Euthyphro

Wittgenstein once casually described his philosophy as the opposite of Plato. I was thinking about this in the bathroom today. I keep a book in the bathroom to dip into while .... 


The current selection is On Certainty.


In remark # 436, Wittgenstein says, 

"Is God bound by our knowledge?" Are a lot of our statements incapable of falsehood? For that is what we want to say.

He is talking about all knowledge here. I think the point is that we want to believe that logic and truth exist outside of God. We want to insist that God could not suddenly decide tomorrow that 2+2=3. God could change the world, he could even end it and us with it but we do not want to imagine that he could change logic and truth.


This bothers us because it feels like a cheat if he could. If God could change truths, especially moral truths, at will then we would have to really trust God in a way that most people are not willing to. Even Saint Paul worries about this, telling us not that Jesus won't betray us but that he cannot for he must be true to himself.


But God can presumably do whatever he wants.


This problem most typically comes up from the other direction and it is called the Euthyphro dilemma after a Platonic dialogue where it famously comes up. According to the Wikipedia page I've linked in the previous sentence (funny how easy it is to know we can trust Wikipedia for some things even though we know it's a horrible source for so many others), the key line in the dialogue is this one,

Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?

Of course, it is easy to see why it was a problem for Plato given the shenanigans the Greek gods were reputed to get mixed up with. But I do not think it is merely a non-scandalous deity that allows WIttgenstein to see the problem in a deeper way than Plato did.

It's always troubled me that Socrates is plainly wrong in the Euthyphro. Euthyphro is quite right to bring his father to justice for maltreating a worker leading to that worker's death. You can separate the problem from the particular instance, and that is what I was encouraged to do when I brought the issue up in first year. And that is fair, "Maybe in this particular case the issue does not matter but it can apply to others so let's forget that and move on."

Despite that it still bothered me in another sense. Plato (and quite possibly Socrates with him because this is one of the dialogues that may be somewhat accurate historically speaking) seems to be morally blind here. He gets excited by a lot of technicalities and never can see the moral issue. And he doesn't seem to get piety either.

Wittgenstein sees that we are trying to bind God here; he sees that that is what we ant to do.