Introduction:
In the extended entry below, I discuss the somewhat interesting and bizarre reception of George Linbeck's The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age. By and large, this book is received as a treatise on 'postliberal' epistemology. To be sure, while it contains some of that element, to treat it solely as an epistemological thesis is to miss Lindbeck's larger aim: ecumenism and unity in the church. In looking at the larger project of George Lindbeck, one cannot miss his great efforts towards unity in the church: his 'observer' role during the Vatican II council (see this interview with Lindbeck by George Weigel pertaining to this in First Things), his efforts in the Lutheran World Federation (LWF) to help pen the Joint Declaration on Justification between the LWF and Roman Catholic church, and the many articles published in myriad journals and books on ecumenism, which are too numerous to list here.
Lindbeck himself has expressed a bit of bewilderment at the larger response to his Nature of Doctrine, and this can be seen a bit in the Forward to the German edition of the book (found in The Church in a Postliberal Age, ed. James Buckley; the mega-theology-reading Amazon reviewer Halden Doerge expresses this same sentiment in his Amazon review of that book). What appears in the extended entry is an attempt to extrapolate what Lindbeck was doing in The Nature of Doctrine with an eye not only on his use of Wittgenstein, but also on his larger corpus. Like Jamie Smith uses Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault in his excellent Whose Afraid of Postmodernism? Taking Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault to Church, I attempt to show that Lindbeck is, similarly, using Wittgenstein to help us Christians be better Christians; what is achieved here is a ressourcement by way of aggiorniamento (Wittgenstein) with the goal of unity (see Jesus's prayer for unity in John 17).
The political implications of this are vast. In untangling claims of 'fideism' (Hauerwas gets this too), I hope I have helped to open up a way to see how radical unity in the church really is both as a witness to our brothers and sisters in the church as well as to those outside of it. I think the work of David Burrell would be a great supplement and "way forward" here as well.
I would love to hear what you think.
Also, for those interested in the fuller investigation, here is a link to the larger paper:
George Lindbeck After Wittgenstein?
Don’t, for heaven’s sake, be afraid of talking nonsense! But you must pay attention to your nonsense.[1]
In the following sections, I seek to ask three questions regarding Lindbeck’s appropriation of Wittgenstein, which are asked in an intentionally provocative order to ‘fish out’ what I will argue is a more appropriate picture of Lindbeck than is regularly offered. The first question asked is, “Is Lindbeck’s reading of Wittgenstein a ‘good’ one?” After briefly exploring both Lindbeck’s own comments on his own usage and some recent scholarship on Wittgenstein, I will be poised to ask the question, “Are Wittgenstein and Lindbeck ‘fideists?’” And lastly, after these two exercises, my concluding inquiry is, “What, then, is Lindbeck doing with the work of Wittgenstein?” As I hope to show, this use of Wittgenstein as a kind of aggiorniamento or ‘updating’ situates Lindbeck within a much older tradition by way of a ressourcement or ‘returning to the sources’ which will be key for his larger ecumenical goal. Lindbeck’s key text that I will be considering throughout this inquiry is his The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age.[2]
In order to begin with this inquiry into Lindbeck’s appropriation of Wittgenstein, it might be helpful to consider first not whether Lindbeck’s reading is a ‘good’ one, but what he says about his own use of Wittgenstein’s thought. In multiple places, Lindbeck admits as a caveat that his own reading of Wittgenstein may be easily contested[3] or that he has divulged responsibility away from such a thinker, thus insinuating that all liability of appropriation falls fully on him.[4] So, to ask whether or not Lindbeck’s reading is faithful to Wittgenstein may in fact be a non-starter as far as Lindbeck is concerned. Also of note here might be the question ‘which Wittgenstein?’ Indeed, as recent scholarship has shown, there really is no longer a single Wittgenstein (if there ever was), as interpretations on almost all key points are hotly debated.[5]
To begin to ask our question, then, at least one example stands out that indicates that Lindbeck’s reading of Wittgenstein may not be as careful as it should be. This is his brief discussion of private religious experience and symbolizations in The Nature of Doctrine. Here Lindbeck mentions that Wittgenstein conceives of private languages as “logically impossible.”[6] However, on a closer reading, one finds that ‘logical impossibility’ is not a category in which Wittgenstein is working as much as the category of ‘sense’ [Sinn] and ‘non-sense’ [Unsinn].[7] Indeed, he had been working quite closely within these categories since his first publication, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.[8] Alasdair MacIntyre sensed this same tendency to interpret Wittgenstein in manner way and attempts to offer the following corrective:
Wittgenstein…has sometimes been interpreted as trying to offer a proof of the logical impossibility of a private language, conjoining an analysis of the notion of language as essentially teachable and public and an account of the notion of inner states as essentially private in order to show that a contradiction is involved in speaking of a private language. But such an interpretation misconstrues Wittgenstein who, I take it, was saying to us something like this: on the best account of language that I can give and the best account of inner mental states that I can give, I can make nothing of the notion of private language, I cannot render it adequately intelligible.[9]
Likewise, David Stern reminds us that Wittgenstein’s “ultimate aim is to get the reader to see that such theories of inner experience make no sense.”[10] At this point, however, one cannot really continue to pose a substantial inquiry into whether or not Lindbeck offers a ‘good’ reading of Wittgenstein because in fact, most of Lindbeck’s Wittgensteinian allusions are in passing to how he has helped Lindbeck out in regards to language or philosophy in general.[11] However, there is one explicit example of how Lindbeck applies Wittgensteinian thought towards his own project in a specific manner in The Nature of Doctrine, but this inquiry have to wait until the final section of this inquiry which attempts to illustrate Lindbeck’s actual strategy.
My second question in regards to Lindbeck and Wittgenstein regards whether or not they are ‘fideists.’ Often assumed, but without ground, is that because Wittgenstein possesses a ‘Wittgensteinian fideism’ and focuses upon ‘descriptive shows,’[12] likewise Lindbeck, because of his philosophical indebtedness to Wittgenstein, emphasis upon ‘intratexuality,’[13] and talk of ‘thick description,’ must therefore also be a fideist through and through.[14] To begin to unspin this complex, fictional web, I shall begin with Wittgenstein himself. In this untangling, because the issues are so vitally connected, the second part of the question as it concerns Lindbeck will be answered simultaneously in the asking and answering of the question, “What, exactly, is Lindbeck doing with Wittgenstein?” Concomitantly, this inquiry will also address Lindbeck’s wider theological project.
Whence Fideism: the Mare’s Nest
Did Wittgenstein himself actually possess a ‘Wittgensteinian fideism?’ It is here that the work of Fergus Kerr is instructive. In his Theology After Wittgenstein, Kerr points out that most conceptions of Wittgenstein’s original relationship to theology have to do with the assumption that Wittgenstein himself must have possessed a ‘Wittgensteinian fideism.’[15] This term was introduced as early as 1967 by Kai Nielsen in an article of the same name.[16] ‘As an atheist he [wanted] to go on arguing that religion is a massive error…[objecting] to the way that certain Christian philosophers allegedly maintain that religion is a way of life that is only intelligible to participants.”[17] The break in credibility occurred when interpreters such as Nielsen and others mistook religion to be what Wittgenstein meant by ‘form of life’ [Lebensform]. Furthermore, for Nielsen, the ‘language-game’ of ‘religious talk’ was assumed to be autonomous and epistemologically self-enclosed. However, as Kerr rightly notes,
The very idea that religion, or anything else on that grand scale, could count as a ‘form of life’ in Wittgenstein’s sense, although it keeps cropping up, has to be excluded on textual grounds. Once that is made clear, the notion that a language-game is autonomous, in the sense required to generate ‘Wittgensteinian fideism,’ proves equally empty.[18]
To sum up, Kerr has shown that on strict textual grounds, Wittgenstein does not equate religion to a form of life, nor is a language-game as found within a form of life (see below) an autonomous endeavor.
Elsewhere, Kerr notes: “Wittgenstein’s final conception of how human beings mesh with the world, as instinctively interacting agents rather than centres of rational consciousness, developed from his discontent with [Sir James George] Frazer’s conception of religious practices as based on beliefs.”[19] Not only does Wittgenstein not equate a ‘form of life’ to a religion, but it turns out that his formulation of the relationship between form of life and language-games is in fact a reaction to a popular conception promoted by religion itself at the time. To return to Kerr’s argument in Theology After Wittgenstein, he directs attention to the Philosophical Investigations and quickly notes that where ‘forms of life’ are mentioned, they speak of something entirely different.
In §19 where Wittgenstein first introduces the idea, he asks us to “imagine a language consisting only of orders and reports in battle. – Or a language consisting only of questions and expressions for answering yes and no. And innumerable others. – And to imagine a language means to imagine a form of life.” In the second place where ‘form of life’ arrives (§23), this term is talked about as modes of activity that include speaking, including commanding, describing, telling a story, joking, thanking, greeting, and praying. As Kerr interprets it, “To imagine a language is to imagine an activity such as commanding and obeying. Language is the conversation that is interwoven with the characteristic activities of human life.” Thus, “To wonder whether such a vast and internally diverse phenomenon as religion or Catholicism would count seems superfluous.”[20] Yet this pleonastic conflation is exactly what Norman Malcolm has promulgated,[21] helping to spread a misrepresentation throughout Wittgensteinian scholarship. It is the scale of ‘religion’ that is far beyond anything found within the Philosophical Investigations that shows this idea to be pure myth: ‘religion’ must, of course, contain innumerable language-games. Because these Lebensformen exist within a larger culture, it is an impossibility to also declare that a language-game could be strictly autonomous. “The notion that any language-game functions in isolation from others has no basis in Wittgenstein’s work. On the contrary: the famous and beautiful comparison between our language and a medieval city shows how far from his mind such a notion was (§18).”[22] If the chapter on this Wittgensteinian fiction could now be considered closed, let us now consider turning to Lindbeck.
George Lindbeck: Description and Wittgensteinian Aggiorniamento
What about Lindbeck’s ‘thick description’? Does not this also further connect Lindbeck to Wittgenstein’s ‘descriptive shows’ and further, to a ‘Wittgensteinian fideism’ that can only ‘show’ things because they are ‘fideistically’ believed? The direct answer to both of these questions is ‘no.’ The first reason that this is false is due to the fact that the term ‘thick description’ comes not from Wittgenstein but from Clifford Geertz who, in turn, borrows from Gilbert Ryle.[23] Quoting Geertz in a favorable manner, he reveals that ‘thick description’ does not refer to ‘thick,’ hermetically-sealed epistemological walls around a religion, but actually refers to intelligible interpretation within that culture. What is actually pilloried as ‘hermetically locked’[24] is that system which seeks to isolate and generalize across all religions as having the same kind of relationships between symbols and deeds. That which is ‘locked’ is that foundational assumption that all religions function and operate in the same general way, thus abstracting away from the particularities of each. Again, quoting Geertz, Lindbeck wants “not to generalize across cases but to generalize within them.”[25] Earlier in The Nature of Doctrine, Lindbeck makes a similar point when he calls into question “the notion that there is an inner experience of God common to all human beings and all religions.”[26] In contrasting his proposed cultural-linguistic theory of religion with what he terms the ‘experiential-expressivist’ outlook, he says, “the sense of the holy or the sacred that is the identifying mark of religion for much of the experiential-expressive tradition is not a common quality, but a set of family resemblances.”[27] This bears a strong likeness to Wittgenstein’s own attempt, as Ray Monk narrates it, to move away from the Socratic notion
that, for any given concept, there is an ‘essence’ –something that is common to all the things subsumed under a general term. Thus, for example, in the Platonic dialogues, Socrates seeks to answer philosophical questions such as: ‘What is knowledge?’ by looking for something that all examples of knowledge have in common. (In connection with this, Wittgenstein once said that his method could be summed up by saying that it was the exact opposite of that of Socrates.) In the Blue Book Wittgenstein seeks to replace this notion of essence with the more flexible idea of family resemblances.[28]
After citing one of the origins of this idea in Wittgenstein, Monk comments that this hunt for essences is paradigmatic of the “‘craving for generality’ that springs from our preoccupation with the method of science.”[29] Instead, as David Stern argues in regards to investigating practices and rules, Wittgenstein’s own approach is intentionally unsystematic which “holds out the hope of doing justice to the indefinite and multicoloured filigree of everyday life.”[30]
To be sure, as we have just seen with the notion of ‘family resemblances,’ there are other times when Lindbeck might sound as if he is waxing Wittgensteinian. “Scripture, one might say, was interpreted by its use.”[31] Also, Lindbeck says, “the case for the theological viability of a cultural-linguistic view of religion can only be presented, not proved.”[32] The latter quotation bears resemblance to Wittgenstein’s dictum in the Tractatus that a proposition can only be shown and not said.[33] The argument could be made that within the context of the two proceeding passages, Lindbeck is not referring at all to Wittgenstein but respectively to the Reformers’ intratextuality in the former and Lindbeck’s desire to move away from a liberal foundationalism that clings to the philosophical fashion of the day in the latter. On the other hand, it could also be plausibly argued that not only is Lindbeck engaging in the two aforementioned tasks, but he is also waxing both Geertzian and Wittgensteinian. Next, I seek to explore this dimension as well as clarifying as much as possible the previous issues regarding fideism and ‘good’ readings.
“What, then, is Lindbeck doing with the work of Wittgenstein?” Lindbeck answers this most directly in the forward to the German edition of his Nature of Doctrine when he says that along with other thinkers such as Hans Frei,[34] David Kelsey, Edmund Schlink, Bernard Lonergan, and Clifford Geertz, his use of Wittgenstein “is meant to be ad hoc and unsystematic.”[35] An ad hoc, and, as he says, ‘pre-theological’ usage directly implies a higher goal, and for Lindbeck, this is his “commitment to the search for Church unity with faithfulness to historic creeds and confessions.”[36] This, I would argue, is the correct frame to begin inquiry into Lindbeck’s use of Wittgenstein.
Before addressing Lindbeck’s key instance of Wittgensteinian appropriation as it is found in The Nature of Doctrine, a brief word may be offered to clarify and connect the deconstructive exercise above about ‘Wittgensteinian fideism.’ As I have shown, there is no such thing. Therefore, because no such thought exists anywhere within Wittgenstein’s actual thought expressed by his texts, to say that Lindbeck possesses such an abstraction becomes even more absurd. To take this one step further, because Lindbeck’s appropriation is both ad hoc and unsystematic, it follows that the reader does not have to impose a system that will topple if one removes one piece of the ‘whole’: because Lindbeck quotes Wittgenstein from time to time and makes direct (unsystematic) use of his ‘forms of life’ (as we will see below), this does not mean, a fortiori, that he must also be a ‘Wittgensteinian fideist’; there is no logical connection to what does not exist.
The key section in The Nature of Doctrine that exemplifies what Lindbeck is doing with Wittgenstein is found in part II of chapter 2 called “A Cultural-Linguistic Alternative.”[37] It is here that Lindbeck first reveals a specific use of a distinctly Wittgensteinian notion, and that is the language-game.[38] Before assessing what use Lindbeck makes of this, we must first take a look at how religion is talked about in the context of the passage in which this usage appears. For Lindbeck,
a religion can be viewed as a kind of cultural and/or linguistic framework or medium that shapes the entirety of life and thought. It functions somewhat like a Kantian a priori, although in this case the a priori is a set of acquired skills that could be different. . . . Like a culture or language, it [religion] is a communal phenomenon that shapes the subjectivities of individuals rather than being primarily a manifestation of those [inner] subjectivities.[39]
The first thing to note is that Lindbeck likens religion to the Kantian a priori. For Immanuel Kant, the exploration of the a priori was always along an epistemological road to knowledge apart from experience which is in contrast to the empirical, or knowledge a posteriori.[40] Furthermore, Kant’s a priori involves cognition and judgment which exist first as inner realities.[41] While Lindbeck is not specifically interested in epistemological problems per se (although it includes it), what he is interested in is the exterior reality of religion as a ‘communal phenomenon’ which is the pre-supposed, assumed reality that shapes individuals within specific cultural contexts. Two decades earlier, Lindbeck had also shown how a kind of a priori can be found within theory of knowledge of Thomas Aquinas.[42] Like Lindbeck’s use of Kant here in The Nature of Doctrine, he was also employing Kant in an ad hoc manner to reveal the underlying (a priori) assumptions found in St. Thomas “that knowledge of being and of first principles is projected into, rather than abstracted from, sense experience.”[43] The claim being made in Thomas is “against the objective a priorism of Augustinian Platonism”[44] which did try to abstract knowledge objectively from experience.[45] Between 1965 and 1984, we can see that Lindbeck is interested in a similar discussion: both in Thomas and in proposing a cultural-linguistic alternative to religion, Lindbeck aims to show that humans are shaped by external realities both in regards to the intellect and in the wider culture/religion-at-large and its effect on the production of meaning; knowledge and meaning never begin first with the self but are always imparted from outside either through existence itself or through a culture/religion as it exists within that reality.
It is within this understanding that we should approach Lindbeck’s key mention of Wittgenstein in The Nature of Doctrine:
Lastly, just as a language (or “language game,” to use Wittgenstein’s phrase) is correlated with a form of life, and just as a culture has both cognitive and behavioral dimensions, so it is also in the case of a religious tradition. Its doctrines, cosmic stories or myths, and ethical directives are integrally related to the rituals it practices, the sentiments or experiences it evokes, the actions it recommends, and the institutional forms it develops. All this is involved in comparing a religion to a cultural-linguistic system.[46]
To extrapolate backwards: as a religion’s presupposed outward form evokes inner experiences, so does a culture’s behavior elicit inner cultural cognitions or thoughts, and finally, so does Wittgenstein say, “to imagine a language means to imagine a form of life.”[47] Each inner or cognitive state presupposes—a priori—an external form, medium, framework, or ‘religion’ of life such as “doctrines, cosmic stories or myths, and ethical directives.” We should note right away that Lindbeck does not make the fallacy mentioned above, seen in Norman Malcolm, of equating religion with an ‘autonomous language-game.’ He equates by use of simile a Wittgensteinian language-game with rituals, sentiments, experiences, recommending actions, and developed institutional forms. Despite Kerr’s correct insistence that a religion is not equated to a ‘form of life’ in the actual texts of Wittgenstein, we can see that here, Lindbeck is not saying that this is what Wittgenstein actually said; on the contrary, Lindbeck is merely pointing to Wittgenstein in order to say something like: now see how Wittgenstein conceives of the relationship between ‘form of life’ and ‘language-games’? – now imagine that the relationship between a religion and its practices and experiences are conceived very much like that, and you’ve got it! Above, granting out that Lindbeck’s reading of Wittgenstein is not always precise and so allowing him to use him in an ad hoc and unsystematic manner, I would argue that this is indeed an appropriately analogous reading of the relationship to forms of life and language to religion and its practices and experiences.[48] What must be remembered is that Lindbeck is not making textual claims regarding Wittgenstein.
Do not Lindbeck’s language-games within religion sound like Wittgenstein’s “commanding, describing, telling a story, joking, thanking, greeting, and praying”?[49] In Lindbeck’s next paragraph after the above quotation, he names this relationship between the two realities to be dialectical. This is contrasted with a unilateral relationship to emphasize that the relationship is not a one-way street, but this needs to be clarified.
The ‘inner’ person needs the ‘external’ person just as the external person needs the inner person for there to be a dance; however, in the case of the cultural-linguistic alternative proposed, it is the external person who takes the lead in the dance. As Lindbeck points out,[50] what the experiential-expressivist outlook does is say that the inner partner takes the lead over against the external person. Within Lindbeck’s cultural-linguistic scheme, he does allow for the external person within the dance to be influenced by the inner person, but this is precisely because the relationship is a dialectical one. The reality is found within the synthesis, but in discerning this reality, the contention here is that the cultural-lingustic primacy on the ‘outer’ over the ‘inner’—without annulling the inner—is actually the more convincing story.
[1] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, trans. Peter Winch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 56e.
[2] George A. Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1984).
[3] Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine, 24.
[4] George A. Lindbeck, “Forward to the German Edition of The Nature of Doctrine” in The Church in a Postliberal Age, ed. James J. Buckley (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), 198.
[5] See Ray Monk, How to Read Wittgenstein, ed. Simon Critchley (New York: W.W. Norton, 2005). After spelling out that the only agreement concerning Wittgenstein is that he has been immensely influential, Monk states “that what I offer here is only one possible way of reading Wittgenstein” (p. 1). See also Alfred Nordmann, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) and the whole survey of discussion revolving around the Tractatus as well as a similar overview of continuing controversies in David G. Stern, Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 2004). Lastly, see Jeffrey Stout’s introduction in Joseph Incandela, et. al., Grammar and Grace: Reformulations of Aquinas and Wittgenstein, eds. Jeffrey Stout and Robert MacSwain (London: SCM Press, 2004). Referring to Thomas Aquinas and Ludwig Wittgenstein, Stout says, “their intellectual legacies are deeply ambiguous, and have generated much controversy. Even their most ardent deenders do not see eye to eye on how they should be read” (p. 1).
[6] Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine, 38. For Wittgenstein’s discussions on private language, see Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), §243-315. Ray Monk, How To Read Wittgenstein, 87-8 points out that, while §243-315 is typically delineated as the ‘private language argument,’ this choice has some arbitrariness about it as he points to Saul Kripke who believes that the argument actually originates in §202: ‘And hence also “obeying a rule” is a practice. And to think one is obeying a rule is not to obey a rule. Hence it is not possible to obey a rule “privately”: otherwise thinking one was obeying a rule would be the same thing as obeying it.’
[7] E.g. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §245, §247, §252-3, §257, §278, §282.
[8] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness (London: Routledge, 2001). While sense and nonsense are found passim, consider these two ‘book-end’ statements within the Tractatus: in the preface, he says, “It will therefore only be in language that the limit can be drawn, and what lies on the other side of the limit will simply be nonsense” (4). The penultimate proposition reads, “My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyway who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them—as steps—to climb up beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.) He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world aright” (6.54).
See also Nordmann, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: An Introduction for a fascinating thesis which offers a fourth, implicit category between sense and nonsense. The first category comprises of language that describes what is true or false about the world, thus sensical (e.g. “Katie walked through the doorway”). The second category describes language that, while not senseless, does not refer to reality because in either their tautological or contradictory state, “there is no situation in the world that would render them true or false, indeed, they cannot be true or false”(p. 3) and thus communicate no real content (“I know nothing about the weather when I know that it is either raining or not raining,” Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 4.461). The third category consists of sentences like “he is envious of my talents,” which for Wittgenstein, masquerade themselves as real sentences but they do not contain any real grammar and are nonsensical, equivalent to something like “the droofgull yuts bobbingly.” For the fourth category, Nordmann argues that Wittgenstein, in the exercise of writing the Tractatus, actually embodies a fourth, implied sentence: “The Tractatus is written in a nonsensical language and it advances a persuasive argument” (p. 8). Also, especially the last chapter “The senses of sense,” pp. 159-202. To wit: “We…discover nonsense because our attempt to use sentences differently fails to yield sentences that have sense. This does not preclude, however, that these sentences and our failure might somehow make sense” (p. 164). Here Nordmann concludes “that there is indeed some sense that is inexpressible in speech. ‘This shows itself’ (Tractatus, 6.522).”
[9] Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theology, 2nd ed. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 101.
[10] David G. Stern, Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 2004), 174. See also 31-50.
[11] Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine, 20, 24, 107, 130.
[12] Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 4.121, 4.1212, 4.461, 6.124, 6.22, and Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §109, §124, §496.
[13] Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine, 113-124.
[14] See, e.g., the following blatant remark in Daniel Arnold, "Of intrinsic validity: A study on the relevance of Purva Mimamsa," Philosophy East and West 51, no. 1 (Jan 2001): “Despite the sophisticated epistemological apparatus and the eminently nonWittgensteinian realism, then, Alston's position seems to me to be, in the end, vulnerable to the same critiques as can be leveled against the Wittgensteinian-fideist positions of, say, D. Z. Phillips and George Lindbeck” (p. 40).
[15] Fergus Kerr, Theology After Wittgenstein, 2nd ed. (London: Society For Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1997), 28.
[16] Kai Nielsen, “Witgensteinian fideism,” Philosophy, 42 (1967): 191-209.
[17] Kerr, Theology After Wittgenstein, 28.
[18] Ibid., 29.
[19] Fergus Kerr, “Metaphysics and magic: Wittgenstein’s kink” in Post-Secular Philosophy: Between philosophy and theology, ed. Phillip Blond (London: Routledge, 1998), 246.
[20] Kerr, Theology After Wittgenstein, 30.
[21] Here Kerr points to Norman Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir, with a Biographical Sketch by G.H. von Wright (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958), 72 and Norman Malcolm, Thought and Knowledge (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1977), 212.
[22] Kerr, Theology After Wittgenstein, 31. Similarly, we see George Schner protesting against this same idea in George P. Schner, “Metaphors for Theology” in Theology After Liberalism, eds. George P. Schner and John Webster (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2000): “…neither Kierkegaard nor Wittgenstein literally proposed a segregation of Christianity from culture based upon a theory of its irrationality or merely pragmatic character” (p. 25).
[23] Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine, 115.
[24] As quoted in Geertz: “This hermetic approach to things seems to me to run the danger of locking. . . analysis away from its proper object, the informal logic of actual life” (ibid).
[25] Ibid.
[26] Ibid., 40.
[27] Ibid., emphasis mine.
[28] Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (New York: Penguin Books, 1990), 337-8, emphasis Monk’s. Wittgenstein’s articulations of this concept are in Philosophical Investigations, §67, §116.
[29] Ibid., 338.
[30] Stern, Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, 167. Stern then quotes Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §624-5, §629.
[31] Ibid., 118-9. Cf. Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 3.326-8, and Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §43, §138-9. This latter citation in the Investigations is Wittgenstein’s own protest to meaning-as-use.
[32] Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine, 134.
[33] Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 4.1212. See also 4.022, 4.121, 4.461, 6.12.
[34] Fideism seems to be a very slippery and inaccurate term also (mis)applied to Hans Frei. See a description of Frei’s frustration with this misrepresentation of his own work in Paul J. DeHart, The Trial of the Witnesses: The Rise and Decline of Postliberal Theology (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 31.
[35] Lindbeck, “Forward to the German Edition of The Nature of Doctrine,” 197-8. See also the original statement in Lindbeck, Nature of Doctrine, 135.
[36] Ibid.
[37] Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine, 32-41.
[38] Ibid., 33.
[39] Ibid.
[40] Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. J.M.D. Meiklejohn (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1990), 1-2ff.
[41] Ibid., 2-4.
[42] George A. Lindbeck, "The A Priori in St. Thomas' Theory of Knowledge," in The Heritage of Christian Thought, ed. Robert E. Cushman and Egil Grislis (New York: Harper, 1965) 41-63.
[43] Ibid., 63.
[44] Ibid., 45.
[45] Here Lindbeck argues that for Thomas our “knowledge of being is a reflection in experience of the light of the agent intellect, and that this latter must, therefore, be understood as a preconscious anticipation [a priori] or openness to the fullness of being [ens], to God” (ibid., p. 62). This “openness to the fullness of being” is a non-objectivized reality. “Existence…never does become a direct, thematic object of knowledge, not even when it is isolated for attention by the metaphysician” (p. 59). Instead, “Metaphysics indicates its objects by negative judgments,” which we find ultimately leads to Thomas’ concept of analogy (59-60).
[46] Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine, 33.
[47] Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §19.
[48] See Lindbeck’s more succinct declaration of this on Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine, 51.
[49] See Kerr’s summary above on p. 6.
[50] Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine, 34.
eric,
thank you for the thoughtful post. i hope that many people are able to work through it b/c this is a very important topic which has lacked clarity for a while.
Posted by: Geoff Holsclaw | February 05, 2007 at 12:54 PM
Eric,
you do a good job of challenging the charge of Wittgensteinian fideism and its application to L. you point out that W. cannot be charge as a fideist b/c his "form of life" and "language-games" are in no way intended to encompass such large entities as religions or entire cultures. Instead, W. is interested in concrete practices and actions, not issues that could be at the level of what might be called a ‘worldview’.
Of course, just b/c W. can’t be called a fideist, doesn’t means the same charge couldn’t be leveled against L. from another direction. Claiming against the 'experiential-expressivists' who make “generalization among instances” and insisting instead that we should make “generalizations within instances” still sounds to many as a type of fideism (although I do not think so). Or course, if you are committed to the project of “generalizing among instances” then you will always hear the alternative claim as fideistic. Emmanuel Katongole in Beyond Universal Reason does a good job of explaining this concerning W. and Hauerwas.
The real question, which Eric hinted at, is not epistemological fideism, but a supposed communal sectarianism. A liberal/expressivist epistemology of "generalizing among instances" is proposed as the only means of securing a political "peace among diversity". When this epistemological/political perspective hears that instead we should focus on "generalizing within instances" all they can hear in is, at best, a sectarian retreat from a public peace, or, at worse, a violent clash within the public sphere. The hidden supposition of this perspective is that determinate thought (i.e. dogmatic religion) equals violence.
The important question is whether there can be both a determinate religious affirmation (commitment to a concrete 'form-of-life') while being committed to the public good? Or put affirmatively, I believe what many disdain as private fideism might indeed be the embodiment of the public good.
(perhaps I have moved beyond the scope of Eric's post and entertained my own soap-box, but hey this is a conversation after all...)
grace and peace be with you,
Posted by: Geoff Holsclaw | February 05, 2007 at 02:04 PM
Geoff,
Wow, yes, you did an excellent job of getting to the point on a few of those issues, especially concerning alleged fideism in Lindbeck.
And you are right to say, "Of course, just b/c W. can’t be called a fideist, doesn’t means the same charge couldn’t be leveled against L. from another direction."
Very true. I hope I didn't come off too causal in these matters, but hoped to show that not only can neither of these thinkers be considered as such, even then, Lindbeck's use of Wittgenstein has always been, indeed, an ad hoc one.
John Wright reminded us that perhaps the most important thing with Lindbeck and Wittgenstein is that Lindbeck is a "Wittgensteinian-Thomist." The 'W.-' is just a clarifier, perhaps not too far removed from how Hauerwas says that an 'ethics' must always be clarified: whose ethics? (although yes, this is a tad different.) The point is that Lindbeck (and Burrell and Hauerwas) are Thomists. Ecumenical dialogue, and for somebody like Burrell, inter-faith dialogue can find much to talk about and furthermore, much to be friends about because of these common roots.
My aim was to break down the ridiculous-ness of cries of 'fideism', as I have tried to do in other conversations. I'm convinced they are nothing more than academic barbs without much, if any ground upon which to stand. Fergus Kerr quickly showed that there is no such thing as 'Wittgensteinian Fideism', and even though granted, Lindbeck does somewhat use 'religion' as a cultural-lingustic 'form of life', it is 1.) not itself a 'language game' (as language games happen within forms of life and 2.) only an ad hoc use at best, and 3.) provides no real cause for concern, even though Lindbeck admits people might think so, as he admits in NoD.
So, to move into your 'soapbox', neither do I see Lindbeck as communally 'sectarian', either. How can he be?
"The hidden supposition of this perspective is that determinate thought (i.e. dogmatic religion) equals violence."
In a similar vein, a professor at NTS asked the panel at the conference concerning narrative persuasion, saying something like, "if all that is left in saying that all stories are ultimately 'groundless' (in the Enlightenment liberal sense of the ground of Reason), then how can you guarantee that your persuasion won't find its culmination in coercive violence? i.e. Constantinianism in another guise?" (this is paraphrased from a much longer question)
Hauerwas' response to this was simple: Well, I hope Jesus has something to do with this! In so many of these discussions of narrative, the opposing voices assume that the Jesus that will be offered will be another coercive caricature of the real Christ. Sadly, they are not to blame, because much of the history of Christianity hasn't offered much else. But it is here where I think that Milbank and David Bentley Hart's work on Christianity as an 'ontology of peace' can be very instructive, but I would want this closely tied with a more [John Howard] Yoderian version of the Christian ethic (which I have so far seen no mention of in their work or perhaps they lump him in with their whipping-boy 'pacifists' in Being Reconciled and in the latter section of The Beauty of the Infinite where DBH, despite all his language about an ontology of peace, lambasts pacifists -- perhaps he means passive pacifists?).
That's all I have for now. Thanks for your comment, Geoff! I'd love to hear further responses to any of the can of worms we've opened up :)
Peace,
Eric
Posted by: Eric Lee | February 05, 2007 at 05:31 PM
Hello Eric and Co,
If one adopts an exclusivist/inclusive approach to interfaith dialogue does not one have to mention salvation in Christ alone, the eternal destiny of non-believers, hell, last judgement etc to be honest and faithful to the Christian witness in its entirity - such ideas can be deemed as insulting and coercive to other religions yet do we water them down in order not to be offensive? Religious dialogue is a lot easier if we say all religions are a path to God!!
I am an interested beginner in theology but have not studied it academically - you have certainly challenged some of the summary to Lindbecks works I have read in introduction to theology books!
Rodney
PS I am a fan of Hans Kung, Paul Knitter and John Hick but I guess Lindbeck would severly critique them?
Posted by: rodney neill | February 06, 2007 at 07:33 AM
Rodney,
Sorry for the delay in response. Yes, I am pretty sure Lindbeck would critique John Hick, because he engages in what Lindbeck talks about as the 'hermetically sealed' approach which tries to generalize across different traditions as opposed to engaging within 'thick description' (a Geertzian term) within each one and its particularities.
Concerning inter-faith dialogue, I do not have much experience with that. Perhaps one place to start would be to realize that our own Christian faith exhorts us not to judge others, because the judgment is not ours, but God's alone. If love in God with all one's being and love of neighbor (including one's enemy!) are central, and if one agrees with 1 John that says God is love, then I think this highly relativizes thinking about whether one is being an 'inclusivist' or an 'exclusivist'.
I think being honest to the Christian witness "in its entirety" would include a confession of how we have wrongly judged and condemned others to hell, not whether we think people should be subject to our judgment.
But I dunno, people like David Burrell and many others who engage in inter-faith dialogue would be much better able to tell us what it takes to engage in this kind of friendship.
Peace,
Eric
Posted by: Eric Lee | February 12, 2007 at 11:26 AM