Ludwig Wittgenstein

Schönbaumsfeld, Genia (2009) Ludwig Wittgenstein. In, Oppy, Graham and Trakakis, Nick (eds.) The History of Western Philosophy of Religion. Durham, UK. Acumen Publishing, pp. 161-174.

Abstract

Wittgenstein published next to nothing on the philosophy of religion and yet his conception of religious belief has been immensely influential. While the concluding, ‘mystical’ remarks in his early work, the Tractatus, are notorious, we find only a single allusion to theology in his magnum opus, the Philosophical Investigations, posthumously published in 1953. Wittgenstein’s mature views on the nature of religious belief must therefore be pieced together from scattered remarks made in his notebooks from the 1930s, the Lectures and Conversations on Religious Belief (compiled from lecture notes), the Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough and from what has come to be known as Culture and Value. All of the above, as well as recorded conversations with friends, testify to Wittgenstein’s life-long involvement with religious issues, so it is not readily explicable why Wittgenstein remained silent about them in his most important work. But then Wittgenstein once said to his friend, Maurice Drury, ‘It is impossible for me to say in my book one word about all that music has meant in my life. How then can I hope to be understood?’ This remark might equally well apply to religion.
Wittgenstein’s reflections about religious belief are inspired by a number of thinkers, such as, for example, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and William James, as well as most notably, perhaps, the Danish philosopher, Søren Kierkegaard . With the latter he shares the view that Christianity is not a theory about the behaviour of supernatural entities, but an existence-communication, whose demands are primarily ethical, not intellectual. The believer, on this conception, is supposed to transform himself, not his ontological commitments; he is called to exist in the truth as lived out by Christ, the paradigm or pattern, not to engage in speculation about the metaphysical compatibility of the ‘two natures’ of Christ, say.
Wittgenstein once wrote: ‘If Christianity is the truth then all the philosophy that is written about it is false.’ If this is indeed apt, it would seem to confine pretty much everything that goes on in philosophy of religion and theology departments to the scrapheap. Small wonder, therefore, that Wittgenstein’s views about the nature of religious belief continue to engender the fiercest opposition, both in those who are sympathetic to religion and in those who are not. In this chapter I will concentrate solely on Wittgenstein’s later conception of religious belief and shall leave his Tractatus views to one side.

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