Wordless Faith

"And this is how it is: if only you do not try to utter what is unutterable then nothing gets lost. But the unutterable will be--unutterably--contained in what has been uttered!"

--Wittgenstein to Engelmann, April 9, 1917.

Commentary by Engelmann:

In the first place, "ideals" themselves, insofar as they are meant seriously as something to be translated into reality, cannot be communicated by words. They are of the spirit, and can be indestructibly demonstrated only by making them real. What still needs to be said after that by way of showing, explaining, teaching can be done in relatively few words. Only in this way can "the word" be restored to the value, the weight, that belongs to it by right. (133)

The intellectual step forward that is needed is the recognition that if new ways of life are to arise in our epoch of hopelessly tangled and confused ideologies, it is not merely one possibility but the only conceivable possibility that they should arise without waiting for a new ideology which--unspoken--had formed their basis all the time and without which they could not have materialized.

Indeed, the transference of all metaphysical essences to the realm of the unutterable has for the first time created the possibility of a universal human way of life without a denial of metaphysical beliefs [nor, it should be added, a confirmation of them either--Ed.] (134)

So the spiritual task of our time is to find the neutral way of life which can be accepted by either side without denying its ideology, and which will make it possible to erect what is of necessity a provisional emergency building as a temporary home for human society until a genuine edifice can be built to last for generations to come.

Wittgenstein himself would undoubtedly have rejected such an account of his aims as a psychologizing falsification of his ideas. He would have insisted that what he had to say was just what his propositions expressed and no more; and if the propositions failed to express it, then the expression was simply wrong and the propositions concerned were worthless.

What Wittgenstein's life and work shows is the possibility of a new spiritual attitude. It is "a new way of life" which he lived, and because of which he has so far not been understood. For a new way of life entails a new language. His way of life is the same as that of some great men of the past, but its special significance for us lies in the fact that only in our epoch has this example come to point the way to a universal new way of life.

Wittgenstein's language is the language of wordless faith. Such an attitude adopted by other individuals of the right stature will be the source from which new forms of society will spring, forms that will need no verbal communication, because they will be lived and thus made manifest. In the future, ideals will not be communicated by attempts to describe them, which inevitably distort, but by the models of an appropriate conduct in life. (135)

And such exemplary lives will be of incomparable value educationally; no doctrine conveyed in words can be a substitute for them. For even if such communication should succeed to the extent of enabling those who have already grasped its point through personal experience to apply it and realize it in their own lives, the fact remains--of which historical instances abound--that any doctrine uttered in words is the source of its own misconstruction by worshippers, disciples, and supporters. It is they who have so far without exception robbed all doctrines laid down in the words of their effect, and who always threaten to turn the blessing into a curse. (135-6)

Letters From Ludwig Wittgenstein with A Memoir, Paul Engelmann (1967).