Walking, Wittgenstein, and God

Without God, what exactly is there?

On Tuesday afternoon my doctor’s office called to say the results of my prostate biopsy were back and could I come within the next hour to get them? Even though it was snowing and I’d accepted waiting until my January 5th appointment, I understood I had to go. My brain didn’t need the additional weeks of mind loops — was it good news, and if so why wouldn’t they tell me over the phone, or the more likely obsession, that it was bad news and they wanted to tell me as soon as possible to get the ball rolling on treatment.

Ever since my urologist told me I needed the biopsy two months earlier, I knew given how my mind works—always spinning, always ruminating, prone to getting into obsessive loops—I was in for a bad time, mentally, until the results came in.

That the actual physical risk was, all things considered, relatively minor¹ did matter, but less than it should. My brain has a knack for finding the least traveled, and most destructive path, and going down it over and over and over, until I’m convinced that will happen.

But I’m sixty now, and I know myself, and knew I needed to keep myself busy to redirect my thoughts towards something else, anything else, so I upped my daily walks from eight miles to twelve, and began carrying a backpack, and adding books to it until by the time the call came it was close to forty pounds.

I highlight the educational benefits from walking, but as I wrote several months ago,

I wouldn’t say walking saved my life, because I was never that despondent, but it has lifted my mood and given me a purpose again. I now need the three hours (or more) a day I spend walking like a monk needs their prayers, which I find physically and existentially fulfilling.

These last two months are a perfect example of what I mean. During my daily walks I forget about the biopsy, my mind calms, and then redirects itself on the book I’m listening to, or the nature around me, or when it does go back to my own physical health it does so with a relaxed clarity emptied of dread. Then for the rest of the day I’m either too tired to worry, or relaxed enough to sit in my local McDonald’s reading, writing, and/or playing around on the internet.

I don’t know exactly why this works for me as well as it does, but I’m reminded of Ecclesiastes 2:24, “A person can do nothing better than to eat and drink and find satisfaction in their own toil,” and walking is my chosen toil, which as far as toiling goes, not a bad toil.

One of the books I listened to during these walks is a biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein (at the suggestion of a friend, thanks Cass!), who I knew little about, and what I did I didn’t like. I believed he was involved in the early 1900s attempts to reduce all of mathematics to logic, to show that it could be derived from first principles alone, which fit that period’s view that rationality was the key to unlocking everything, including answering what is our place in the universe, and what exactly the universe was anyways.

Or that Wittgenstein was an integral part of the utilitarian, materialist, and logical positivism movements that dominated the intellectual environment of the post-Victorian era, a worldview that I had once been fully on board with, but had soured on, as I’ve come to realize that while science is wonderful for building great things in our world, it can say little about the deeper, more existential questions, such as why are we here, what is a good life, and yes, what is the meaning of it all?

I went to grad school in theoretical physics because I thought it could answer those questions, or at least it was the best method for trying, only to realize (slowly) that the Standard Model was rationalist theology and the Big Bang genesis dressed up in math². Sure, it was far more concrete, and painted a fuller, more detailed and nuanced picture than other approaches, but it still left all those "boundary problems" unanswered.

After a few chapters of the biography I realized how wrong I had been about Wittgenstein, and that he’d arrived at effectively the same conclusions a century before me, but in a more systematic, precise, and thoughtful way.

Wittgenstein had begun to have doubts on that whole “we can understand everything” project early on. Those doubts, and the belief that there was more to life than sitting in a room thinking, led him to the trenches of World War I, something that he, a highly educated very wealthy man, had to insist over and over to military authorities that he wanted. To be posted in the most dangerous position possible—the night watch at the front-line observatory—to force himself out of his academic comfort into the actual world of mortality, randomness, and chaos.

He wanted to be at the boundary of the war (physically and emotionally), because it is at the boundary that essential truths reveal themselves—both in the mathematical and existential sense.

That is the same intellectual rationale for why I focused on street addiction in the Bronx over a decade ago. Not as he did, to put myself at risk, a far more courageous (or reckless) choice, but to try and see life stripped of niceties. As I wrote then,

My first career was studying the rules that drive the material world, theoretical physics. Physicists use extremes to learn how nature works: They take stuff and smash it together at really high speeds to strip matter of the ancillary fluff and expose the essential core.

My current career, of working with homeless addicts in the Hunts Point neighborhood of the Bronx, is equally revealing. It is seeing life stripped of ancillary fluff, leaving what is essential. It exposes the things often forgotten when you have a steady job, a supportive family, and own lots and lots of stuff.

The result for each of us was the same, at least directionally. We both became spiritual, although in his case it was, again, more precise, concise, and powerful.

As he wrote in his notebook, while in the trenches³,

“What do I know about God and the purpose of life?”

I know that this world exists.

That I am placed in it like my eye in its visual field.

That something about it is problematic, which we call its meaning.

That this meaning does not lie in it but outside it.

That life is the world.

That my will penetrates the world.

That my will is good or evil.

Therefore that good and evil are somehow connected with the meaning of the world.

The meaning of life, i.e. the meaning of the world, we can call God.

And connect with this the comparison of God to a father.

To pray is to think about the meaning of life.

I cannot bend the happenings of the world to my will: I am completely powerless.

I can only make myself independent of the world – and so in a certain sense master it – by renouncing any influence on happenings.

Wittgenstein proved the 'There are no atheists in foxholes' quip, although fitting his emphasis on precision, what he actually found out was 'There are no logical positivists in front-line lookout posts.'

Those thirteen lines are a fair overview of my own philosophy, with the first four a concise summary of my theology.

I know that this world exists.

That something about it is problematic, which we call its meaning.

That this meaning does not lie in it but outside it.

The meaning of life, i.e. the meaning of the world, we can call God.

For most of history that was implicitly understood, and man was humbled by his recognition of his subservient place. It wasn’t until the Enlightenment that intellectuals began to believe they could solve those final questions, and once we began to believe that, the meaning became less meaningful. It became the error bar, or the kludge variable in a mechanistic model that would eventually be filled in and completed. It became something to refine, rather than a foundational truth. It went from contemplation in a temple, to adding another line in a spreadsheet.

The rationalist believes that with enough time, enough computer power, or a large enough model, eventually everything can be understood, and the error bar will go to zero and so God isn’t necessary.

This is fundamentally wrong, but no amount of words can convince everyone of that. Or even a majority. You either see it or you don’t. You either believe in a foundational humility, or you don’t.

Many of my posts, including last week’s, address the question of why is it that we are so unhappy given how wealthy we are—living long lives of plenty, yet seemingly unfulfilled, and with the sense that it was better before.

I was going to write a piece addressing concrete reasons for that—the inequality in our society, the banality of modern life at an aesthetic level, the impersonal soullessness of our economy, the lack of community—all which I believe explain a great deal of the current malaise.

Yet, I also believe there is the larger issue that “we no longer believe in God.” In the Wittgenstein sense, of there being something beyond us that is unknowable.

If you believe that everything is material, and everything can be understood, gone is the mystery and enchantment of living, and that misses the singular point that it is filled with purpose rather than being pointless.

It erodes the understanding that we are embedded in something “bigger than us in every way” and leads to the mistaken notion that happiness can be perfected through policy tweaks, like dials on a machine.

Humans became imbued with an unjustified pride that can only end in defeat, while they continually kick the intellectual can down the road—one more variable! one more subatomic particle! one more curled-up spatial dimension!

The “error” bar can never be removed—we might be certain that the universe is 13.8095670923409 billion years old and began in an inflationary explosion, but we cannot say anything about what it exploded from, or why it exploded then, or what was before the explosion. While the scientific quest to understand might keep us busy, and add to our material comfort through technological advances, it results, without anything else, in spiritual lives that are hollow, unfulfilled, and often nihilistic.

It is Wittgenstein’s last two lines that I’ve only really begun to understand, and appreciate, especially these last two months with the possibility of cancer, and mortality, hovering in the back of my mind,

I cannot bend the happenings of the world to my will: I am completely powerless.

I can only make myself independent of the world – and so in a certain sense master it – by renouncing any influence on happenings.

Almost everyone I intellectually respect, and admire, ends up with some version of this view—either via Eastern mysticism, stoicism, Catholicism, etc. They may not always pull it off, but they understand contentment in this life (and sometimes even fulfillment) requires a humility.

This is different from a nihilistic fatalism, because you can impact your immediate surroundings, and change your own circumstances, but there are still forces far larger than you (both in the here and now, and beyond) that you cannot change and acceptance of that opens up a wealth of obtainable and inexpensive avenues to happiness. Such as walking twelve miles a day with a backpack jammed with books, and stopping halfway to watch the American Mink (who I see every day and have named Basil) enact their purpose.

When my doctor told me on Tuesday that the growths on my prostate were not cancerous, I was obviously relieved, but it was less consequential than I expected, because for the preceding month I’d been far less stressed than I thought I would have been. Although when I got to the point in the book where Wittgenstein found out he was dying from a cancer that had jumped from his prostate to his spine I admit I thought too much about my lower back pain than was healthy.

But all things considered, given my tendencies, it has been a remarkably peaceful two months, though I've certainly been distracted and irritable, I've also been content, and happy.

One more reason I hope to never stop walking, reading, and most of all, believing in a God.

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PS: Thank you for all the kind words, emails, and messages. Again, I’m sorry I’ve not been able to respond to all, or even most, of them.

I am starting to map out my plans for 2026, and for the next two months I will be staying in the US, since I still have some personal issues to address.

I will be in Chicago from the 30th to the 5th, and in DC from the 8th to the 11th, then I want to begin a series of slow bus trips from Chicago to the west coast. I’ll update you when I have a more concrete plan.

Until then, thank you so much, and have a great New Year.

1. Only one third chance the growth was cancerous, and even then almost certainly highly treatable.

2. One of the things I've long argued is that in early physics (Newtonian) the math was a metaphor (model) for a grounded reality that we knew to be true, and once physics crossed the boundary where the reality became a metaphor of the math (quantum, particle physics) then the intellectual content of it dropped to effectively another philosophy— A philosophy that is strong, and powerful (at least technologically), but ontologically no stronger than theology.

3. I realize he went on to refine these statements, in his later work, but I don’t believe his conclusions are fundamentally different. At least not with respect to the question of humility.