felix hominum: warming up for St. Augustine's day

The commemoration day of Saints Augustine is drawing near. You might say his feast is fast approaching. The only reason I am posting this is so I could make that horrible pun.

But for some real fun, how about a warm up to the festivities? Something I've been poking away at for a little while when the time allows. Not all the notes and refs are there, but I'll put them in at some point.

It will probably only be of interest to folks like Mind Your Maker, but you know, we all have our own idea of fun.

Wittgenstein thrice quotes from Augustine's Confessions in the Philosophical Investigations . He began his Philosophical Investigations with a quotation from book one of the Confessions, where Augustine described how he learned to speak. His critique of the "Augustinian Picture theory" of language, which extended to paragraph 64, provides "a convenient focus to present (in his new idiom) points of agreement as well as disagreement with his earlier thought." At paragraph 89, he quotes from book XI, and Augustine's famous dilemma about understanding temporality. We know what time is, but if we ask "what is time" we seem not to be able to explain it. And at paragraph 436, we find Wittgenstein again quoting from book XI. Concerning words, they are "manifest and ordinary, and yet the things themselves are too deeply hidden, and discovering them is new". As Augustine's description of language from the Confessions seemed a good point of departure for Wittgenstein's further investigations into the nature of language, so I propose to continue the relationship.

Wittgenstein, in his preface to the Tractatus, tells his readers the meaning and method of his work:

Its whole meaning could be summed up somewhat as follows: What can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent... The book will, therefore, draw a limit to thinking, or rather--not to thinking, but to the expression of thoughts... (TLP, Ogden translation; Routledge, 1992, p 27)

From the outset of the TLP, Wittgenstein was convinced that the problems of philosophy stemmed from a "misunderstanding of the logic of our language" , a misunderstanding which was to be cleared once one understood that logic. Thus a correct understanding of his work will take into account both the meaning and the method of the TLP. How we arrive at the union of the two is done through an examination of language, or more properly, through language itself.

Wittgenstein further elaborated on the purpose of his early work in a letter to his publisher, Von Fricker:

The book's point is an ethical one. I once meant to include in the preface a sentence which is not in fact there now but which I will write out for you here, because it will perhaps be a key to the work for you. What I meant to write, then, was this: My work consists of two parts: the one presented here plus all that I have not written, and it is precisely this second part that is the important one.

The goal then is to use the "ladder" to climb to the transcendent. One is supposed to have "climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up)" (TLP 6.54). Logic and ethics, the principle of the world and its value, are transcendent. These are things which "cannot be expressed" , they are, in the words of Petersen (1990) "not to be found in the world, they cannot be represented by sentences." This means that one does not directly describe the ethical, but rather what it is, is shown by language. I hope to show that this is also a route taken by Augustine: the content of ethics shows itself in the analysis of language in Book XII of the Confessions.

Though Wittgenstein of the Philosophical Investigations may not agree, I suggest that he (Wittgenstein) had already found a clue to unraveling Augustine's dilemma about time, how these "ordinary words" can be understood, and that Augustine's interest in language went far beyond that presented in Confessions I, viii. In the course of the examination into the nature of time in the Confessions, Augustine posits and then dismisses several ancient theories. In chapter 27 of book XI, he takes a new approach. He investigates the relationship between time and eternity by examining a "proposition", so to speak, a line from a hymn written by Ambrose: "Deus creator omnium." In short, I suggest that Augustine's approach can be understood in terms of the arguments of the Tractatus, specifically: the distinction between saying and showing which is put forth by Wittgenstein in his own analysis of language. The "picture theory" is not the only analysis of language which Augustine undertook. In the course of the Confessions he was also intensely interested in a particular "kind" of language: revelation. In Book XII he engaged in analysis of the first line of Scripture, and his analysis of language led him to an ethical conclusion.

Wittgenstein states that "We make to ourselves pictures of facts." This is how our language works, and how we represent our world. Let us consider some prominent points of Wittgenstein's general theory of representation.

The picture is a model of reality... The elements of the picture stand, in the picture, for the objects.
The picture consists in the fact that its elements are combined with one another in a definite way.
The picture is a fact. (TLP 2.1...2.15)

What Wittgenstein argued is that we relate to our world by picturing. In its most simple form, one can simply draw a picture of a set of objects. The picture is intended to communicate something: it represents a "state of affairs". The picture itself becomes one of the facts of the world (TLP 2.141). A drawing of a set of objects is itself another fact in the world, another object among others. What makes the drawing a picture is that "the elements of the picture are combined with one another in a definite way" which in turn "represents that the things are so combined with one another." This ability of the picture to combine elements in a certain way "is called its structure, and the possibility of this structure is called the form of representation of the picture."

This pictorial form, this kind of potentiality of representation, is not something which is an element of the picture, nor something which is captured as one object among others on canvas. It is something which we can see about the picture which the picture itself does not portray. "The picture, however, cannot represent its form of representation: it shows it forth."
For Wittgenstein, what is shown forth by all pictures of reality is "the logical form, that is the form of reality." But there are many kinds of pictures. And Wittgenstein rightly states that "a picture can represent every reality whose form it has...the spatial picture, everything spatial, the coloured, everything coloured, etc." Since for Wittgenstein the structure of world is logical, the "logical picture can depict the world". It is this which the picture and the world share, - the logical form.
It is important to remember that this picturing is not empirical. The world consists of all the possible facts in logical space (TLP 1.13), and the "picture represents a possible state of affairs in logical space". The empirical truth or falsity of the picture is not of primary importance. It points to the logical world.
This picturing is what constitutes thought for Wittgenstein. "The logical picture of the facts is the thought." This thought is "projected" into language when we form propositions which express the thought (3.1-3.11). The "sensibly perceptible sign" (sound or written sign) is the "method of projection" which is "the thinking of the sense of the proposition". Throughout the 3's, Wittgenstein engages in an analysis of the proposition, distinguishing between accidental and essential features:

Accidental are the features which are due to a particular way of producing the propositional sign. Essential are those which alone enable the proposition to express its sense.

It is the essential features which reveal something of importance. For Wittgenstein, these reveal logic. Analysis of the proposition is needed because "language disguises the thought, so that from the external form of the clothes one cannot infer the form of the thought they clothe". Thought and the proposition have been identified in TLP 3.5; 4, but the expression of thought in language is not always clear. It is philosophy's task to make propositions clear.

The proposition is a particular kind of picture, and as a picture, it too is a "picture of reality" or a "model of reality as we think it is" (4.01). And as a picture, it is subject to the distinction between saying and showing: "The proposition shows its sense. The proposition shows how things stand, if it is true. And it says that they do so stand." One can distinguish between what it says and what it shows because the "logical scaffolding" is independent of the truth or falsity of the proposition. A proposition fundamentally shows us this logical scaffolding, it says something hangs on this scaffolding in such and such a way in the world. Wittgenstein states that "one can draw conclusions from a false proposition" ; the conclusion one can draw is fundamentally not something in the world, but something about the world: that it has this structure, the logical scaffolding.

Wittgenstein compares this with the process of looking into a mirror. The "logic of the facts cannot be represented" , so how can we know that there is this logical form?

Propositions cannot represent the logical form: this mirrors itself in the propositions.
That which expresses itself in language, we cannot express by language.
The propositions show the logical form of reality.
They exhibit it.

This mirror is rather odd. An empiricist would be concerned with the fact that there is a mirror. What Wittgenstein wants us to see is what the mirror reflects out of itself. There are things which the mirror shows us which are not the content of the mirror itself. It is this kind of analysis of language that is of interest to us, for it leads to the distinction that "what can be shown cannot be said."

Grasping the reflection of the mirror eventually leads to the concept of the transcendent. The category of the transcendent includes logic itself, the concept of the self (here there is debate over trans. solipsism notes), ethics. Wittgenstein thinks he has reached the point of the limits of language and thought by articulating the possibility that one can ( via the truth tables and knowledge of elementary propositions) exhaust the range of possibilities and hence the world. But to have exhausted the range of possibilities is not the end.

Like Wittgenstein, Augustine of the Confessions was intensely interested in language. His description of how he learned to speak is recorded in chapter. viii of Bk I. He trained as a rhetorician, and spent some time at the height of his profession sitting "in cathedra mendacii " , he was well aware of how language disguised thought. Yet not only does the rhetorician have an interest in words. So also does the philosophical exegete of Scripture. Augustine confessed to God that he wished to "consider the wonders of your law" - the written word as language, for Augustine as for Wittgenstein, contains mirabilia, things which are not evident unless one engages in a thorough analysis of language and the proposition.

In chapter ii of Book XI, Augustine notes that there are difficulties in understanding the 'propositions' of Scripture. Moses wrote in another time, and in another language, and yet even if he were present to Augustine, Moses would not fully be able to explain the sense of the words. Like Wittgenstein, Augustine realized that meaning is not fully found in the empirical.
Augustine turned to his celebrated discussion of time in the remainder of Bk. XI. Yet he is a creature within time; he is on this side of Wittgenstein's limit. Is there a way of viewing time sub specie aeternitate, to climb Wittgenstein's ladder and view time as a limited whole?
Augustine, like Wittgenstein, distinguished between sentences which have no sense and those which are false. In chapters x-xiii of Bk. XI, Augustine addressed those who posed the question "What was God doing before He made heaven and earth?" Wittgenstein answered the problem:

Most propositions and questions, that have been written about philosophical matters, are not false, but senseless. We cannot, therefore, answer questions of this kind at all, but only state their senselessness. Most questions and propositions of the philosophers result from the fact that we do not understand the logic of our language.

Understanding the logic of language is the first step in Augustine's treatment. Wittgenstein's point elucidates Augustine's method, and shows why he (Augustine) included a discussion of this "nonsensical" question in the discussion of time. The question itself is a "high" one; only the language in which the question is posed is incorrect. There is a kind of categorical error in asking what God did "before" He made the creation in which temporality (and hence a referent for the 'before' ) exists.
So the TLP informs our reading of Augustine: our language is important, and in many cases the problem of philosophy is really a problem of the logic of language. If the question is posed improperly, not according to the logical categories, then it is senseless. But it is not "false". It has simply not understood the logic of the categories of time and eternity. What seemed like a question, upon further analysis, turns out to be "nonsense." It is not gibberish, but it does not have sense. Yet it does have a redeeming quality: it points beyond itself. As M. Hodges says: "The things we say are really nonsensical, but we say them because they direct attention to the implicit limits of language ".
Augustine continued his investigation into time. Wittgenstein's reference to Augustine in PI 436 is most telling.

Here it is easy to get into that dead-end of philosophy, where one believes that the difficulty of the task consists in our having to describe phenomena that are hard to get hold of, the present experience that slips quickly by...we find ordinary language too crude, and it looks as if we were having to do, not with the phenomena of every day, but with ones that "easily elude us, and, in their coming to be and passing away, produce those others as an average effect". (Augustine: Manifestissima et usitatissima sunt, et eadem rursus nimis latent, et nova est inventio eorum.)

The sentence in quotations is not actually a translation of the line from Augustine (Conf. XI, xxii): Augustine wrote that "we say these words, and we have heard them, and we understand, and are understood". And it is in response to this ordinary use of words that he continued: "They are most manifest and ordinary, and yet these things themselves are too deeply hidden, and the discovering of them is new." We can talk about time using ordinary language, but there is something "deeply hidden" in our discussion.
It is through analysis of language that Augustine proceeded. Wittgenstein analyzed the proposition into its constituent parts. For him the elementary propositions and atomic facts were the constituent parts of language and thought. Augustine also engages in analysis of language, but for him this takes a slightly different turn. We recall that there are accidental and essential features of the proposition: one of the essentail ones for Augutsine is that it is actually spoken. In chapter xxvi he compared the measuring of time with the measuring of words in a poem. In a line of poetry there are so many words, and each of these words has so many syllables, either long or short. We measure them; we analyze language into its constituent parts.
"Deus creator omnium" is the 'proposition' par excellence for Augustine. In its analysis he found his answer to the question what is time. "O God, creator of everything!"; what the proposition says is obvious enough. However, that is not all there is. The line of poetry is from a psalm, and psalms are songs to be sung. The song can be divided into long and short syllables, each of which has a temporal value, but this is still just "describing". Augustine moves from the proposition to the subject that is considering the psalm as a whole, and concludes that time is somehow located in his own self - in te, anime meus, tempora mea metior . The whole of the psalm is already contained in the mind, and it is spoken outwardly. The thought in the psalm is a whole, and yet it can be extended sequentially into temporal existence. The psalm says one thing, but it shows something else. An analysis of language has provided Augustine with a way of moving beyond the content of the words themselves, as they describe things, to an answer to the question what is time.
The proposition's elements are arranged as a picture of the extension of time as contained within the whole of a single thought. The proposition shows how one can understand time. "The applied, thought, propositional sign is the thought." As Wittgenstein said "There is indeed the inexpressible. This shows itself; it is the mystical." "Reality is compared with the proposition". In this case, Augustine's thought concerning the proposition, and the proposition are identified ; he holds a thought in his mind, which is expressed outwardly in language. The temporal reality is compared to the proposition. It is the sequential extension of what is known as a whole in the mind.

Wittgenstein, in a ---letter to his publisher, claimed that the book's point was an ethical one; the purpose of the ladder to transcend the realm of the possible world. Part of the climbing involves seeing how propositions, pictures of reality, point beyond themselves to the logic which "fills the world". "The limits of my language means the limits of my world." Wittgenstein's analysis of contradictions (and tautologies) led him to conclude that it is not important what these say (indeed they say nothing), but rather what they show. They revealed the laws of logic which governed the world of the Tractatus.

Augustine as well saw in the analysis of propositions the 'laws' which governed his world. In book XII of the Confessions he attempts a thorough analysis of the first line of Scripture: "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." Particularly, his analysis of the contradictory interpretations showed him something about the principle which governed scriptural language, and hence his world.

In chapter xvii of Book XII, Augustine began to 'break down' the proposition into its constituent parts: heaven and earth are names, but of what? He offered several possible interpretations, positing that these names may correspond to either visible or invisible entities. All of this confusion arises because language is unclear; the names may correspond to several objects. Can one give a precise meaning to the phrase, and so clear up the problem? This is one option, but it is not the one Augustine chose. Instead, he considered the purpose of Scriptural language. "The law is good to edify, if one uses it legitimately, because the end of it is charity..." With this in mind, he continued through chapters xx-xxii to give no less than 10 different "meanings" to the first line of Scripture.

What Augustine did was put forth a series of "contradictions". In chapter xxiii he explained that "disagreements" can arise in language over two issues: either the truth of the things themselves, or the meaning of the one who is speaking. Like Wittgenstein, Augustine "can draw conclusions from a false proposition". In this case, two propositions concerning the meaning of "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth" may be contradictory. By way of expansion, the exegetes may say the very first thing God created was the material created order, or in the very first thing God created was the invisible and the visible created order. These are logical contradictions. Yet Augustine did not choose between them. He wanted to have the contradiction and the tautology: both x and not x, where both cases are "true".

How does Wittgenstein inform our understanding of this? For Wittgenstein, recognizing contradictions and tautologies shows the nature of logic, which in turn leads one to what is truly important: the ethical. What Augustine has done is to use a similar method: by bringing our the necessary contradictions in the interpretation of Scriptural propositions, one is led to understand that truth is "not in you, nor in me, but...is above both our minds". The contradiction points beyond itself to a place beyond the limits of language, where one perceives ipsam caritatem - charity itself. The end is not to be found in the world, but the language itself points to the transcendent.

What I have attempted to do so far is not to reconcile the thought of Wittgenstein and Augustine. Many points are left unsaid. I have rather hoped to use Wittgenstein's ladder to climb through some of Augustine's thoughts on language and its use in ways which Wittgenstein himself did not attempt. Specifically, both thinkers say in language a principle of how the world works. Augustine's thoughts on time and on contradictory exegesis can be understood as his attempt to understand the world and transcendent foundations of ethics through analysis of language.

How does the analysis of the single line from “deus creator omnius” become the entrance for Augustine’s investigation of time? The proposition is not a description of reality, but is rather as a whole a picture of reality. In this way the “proposition” – “deus creator omnius” – is a picture of reality as Augustine sees it in Confessions XII. The totality of the sentence is itself not the description, but the picture of that reality.