I think that "hope" in the broadest sense ultimately points toward a Reality that transcends language as we understand it. The "hopeful" behaviors of all life forms point to a final Hope that is the culmination of lessor hopes.
Finally, a thought experiment: Let's say there is a lifeform a million years from now that possesses a meta-language that transcends our current language and thought in the same way our language transcends the communication and thought of our dogs and cats. Would that lifeform be justified in saying we knew nothing of hope because we could not express it (or even think it) in their meta-language? I don't think so. Their experience of hope might be exponentially and dimensionally deeper than ours, but it would be part of a continuum of "hopefulness" seen throughout the evolutionary journey if Life as we journey toward our Transcendent Source.
Now, this leaves open the question of whether there is in fact a Transcendent Hope, or if this is merely an evolved illusion foisted on us by our unconscious genome seeking to propagate itself. And it could well be that this is all sound and fury signifying nothing as our genes seek to reproduce for no reason with no meaning. But it also could be the case that even our genetic drive to survive and thrive and procreate is itself a manifestation of Transcendent Hope which has created all things to evolve and unfold toward fulfillment in Divine Love. And, I think there are good reasons to think the latter, and not the former, is the case.
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