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Wittgenstein: The Sign and the Thing Signified (Meaning and Application)

Frege ridiculed the formalist conception of mathematics by saying that the formalists confused the unimportant thing, the sign, with the important, the meaning…Without a sense, or without the thought, a proposition would become an utterly dead and trivial thing….And the conclusion which one draws from this is that what must be added to the dead signs in order to make a live proposition is something immaterial, with properties different from all mere signs.

But if we had to name anything which is the life of the sign, we should have to say that it was its use.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books, p. 4

I have rewritten this post several times. Philosophers tend to make me do that. They don’t necessarily communicate in such a way as to be understood. But anyhow, I’m convinced there’s something interesting, and probably important, here. I just don’t know that I can put my finger on it precisely as of yet.

I have written about meaning and application on the blog several times. For example, I did a three part series on the subject last Fall (HERE, HERE, and HERE). Why do I care? I care because I realize that we cannot claim to truly understand Scripture unless we are actually experiencing and living out its teachings. I discuss that in the other posts, so I won’t retread it here.

The life of the sign (call it meaning), Wittgenstein says, is the use of the sign (call it application). That is, if we are not correctly using the sign, applying the sign, then the sign is empty, meaningless, and, really, lifeless. This goes for a sentence on a page. The words I am writing have no power in them unless they are put to some sort of use. The same goes for all sentences written by all writers. They are dead letters: empty pixels. Without a spiritual meaning (I don’t know what else you could call it) behind the letters, words, sentences, etc. they are of no use. If you do not make use of your reading, then you either reject it or do not understand it. In the latter case, it is dead to you, or you are dead to it, depending on how one looks at such things.

Now you might apply this concept to a number of things. Say, for instance, the sacraments (confusing the sign and the thing signified, or failing to experience and live out the internal meaning), or the actual reading of Scripture (failing to make application, or use, of its teachings in your own soul). In general, this is a failure to draw out the immaterial from the material; or an inability to distinguish the difference. When you miss one, you miss both; when you confuse them, well, you are confused. You cannot separate them, but at the same time you must not confuse or conflate them.

Confused?

Secret Sacraments (Technopoly)

When Catholic priests use wine, wafers, and incantations to embody spiritual ideas, they acknowledge the mystery and the metaphor being used. But experts of Technopoly acknowledge no such overtones or nuances when they use forms, standardized tests, polls, and other machinery to give technical reality to ideas about intelligence, creativity, sensitivity, emotional imbalance, social deviance, or political opinion. They would have us believe that technology can plainly reveal the true nature of some human condition or belief because the score, statistic, or taxonomy has given it technical form.

Neil Postman, Technopoly, p. 90

If Technopoly is the cult of technology (the love and acceptance of technology exalted to an idolatrous/religious level), then we have to be on the lookout for its sacraments. We can take two views of the idea of what a sacrament is based on classic Reformed theology. First, in the classical sense of the word, sacramentum refers to an oath of allegiance taken by a soldier to his king and/or country. In other words, participating in the sacrament consecrates the participant to the service of the one administering the sacrament. Second, sacraments are ‘visible words.’ That is, they are visible signs pointing to invisible realities.

If you apply this understanding of the sacraments to what Postman is saying you may get the following (relating to the two points above): First, as we’ve already seen (HERE), individual technologies carry with them certain imperatives. They, in some sense, say to us, ‘Do this and live.’ If this is truly the case, and I think it is, we must be mindful of the fact that those technologies may call upon us to pledge allegiance if we are going to successfully live in this world. Second, the tangible objects of technology may in fact be visible signs of invisible realities. The physical presence of an iPhone in my pocket is a visible sign of an invisible reality about myself and the world around me.

I am not going into specific analysis here, but I want to make one particular point. We do not have answers to where our technologies will lead us, or whether they are necessarily good or bad (or a mixture of the two). We fail only when we neglect to ask questions of those technologies; and these two categories relating to sacraments propose two vital questions: where is my allegiance as I use this tool (or it uses me)? and What invisible realities (about myself, the world, and even heaven) does it point to?