“Of that whereof one cannot speak, thereof one should remain silent.” With these words, published in 1921, Ludwig Wittgenstein concluded his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and brought Western philosophy, as it had been known, to an end. Thereafter all schools of philosophy should have become centers of silent contemplation, as in Yoga or Buddhist meditation. But, on the principle of “publish or perish,” even Wittgenstein had to keep on talking and writing, for if the philosopher remains silent we cannot tell whether he is really working or simply goofing off. But with Wittgenstein intellectually respectable and academic Western philosophy became trivial. He showed that it could not discuss metaphysics—that the exciting questions of ontology and epistemology were meaningless, and that thereafter the philosopher must content himself with being simply a sophisticated grammarian or specialist in mathematical logic. William Earle (1960) in his witty essay “Notes on the Death of a Culture” described the new academic philosopher as a pragmatic nine-to-five businessman, going to his office with a briefcase to “do philosophy” in the same spirit as an accountant or research chemist. He would not dream of wandering out at night to contemplate the stars or to ponder such matters as the destiny of man and the final significance of the universe. If he thought he could get away with it, he would go about campus in the scientist’s white coat.
As an adolescent I used to frequent an area in London, near the British Museum, where certain shops advertised themselves as purveyors of “philosophical instruments.” Imagining that philosophers confined themselves to abstract thinking and required no other instruments than pen and paper, I was surprised to find that these shops sold slide rules, chronometers, microscopes, telescopes, and other scientific appliances, and that they were old-fashioned and venerable shops surviving from an age when science was called “natural philosophy.” Thinking it over, this made sense. For philosophy, as Aristotle had said, begins with wonder—so that the true philosopher is a person who is naturally curious, who finds that existence is a marvelous puzzle, and who would like to find out (in Clerk Maxwell’s childhood phrase) “the particular go of it.” Thus if philosophy is an attempt to describe and explain the world, to discover the order of nature, it must obviously go on into physics and chemistry, astronomy and biology, not to mention mathematics and metamathematics.
But what is the sense of wonder? On the one hand, it is a sort of aesthetic or mystical thrill, like being in love, or as Whitman felt of the planets and stars that “the drift of them is grand.” On the other hand, it is an attempt to solve the puzzle of translating the pattern of the world into the linear orders of words and numbers that can be scanned and controlled by the faculty of conscious attention. For there are many of us who do not feel that we know anything, or are humanly competent, unless we can make this translation. The difficulty is that, from the standpoint of linear thinking and scanning, the natural world comprises innumerable variables. Using conscious attention, most people cannot keep track of more than three variables at once without using a pencil. A skilled organist, using both hands and feet, could manage a six-part fugue. But the practical problems of life—of politics, law, ethics, economics, and ecology—involve hundreds of thousands of variables with which the scanning pace of conscious attention simply cannot keep up, even when aided by computers. What scholar, except perhaps an authority on the manufacture of Japanese swords in the sixteenth century, can really keep abreast of the literature in his field? How can the President of the United States possibly be informed of all that he needs to know? There simply isn’t time to pass one’s eyes along the miles of letters and figures required, much less to absorb and make sense of them.
This is likewise the problem of philosophy, considered as a verbal and conceptual discipline. As natural philosophy, as a discipline that must always keep in mind the findings of the sciences, it cannot keep track of ever more complex descriptions of the world’s pattern. It cannot give us a Weltanschauung, a total and orderly view of the world, based on masses of intellectually indigestible information. As an attempt to describe or define the nature of being, of consciousness, of knowledge, or even of energy or electricity, we find that this can no more be done in language than one can obtain an answer by spelling out theological questions on the dial of a telephone. Whether spoken or written the word W-A-T-E-R neither quenches thirst nor floats a boat, and, in a somewhat similar way, verbal efforts to describe existence give no understanding of it because you can’t say anything about everything. It would be absurd to say that the universe, as a whole, is moving in a certain direction, for this would require some external point of reference, which would, by definition, have to be included in the idea of universe. In fact, we cannot even imagine what kind of verbal or mathematical answer would satisfy such a question as “What is reality?”
But does all this mean that philosophy, or basic wondering, has come to a dead end? A philosopher, a wondering individual, retains an urgent interest in, say, problems of ethics and aesthetics and is not going to stop thinking about them. And a metaphysician, even though he knows that he cannot even formulate his ontological and epistemological questions, will not easily abandon his amazement at being and knowing. He feels incomplete, intellectually and emotionally hungry, unless he has somehow made sense of being an “is” in imminently painful transition to being an “isn’t,” of experiencing himself as a complex system of vibrations, as a multiplicity of sensitive tubes, tissues, and nerves inevitably doomed to dissolve with the greatest reluctance. He asks, “How and why am I in this delectable-horrible situation?” Above all, he wants to penetrate whatever it is that is the substantial referent of the word “I.” No amount of sophistry will persuade him to set aside these questions of feeling and devote himself exclusively to symbolic logic or collecting postage stamps.
I have said that in the West the preoccupations of most academic philosophers have become trivial. In the university, departments of philosophy are usually underpopulated and removed to obscure offices, and the coveted degree Philosophiae Doctor is awarded to people who experiment with rats, devise computers, or concoct new drugs. This is not without reason, for I am suggesting that, in the West, real philosophy turned into science. To answer the question “What is reality?” we had to go beyond talking and thinking to empirical experiment, to the use of “philosophical instruments.” But marvelous as the development of science has been, those almost ineffable questions are still unanswered, and the technologies based on science are seriously threatening the continuance of life on this planet. They have amplified—turned up the volume on—human behavior, and we are not at all sure that we like ourselves.
For this reason alone there is still an important place for the philosopher as a sort of ombudsman or critic of the applied sciences, and in this sense people like Arthur Koestler, Lewis Mumford, Jacques Ellul, Noam Chomsky, and Buckminster Fuller must be considered more relevant philosophers than Carnap, Ayer, Reichenbach, and Anscombe—to mention but a few of the hard-core academicians. But to any young reader (as of 1972) who has the philosophical spirit, the wonder at being, all these names are in the past. I don’t want to say obsolete or passé, for they are in the same eternal past as Voltaire and Hegel. But today young and philosophically enthusiastic people are reading Herman Hesse, Krishnamurti, D. T. Suzuki, Theodore Roszak, Spencer Brown, Fritz Perls, Gurdjieff, Thomas Merton, and Baba Ram Dass, or, to go back a long way, Meister Eckhart, Lao-Tzu, the I Ching, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the Upanishads, Patanjali, and the Bhagavad Gita. (This is just a sample. For verification, consult your local paperback bookstore or The Last Whole Earth Catalog.)
This odd miscellany of names and titles indicates that the trend of serious philosophy in the West is going in the direction of contemplative mysticism, that is, to an interior empiricism, which may require such “philosophical instruments” as LSD-25, the control of breath (pranayama), or the practice of Zen meditation for the direct exploration of consciousness and its varying states. The problem is that if man, as amplified by technology, is a self-contradictory, suicidal, and nonviable organism, some way must be found of changing or getting beyond whatever it is that we mean by the word “I.” It is already clear from the sciences of biology and ecology that every living organism is a single process or field with its environment. But this situation is not ordinarily reflected or experienced in our normal self-consciousness or sense of identity, wherein we still seem to be isolated centers of sensitivity and activity inside bags of skin. But if one were to feel one’s existence as the organism-environment process, which the biologists and ecologists describe, one would be having an experience of “cosmic consciousness” or of identity with the total energy of the universe as described by the mystics. The “peak experiences” of an Eckhart, Ramakrishna, Hakuin, or (interestingly enough) Schrödinger (1964) and all the accounts of these changes of consciousness given by James (1936), Bucke (1959), and Johnson (1959) would seem to be vividly sensuous apprehensions of our existence as the biologists and ecologists describe it in their theoretical languages. The mystic is therefore feeling himself-and-the-world as it is accurately described by scientists, in somewhat the same way as, by informed use of a telescope, one can get the feel of one’s place in the solar system and the galaxy, or as by frequent air travel one really knows that the earth is a globe.
Now the mystic tells us things that really do not make sense when put into words: that what we do and what happens to us are actually the same process, as are also something and nothing, solid and space; that as the stars shine out of space the world emerges immediately from the Void in an eternal now of which the past is merely the wake or echo, not the cause; that this Void is in fact one’s basic self, but is felt as emptiness in the same way as the head is a blank to the eyes; that each one of us is therefore an aperture through which the universe knows itself, but not all of itself, from a particular point of view; that death is the same total blankness (i.e., our self) from which we emerged at birth, and that what happened once can always happen again. And so on. All this means nothing to a literate intellectual of a Western industrial culture in the same way that descriptions of color, light, and darkness are meaningless to the congenitally blind, or that the most ingenious comments of a music critic give no impression of the sound of a concert.
But this literate intellectual is “blind” only because of the idée fixe that the intelligible is only what can be said. Surely I know how to breathe even if I cannot describe the full physiology of the process. Furthermore, I learned how to swim not by reading about it in a book but by getting into the water and following certain instructions. Thus, as Spencer Brown (1969) has pointed out, one may go beyond Wittgenstein’s limit by analogy with music and mathematics. We cannot say (describe in words) the sounds of music, but by a convenient notation we can instruct a person what to do with a certain instrument—instruction of the same kind as “drop a perpendicular” or “describe a circle” in geometry (pp. 77–79).
Thus in the pursuit of philosophy as a purely verbal discipline Wittgenstein made it clear that because there is no way of answering such questions as “What is reality?” one must regard them as false problems and consign them to silence. But he did not follow his own advice. By “silence” he seemed to mean ignoring or dismissing, and changing the subject of discourse. But if the philosopher, still agog in his heart with the metaphysical question that he cannot formulate in meaningful words, were to follow Wittgenstein’s instruction more literally, what then? He would actually be silent. He would not only (at least for a time) stop talking, but also stop thinking, by which I mean talking and figuring to oneself sub voce. He would hear, see, touch, taste, and smell without comment or judgment, without any attempt to translate the experience into words. If words came into his mind automatically and compulsively, he would listen to them as mere noise, or get rid of them by humming the meaningless sound “Ah!” He would then be in a state to know reality directly so that he would no longer need to ask what it is—i.e., into what verbally labeled class it should be put.
Remaining in this state, he might marvel at how many things there are that aren’t so. He would have no sensation of himself as an ego or observer separate from the whole field of his experience. He would have no perception of anything that is past or future—only of a vibrant eternal now, which, when felt with the ears alone, would be heard as emerging immediately from silence and nothingness. Discussing it later with colleagues who had made the same experiment, he might agree that our normal view of life is backward: that the present does not follow from the past, but the past from the present, streaming away like a contrail. Having really felt what it is to breathe, he might realize that the distinction between the voluntary and the involuntary is arbitrary—to the evaporation of the problems of free will and determinism. But he would genuinely have had to come to the state where verbal thinking has stopped, and consciousness remains bright and clear. He would then be practicing what is Sanskrit is called dhyana, in Chinese ch’an, and in Japanese zen, and which may approximately be translated “idealess contemplation.”
Characteristically, when the professional philosopher hears about this he begins to think up objections without trying the experiment. For he may be sure that not-thinking is a vacuous, anti-intellectual mindlessness from which no good can come, not realizing that if one thinks all the time, there is nothing to think about except thoughts—which is rather like incessant talking without listening. The health of the intellectual life requires precisely that there be pauses in it, and not merely such diversions as sleep, physical exercise, or carousal. Academic philosophers tend to be scholastics like the theologians who refused to look through Galileo’s telescope. As natural philosophy developed instruments to explore the external world, theoretical philosophy needs instruments, or at least experiments, to explore and feel the nonverbal world—if for nothing else than to stop confusing the world as it is with the world as it is represented in common language. W. Pagel (1935, p. 97) and Joseph Needham (1956, pp. 89–98) have documented the collaboration of natural philosophers (scientists) and mystics in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in their common opposition to scholastic rationalism and their common interest in the empirical approach, for the mystic wants to go beyond doctrine and dogma, beyond belief, to the actual experience of the Ground of Being—to use Paul Tillich’s decontaminated phrase for God.
This means, then, that philosophy in and of the schools must turn (and in some places is turning) to what have been called spiritual disciplines, though (and I think properly) without commitment to any doctrinal system. In fact, beliefs are obstacles to dhyana because consciousness must be clear of thoughts. American and British philosophers, with characteristic pragmatism, will of course ask what good this will do, and whether it will provide directives for behavior. But the apparent paradox of dhyana is that if one is doing it for a result, one is not doing it, since its essential attitude is to be aware of what is, not what should or might be. In the same way, a musical performer becomes self-conscious and awkward if he worries about what effect he is having on his audience, and thus the results of dhyana, are always unintentional. Egocentricity, for example, diminishes without any self-frustrating egocentric intention to get rid of it. Furthermore, the temporary suspension of conscious thought acts in somewhat the same way as “sleeping on” a problem, for it frees the brain as a whole to analyze it, replacing the linear scanning of conscious attention. As is well known, the brain, below the level of consciousness, regulates the myriad variables of our organic processes without thinking. Brain operation, unhindered by conscious effort, is obviously the source of the astonishing performances of lighting calculators, and there seems no reason why such subliminal cogitation should not be effective in being addressed to highly complex social, ethical, and legal questions. After all, it is well recognized in the legal profession that a good judge must not only know the law as written; he must also have a sense of equity—that is, a mysterious sense of fair play that no one has ever been able to define, although we recognize it at once when we see it. Such a judge cannot teach equity because, like even the greatest neurologists, he does not understand his own brain, for the order of the brain is so much more complex than what Northrop Frye has called the order of words.1
But I think it must be understood that the order of the brain is complicated because, and only because, we are trying to translate it into words. If I may invent a verb, the more we try to “precise” the world, to discern its clearly cut structure, the more precise we compel ourselves to be. The world retreats into ever greater complexity by analogy with the whirlings of a dog chasing its own tail, and, as Spencer Brown (1969) has put it, “In this sense, in respect of its own information, the universe must expand to escape the telescopes through which we, who are it, are trying to capture it, which is us” (p. 106). In this game of trying to control the controller and guard the guards, the philosophers and scientists, the lawyers and generals, are compulsively locked. Make almost any statement to a logical positivist or scientific empiricist, and he will say, of the first word or phrase in your statement, that he does not know what you mean. He forces you to define it more precisely, and then pulls the same stunt on whatever definition you give him … ad infinitum. In the same way, the law complicates itself out of manageability by trying to define itself, and security systems become hopelessly paranoid in trying to secure themselves. To the degree that you make an object of the subject, the subject becomes objectionable. The end is suicide.
To the extent, then, that professional philosophers have locked themselves into a word game, to define definition, they cannot be said to be lovers of wisdom. They will reason, endlessly, about reasoning; calculate about calculating; talk about talking until no one can keep track of it. This does not mean that no more philosophical books can be written or discussions held. There must simply be something to write and talk about, other than writing and talking, and we can write and talk meaningfully only of shared experiences. Thus to have anything to discuss among themselves philosophers must become contemplatives, and mystics in the strict sense (Greek muein) of those who, at least sometimes, keep silent—not only vocally but also in their heads. Every so often the philosopher must become again as a child, and contemplate the world as if he knew nothing about it, had no names for it and no idea of what is happening. This is an essential cathartic for the intellectual: to listen directly to the universe as one listens to classical music, without asking what it means. This is Yoga (Sanskrit yuj = Latin jungere) in the sense of being joined to or one with what is going on. Patanjali’s definition, yogas chitta vrtti nirodha, means approximately that Yoga is silence of the mind, and this is the way that Western philosophy must go if we are to take Wittgenstein’s aphorism as a positive direction.
1. Put simply—by Young (1960) and in a highly sophisticated way by Pribram (1971)—it is amazing to see how what really amounts to subjective idealism can be stated in neurophysical terms. The structure of the nervous system (which we do not really understand) determines our view of the world and yet is itself, presumably, something in that world. Which comes the first, egg or hen? And what do I mean by “I” in saying “I do not understand my nervous system,” which is presumably what I really and truly am? The limitation of philosophy is that you can’t kiss your own lips, which is another way of saying, with the Upanishads, TAT TVAM ASI, or “You’re IT.”
Brown, G. S. (1969). Laws of form. London, UK: George Allen & Unwin.
Bucke, R. M. (1959). Cosmic consciousness. New York, NY: Dutton.
Earle, W. (1960). Notes on the death of a culture. In M. R. Stein (Ed.), Identity and anxiety: Survival of the person in mass society. New York, NY: Free Press of Glencoe.
James, W. (1936). Varieties of religious experience. New York, NY: Modern Library.
Johnson, R. C. (1959). Watcher on the hills, New York, NY: Harper & Row.
Needham, J. (1956). Science and civilization in China, Vol. 2. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Pagel, W. (1935). Religious motives in the medical biology of the seventeenth century. Bulletin of the [Johns Hopkins] Institute of the History of Medicine, 3, 97.
Pribram, K. (1971). Languages of the brain. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Schrodinger, E. (1964). My view of the world. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Wittgenstein, L. (1921). Tractatus logico-philosophicus. London, UK: Kegan Paul.
Young, J. Z. (1960). Doubt and certainty in science. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
From The Owl of Minerva: Philosophers on Philosophy, edited by C. J. Bontempo & S. J. Odell, 1975, New York: McGraw-Hill. Copyright © 1975 by C. J. Bontempo & S. J. Odell. Reprinted with permission of the C. J. Bontempo estate and S. Jack Odell.