d. Algunas aproximaciones metapsicológicas

•

nihilism; for Wittgenstein, perhaps worse, gassing or babbling.

For Nietzsche, the hidden philosophical act is the exercise of the typological power of the priest.

For Wittgenstein, it is the erasure of the line of partitioning between the sayable and the unsay­

able, between the thinkable and the unthinkable;

it is the will to non-clarity about limits. It is thus also, and here Nietzsche would agree, the blind, properly

unchained

exercise of a language deliv­

ered over to the dream of not being interrupted by any rule, nor limited by any difference.

For Nietzsche, the announced act is archipoliti­

cal, since the pure affirmation is equally the pure destruction of the earthly power of the priest.

For Wittgenstein, it is archiaesthetic, since the principle (which is itself unsayable) of all clarity regarding the limits of the sayable proceeds from the possibility of gaining access to the artistic paradigms of pure showing, which also means access to the saintly life as inner beauty: "Ethics and aesthetics are one and the same" (6.42 1 ) . And, better yet, this belated, almost testamen­

tary declaration (after many abandonments and wanderings what is essential comes back): "I

think ¹ s^ummed up my attitude to philosophy when 1 said: philosophy ought really to be writ­

ten only as a

poetic composition ."3

3 LudWig Wittgenstein, Culture a nd Value, ed. G. H . von Wright, trans. Peter

3

Here, though, is what Nietzsche and Wittgenstein do

not

share : the second is "strongly affected" by the first's hostility toward Christianity.

The connection of Christianity to modern antiphilo­

sophy has a long history. We ^can easily draw up the list of antiphilosophers of strong caliber: Pascal, Rousseau, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and Lacan. What catches the eye is that four of these stand in an essential relation to Christianity: Pascal, Rousseau, Kierkegaard, and Wittgenstein; that Nietzsche's enraged hatred is itself at least as strong a bond as love, which alone explains the fact that the Nietzsche of the "letters of madness" ^can sign indifferently as "Dionysus" or as "the Crucified"; that Lacan, the only true rationalist of the group, but also the one who

completes

the cycle of modern antiphilosophy, nonetheless holds Christianity to be decisive for the constitution of the subject of science, and that it is in vain that we hope to untie ourselves from the religious theme, which is structural in nature.

Winch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1 984) , p. 2 S .

The true question consists in knowing what

"Christianity" is the name of in Wittgenstein's antiphil­

osophical arrangement. It is certainly not the name of an established, or instituted, religion. This is, moreo­

ver, never the case, not even for Pascal, whose hatred of the Jesuits is clearly aimed at everything in religion that takes the form of a

reality.

The "religion" of antiphi­

losophers is a material they grab hold of at a distance from philosophy so as to name the singularity of their act.

Wittgenstein's references to Christianity are first of all literary and Russian : Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. The Gospel itself is grasped as such an oeuvre, the possible example of a principle of clarity as to what the saintly life, that is, the beautiful life, can be.

In truth, "Christianity" names a clarification of the sense of life, which is also the sense of the world (since, as per

5 . 63 ,

"I am my world") . It can then be distrib­

uted along two axes :

1 .

Objectively, we know that the sense of the world does not belong to what can be said, which, in the form of the proposition or of theory, is only scien­

tific. Thus the sense or meaning of the world, situated out of reach of the sayable, can be represented as tran­

scendent (external to the world) . And as a result the name of God is appropriate for it. In a notebook from

1 9 1 6 ,

Wittgenstein writes: "The meaning of life, i.e.

the meaning of the world, we can call God."l We find

1 Quoted in Ray Monk, LudwiO Wittoenstein: The Duty if Genius (New York:

W I T T G E N S T E I N ' S \. N T I P H I L O S O P H Y

the same disposition again in the

Tractatus.

For example

6.43 2 :

"God does not reveal himself

in

the world," to be completed with

6 .45 :

"Feeling the world as a limited whole-it is this that is mystical." Christianity will be the most accomplished aesthetic form for showing that which, under the name of God, agrees with the feeling of the limits of the world.

2 .

Subjectively, Christianity designates life ordered in accordance with its unsayable meaning, the "beauti­

ful" life, which is the same as the saintly life. It is synonymous with happiness. Wittgenstein already noted this in his journal, talking about Nietzsche.

Indeed, he continued: "Christianity is the only

sure

way to happiness."2 The word "happiness" here deSignates life with meaning (the world practiced according to its meaning or sense, which is, as was the case for Pascal, absent from the world itself) .

The whole difficulty (tied, as we will see, to the absence of any metalanguage) lies in the fact that,

since there is no sense if sense, nothing obliges us to Jollow the path if sense, or if happiness; nothing obliges us to Christianity.

In his journal Wittgenstein continues as follows: "But what if someone spurned this happiness? Might it not be better to perish unhappily in the hopeless struggle against the external world? But such a life is senseless.

But why not lead a senseless life? Is it ignoble?"3

We clearly see that under the word "Christianity" a

Penguin, 1 990) , p. 1 4 1 . Hereafter cited as Monk.

2 Quoted in McGuinness, p. 2 2 5 ; and Monk, p. 1 2 2 . 3 Ibid.

battle without norm is raging between sainthood (happiness) and abjection (nonsense, the ignoble, suicide) . In this battle, for which science (that which delivers sense

in

the world) is entirely useless, we can find support only in the aesthetic feeling (the ugliness, which is

seen ,

of life without God) and in the infinite clarification of the sayable, of which we can hope that it nurtures a silent experience of the limits of the world and gives us access to happiness.

In the first direction, Wittgenstein multiplies the self-examinations of his conscience and considers, as Pascal does for the misery of the human condition, the frankly unaesthetic side of his soul. The texts on this point are legion. Let me cite a letter to Russell from

1 9 1 4:

"My life is FULL of the ugliest and pettiest thoughts imaginable (this is

not

an exaggeration) . . . My life has been one nasty mess so far."4 With no less than three brothers who committed suicide, he who would also declare that since the age of nine "he continually thought of suicide,"5 focuses on suicide as the elemen­

tary, almost atomic form of sin (and if Christian sainthood defines happiness, it is logical that suicide, that legitimate consequence of unhappiness, would be the quintessential Evil) . In a notebook from

1 9 1 7,

talking about Dostoevsky: "If suicide is allowed, then everything is allowed. If anything is not allowed, then

4 Letter of March 3, 1 9 1 4, from Skjolden, Norway, to Bertrand Russell, in Ludwig Wittgenstein, Letters to Russell, Keynes and Moore, ed. G. H . von Wright (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1 974) , pp. 53-4.

5 McGuinness, p. 50.

W I T T G E N S T E I N ' S A N T I P H I L O S O P H Y

suicide is not allowed. This throws a light on the nature of ethics, for suicide is, so to speak, the elementary sin."6 Here we see the Wittgenstein of the perpetual

In document Subjectividad contemporánea y efectos en la estructuración psíquica: los fenomenos de desligadura (página 160-171)