John Wisdom (1904-1993)
“My dear, it’s the Taj Mahal.” That is what the 20th century British philosopher John Wisdom imagines one woman saying to another, a friend who is trying on a hat and who is “studying the reflection in a mirror like a judge considering a case.” After a pause, her friend says (“in tones too clear,” writes Wisdom) the remark about the Taj Mahal. “Instantly the look of indecision leaves the face in the mirror. All along she has felt there was about the hat something that wouldn’t quite do. Now she sees what it is.”
According to Wisdom’s analysis, talk of God has important similarities with such everyday uses of metaphor. What he is saying is not that the things people say about God (such as that God is all powerful or all knowing, for example, or that God is love) are said of God metaphorically (as the woman in Wisdom’s story says metaphorically of the hat that it’s the Taj Mahal). That idea—that the things believers “predicate” of God are predicated metaphorically—is an ancient one. But that is not the point that Wisdom is making.
Instead, Wisdom is making the point that people use sentences such as “God exists” or “God does not exist” in much the same way that the woman in his little story uses the remark about the Taj Mahal. By his thinking, the way the woman in the story uses that line is not at all to convey any new information. It’s not to tell anybody anything they didn’t already know, or already see clearly enough. As Wisdom is careful to note, “the hat could be seen clearly and completely before the words ‘The Taj Mahal’ were uttered.” He goes on:
And the words were not effective because they referred to something hidden like a mouse in a cupboard, like germs in the blood, like a wolf in sheeps’ clothing. To one about to buy false diamonds the expert friend murmurs “Glass,” to one terrified by what [s]he takes to be a snake the good host whispers “Stuffed.” But that’s different. That is to tell somebody something [s]he doesn’t know—that that snake won’t bite, that cock won’t fight. But to call a hat the Taj Mahal is not to inform someone that it has mice in it or will cost a fortune. It is more like saying to someone “Snakes” of snakes in the grass but not concealed by the grass but still so well camouflaged that one can’t see what’s before one’s eyes. Even this case is different from that of the hat and the woman. For in the case of the snakes the element of warning, the element of predictive warning, is still there mixed, intimately mixed, with the element of revealing what is already visible. This last element is there unmixed when someone says of a hat which is plainly and completely visible “It’s the Taj Mahal.”
Wisdom suggests that a lot of religious discourse, including “There is a God” or “God exists,” is just like that. It doesn’t tell anybody anything new. Nor does it (at least it doesn’t have to) mix the issuing of warnings or similar things with just letting something be seen. Instead, all it does is just that: to let something be seen. But what’s most interesting about such religious discourse that just lets something be seen is the same thing that’s most interesting about his Taj Mahal hat example. What is most interesting about all that is that what’s said—what’s revealed or opened up to be seen by such discourse—is nothing that isn’t already clearly visible and completely evident and seen even before anything’s said. It’s a matter of revealing what was never covered over in the first place, but was hiding in plain sight all along, like telling someone who’s looking for her glasses that she’s wearing them already. Such remarks, such discourse, let’s those who have the eyes for it, see, or those who have the ears for it, hear.
Often times, what most needs to be pointed out is not what’s hidden away or disguised, but precisely what’s there in plain sight for everybody to see. It’s something so obvious that we need special attention or help not to overlook it. What we overlook is not what’s glaring and showy, what’s flashy and fresh, what calls attention to itself one way or another. It’s what’s right there in front of us but does not call attention to itself, what’s inconspicuous and unobtrusive. That’s what trips us up most easily and often.
What’s obvious, so inconspicuous and unobtrusive that we almost always overlook it, is sometimes what’s most important. Sometimes it’s what’s really most striking and wonder-provoking--what’s most riveting of our attention, once it is pointed out. Like pointing out the snakes plainly visible in the grass all along, but for that very reason unnoticed until someone says “Snakes!” and lets what’s so plainly visible be seen.
Wisdom is suggesting that religious discourse is at least often like that (except, as he is careful to note, that the element of warning that goes with the example of the snakes need not be present—though, I would add, it can be). It doesn’t so much tell us anything new, convey to us any information that isn’t already readily available and even, in one clear sense, already known by everybody, as it does let us see it again for the first time. It is like the line in the poem by T. S. Eliot about how we finally, after all our journeying, come back again to the same place we started, only now we know it for the first time.
“God is dead in Salem!” John Proctor, the central character in The Crucible—Arthur Miller’s drama about the Salem witch-trials, written during the same period that Wisdom made his remarks, and occasioned for Miller by the McCarthy witch-hunt for “communists” everywhere in the United States—cries out at a critical juncture in the action of the play. In some ways that statement is less about God than about Salem—or, rather, so far as that goes, than about the United States during the McCarthy period. Or, rather, it is about God, but no less about Salem, about the U.S. in the nineteen-fifties—and about much more, which is finally beyond cataloguing.
God is dead in Proctor’s Salem, which is and is not the United States in the Eisenhower years, or the United States (and elsewhere) even today. But the Devil is alive and well there.
Note to readers: The above post is most of a section from “Hushed Talk of God,” a chapter in my book God, Prayer, Suicide, and Philosophy: Reflections on Some of the Issues of Life (available in the “Shop” at the top of this blog site). All the quotations from John Wisdom are from his piece “The Modes of Thought and the Logic of God,” contained in John Hick, editor, The Existence of God (New York: Macmillan, 1964).