Assertion Vs Expression At Family Dinner
Wittgenstein as understood through incomprehensible family members
Around the table at Thanksgiving dinner a very-distant relative was recounting the time that a freak flood nearly carried their house away. The flood waters managed to rise in such a manner that their house was spared, but the homes of their neighbors faced catastrophic devastation. Upon sharing this the relative shared that they felt incredibly lucky, prompting their spouse to lean over and interject a reminder that they were not lucky but blessed, that it was thanks to God that they were spared, and they both then thanked God for showing them mercy.
Here are two ways to react to this exchange. The first is to see this as an assertion of fact - that God exists and directly intervened to divert the floodwaters as some sort of personal gesture, perhaps to bless the righteous and punish their wicked neighbors. Taken this way it occurs to me a very repulsive thing, and I feel strong urges to generate counterarguments and to generally punish and humiliate them for bearing this sort of worldview.
The second way to react to this exchange is to see it as an expression of feeling - that they feel humility and openness and gratitude and that the deepest expression of those feelings occurs in the context of religious belief and practice. Taken this way I myself feel supportive and open to those feelings, and I find the religious expression thereof to be alien and even off-putting to me it’s something that I can at least understand from a distance.
I’m sharing this example to illuminate one Wittgenstein’s core ideas - that language does a hell of a lot more than just try to assert facts, and that a lot of confusion and conflict comes about from trying to take some uses language as literal and factual when it they are serving a different purpose entirely.
A lot of strife in my life lifted when I realized how many of my conflicts were operating at a shallow level, as some sort of tug of war over supposed facts, when the deeper issues were really about emotions and ways of life. Facts and logic and reason and whatnot are wonderful tools and are quite frequently applied inappropriately in human conversation - generating connection and agreement is quite often a matter of playing an different game entirely.