Dear All
Another busy week ahead with the initiation of the British Carmelite year of celebrations for the 500th anniversary of St Teresa's birth this Wednesday at Kensington. Next Monday is also my inaugural professorial lecture here at St Mary's. If you want to come and have not booked a place please contact myself or Hannah Bowyer at St Mary's. We are filling up fast so don't leave it too long!
For those who cannot attend the event will be filmed and put on www.smuc.ac.uk/inspire In the meantime here is a small section to whet your appetites.
With all good wishes
Peter
Wittgenstein and Tagore: Two Sentinels on the
Borderlands of Modernity
In a letter to Paul Engelmann written on the 23rd October
1921 Wittgenstein expressed his disapproval of one of the Bengali’s works – the
short play The King of the Dark Chamber,
he wrote:
It seems to me as if all that wisdom has come out
of the ice box; I should not be surprised to learn that he got it all
second-hand by reading and listening (exactly as so many among us acquire their
knowledge of Christian wisdom) rather than from his own genuine feeling. Perhaps I don’t understand his
tone; to me it does not ring like the tone of a man possessed by the truth
He goes on to suggest in the letter that Tagore may have suffered from
a weak translation (something he would correct a decade later by attempting
with Yorick Smythies his own translation of the play) or indeed that the fault
may lie within Wittgenstein himself.
This letter alone goes some way to
furnishing an explanation of why Ludwig was to inflict the Bengali’s writings
on the bemused members of the Vienna Circle a few years later – it was as
though Wittgenstein himself was trying to come to terms with Tagore’s writings
and make sense of how they should be incorporated (or not) into his own
inter-war search for ‘the truth’ (which would include, inter alia, his study of Soren Kierkegaard, Fyodor Dostoyevsky,
Count Tolstoy, Oswald Spengler and James Frazer – reflections upon all of whom
can be found in the inter-war writings).
Accordingly, a few months later we find him
writing to Ludwig Hänsel to say that he had revised his opinion as ‘there is
indeed something grand here’ (See Monk p.408). Within this re-evaluation of
Tagore can be seen Wittgenstein’s inter-war (and inter- Tractatus and Philosophical
Investigations) search for the meaning
of religious truths. So, Having given (as he thought) final shape to his views
on logic and propositional structure in the earlier Tractatus it is almost as if he now sought to find similar clarity
to these broader religious and aesthetic questions, no doubt spurred, I have
suggested in an earlier book, by his encounter in the trenches with, first ‘the
nearness of death’(appropriate for this centenary year of the WW1) and secondly
the re-working of the Gospels by Leo Tolstoy[1].
From this, what we might broadly term his existential approach to religion,
arises one of the observations that occurs in his notebooks at the time, where he
writes:
A religious question is
either a “life question” or (empty) chatter. This language game, we could say,
only deals with “life questions”. (Wittgenstein BEE 183:202) [2]
With this comment in mind it becomes clear which criteria Wittgenstein was
applying to Tagore’s play – was it indeed a ‘life question’ or mere ‘empty
chatter’ (indeed, we could argue that this became his talisman towards all
academic discourse later in life). Initially at first he seemed to think the
latter before moving to the former. What was it about Tagore’s work that could
have elicited this move? Regardless of the writings of both men of letters, the
backgrounds and influences on the two men might immediately suggest a bond, if
not, to coin Wittgenstein’s phrase, a ‘family resemblance’.
[1] McGuinness
and Monk tell the strange story of how shortly after arriving in Galicia during
his war service in 1914 he walked into a bookshop which only contained one book
– Tolstoy’s Gospels. At this time he
was feeling particularly low and in Monk’s words he was quite literally ‘saved
by the word’ (Monk 1990:115
[2] Eine
religiöse Frage ist nur entweder Lebensfrage oder sie ist (leeres) Geschwätz.
Dieses Sprachspiel – könnte man sagt – wird nur mit Lebensfragen gespielt.
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