In his book Dying for God, Daniel Boyarin discusses the attitudes to martyrdom of Rabbinic Jews and Christians. For Boyarin differences between the Talmud and the writings of orthodox theologians such as Ambrose do not result from the former being any more tolerant of those who are deemed to act contrary to their faith, rather it is in the ‘forms of textuality and authority that they generate and venerate’ (p. 66) that the two groups differ. To illustrate his point Boyarin uses as an analogy Mikhail Bakhtin's distinction between Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Ambrose and other patristic authors correspond to Tolstoy, with much stricter control on their texts, restricting the limits of the conversion within the bounds of orthodoxy. In contrast Rabbinic Jews are participants in a community of debate with an unwritten text which is not controlled by any particular individual or group, but which remains open for future questioning.
It is not my purpose here to debate the accuracy of this depiction, rather it is to draw light to a similar opposition that Tim Labron describes in Wittgenstein's Religious Point of View. Labron's thesis is that we can gain greater insight into certain aspects of Wittgenstein's later thought if we draw an analogy between what Wittgenstein is attempting to do and the practice of religion in the Jewish Rabbinic tradition. For Labron it is a mistake to identify Wittgenstein's thought as religious. Rather, his aim (following Norman Malcolm) is to draw an analogy between his philosophical practice and religion. This is not in order to provide an explanation (which after all would be most un-Wittgensteinian!), but to show certain points of similarity.
In order to draw such an analogy, however, we need some notion of religion. Labron argues that attempts to uncover a general notion of religion which underlies Wittgenstein's thought will fail. First, because they lack any content that is specific to religion alone, and secondly, because they run counter to Wittgenstein's instance that in order to understand beliefs we must look to the particular practices and forms of life within which they have meaning. If a general notion of religion cannot illuminate Wittgenstein's thought could a particular religious practice throw light on it? In contrast to Malcolm, who was unsure of ascribing any particular religious attitudes to Wittgenstein, Labron takes a lead from a remark Wittgenstein made in a letter to his friend M. O’C. Drury: ‘my thoughts are one hundred percent Hebraic’ (p. 4). This remark was made as the conclusion of a contrast Wittgenstein draws between the Jewish emphasis on the seriousness of this life and the Greek emphasis on the ephemeral nature of earthly life in comparison with spiritual contemplation of the eternal forms.
Labron further argues that far from having a negative attitude to Jewish thought (and his own Jewish origins) Wittgenstein placed the highest value upon it. Here Labron distinguishes between the Rabbinic tradition of Hebraic thought, and the medieval thought of those theologians such as Maimonides who imported alien Greek ideas into the Hebraic tradition. In opposition to Greek thought with its emphasis on ultimate foundations beyond our everyday practices, the Hebraic tradition reconnects us with the practices within which our religious concepts have meaning.
This opposition is used by Labron to read the development of Wittgenstein's thought from the earlier Tractatus attempt to show the ultimate logical structure of reality, to the later criticism of philosophies which seek to find external foundations for our practices. In order to throw light on this reading of Wittgenstein Labron contrasts it with that found in Philip Shield's Logic and Sin. Shield focuses on the Tractatus, arguing that Wittgenstein equates philosophical confusion to sin, a result of our disobedience to the limits set by logic. To this end he draws a comparison between Wittgenstein and Reformed tradition theologians, such as Calvin, arguing that just as they place the individual before God's will as the ultimate ground upon which all creation is dependent, so Wittgenstein places the individual before the demands of logical form, the ultimate ground of all meaning.
Labron argues that the search for the logical form of the world in the Tractatus came to represent for Wittgenstein a form of idolatry: an expression of the Greek desire to find ultimate foundations. The narrative of Wittgenstein's philosophical development is familiar, but what is original to Labron is the comparison with Rabbinic thought, as Wittgenstein moves away from the Greek search for pure forms to the Hebraic observation of the concrete practices with constitute religion.
The project Labron attempts is extremely ambitious involving not just a narrative on Wittgenstein's philosophical development, but an attempt to situate it in the context of a dialectic between Greek and Hebraic thought. As such it should be viewed as the beginning of a conversation, particularly as Labron admits that his characterisations of Greek and Hebraic thought represent only certain elements of those vast traditions, and moreover that he is making no claim of direct influence from Hebraic thought on Wittgenstein. Nevertheless it opens up new avenues for investigating Wittgenstein's philosophy and has the great value of connecting contemporary philosophical questions with Rabbinic thought.
Conversations (even friendly ones) need not end in agreement and I shall end this review by raising two challenges to Labron's narrative. First, there are question marks in regard to his reading of Wittgenstein and his religious point of view. He discusses the saying/showing distinction in connection with Shield's treatment of it in the Tractatus, but does not trace its development in the later works. Hence he fails to address those readings of Wittgenstein according to which religion concerns not just particular language games, but the very possibility of language (to equate such a concern to the foundationalism of the Tractatus is surely to pre-judge the issue). In relation to this it is arguable that Labron fails to see the continuities between the earlier and later Wittgenstein and overemphasizes the distinctions. To this end some analysis of the influences upon the Tractatus and particularly that of Frege on the saying/showing distinction might help to clarify the continuity and changes in Wittgenstein's thought.
The second concern I raise concerns the direction of interpretation between Hebraic thought and Wittgenstein's writings. I noted that Labron makes no claim to represent the whole of Hebraic thought; however, my concern would be that his interpretation has been tailored to fit a certain reading of Wittgenstein. Just as, particularly in the reformed tradition, Platonic Greek thought is contrasted with the God of revelation, so here I wonder if Labron's reading of the Hebraic tradition has been conditioned by a desire to find a neat fit with Wittgenstein's rejection of Greek metaphysics (of course the reading of the Greek tradition is extremely narrow, to say the least). Labron must be thanked for opening up these questions and for providing the start of what promises to be a fruitful conversation.
