More Psyche. This one starts with lecture notes by students of Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Psyche Papers 3.
1991
Intimations of Possibility
The point is that if there were evidence, this would in fact destroy the whole business. Anything that I normally call evidence wouldn't in the slightest influence me.
Suppose, for instance, we knew people who foresaw the future; make forecasts for years and years ahead; and they described some sort of a Judgment Day. Queerly enough, even if there were such a thing, and even if it were more convincing than I have described, belief in this happening wouldn't be at all a religious belief.
Suppose that I would have to forego all pleasures because of such a forecast. If I do so and so, someone will put me in fires in a thousand years, etc. I wouldn't budge. The best scientific evidence is just nothing.
A religious belief might fly in the face of such a forecast, and say "No. There it will break down."
As it were, the belief as formulated on the evidence can only be the last result -- in which a number of ways of thinking and acting crystallize and come together.
A man would fight for his life not to be dragged into the fire. No induction. Terror. That is, as it were, part of the substance of the belief.
That is partly why you don't get in religious controversies, the form of controversy where one person is sure of one thing, and the other says: "Well, possibly."
You might be surprised that there haven't been opposed to those who believe in the Resurrection those who say "Well, possibly."
INCE THE BEGINNING of these Psyche Papers, I have had numerous letters from our readers, and one (why only one?) cancellation of subscription from the library of a college operated by a religious organization. All of them, including the cancellation, have been fruitful, and anyone who had read them all would notice, here and there in this work, points and considerations that would never have been made without the contributions of many other minds.
There is some interesting lesson in this fact. It is not exactly that we learn from each other, for no one can really learn anything except in and by himself; it seems better to say that we learn because of each other, and, indeed, that if there were no others, there could be no learning at all. In this there is a mystery, for we know not how to account for the first beginning of all learning, and it is one of the mysteries shown forth in the story of Psyche and Eros. After a long journey, we will return to it. The readers' letters often recommend certain readings, and I always do them. The passage above comes from one of them, and its occasional incoherencies are not to be attributed to Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose work it is, sort of. Somewhere around 1938 Wittgenstein gave a series of lectures "on religious belief," and some of his students took notes. A compilation of notes by three of the students can be found in a little paperback called Wittgenstein: Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief. They have done, I am sure, the best they could, but the book still stands as a warning to teachers that only those words that they now wish they hadn't spoken will be remembered accurately. Nevertheless, the book is very valuable, rich in provocative hints.1 There are several of them in the quoted passage. One of them arises from the useful and all too unusual observation that belief ought not to be understood as one thing. We should know that better than we do, for it is not only religionists, but also scientists who say, and have no choice but to say, that they "believe" this or that rather than that they "know" this or that. The scientists tend to be a little more careful than the religionists in making that distinction, and the pseudo-scientists, the sociologists, educationists, psychologists, economists, and all the various tribes of -ists, a lot less careful. Plato, however, seems to have made it most rigidly, when he divided all the ways of trying to understand into the progressively more valuable families of dream, belief, knowledge, and dialectic, calling science a way of belief. (Hume seems to have done so as well, when he argued that a million black crows do not license us to know that the next one will be black, or something like that. I have much forgotten Hume.) The most intriguing hint of the passage is found in the last question. The quarrels between the believers of A and the believers of notA are well-known to us, and so too the quarrels between believers and non-believers, and, if we think about it for a while, it does seem to us surprising that there has not arisen in the context of any belief system whatever some third party, those who say "Well, possibly." I suspect, of course, that they are out there, crouching in muddy shell-holes in No-man's Land between the ignorant armies, keeping their heads down. Some of them, I suspect, are reading this sheet. Later in the notes we find this: "If you ask me whether or not I believe in a Judgment Day, in the sense in which religious people have belief in it, I wouldn't say: 'No. I don't believe there will be such a thing.' It would seem to me utterly crazy to say this.... I can't say. I can't contradict that person." And this: "If you say 'Do you believe the opposite?' -- you can call it believing the opposite, but it is entirely different from what we would normally call believing the opposite." Perhaps Wittgenstein was being tactful; perhaps the note taker left something out, who knows, but if Wittgenstein thinks that he would have to be utterly crazy to say No, I don't believe, then he must also find him utterly crazy who says Yes, I do believe. I wouldn't object to the characterization. Certainly, in our time, the most noticeable effect of religious belief in our time is bitter conflict between religionists who suppose that they "believe the opposite" of what other religionists believe. The conflict, although so far somewhat less violent, is no less bitter between the religionists and the anti-religionists, another pairing of believers of the opposite. If it seems to you too strong to think of all such combatants as utterly crazy, imagine yourself standing in the street between the Pro- and Anti- abortion demonstrators and saying "Well, possibly" when asked if abortion is murder. You might perhaps be a bit safer than you would be in saying "Well, possibly" as to God's disposition of the real estate between the Israelis and the Palestinians, but maybe not. Better not to do either. We have forgotten, and forgotten long, long ago, what "religion" means, and why it has been everywhere and always an element of human culture and a preoccupation of human persons. It is best thought of, it seems to me, as a kind of suspicion, and worst thought of as a kind of knowledge. It is a suspicion about invisible connections, the ties and links referred to in the stem of the word that we use, the lig in religion, and in ligature as well, and even in relic in a slightly different form. In the scrutiny of language, as Voltaire pointed out, the consonants count for very little, and the vowels for nothing at all; "relic" and "religious" are the same word, and the relic itself, even a plastic swizzle suck, can be construed as the knot in the tie that binds, which is why you still have that swizzle stick. When one of our ancient mothers began to suspect that the motions of the sun had something to do with the barley, and then to wonder whether there might be something else that, in the same mysterious fashion, had to do with the motions of the sun itself, she was thinking religiously. But, and a very big but it is, she was also thinking scientifically. This is one clear way to understand what we mean by science; it is a uniquely and universal human enterprise that begins with suspicions of invisible connections and remarkably often seems to find them, so that we are brought to that condition in which we can have newer suspicions. And when it occurs to the hunter, as seems always and everywhere to be the case, that there is some just price to be paid for the killing of the deer, he is suspecting a connection. Was he a better or a worse man, a smarter or a stupider man, than our hunters, because he thought it meet and right to ask forgiveness and seek reconciliation with his prey? In this case, the suspicion is not exactly of the same sort, not a suspicion like the one that makes science. The suspicion of the link between the sun and the barley will lead to what can be seen; it is "invisible" only for a while. It will be seen. But the suspicion of kinship with the earth and the beasts and all life will never be confirmed as the heat of the sun will be shown to bring forth the green plants. The same is true of other suspicions that all peoples seem to have had. Such little things (are they little?) as the utterly unaccountable fact that there seems to be something wrong about lying and something right about truthfulness have always given pause, provoked wonder and suspicion.2 We, of course, have been taught that all such notions of right and wrong come from social conditioning, and have mightily labored, as you know, to provide such conditioning as a form of "education." This teaching permits us to see moral issues as political issues, and the "values" of the people as, at least potentially, something that we can shape and control. We seem not to be doing it very well, but we will, of course, try harder, and seek funding for new programs. We have to conclude, out of our superior knowledge, that the superstitious ancients tried to behave well only out of their fear of the gods, which we do not intend to invoke. It never occurs to us that it might well have been the other way around, that the unenlightened savages were led to thinking about the fear of the gods by the simple fact that they had it in them to want to do the right thing, and that they seemed to know what it was. Some of you will remember the issue in which we awarded Norman Lear, a well-known television producer, a prize for his suspicions, the First Faltering Footsteps Award. It was because of an address he had given, in which he boasted of the great and indubitable achievements of the liberal movements of our age, but lamented that that same movement seemed to have had the effect of destroying what he called some "spiritual" component of our lives and, most especially, of the rearing of our young, the whole enterprise that we call "education." What he really wanted, although he didn't put it this way, was that the children would come to look upon the forests, the whales, the wretched of the earth, the starving, all folk of other colors, etc. and etc., as sacred; but he found himself living in a world that he had helped to bring about in which the word "sacred" could no longer be used without raising cries of outrage and constitutional jitters from millions of other Norman Lears, not yet reconstituted. And all he could think of as remedy was to encourage the representatives of various churches and sects to come up with some way of bringing the spiritual into respectability without offending either the liberal establishment, a hard job, or each other, an impossible job. His message was not warmly received by the religion functionaries to whom he spoke.3 Here is Lear's problem. He wants to say this, and he wants to be believed: Let us care for the Earth, and for each other, and for all that lives. Let us come to see that all these things are, uh, well, special, hmm, valuable, you know. (He can't really say "sacred." He sort of thinks he knows what it might mean, but it's, well, let's admit it, it's controversial.) So he imagines, what else, poor man, that what's needed is persuasion, and maybe role-modeling, so that children, and many others, would come to believe (realize? know?) that the whales and the trees and the poor are what another age might have called sacred. He imagines that the manipulation of sentiments combined with sweet preachments will bring about in the young exactly what Socrates would have called "piety," another word that Lear can not use, for it is now tainted both with sectarian implications and with, let's be honest, suggestions of the mechanical ritualism of traditionalists or of the unseemly public protestations of the fundamentalist faithful. We have seen more than enough of electrical evangelists raising their misty eyes to heaven, and of weirdos holding up slogans at football games. It wouldn't be so bad if we could be sure that all such were cunning charlatans, but some of them really seem to be just jerks. Nor can Lear make his appeal to piety in the sense of the word to be found not in the practices of some sect but in Antigone, for instance. It's too bad, for he would find some useful strength in the idea there, but the young people he has in mind seem no more able to read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest such works than their teachers are. The preaching and persuasion, of course, are not without effect. We do see frequent displays of cute little children holding up for the camera crayoned posters on behalf of the whales and the earth. But if Lear does not consider this sufficient effect, he is right. It is rather a case of what Socrates called Right Belief, a condition both praised and condemned by its name. Right belief is a very interesting idea. The Greeks were aware, as we are, that there is, perhaps in almost everyone, a push toward goodness. Without some special reason to be otherwise, we will treat each other with decency and kindness, if the price is not too high. In general, if not always in particulars, we prefer and intend to tell the truth rather than a lie. And so forth. There are many examples in every daily life. In other words, although we may often discover some reason to do otherwise, we are inclined to do the right thing, and we have some pretty good idea what that is. Whence this Right Belief arises, we do not know. Surely, in the individual, it comes in part from social example and the suggestions of lore, but the origin of the impulse out of which flow those examples and suggestions is misty, and the cause of the ground in which they so readily take root is unclear. Nevertheless, in many cultures the mere existence and prevalence of Right Belief seems to have been enough to engender a satisfactory ethic which seems not to have required curricula and special preachments to children about the sanctity of the earth, but only stories. But Socrates thought to see a perilous weakness in Right Belief; he thought it weak not because it was wrong -- far from it, but because it was belief, only belief. All belief stands on shaky ground. In the time of Socrates, as in ours, there were skilled practitioners of that art by which those who believed A could be cleverly brought to believe B instead, and thereafter, if necessary, C. And life itself will often have the same effect. In the most ardent believer in such things as the sanctity of the earth, and particularly in one for whom the sanctity of the earth is a very fuzzy notion, one new appetite, one new fear, one new glimmer of self-interest, will put a possibly fatal crack in the edifice of Right Belief. Thus it was that Socrates tried again and again to put Right Belief to the test of Reason, not at all to prove it wrong, but to transform it from belief into Knowledge, so that we might "know" that truth is better than the lie as surely as we know the equality of the angles where the line intersect. In this, I would say, Socrates failed. Read the little dialog called Euthyphro. It is precisely about the quality that Lear wants in us all. Piety. Euthyphro is a self-proclaimed expert in piety, and he offers to instruct Socrates. What follows is both funny and sad. We are left where we probably should be left after all such considerations, however expert and thorough -- in uncertainty, a condition from which two paths lead, one into cynicism, and the other into suspicion. And both paths run both ways. Consider now what is suggested by the story of Psyche and Eros, and by the religious context of which it is so much a part. It is surely no sermon on certainty; it is an awakening unto suspicion. Where the education of the educationists, even as it might be mitigated by Lear, says: Look at us and listen to us, the education of Psyche and Eros says: Look into yourself; consider and consider again all your suspicions; see for what it is the path that you are walking; think of the palace where you live, the invisible powers that serve you, the darkness that hides the better meaning of your pleasures and joy. Consider the fruit that you must bear, and the destiny that may be rightly yours. And as to the world, that Earth that gave you life and nourished you, behold and regard the life that shares her with you. Be mindful of the ants, and all the tiny, mighty powers; listen to the reeds, who know, as well as their cousins the oaks, that all life must ride on the tides and the currents that flow through all the world. When the eagle falls out the sky and offers you help, take it: when the contriver by Nature's example of all human devising, mind itself, shows you the path, walk it, even to Hell. All that, which would arouse, even in the very young, deep and nagging suspicions of connections, will not provide a curriculum, of course, and it isn't democratic.4 It serves neither this nor that social agenda, unless we can understand, as perhaps we ought to understand, that there is only one social agenda for children of the same mother, all of one blood, and that all our lives and destinies are tied together in one great pattern. That does sound like a conclusion (conviction? realization? belief?) that would bring about just what Lear would like to see, but it can be reached only by one who is free of sectarian ideologies, free to say, Well, possibly. Among those who heard him, there were probably no sayers of "Well, possibly." Their responses showed them just what you would expect -- protectors of dogma and doctrine, and conservators of the system. And the same would have been true at the educationist convention. All such folk have their suspicions, of course, but they are suspicions of threats to their own practices and beliefs, suspicions of possible offense to their own sensibilities. The religionists and the anti-religionists, the ones who believe the opposite, surely are different from each other, but not in any important way. It is a sadness of our time that we can not easily imagine how to live without joining one or the other of these gangs. The story of Psyche and Eros comes from a time when there were no such gangs, when Herodotus, for instance, could say of the Parthians or the Egyptians, or any other group he mentioned, not that they were unbelievers or heretics, or that they were wrong and stood in need of correction, but that they worshiped the same divinities as the Greeks under different names, and that their practices, however remarkable to a respectable Greek gentleman, had clearly the same laudable intentions as those of the Greeks -- to acknowledge and honor some invisible connection. Even Herodotus, fussy, pedestrian, and skeptical, could see that the gods and goddesses were metaphors, and it was for seeing just that that Socrates was hauled into court. But the invisible can not become visible, and metaphor is all that we can see of what can not be seen.
Richard Mitchell
Notes:
1. Wittgenstein is always provocative. Read anything by him. I am still waiting for a copy of his commentary on Frazier's Golden Bough, another reader's suggestion, but I know that it will cause something interesting in this project. I do wish that we had also some consideration from him of such things as political and pedagogical belief. The little volume at issue here does include comments on Freud which are, in effect, an examination of psychological belief. Those of you who have the time would find it fascinating to compare this section with Hanna Arendt's comments on the idea of the unconscious in The Life of the Mind.
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2. Here is an intriguing new book: The Death of the Soul: from Decartes to the Computer, by William Barrett, from Doubleday Anchor Books. Starting on page 93 you will find a provocative consideration of Kant's argument that what troubles us about lying is really nothing but the inherent logical contradiction of the deed: I say A while meaning, and knowing that I mean, not A. It is my reason that grumbles.
This is a book well worth your time and attention. It is, although Barrett doesn't use this word, about suspicions. It provides also interesting discussions of that new academic frenzy that has bewildered so many of us -- deconstructionism. In the Epilogue Barrett announces that he is coming "to a halt, not a termination -- for the questions involved here will occupy us in a later work." That makes me nervous. I'm pretty sure that I first read Barrett in the early fifties, and I do hope that he is in good health. Do I pray for that? Well, possibly.
- BACK - 3. Lear called me up. He was talkative and enthusiastic. He wanted to read the piece and other stuff from this sheet. He was going to go and speak likewise to some annual convention of the NEA, or maybe the AFT. I forget which. I suggested that he might think again about that. He hinted that he had a new TV series coming along, and that it would renovate the spiritual. I sent him some stuff, warning that it probably wouldn't be what he wanted. And it wasn't.
- BACK - 4. Thinking of those ants that helped Psyche, about whom there will be more later, puts me in mind, strangely, of the first essay in The Lives of A Cell, Lewis Thomas' first book, which most of you have probably read. It was about the mitochondria. It was simply astonishing. It revealed vast new worlds, and connecting paths beyond counting. Go and read it again. I am trying to imagine some sort of curriculum in which children would look back and forth awhile from Thomas' mitochondria to Psyche's ants.
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