Brian Morton's review of Brandy Schillace's Death's Summer Coat (Books, 4 April) dismisses Wittgenstein's “firm declaration” that death is not an event in life, and in doing so seems to overlook the point and purpose of the remark in the Tractatus: “Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death...”
Wittgenstein writes that “Our life has no end in just the way our visual field has no limits.” The analogy is with the way we cannot stand outside our visual field in order to plot its limits. This is a “grammatical” remark about the metaphysical limits of “my world”: I cannot “step outside” the totality of the world I inhabit as a conscious subject. This is of a piece with his claim that I can't express, in language, language's “outer limits”.
Of course, Wittgenstein does seem to assume that, with death, consciousness comes to an end. A Christian response to this might be to agree with the logical claim, in that with say, a “near-death” experience the individual survives it (Lazarus?); and if on the other hand consciousness does persist in a new way beyond death then we cannot speak of it except through analogy – and, like our visual field – and Christ's risen life – it has no limits either temporal or logical; Wittgenstein in that same passage refers to eternity in just these terms.
Revd Stephen Wilson, Faversham, Kent
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