Reflections
Saints and Prophets
After some time of studying Wittgenstein and Heidegger, the two oddly started to merge. They’re so obviously different in so many ways and yet it became increasingly hard for me to say what that difference was. One rough contrast that came to me was to say that Heidegger aspires to be a prophet and Wittgenstein aspires to be a saint. Maybe more a difference of style than of substance—although especially with these two thinkers, style and substance are hard to disentangle—but I’ve come to find the saint/prophet contrast more generally helpful. In this blog post I’ll develop that contrast a little.
Saint Wittgenstein
After he published the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in 1921, Wittgenstein withdrew from philosophical activity. He worked for a time as a gardener in a monastery and spent several years teaching schoolchildren in remote Austrian villages. Politically, it was a tumultuous time. The Austro-Hungarian Empire had fractured into a mosaic of ethno-states and Austria itself remained an impoverished rump of its former self, struggling with debt and inflation as one of the losing parties in the First World War.
One of Wittgenstein’s few friends in the mountain village of Puchberg was Heinrich Postl, a local coalminer and member of the village choir. On one occasion, Postl spoke to Wittgenstein of his hope that he might somehow improve the world. “Just improve yourself,” Wittgenstein replied. “That is the only thing you can do to better the world.”
That, in brief, is the credo of the saint. Prophets want to improve the world and saints want to perfect themselves. An aspiring saint doesn’t necessarily succeed in this aim—Wittgenstein would have been a much less interesting person if he had—but flaws of character are a shortcoming in a saint. A high degree of virtue is also expected of a prophet but even the greatest of prophets can be imperfect persons. Because of a lapse, Moses is denied entry to the Promised Land.
"To the Glory of God"
The primary audience of Wittgenstein’s philosophy was always himself. His unpublished notebooks amount to nearly one hundred times the length of the work he authorized for publication. As for the work he did publish, it’s unclear whether other people were even the primary intended audience there.
Wittgestein saw the publication of the Tractatus as the end, rather than the beginning, of his philosophical career. The preface opens by remarking that the book is likely only going to be understood by others who have already had similar thoughts. He stipulated that Philosophical Investigations should be published only after his death. There he closes the preface by saying he makes his thoughts public only with misgivings and that he thinks it unlikely that it will be understood by others.
Even more striking is the end of the Foreword to Philosophical Remarks, a book that he ultimately didn’t publish:
I would like to say “This book is written to the glory of God,” but nowadays that would be chicanery, that is, it would not be rightly understood. It means the book is written in good will, and in so far as it is not so written, but out of vanity, etc., the author would wish to see it condemned. He cannot free it of these impurities further than he himself is free of them.
Devotion to the “glory of God” was a quality Wittgenstein admired in Bach’s fugues and in the detailed stone engraving high up in Medieval cathedrals, where no mortal eye would be able to appreciate the workmanship. The work was done not to please one’s fellow man but to please God. And the principal way such work might fall short of perfection was due not to a deficit in craftsmanship but to a deficit in character. For Wittgenstein, the impurities of his work and the impurities of his character were inseparable.
Heidegger the Prophet
Heidegger was no saint. There was the whole Nazi thing, of course. But beyond that, he was proud, ambitious, and not above seducing a student or throwing a colleague under the bus if it suited him. His involvement with the Nazi Party was itself part of that ambition. Heidegger wanted to remake the German university system in his own image and collusion with political evil seemed the most expedient means to that end.
In short, Heidegger saw himself as a prophet. He had something to say and he knew it was important and he had to get the message out. In his later work, Heidegger writes about humankind having the distinctive task of guarding the truth of Being and of being the “shepherd of Being.” He writes these things with the admonitory tones of a prophet. In modernity, we’re falling far short in these tasks, we’ve become lost to ourselves, and to Being. Heidegger the prophet wants to guard the truth of Being as others have given up their vigil and he wants to shepherd us back toward Being.
Heidegger styles himself as someone who has seen further or more deeply than the rest of us. He has seen our destiny and he has seen how badly we have deviated from our proper calling. It’s his job to set us back on the right path—or at least to reflect on what might save us.
Private Saints, Public Prophets
A crucial difference between saints and prophets is that prophets need to be heard. Jeremiah’s jeremiads seethe with the frustration that the people just won’t listen. Cassandra is made mad by the failure of those who hear her to understand what she’s saying.
The life of a saint can be much less public. You can retreat to the desert and experience some frustration when your asceticism draws a crowd. Kierkegaard writes of his knight of faith as seeming for all the world to be a humble shopkeeper. The rest of the world doesn’t need to know that you’re a saint. In fact, if you want the rest of the world to know, you’re probably not a saint.
I find that contrast—that the prophet needs to be heard and the saint doesn’t—to be a helpful way of conceiving two contrasting ideas of human flourishing. Very few people make a lasting mark on the world. For some people, that matters more than it does for others.
The Glovemaker of Avon
Consider how unlikely Shakespeare’s life story was—so unlikely that various conspiracy theories insist on even less likely stories with posher protagonists. Shakespeare was the son of a glovemaker in the provincial town of Stratford-upon-Avon. In 1582, at the age of eighteen, he married an older woman who gave birth to his first child six months later. A decade after that, he was working as an actor and playwright in London’s buzzing theatre scene. A couple decades after that, he retired back to Stratford, having written plays that put his market value today somewhere in the neighbourhood of Taylor Swift. Taylor Swift is pretty good but I doubt her music will be outselling everyone else’s four hundred years from now.
We know very little about Shakespeare’s life, especially his early life. But the most obvious trajectory that lay ahead of him in 1582 was to become the wittiest glovemaker in Stratford. It’s dizzying to think how much likelier that trajectory was than the one that played out in this timeline. Even more dizzying to think how many potential Shakespeares ended up as witty glovemakers instead. Or, borrowing a page from Virginia Woolf, how many female potential Shakespeares ended up stuck in domestic drudgery or crushed for the uppitiness of their ambition.
We’d be worse off if Shakespeare had remained in Stratford. I think it’s fair to say that Shakespeare would have been worse off too. He had gigantic talent and some combination of ambition, hard work, and luck allowed that talent to sing. The thought of keeping the genie of Shakespeare’s genius stopped up in a bottle while he dutifully stitched gloves together is a thought of a life that’s been stymied.
That’s not to say that Shakespeare is a prophet according to my saint/prophet dichotomy. He fits a third category that I’ll come back to later. But Shakespeare was certainly not a saint. We know little about his life, but all signs point to an aspiration to achieve perfection in his work rather than in his person.
Stymied Talent
Part of what I find striking about Wittgenstein is that I’m not sure his life would have been stymied had he not become a philosopher. We certainly would have missed out on work that strikes me as some of the most original and penetrating that two and a half thousand years of European philosophy has produced. But if he had spent his life as a gardener or a schoolteacher, I think he might still have been able to flourish according to his own stringent standards. Wittgenstein sought to perfect himself, and asceticism played no small part in that quest for self-perfection. Stymying his intellectual talents could have been a part of that austerity. Instead we have philosophy whose power derives from its austerity.
A parallel in this regard is Gerard Manley Hopkins. Hopkins had a gift as a poet. He also had a vocation as a priest and he felt a tension between them. To become a saint required self-denial and he felt his love of poetry and the love for the world and for language that found expression in his poetry were contrary to the ascetic demands of spiritual purity.
The trouble is that he was a much better poet than he was a saint. He struggled with depression and loneliness. The self-denial he demanded of himself was more than he could bear.
On the other hand, if he hadn’t had such a conflicted relationship with his own poetic gifts, maybe Hopkins would have been a much more conventional poet. Maybe the struggle against his own talent found expression in a struggle with poetic form that gave birth to sprung rhythm. He might not have been a happy saint but, like Wittgenstein, he produced work whose character seems essentially connected to an aspiration to self-perfection.
The Idiosyncrasies of a Saint
I’ve said that a saint doesn’t aspire to make an impact on the world and aims instead only at self-perfection. But then I’ve gone on to enlist Wittgenstein and Hopkins as examples, two men who had colossal impact on their respective fields. I could have included Van Gogh as a third. I don’t think that undermines the point. Instead, it suggests something of the nature of their contributions.
If Mozart hadn’t lived, we’d be deprived of some of the finest music in the classical canon. But we’d still have a lot of music that resembles Mozart’s. It’s just that none of it was quite as good. Mozart absorbed the musical traditions around him and brought them to a kind of perfection. The same is true of even Shakespeare. He was a very very very very good playwright of the Elizabeth and Jacobean periods, but he wasn’t doing something different in kind from Marlowe or Kyd, Webster or Middleton. He was just doing it better.
By contrast, if Wittgenstein hadn’t lived, if Hopkins or Van Gogh hadn’t lived, nothing like their work would have arisen. Each one of them was sui generis. It’s precisely because they weren’t trying to insert themselves into an ongoing cultural conversation that they were able to make such distinctive contributions. They’re like outsider artists who were too well trained and too gifted to be mere curiosities. But their work was a product of a discipline that was directed inward rather than outward.
I think it’s possible to be an idiosyncratic prophet as well—Blake and Nietzsche are examples—but your destiny as a prophet entangles you much more with your community than if you’re a saint. Prophets also stand a bit apart from the culture they’re in. The difference is that they’re trying to change that culture whereas saints are trying just to change themselves.
"Five Tons of Love"
I’ve mentioned Shakespeare and Mozart as contrast cases with saints. But neither of them is a prophet either. Prophets have something to teach us. If Shakespeare and Mozart are prophets, what are they prophesying? In fact, Wittgenstein complained of Shakespeare that he wasn’t “a prophet or teacher of humanity,” as I discussed in an earlier blog post.
Part of what’s astonishing about Shakespeare is that it’s very hard to pin down anything particular that he had to say, precisely because he seemed to want to say everything. Shakespeare the author seems to vanish into his characters.
Shakespeare and Mozart seem to me to belong to a different class of artist. They did what they did not for their own sake, like saints, nor for the sake of others, like prophets, but for the sake of the work itself. (A curious parallel: I’ve heard the three vehicles of Buddhism distinguished by saying that the Theravāda practice for their own liberation, the Mahāyāna for the liberation of others, and the Vajrayāna for the sake of the practice itself.)
Chekhov, another artist I’d place in this category, described The Seagull thus: “three female roles, six male roles, four acts, a landscape (a view of a lake), much conversation about literature, little action, and five tons of love.” The five tons of love are what make the play immortal.
Contrast Chekhov with his near-contemporary Ibsen, who was every inch the prophet. Ibsen had an urgent social message and he bent his characters to serve that message. Chekhov loves his characters too much to let his own perspective drown out theirs. The same is true of Shakespeare. Or, to take a more contemporary example, Alice Munro. So many of the characters in her stories are nasty but her fiction is devoid of cynicism because it’s shot through with love.
A Failed Saint
One last example and then a conclusion. Leo Tolstoy was to the novel something like what Shakespeare was to drama and poetry or Mozart was to music. It’s not just that all three were very good at the thing that they did. It’s the seeming omnipotence of their powers. Tolstoy has at his effortless command all the tricks of narrative prose. War and Peace seems to revel in Tolstoy’s ability to take in everything from the grand sweep of history to the intimacies of domestic life, and to shift between them seamlessly.
Then, sometime in the 1880s, Tolstoy resolved to become a saint. He tried to live like a peasant, started writing simpler stories with instructive morals, and wrote non-fictional works articulating a vision of a kind of socialist Christianity. This period of his life was an inspiration to Wittgenstein and Gandhi, among others.
The thing is, Tolstoy wasn’t a very good saint. He was irascible and quarrelsome, inconsistent and sanctimonious. He was an aristocrat who fetishized the peasantry from a distance—unlike, say, Chekhov, who wrote from closer acquaintance of peasant life and whose view of peasants was less varnished.
I’ve suggested that Wittgenstein and Hopkins weren’t entirely successful as saints—and that the power of their work comes at least in part from their struggle with the calling of sainthood. But they did feel that call and responded to it honestly. I don’t get that feeling about Tolstoy.
You might say that Tolstoy play-acted being a saint just as he play-acted being a peasant. He was a prophet, no question, but he wanted to be a saint. He should have contented himself with being a prophet.
The Fruits of Action
Early in the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna urges Arjuna to fulfill his duty without attachment and without desire. “Be intent on action, not on the fruits of action.” This is another way of expressing the credo of the saint. For a prophet, action and the fruits of action are entwined. You’re undertaking a course of action in order to achieve a certain result. But for a saint, the value of what you do is internal to the action itself. Nothing external to the action—no fruit or outcome—adds to or detracts from what you’re doing.
We have no shortage of prophets in the world today. From tech entrepreneurs to advocates for social justice, everyone wants to change the world. Not to want to change the world is taken to be a mark of modest ambition or complacency. What I find remarkable about sainthood is that it’s a highly ambitious and very uncomplacent calling that doesn’t try to change the world.
The work of people like Wittgenstein, Hopkins, and Van Gogh testifies to the fact that this calling can have transformative effects on the world. But the transformations it effects are often surprising precisely because the transformation wasn’t part of the point. If Tolstoy or Heidegger had changed the world in some way other than the way they’d had in mind, they would have been disappointed. Wittgenstein and other saints confound us because they don’t tell us how they want us to respond to their work. They don’t tell us because our response doesn’t matter to them.