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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?

Thinking with the Fingers

It is misleading then to talk of thinking as of a ‘mental activity.’ We may say that thinking is essentially the activity of operating with signs. This activity is performed by the hand, when we think by writing; by the mouth and larynx, when we think by speaking; and if we think by imagining signs or pictures, I can give you no agent that thinks.

-Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books, p. 6

I found this passage interesting because it ties into Polanyi’s idea of ‘indwelling.’

There is an odd dualism that runs through much of the modern ‘scientific’ thought I’ve encountered that portrays the brain and body as strangely at odds. For example, the idea that one must have a ‘fully functioning’ brain in order to have a meaningful existence. The oddness of such a view is particularly striking because this viewpoint is held by the very same people who would maintain that thinking itself is really only a physical process. I will go no farther with that line of thought.

I do not see how anyone can dispute the fact that we think with more than the brain. Philosophers will continue their debates over the nature of the mind as an entity, wholly the same as, or different from, the brain; but at least this much is clear: we think with our fingers and mouths as much as we silently contemplate conundrums in the ‘pure mind.’

Just this past Lord’s Day, as I was preaching on Judges 9, I found myself learning new things about the text as I preached. I was not deliberately engaged in a silent chain of reasoning. I was thinking with my mouth. As I spoke, so I learned. This happens fairly regularly. And now, as I type, it is debatable whether the words form in my mind or in my fingertips, as I do not consciously decide to write before the words appear before me and I become a spectator of them.

Perhaps the modern thinkers do not emphasize the physicality of the mind too much; Perhaps they emphasize it to little. The Word becoming flesh matters.