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Face of Mystery, Mystery of a Face: An Anthropological Trajectory in Wittgenstein, Cavell, and Kaufman's Biohistorical Theology
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 June 2011
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The work of Ludwig Wittgenstein counts among the most significant philosophical influences on Gordon Kaufman's recent theology. Yet important convergences between Kaufman's theological worldview and Wittgenstein's philosophical teaching remain unexplored. In this essay I shall examine a number of such convergences connected with the concept of the human. The thought of Stanley Cavell will play a central role in the discussion. Kaufman shares with the skeptical Wittgenstein revealed in Cavell's writings an abiding concern with the ordinary in human life—for example, everyday language, the human body—but both are interested in this ordinariness as the locus of ineradicable mystery. A richly textured treatment of the ordinary (and mysterious) situation of face-to-face human encounter emerges when relevant passages of Wittgenstein's, Cavell's, and Kaufman's writings are compared. This article will develop some of the implications of this comparison that hold particular promise for theological anthropology. The orientation and concerns of the paper are thus primarily constructive.
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1 By adopting Kaufman's concept of a “trajectory” of ideas, I mean to underscore the creative and constructive dimension of the reading I propose. To read Kaufman, Wittgenstein, and Cavell together, as I undertake to do here, is both to focus attention on shared insights embedded in these authors’ texts and carry the development of these ideas a modest step further, articulating them in a way not anticipated in any single source.
2 Kaufman, Gordon, An Essay on Theological Method (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1975) 11.Google Scholar See also idem, In Face of Mystery: A Constructive Theology (Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press, 1993) 301–41Google Scholar.
3 See Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Philosophical Investigations, §§ 124–33 (trans. Anscombe, Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret; New York: Macmillan, 1968) 49–51.Google Scholar
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5 Wittgenstein, Investigations, §109 (p. 47).
6 Kaufman, Essay, 3.
7 See especially the essays in Cavell, Stanley, In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1988)Google Scholar.
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9 Ibid., 112.
10 Wittgenstein, Investigations, §§283-86 (pp. 97-98); §§536-37 (pp. 144-45); §539 (p. 145); II.iv. (p. 178).
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20 Ibid.
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61 , Kaufman, Essay, 32.Google Scholar Wittgenstein seems to be making a similar point when he writes with reference to religious belief and practice: “The words you utter or what you think as you utter them are not what matters, as much as the difference they make at various points in your life” (quoted in Phillips, Dewi Zephaniah, Wittgenstein and Religion [New York: St. Martin's, 1993] 238CrossRefGoogle Scholar ). One can legitimately gloss this “difference at various points in life” with the idea of a change in orientation. The ability of a religion to effect such changes is of central importance, Wittgenstein suggests.
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64 , Cavell, “Declining Decline,” 36.Google Scholar
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67 See in particular Kaufman's treatment of “Serendipitous Creativity” in In Face of Mystery, 264-80. Compare also idem. Essay, 17, where Kaufman suggests that the dynamic of an “open-ended questioning, always pushing on beyond what is presently known” animates human consciousness as such.
68 , Wittgenstein, Investigations, §124 (p. 49).Google Scholar
69 , Phillips, Wittgenstein and Religion, 79-102, 245–47.Google Scholar
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71 Ibid.
72 , Cavell, “Being Odd,” 118.Google Scholar
73 Ibid.
74 , Cavell, “The Uncanniness of the Ordinary,” 166.Google Scholar
75 , Kaufman, In Face of Mystery, 57 (my emphasis).Google Scholar
76 Ibid., 60-61.
77 , Cavell, “Being Odd,” 118.Google Scholar
78 Ibid.
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80 Stanley Cavell, “The Availability of Wittgenstein's Later Philosophy,” in idem, Must We Mean What We Say? (Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976) 72.
81 Ibid.
82 Ibid.
83 Ideas and practices “contribute to our further humanization” to the extent that they “augment [our] powers of creativity and freedom and the capacity to take responsibility for ourselves and our world” ( , Kaufman, In Face of Mystery, 309)Google Scholar.
84 , Wittgenstein, Investigations, §109 (p. 47).Google Scholar
85 , Kaufman, In Face of Mystery, 237–50.Google Scholar
86 Malcolm, Norman has stated (Knowledge and Certainty [Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1963] 119Google Scholar ) that “comforting a suffering person” represents a particularly appropriate example of the type of practice Wittgenstein wished to designate with the term “form of life” (quoted in Kerr, Fergus, Theology after Wittgenstein [London: Blackwell, 1986] 30)Google Scholar.
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88 Among the numerous treatments of the topic, see in particular Incandela, Joseph M., “The Appropriation of Wittgenstein's Work by Philosophers of Religion: Towards a Re-evaluation and an End,” Rel 21 (1985) 457–74Google Scholar ; and , Kerr, Theology after Wittgenstein, 28–52Google Scholar ; and , Phillips, Wittgenstein and Religion, xi-xii, 56-78, 79–102Google Scholar.