Unsettling Arguments: A Festschrift on the Occasion of Stanley Hauerwas's 70th Birthday

By Cascade Books

Scott Bader-Saye
Frederick Christian Bauerschmidt
Michael Baxter
Daniel M. Bell Jr.
Jana Marguerite Bennett
Michael G. Cartwright
William T. Cavanaugh
Peter Dula
Chris K. Huebner
Kelly S. Johnson
D. Stephen Long
M. Therese Lysaught
David Matzko McCarthy
Joel James Shuman
J. Alexander Sider
Jonathan Tran
Paul J. Wadell
Theodore Walker Jr.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: Jul 2, 2010
• ISBN: 9781621890515

Book preview

Introduction

charles r. pinches, kelly s. johnson, and

charles m. collier

Stanley Hauerwas is something of a character. This is perhaps fitting: that someone who has written so much about character has it. Of course, as Stanley has himself noted, the point trades on an ambiguity. Good character in the Aristotelian sense comes with the possession of the virtues; being a character, on the other hand, suggests uniqueness, even strangeness. Characters are often those whose pattern of thought and behavior deviates from, rather than follows, the mean, as Aristotle recommended. This applies in Stanley’s case: he deviates from the norm. Indeed, none of us knows anyone who is remotely like him.

Hauerwas’s notorious character has sometimes gotten him into trouble. Indeed, it is precisely what has caused many in the guilds of Christian theology and ethics to reject his ideas. How could a man who can be so crude, who can speak in such brash tones, who can so readily dismiss certain of his critics, who writes about justice as if it is a bad idea, and who, on the other hand, refuses in his writing to address matters that matter, like feminism or interreligious dialogue . . . how can such a man be a teacher of virtue?

No doubt the character of Stanley Hauerwas—what makes him stand out among his fellow practitioners of the discipline of theological ethics—has partly to do with his unique personal history. He grew up in East Texas among bricklayers, for whom swearing is an art second only to bricklaying itself. This also means that he came to the academy from a long distance outside it, and its characteristic affectations never wrote themselves very deeply onto his person.¹ Moreover, the deep joy of discovery of the world of ideas—which Stanley first felt when he left off bricklaying to attend Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas—is an integral part of this history and has worked its way deeply into his character. It partly accounts for the brimming enthusiasm—sometimes shown in enraptured bliss, other times in stirring anger—that accompanies virtually every one of his exchanges about theological or philosophical ideas.

But in Stanley’s case it would be a mistake to think that his strange character simply derives from rural Texas and has nothing to do with the character he has championed in his voluminous writing about the Christian virtues. In his final three Gifford Lectures, Hauerwas took up the theology and ethics of Karl Barth, claiming it succeeded where William James and Reinhold Niebuhr had failed. At one point he quotes Barth as follows:

The God whom the Christian confronts is the true God who is also true man. Confronting him, man is confronted by his creature, the neighbor, the fellow man who is God’s child with him and hence his own brother. As he confronts God and is in covenant with him and responsible to him, not only atheism and religiosity and nostrification but also the inhumanity which in the world can compete so strangely with the knowledge of God, and therefore with humanity, can be no alternative for him. In his acts he simply cannot take part in the great vacillation between his being without or against his fellows and his being for them. It is thus most striking that he presents himself to other men of the world as a nonconformist, as one who is zealous for God’s honor, as a witness to what he who is also a man of the world, has to advocate to others of his kind. He does this by offering to them the image of a strangely human person.

²

In his Gifford Lectures, Hauerwas turns Barth’s words toward Barth himself. We wish to turn them once again. Stanley Hauerwas has spent his adult life trying to understand what it is to be—and to become—a strangely human person in Barth’s sense. He is indeed strange, but the strangeness is birthed and nurtured not only in Texas brickyards but also in the church where he confronted God who is also the true man. This has worked its way into the deepest reaches of his character, and it is also the key to understanding the notorious and unsettling character known as Stanley Hauerwas.

•

The editors and contributors of this volume all have come to know Stanley well. This began for each of us when we came to him as aspiring students in theology and ethics. First meetings were often unsettling; the response was often: How could this man be for real? But incredulity turned to admiration and respect as each of us began to learn from Stanley and know the character beyond the reputation. And this is when we began to be challenged and changed in our characters.

As many of us who have gone on from Stanley’s classes to teach our own like to tell our theology students on the first day of class, transformation is the real stuff of education. If you really only want a class that offers you the edge you need to compete for a lucrative job in today’s marketplace, don’t bother with theology. And please also don’t imagine that you’re getting educated. To be educated you must be changed, fundamentally remade by your study with others to see and think about God, the world, and yourself in a new and different way.

If we are right, and if transformation is indeed the measure of education, then Stanley must be an extraordinary teacher—given, that is, the testimony we have just offered as his students. Yet how so? What is so extraordinary about this man’s teaching? What so transformative?

The answer is more elusive than one might think. In fact, sitting in one of Stanley’s graduate seminars is hardly an unequivocally blessed experience. One needs constantly to suppress thoughts such as: Why is this man laughing so uproariously at his own jokes, which seem to be funny only to him? Does he know that we’re laughing as much at him and his strangeness as we are at the jokes that he tells? Hauerwas also adopts the convention, perhaps learned from a year teaching at the University of Chicago, of referring to students as Mr. or Ms. So-and-so. But this means that he must pronounce last names, which he typically either mixes up or murders phonetically. (Indeed, to this day, many of us do not know how to pronounce one another’s names because Stanley’s mispronunciation still rings in our ears.) The reading for the day is almost always absurdly long, and everyone knows there is no chance that it will be covered with anything like thoroughness. Moreover, one knows that the next week will be the same all over again with another book: each week an exercise in woefully incomplete understanding. This is not helped by the fact that Stanley often takes up large tracts of time reading from the formidable stack of unassigned books he always carries to lectures and seminars, often stopping to correct himself where he has stumbled in his reading. When he is finished, students know the text just read is somehow significant, but the length of the quote makes it almost impossible to guess which part. If Hauerwas adds a comment, you have to strain to see the connection. If a classmate chimes in with something, you suppose they are either surpassingly brilliant, since all this seems to them to make perfect sense, or else at least as confused as you are, just a little more foolish about showing it; in either case, you are bound to learn nothing from what they say. And, if you respond, or worse, are asked by Hauerwas to respond, well, this is when you sputter out something barely coherent and then sink back into private confusion, wondering what could possibly be said next that might move things along.

And after the bumbling response we have just described, Stanley’s next words are usually: "Well, isn’t that interesting!"

It is important to understand that this is not some pedagogical method Stanley has adopted, nor is it a form of today’s educational convention of always praising and pleasing the customer/student. Stanley is telling the truth: he does indeed find what you said interesting. Of course, what happens next is that Hauerwas takes your comment somewhere you had no idea it could go, which can be either a happy or unhappy destination. (For instance, sometimes he will note, typically [but not always] in a kindly way, that you have done little else than display the presumptions of your age.)

Interesting is perhaps Stanley’s favorite word.³ This is partly because Stanley is interested in so much, as his incredibly broad and voracious reading habits attest. And spoken in seminar, Hauerwas’s interesting is almost always an invitation to think together. It grasps some point that seems, perhaps even to the speaker, utterly isolated and confused, and throws it into the middle of a conversation. He does this not only for the sake of the interesting idea but also for the sake of the student whose idea it is. He cares not just about what is thought and said, but about those who say and think it. If you are his student, this means he cares about you. And when he throws your idea (or his version of it) into the center of the conversation, he means to put you there too.

Here the transformation from bumbling student to fellow scholar (and friend) begins. You come to recognize that you are really are in the midst of a conversation that Stanley has been having with his students and many others for the past forty-five years. He thinks you are interesting.

From this point forward, Stanley will never let up unsettling you, reminding you in any number of ways that you are in the middle of an ongoing theological conversation. Indeed, if it were only for a moment in a graduate seminar that you were taken in, it could not last. As Hauerwas knows from Aristotle, one sparrow does not make a spring. You need to develop habits of thought—and, yes, work—that can sustain you in the midst of this theological conversation. You will need to expand your reading (or remediate the weak preparation you brought to graduate school). As he throws you into the deep end of theological and philosophical works you were missing in those readings courses for which he always somehow found time, he assumes that by virtue of the fact that you and he are now reading and talking together that you are interested and qualified to read whatever else he happens to be reading or writing at the time. And so begins a cascade of books and articles thrown your way.

Among these are essays from Stanley’s own pen that are in a remarkably disordered condition. This is a stunning fact about Stanley, likely both a learned virtue and a divine gift, that none of us have ever seen so plainly displayed in any other academic, nor been able ourselves to replicate. Stanley Hauerwas will gladly show you anything and everything he has written, no matter its shape.

It is said of C. S. Lewis that he almost never had to revise a sentence. Thoughts flowed with order, beauty, and precision directly from his mind to the page. This was a remarkable gift. But think what it must have been like to be one of Lewis’s students. How could one ever hope to match such a master? In Stanley’s case, the incomplete and disorganized half-essays that frequently turn up in our mailboxes function as another invitation to think together. Indeed, they embolden his students. In the preface to his many books, Hauerwas always thanks any number of students who have, he sometimes says, saved me from a host of errors. This is not patronizing display. We the editors and contributors to this volume have all at some point poured over raw, unfinished essays by Stanley and brought back copies to our teacher full of corrections and suggestions for improvement. And many of the things we have marked in the margins have in fact made their way into his books.

What we hope is emerging is a portrait of a teacher whose character is uniquely and remarkably shaped so as to gather a rag-tag group of graduate students and to set them to work, together, on thinking theologically about ethics. He has taught us that this is genuinely work that requires daily dedication and sacrifice. None of us outworks Stanley, even now at seventy years old. But in the challenge to tend to (and love) our students while also reading new things and writing as we can, his example of vigor, passion, and engagement sets the standard that is always before us.

He has also taught us that the work of theological ethics necessarily involves critical thought, which means, as he has so often encouraged us, that we must criticize him. One of the things that makes Stanley and his work so unsettling is that he places the pursuit of truth before every sentimental piety. Nice people worry about offending others. Stanley does not. He has often joked, Why say something politely, when you can say it offensively? That American Christians are more likely to be offended by someone saying shit in church than we are by followers of Jesus often hating and wanting to kill their enemies is one of the things that Stanley has strived to make increasingly uncomfortable for his brothers and sisters in American Christianity. This is in fact one of his most important ways of serving the church—he works to unsettle those things that have no basis in, and that might well contradict, the gospel of Jesus Christ. This too is why we seek to honor Stanley by arguing with him; we want to unsettle any of his arguments that seem to be out of step with the gospel. Were we to place our love for Stanley above the truth about God we seek in common, we would have failed to receive one of his most important lessons.

In his Confessions, Augustine tells of the realization that came over him when he first read Cicero. To Augustine’s surprise, Cicero was not concerned in the Hortensius to make his readers a member of his school of thought. Rather his deepest concern was to hold up to them a vision of the truth, to exhort them to put aside whatever stood in their way so that they could wholeheartedly pursue it. Stanley Hauerwas is so often pegged as such a polemicist and partisan that it is easy for those who do not know him well to assume that his main concern for his students is that they become members of the Hauerwas School of theological ethics. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, what Stanley has always displayed to his students is that not only they but he, Stanley himself, is charged, equally and together, with no more nor less than the task of pursuing the truth wherever it may be found. This is a charge that long predates Stanley Hauerwas, and will long outlast him, a truth upon which Stanley has always rested his hope. (Perhaps it is with him even more strongly now that he has reached his allotted span of seventy years and knows he has no biblical right to expect any more.)

It was with this in mind that we first settled on the idea that this volume of essays in honor of Stanley Hauerwas, written by eighteen of his students, should have the unifying focus of the critical engagement with certain key features of his work. Each essayist was given the task of describing and reviewing some important trajectory in Stanley’s thought and then testing it with what they understood to be the best and most trenchant criticism available. We hope together to honor him by showing him where he might have gotten it wrong and by doing what we can to move on to something truer. This is a fitting gift only if one believes fully in the truth. And there is no doubt in our minds that this conviction sustains the character of our strange and remarkable teacher, who is much beloved by us all. We hope the book might contribute in some small way to that great work of unsettling arguments about which we have learned so much from Stanley Hauerwas.

•

While this critical focus unites all the essays, the type and degree of criticism varies from essay to essay. Additionally, the foci of the essays are diverse, for Stanley has written so much about so much. We have assembled them into four broad categories, knowing that some of the essays could be at home in more than one. The first group, which we have titled Influences, includes essays by Peter Dula on how and how well Hauerwas has used the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, by Frederick Christian Bauerschmidt on Hauerwas and Aquinas, by D. Stephen Long on how much and how well Hauerwas has understood and used the theological tradition from Duns Scotus forward (Steve’s is an essay that might have been place in another section since it is much concerned with a theological appraisal of economic issues), and finally by J. Alexander Sider, who critically explores the relation between Hauerwas’s work and that of his friend John Howard Yoder.

The second group, Politics, contains several essays that treat obviously political topics. William T. Cavanaugh engages Hauerwas and one of his most formidable contemporary critics, Jeffrey Stout, on Christianity’s relationship to democracy; Daniel M. Bell Jr. engages Hauerwas on war; and Theodore Walker Jr. revisits Hauerwas’s critique of natural theology in connection with Martin Luther King’s sermonic appeals to justice. Of course, if, as Hauerwas thinks, Jesus is political, then there is more to politics than traditionally meets the eye. The second group of essays thus also includes an essay by M. Therese Lysaught that illumines the liberal character of Hauerwas’s interest in medical ethics, as well as a contribution by Michael Baxter that rethinks Hauerwas’s treatment of the church as polis.

The third group of contributions, Bodies, attends to the importance of fleshly particularlity in Hauerwas’s work. Scott Bader-Saye takes up the repeated reference to Jews and Jewish bodies in Hauerwas’s work, and he makes a case for the significance of Hauerwas’s thought being haunted by the Jews; David Matzko McCarthy looks at that particular constellation of bodies known as the family and wonders about a road suggested but not taken in Stanley’s thought—the redemption of the natural. Jana Marguerite Bennet works at the intersection between feminist theology and Hauerwas’s contribution to disability studies to call into question the word on the street about Duke being an inhospitable place for women. Jonathan Tran closes out the third section by acknowledging Hauerwas’s racism, while also affirming the importance of Stanley’s patient refusal to say more than he should on the subject.

The fourth and final section, Practices, marks the Aristotelian turn in Hauerwas’s thought, and, naturally enough, begins with a contribution by Paul J. Wadell on friendship and Stanley Hauerwas as a friend. Chris Huebner explores Stanley’s way of reading, particularly in light of critiques that his readings of Milbank and MacIntyre are imprecise—or are they instead charitable? Kelly Johnson examines Stanley’s appeals to liturgy as a formative practice, connecting its weaknesses to his practices of truth telling, while Joel Shuman reflects on craft, including both bricklaying and worship, as a particularly rich category for further development. Finally, Michael Cartwright reflects on Stanley as an academic and an advocate for university life, although one who has engaged continually in arguments about the nature of Christian higher education.

•

Together, the editors and contributors celebrate and thank God for the remarkable witness that is Stanley Hauerwas, whose friendship each of us counts as among the greatest gifts of our lives. He makes us put out into the deep with him and expects us to join him there in the joyful and sometimes terrible work of speaking truthfully about God. He is a faithful (if not comfortable) friend. This volume is our opportunity to say thank you to our teacher and to testify to how he has helped form us as scholars and transform us as Christians. The arguments and friendships that Stanley has drawn us into continue to unsettle our lives.

How interesting indeed.

1. This is certainly Stanley’s self-perception, visible throughout his memoir, and one with which we largely agree. Yet in this introduction to a book that seeks to honor Stanley by arguing with him, it is worth pointing out that certain of Stanley’s controversial theological positions—for example, his stance on homosexuality—sit quite comfortably with his secular academic social location.

Stanley himself poignantly narrates an episode from his early academic years in which he discovered that his academic formation was alienating him from the gun culture of his Texan upbringing. Upon seeing his father’s masterful restoration of the stock of a vintage deer rifle, Hauerwas blurted out: Daddy, you realize that someday we are going to have to take these goddamn things away from you people. Stanley now views this response with disdain: Talk about becoming an Eastern shit. See Hannah’s Child: A Theologian’s Memoir (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010) 34. It’s fascinating that Stanley said this to his father before encountering the work of John Howard Yoder—before, in other words, becoming a pacifist. Ironically, Yoder’s influence would make it increasingly difficult for Stanley to say things like this to and about people with guns. It’s thus arguably the case that Yoder’s pacifism, as much as Stanley’s working-class roots, shielded him from being too deeply inscribed by academic affectations.

2. Karl Barth, The Christian Life: Lecture Fragments, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1981) 203–4; cited in Stanley Hauerwas, With the Grain of the Universe: The Church’s Witness and Natural Theology (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2001) 196.

3. The word is, in fact, the final word in Stanley’s memoir: But in fact what I have learned is quite simple—I am a Christian. How interesting (Hannah’s Child, 284).

I: Influences

1

Wittgenstein among the Theologians

peter dula

In Wittgenstein’s work, as in skepticism, the human disappointment with human knowledge seems to take over the whole subject. While at the same time this work seems to give the impression, and often seems to some to assert, that nothing at all is wrong with the human capacity for knowledge, that there is no cause for disappointment. . . . To me this fluctuation reads as a continuous effort at balance, or longing for it, as to leave a tightrope; it seems an expression of that struggle of despair and hope that I can understand as a motivation to philosophical writing.– I am led again to recognize, and again with no little astonishment, how at odds I find myself with those who understand Wittgenstein to begin with, or assert thesis-wise, the publicness of language, never seriously doubting it, and in that way to favor common sense. I might say that publicness is his goal. It would be like having sanity as one’s goal. Then what state would one take oneself to be in?

¹

Stanley Hauerwas is most famous for making clear the way Christian communities are formed by the Christian story, the kinds of practices that this story entails,² and the way those practices frequently place it in opposition to the American story. That achievement was made much easier for him by the work of Alasdair MacIntyre under whose tutelage Hauerwas became known as the theological voice of communitarianism.³ Yet for all his emphasis on communitarian key words like community, story, practice and tradition, some of the most interesting characters in Hauerwas’s texts have explicitly rejected the church community and its stories and practices. The most obvious case may be in Naming the Silences. There we have the usual Hauerwasian formulas: We cannot afford to give ourselves explanations for evil when what is required is a community capable of absorbing our grief;⁴ what we lack is the wisdom and skills of a community constituted by a truthful narrative that can comprehend such deaths without denying their pointlessness.⁵ But they are muted by the fact that fully one-third of the book is devoted to the patient re-telling of Peter DeVries The Blood of the Lamb, the story of the relationship between Don Wanderhope and his 11-year-old daughter dying of leukemia. Wanderhope is the hero of Hauerwas’s book despite the fact that he trusted few people and no church,⁶ is uneasy with Christian language, and does not participate at all in most recognizable ecclesial practices. He is just another lost and lonely twentieth century literary figure, struggling with belief and unbelief in the face of modern technology and bureaucracy and occasionally fortunate enough to struggle in the company of a friend, lover or daughter. The most Hauerwas can say about Wanderhope’s Christianity could be said of the majority of Americans of his generation: because he grew up in a staunchly Calvinist family, he swims in the sea of faith.

⁷

Perhaps more striking, Hauerwas has explicitly identified himself with Everett Chance, the articulate and obnoxious anti-war atheist of David James Duncan’s frankly pluralist novel, The Brothers K.⁸ By pluralist I don’t just mean that Duncan has been clear about his own idiosyncratic combination of Jesus, Rumi, and the Buddha, but that the Chance family has a fundamentalist mother and a father is just as devoutly committed to the religion of baseball. Everett, the oldest of the Chance brothers, is also the most clear about his antipathy to the church.

How shall we understand Hauerwas’s affection for these characters in light of his contempt for individualism and his (according to some) account of community that seems to suffocate just such characters? What should we make of their contempt for church in light of Hauerwas’s liturgy based ethics course?⁹ One way, and perhaps the most Hauerwasian way, to understand this would be as examples of Hauerwas’s low opinion of belief and subjectivity.¹⁰ It is not beliefs, but practices that matter. Don Wanderhope and Everett Chance are proof of the formative power of community, story, and practice in spite of their personal rejection of it. Without ever exactly denying such a reading, I want to let these examples point in a different direction, towards an account of community in which Wanderhope and Chance (and Hauerwas) are indispensable. Hopefully such an account will serve to strengthen an account of community that sometimes threatens to obscure individuality.

I begin with the suspicion that American theologians frequently identified with Wittgenstein and postliberalism, such as Hauerwas, George Lindbeck, and James McClendon, have lost, or never gained, the balance that Stanley Cavell, his greatest reader, claims (in my epigraph) is essential to Philosophical Investigations. That is, I suspect that those theologians never seriously doubt the publicness of language and are rarely disappointed with human knowledge. In other words, skepticism, for them, is not a threat to be taken seriously. Moreover, this is the case because their reliance on a particular account of community keeps the publicness of language from coming into question. In this essay I use (Cavell’s) Wittgenstein to make it more difficult to assert the importance of community, practice, and tradition in Christian ethics, not because I think they are unimportant, but because they are too important to get wrong.

I call this a suspicion because Lindbeck and Hauerwas do not write about Wittgenstein.¹¹ Lindbeck calls Wittgenstein a major stimulus to my thinking.¹² and occasionally refers to things like language-games and forms of life but in ways that assume we all know what Wittgenstein meant by them. Neither has Hauerwas published any extended reflections on Wittgenstein though he grants him significant influence over his work writing, Wittgenstein ended forever any attempt on my part to try to anchor theology in some general account of ‘human experience,’ for his writings taught me that the object of the theologian’s work was best located in terms of the grammar of the language used by believers.¹³ Therefore what follows will be less a report on what they say about Wittgenstein and more a reconstruction of the background that might make sense of their claims for his influence.

¹⁴

Theology after Wittgenstein

What is Wittgenstein supposed to have done for theology? What was it about Philosophical Investigations that was so important to postliberalism? For Lindbeck and Hauerwas, Wittgenstein helped save theology from having to rely on foundationalist defenses of Christian faith and practice, whether in cognitive-propositionalist or experiential-expressivist forms.¹⁵ In particular, the old liberal reliance on the individual’s self-authenticating religious experience, which depended upon a Cartesian account of selfhood, is dismantled. With the rise of modern science, so the story goes, theology was forced to concede any authority in matters of fact. Its only province became interiority and thus experience became the essence of religion. Doctrine and worship, and anything else which differentiates one religion from another, were diverse ways of thematizing a universal core religious experience. Here we are all like the child Augustine in the opening of the Investigations. There is something inside us, already fully formed, but still struggling to express itself, to make itself public. In the opening of Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein famously demonstrated how poorly Augustine understood the acquiring of a language and was able to show that we are constituted by language and that acquiring a language includes a great deal more than ostensive definition. It includes learning an entire set of skills (like naming and pointing). Further, unlike the case of Augustine, language shapes our subjectivity rather then being a vehicle for an already shaped subjectivity. The basic postliberal move was to say the same thing about religion by showing how experiential-expressivism repeated the mistake Wittgenstein exposed in Augustine, only now in the context of religion understood as cultural-linguistic practice. The experience of the saints or of William James’ heroes were not pre-religious but were dependent upon and shaped by the practices in which the person was engaged. As Lindbeck put it, Like a culture or language, [religion] is a communal phenomenon that shapes the subjectivities of individuals rather than being primarily a manifestation of those subjectivities.

¹⁶

Another, related, appeal to experience could be found in the revisionist theologies of the 1970s and 80s. For David Tracy, Gordon Kaufman, or James Gustafson, theology was tested by appeals to experience and found to be wanting in many respects because doctrinal claims were often unintelligible to the experience of someone called modern man. To do theology in this manner meant to offer defenses, explanations, or revisions of theological claims in language that were accessible to those outside what Tillich once called the theological circle. Theology was to be, in Kaufman’s words, a generally significant cultural enterprise with universal and public standards, not a parochial or idiosyncratic activity of interest only to special groups.¹⁷ To this the Wittgensteinian theologian learned to simply respond, Of course they will find much of this unintelligibly parochial. Religion is a ‘form of life,’ consisting of particular language games, distinct from the form of life called ‘modernity’ or ‘liberalism’ and so it should not be surprising that it is, as yet, unintelligible to them. In fact it is a testimony to Christian distinctiveness. Experiential-expressivism’s failure to properly attend to such distinctions was a denial of the human. The particularities that are constitutive of each of us were made to disappear into the universal Cartesian self.

Forms of Life

This prompted a renewed attention to the church and to liturgy. Fergus Kerr’s work on Wittgenstein is admirable in part because he is patient enough to resist the rapid move to ecclesiology made in Lindbeck and Hauerwas. But while Kerr doesn’t say a great deal about church in Theology After Wittgenstein, his reading displays the kind of move that made the turn to church possible. For example, Kerr writes that Wittgenstein shows that there is nothing inside one’s head that does not owe its existence to one’s collaboration in a historical community. Or, Wittgenstein reminds us of our dependence upon the community. The point of the private language fantasy is . . . to reaffirm the indispensability of belonging to a community.¹⁸ Part of the great usefulness of Wittgenstein to theologians who are trying to recover a thicker ecclesiology was that they were able to insert church where Kerr has community. The church is the community in which a distinct set of practices and language games making up a form of life are learned and taught. The Wittgensteinian assault on privacy seemed to entail some variety of communitarianism. So James McClendon thinks he must find a community for Wittgenstein (his students), famous for his isolated, solitary lifestyle, as if language’s publicness was some kind of imperative to extroversion.¹⁹ Unlike Kerr, who makes clear that a religion could never be the sort of thing Wittgenstein meant by form of life, for these theologians, religions or cultures just obviously qualify as forms of life.

²⁰

It would be a mistake to say that the postliberals have gotten Wittgenstein wrong. After all, the Investigations does offer fairly clear critiques of pre-linguistic experience and of conventional accounts of privacy. Yet this reading of Wittgenstein also seems to miss something. That something may be come apparent if we attend to two aspects of Cavell’s reading: the first with regard to forms of life, the second with regard to Augustine. Cavell has been suspicious of readings of forms of life that focus on the ethnographical to the neglect of the natural or the biological, or as he will put it, not forms of life but forms of life. He writes,

The idea is, I believe, typically taken to emphasize the social nature of human language and conduct, as if Wittgenstein’s mission is to rebuke philosophy for concentrating too much on isolated individuals. . . . Surely this idea is not wrong, and nothing is more important. But the typical emphasis on the social eclipses the twin preoccupation of the Investigations, call this the natural. [See Philosophical Investigations, §185 and §206 and p. 230]. . . . Here what is at issue are not alone differences between promising and fully intending, or between coronations and inaugurations, or between barter and a credit system, or between transferring your money or sword from one hand to another and giving your money or sword into the hands of another; these are differences within the plane, the horizon of the social, of human society. The biological or vertical sense of form of life recalls differences between the human and so-called lower or higher forms of life, between, say, poking at your food, perhaps with a fork, and pawing at it, or pecking at it.

²¹

In that light, Wittgenstein’s frequent uses of tribes are not meant to be examples of different forms of life but varieties of a problem we see repeatedly with our neighbors, families and congregations.²² Here is Cavell commenting on one of Wittgenstein’s examples of an unintelligible culture, examples that the theologians see as examples of forms of life, "These examples are all very upsetting. Is it because these people are not really intelligible to us? No doubt we cannot communicate with them—at least in certain areas. But that is not an unfamiliar fact, even with our friends.²³ The form of life that is Wittgenstein’s constant preoccupation is the human form of life. ‘The group’ which forms [Wittgenstein’s] ‘authority’ is always, apparently, the human group as such, the human being generally."²⁴ Reading forms of life as plural encourages the difficulties of understanding each other (within the form of life called human), which so haunt the Investigations, to become obscured by the difficulties of church-world communication.

Wittgenstein’s Augustine

We find compelling evidence for the centrality of this theme in the very first lines of the Investigations, for it opens with the fantasy of a child struggling to make himself understood to, presumably, family. So it may be useful here to turn to a question that preoccupied Cavell more than any other Wittgenstein commentator I am aware of: how does Philosophical Investigations begin?

It does not open with a philosopher’s words. I mean, of course, philosopher in the sense that they are not the words of Russell, Frege, Carnap, or any other twentieth century analytic philosopher. That is, if we accept an opposition between philosophical words on holiday and ordinary language that is at home, Augustine’s words are ordinary. But that may still miss something crucial, the way this opening blurs that distinction and guards against making it too quickly. Cavell reports having read the Confessions prior to an encounter with Wittgenstein without thinking to pause at Augustine’s description of infant language learning. Most people have understood these words to be ordinary language. It took Wittgenstein pausing here to show us that this is language on holiday. That ought to alert us to something: "If we are stopped to philosophize by these words, then what words are immune to philosophical question?"

²⁵

So already in the opening lines, Wittgenstein is teaching us how to read him. He is claiming the genre of confession.²⁶ He will be as curious about his own words as Augustine’s. When he keeps asking what do we say when? he really wants to know. He is not simply making a point for the ordinary against the metaphysicians. The questions—What should we say if . . . ?—seem to be rhetorical.  Any native speaker knows. But then why not just tell us? Why are there so many questions marks in this text? They are requests for the person to say something about himself, describe what he does. So the different methods are methods for acquiring self-knowledge.

²⁷

I hope this goes some distance in explaining why Cavell invariably insists on turning Wittgenstein’s criticism into self-criticism. Over and over again, Cavell takes Wittgenstein’s remarks about others and turns them on ourselves.²⁸ The tribes are not other cultures or other religions. They are us. The child Augustine is also us. The Investigations is a gallery of self-portraits. Some of them hold us captive. Some of them can liberate us from that captivity. But they are all us. Exclusively cultural readings of forms of life turn into modes of avoiding Wittgensteinian self-criticism.

But the most striking thing, for Cavell, about the opening of the Investigations is that it begins with a child. More specifically, with an adult, Augustine, remembering his childhood. That child, Cavell claims against the more common reading, is not just a springboard for reflections that end up leaving him behind.²⁹ The child remains present throughout the entire text. Cavell writes,

The child reads to me, among other ways, as the witness of its elders’ lives, an image of children as beneficiaries and victims of an unclear world we have to leave to them. The rest of the Investigations is then a record of our discovering the capacity to come specifically, concretely, patiently, to their aid in clarifying it, something not perfectly distinguishable from coming to ourselves.

³⁰

Wittgenstein chooses to open a book whose fundamental preoccupation is catechesis with a scene of instruction, one that displays its difficulties. "Haunting the entire Investigations, the opening scene and its figure of a child signals that the question ‘where did you learn—what is the home of—a concept?’ may at any time arise."³¹ And not just for children—At any time I may find myself isolated.³² That sense of loneliness, the hint of permanence in the child’s isolation³³ in the passage from Confessions is one thing that the investigation of the ordinary discovers. Picture the child. Perhaps, as Cavell suggests, as someone you might come across in a Beckett play. If you notice how his elders don’t help him at all, if you notice that they pay no attention to him, then like Cavell, you may begin to sense the deep anxiety, even sadness, with which Wittgenstein announces his project. Just as important is how attentive the child is, a fact made inescapable by the juxtaposition with his elders’ inattentiveness. The child, teachers at least will notice, is a model student: observant, perceptive, independent, curious. The scene portrays language as an inheritance but also as one that has, as it were, to be stolen, anyway in which the capacity and perhaps the motivation to take it is all together greater than the capacity and perhaps the motivation to give it.³⁴ We are impressed and saddened by the distance between the child and his elders. He is not one of them. He must struggle to understand them. They cannot understand him. It is as if the child came into a strange country and did not understand the language.³⁵ He becomes, appropriately, the hero of a book about finding one’s voice amid others who often seem strange and who make it seem as if it is up