The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God (40 page)

Engelmann says that Wittgenstein had a concept that he called “wordless faith,” a conscious effort to live out the implications of the
Tractatus
—that is, to
do
what could not be said but could be shown. In regard to ethics, Wittgenstein believed that any attempt to put them into words, to make of them a doctrine, was invariably a corruption. “The thing to do is to
say
nothing about ethics or religion but simply to act.” (This coincides with Moore’s idea that “good” cannot be defined.) We must remember that it is logically impossible for the sense of the world to be itself part of the world, “since the meaning of anything cannot be part of that of which it is the meaning.”
11

A concern with the mystical understood in this way could make someone religious in a Wittgensteinian sense, but it would be a religion, as he asserted, without a doctrine, even without doctrinal principles. He saw certain similarities between being religious—in the mystical sense he described—and being in love. No one who has been in love asks the purpose of it, or thinks that it can be put into words without losing some of its experiential quality. This links with Robert Musil’s “other condition.”

So, always acknowledging that any attempt to put Wittgenstein’s idea of the mystical into words is by definition self-defeating, his ideal type
of the mystical/religious individual, who did not embrace supernatural doctrines, would be someone who so loved poetry or paintings or teaching that he or she devoted a lifetime to creating, or intimating—in their art or actions—what could not be said. Living at the limits of language, and being aware of those limits, is to live on the edge of a mystical life. At certain points in his career, Wittgenstein seems to have felt the urge to live in this way, that it was somehow a special form of intensity, a life that was somehow “higher”: “The highest cannot be spoken; it can only be done.”
12

He also tackled the question of the soul. He thought that religious forces had taken over two psychological phenomena and amalgamated them. One is the fact that we know we understand ourselves very differently from the way we understand others. We are “inside” ourselves in a way that we can never be inside anyone else. At the same time, and not so simply, he gives this second example: “When we are grief-stricken, where do we feel our grief?” We could say we feel it more over our right eye than over our left ear, he suggests, but we don’t say it because it’s not what we feel. His point is that we don’t have a language to talk about many aspects of experience, not even after all these years of evolution. This is where areas of ambiguity arise, and “soul” is the name we give to this gap in our self-understanding.

The concept of the soul is thus one aspect of the mysticism he identified, perhaps the most personal aspect of his wordless faith. Using his illustration, we feel grief in our soul because we have no other way to describe it, there is nowhere else to place it.
13

WHITEHEAD’S FAITH IN PROCESS

The meeting and subsequent friendship between Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell has become famous. The former turned up unannounced in the latter’s room in Cambridge while Russell was having tea. Wittgenstein spoke little English, but refused to converse in German. Despite this unpropitious beginning, Russell quickly determined that Wittgenstein was a genius, and the Austrian was invited to join the Apostles (see p. 77).

Like Wittgenstein, Russell was an aristocrat. The godson of the philosopher John Stuart Mill, he was born halfway through the reign of Queen Victoria, in 1872, and died nearly a century later, by which time he, like many others, saw nuclear weapons as the greatest threat to mankind. Once described as “an aristocratic sparrow,” he is shown in Augustus John’s portrait to have had “piercingly skeptical eyes, quizzical eyebrows, and a fastidious mouth.”
14
He once wrote that “the search for knowledge, unbearable pity for suffering and a longing for love” were the three passions that governed his long life. “I have found [life] worth living,” he concluded, “and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered.”

One can see why. John Stuart Mill was not his only eminent connection—T. S. Eliot, Lytton Strachey, G. E. Moore, Joseph Conrad, D. H. Lawrence, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Katherine Mansfield were just some of his circle. He championed the Soviet Union, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature (in 1950) and appeared (sometimes to his irritation) as a character in at least six works of fiction, including books by Roy Campbell, T. S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley, D. H. Lawrence and Siegfried Sassoon. When Russell died in 1970 at the age of ninety-seven, there were more than sixty of his books still in print.

Of all his publications the most original was the massive tome that appeared first in 1910, entitled, after a work by Isaac Newton,
Principia Mathematica
. This book is one of the least read of modern times. In the first place it is about mathematics, not everyone’s favorite reading. Second, it is inordinately long—three volumes running to more than two thousand pages. But it was the third reason which ensured that this book—which indirectly led to the birth of the computer—was read by only a few: it consists mostly of a tightly knit argument conducted by means of specially invented symbols. Thus “not” is represented by a curved bar; a boldfaced v stands for “or”; a square dot means “and.” The book was ten years in the making, and its aim was nothing less than to explain the logical foundation of mathematics.

In December 1889, Russell went up to Cambridge—an obvious choice since the only passion that had been observed in the young man was for mathematics, and Cambridge excelled in that discipline. Russell loved the clarity and certainty of math, and found it, he said, as moving as poetry,
romantic love or the glories of nature. He particularly liked the fact that the subject was “totally uncontaminated by human feelings.”

At Cambridge he attended Trinity College, where he sat for a scholarship, and here he enjoyed good fortune, for his examiner was Alfred North Whitehead. Then barely twenty-nine, Whitehead was a kindly man (he was known in Cambridge as “cherub”), already showing signs of the forgetfulness for which he later became notorious. No less passionate about mathematics than was Russell, he exercised that passion in an irregular way. In the scholarship examination Russell came second—a young man named Bushell gained higher marks. However, Whitehead convinced himself that Russell was the abler man and so burned all the examination answers, and his own markings, before recommending Russell for the scholarship.

Russell did not disappoint, and graduated as a “wrangler,” as first-class mathematics graduates are known at Cambridge. But if this makes his success sound effortless, it is misleading. Russell’s finals so exhausted him (the same happened with Einstein) that afterward he sold all his math books and turned with relief to philosophy. He said later that he saw philosophy as a sort of no-man’s-land between science and theology. By then he was aware that Whitehead, now a good friend, was working on many of the same problems, and they decided to collaborate.

The collaboration was a monumental affair, with a few side issues (there are grounds for believing that Russell fell in love with Whitehead’s wife). For a decade the book dominated both men’s lives, and when it appeared in December 1910 it was clear that Russell and Whitehead had discovered something important—that most mathematics, if not all, could be derived from a number of axioms logically related to one another. In the
Spectator
, the reviewer concluded that the book “marked an epoch in the history of speculative thought” in its attempt “to make mathematics more solid than the universe itself.”

After
Principia
, the two men began to go their separate ways. (They would remain friends for the rest of their lives but Russell’s anti-war activities during 1914–18 did not sit well with Whitehead, who lost his son during the hostilities.)

Both now embraced philosophy more fully. Whitehead left Cambridge, after twenty-five years, and moved to University College London; then,
four years later, he was appointed professor of applied mathematics at Imperial College. He stayed there for ten years, producing
The Concept of Nature
and a book on relativity, among other works. In 1924, he moved to Harvard as professor of philosophy, sparking the quip that the first philosophy lectures he ever attended were those he delivered himself.

While he was in London, Whitehead had turned his attention to the philosophy of science, and it was this that led him to reconfigure ideas about God. His knowledge of mathematics, and physics, too, led him to reject the traditional view that each object has a simple temporal and spatial location. Instead, he proposed that all objects should be understood as fields having both spatial and temporal extensions. He illustrated his argument by asserting that there is no such thing as a point, an entity without mass. Nor can there be a line, understood as something with length but no breadth. These are abstractions, not concrete entities. This led him to the view that objects, things, are events, the result of (essentially ongoing) processes, and that this,
process
, is the “fundamental metaphysical constituent” of the world, rather than substance. The basic fact of life is flux: even stones or pebbles, which appear to lie in just one place for years on end, are changing slowly—the whole world is forever “becoming.” This is the essence of Whitehead’s
Process and Reality
, published in 1929 (which started life as a series of Gifford Lectures in 1927–28).
15

The 1920s were a decade of remarkable progress in quantum physics: wave-particle duality was discovered, Einstein’s theory of relativity had been empirically confirmed, the uncertainty principle had been demonstrated and Newton’s fixed mechanical universe was exploded once and for all. It was Whitehead’s view, in response to these latest discoveries, that energy was the underlying principle of reality, that it was constantly forming and re-forming; and this had two consequences of particular interest here. First, that this process, flux, becoming—call it what you will—is in fact the only divine entity that exists, that God in effect set the world in motion; he is the flux that brings everything into actuality, but he doesn’t directly govern the form the process takes—there is freedom in the processes by which energy takes its various forms. And second, that the main concern of traditional religions has been to find some order in the flux of process, in an attempt to make sense of what has gone before, in order to
anticipate what lies ahead.

Whitehead’s writing style leaves a lot to be desired, his arguments are not always easy to follow, but it would seem that he advocated a form of post-Nietzschean deism in which there is a God who creates energy but little more, and in which there is certainly no role for Abraham, Isaiah, Jesus or Mohammed. Perhaps because of his poor style, perhaps because deism is too abstract for many would-be believers, his attempt to marry science and religion has never proved very attractive.

RUSSELL’S FAITH IN KNOWLEDGE AND LOVE

Russell’s message was very different. In books and essays,
Why I Am Not a Christian
,
The Conquest of Happiness
,
Satan in the Suburbs
,
Behaviorism and Values
,
Eastern and Western Ideals of Happiness
,
The Danger of Creed Wars
, Russell faced the problems and opportunities of secular society head-on, in much plainer language than Whitehead seemed capable of. Described by Paul Edwards as “one of the great heretics in morals and religion,” Russell was never a purely technical philosopher. He had, said Edwards, “always been deeply concerned with the fundamental questions to which religions have given their respective answers—questions about man’s place in the universe and the nature of the good life.”
16

Russell’s style was uncompromising and combative. “I think all the great religions of the world—Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, Islam, and Communism—both untrue and harmful.” After noting that a belief in hell was no longer necessary among Christians (their beliefs were getting “smaller”), he dismissed the reasons people have for believing in God. “What really moves people to believe in God is not any intellectual argument at all. Most people believe in God because they have been taught from an early infancy to do it, and that is the main reason.” He thought it doubtful that Christ ever existed, and declared that Christianity was a doctrine that “put cruelty into the world and gave the world generations of cruel torture.” He saw no evidence that religion made people virtuous—in fact, “every moral progress that there has been in the world, has been consistently opposed by the organized Churches of the world.”
17

Furthermore, neither experience nor observation had led him to think that believers were either happier or unhappier, on average, than unbelievers.
18
“The whole conception of God is a conception derived from the ancient Oriental despotisms . . . it seems contemptible and not worthy of self-respecting human beings. . . . A good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage.” All of what he called the great cosmic philosophies showed, he said, a naïve humanism: “[T]he great world, so far as we know it from the philosophy of nature, is neither good nor bad, and is not concerned to make us happy or unhappy. All such philosophies spring from self-importance and are best corrected by a little astronomy. . . . We are ourselves the ultimate and irrefutable arbiters of value, and in the world of value Nature is only a part. Thus in this world we are greater than Nature.”
19

The First World War “was wholly Christian in origin.” All the politicians involved in it were “applauded as earnest Christians.” He also held that the dangerous features of communism were “reminiscent of the medieval Church. They consist of fanatical acceptance of doctrines embodied in a Sacred Book, unwillingness to examine these doctrines uncritically, and savage persecution of those who reject them.”
20