Abstract
Wittgenstein’s attitude toward Christian believing is more complicated that many philosophers have been led to believe. The hiccup in the received account began as a neglect of Wittgenstein’s subject-involving method in philosophy of religion. Wittgenstein’s method cannot be subsumed under the rubric of philosophy-as-[quasi-scientific]-explanation. Rather, Wittgenstein’s method was subject-involving in the sense that by his own methodology he put himself at existential risk. In 1931 he wrote that “[t]he movement of thought in my philosophizing should be discernible also in the history of my spirit, of its moral concepts & in the understanding of my situation”. Apparently, to understand Wittgenstein’s method we are right to look closely at his biography. In the following essay I show that during his Norwegian sabbaticals, especially that of 1936–1937, Wittgenstein embodied the very method he advocated in his exploration of Christian believing. This method involved him in an enduring practice of actually praying, in close study of passionate Christian thinkers, and in public confession of his private sins. Although his journey ends shy of Christian believing, the form of his spiritual quest exemplifies the manner in which philosophers of religion ought to consider as internal to the investigation of religious concepts.
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Notes
See Brad J. Kallenberg, Ethics as Grammar: Changing the Postmodern Subject (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001).
“Die Denkbewegung in meinem Philosophieren müßte sich in der Geschichte meines Geistes, seiner Moralbegriffe & dem Verständnis meiner Lage, wiederfinden lassen”. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Ludwig Wittgenstein: Public and Private Occasions, edited by James C. Klagge and Alfred Nordmann, (Lanham, MD: Rowan & Littlefield, 2003), 133. Hereafter PPO.
The suggestion that biography embodies philosophy did not originate with me. See James C. Klagge, Wittgenstein: Biography & Philosophy (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
D. Z. Phillips, Religion and the Hermeneutics of Contemplation (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value: A Selection from the Posthumous Remains, ed. G. H. von Wright and Heikki Nyman, trans. Peter Winch, Edited by Georg Henrik von Wright in collaboration with Heikki Nyman; second edition revised by Alois Pichler (Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell, 1998), 4e.
D. Z. Phillips, Philosophy's Cool Place (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999).
Wittgenstein, Culture and Value: A Selection from the Posthumous Remains, 24e.
Ibid.; Lectures & Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology, and Religious Belief, ed. Cyril Barrett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966). English speakers have also profited from the translation by James Klagge and Alfred Nordmann, of notes and lecures such as “Remark’s on Frazer’s Golden Bough”. See Philosophical Occasions, 1912–1952, ed. James C. Klagge and Alfred Nordmann (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing, 1993).
That these two are the go-to favorites is unfortunate. Much of the Nachlaß has been published into English, and a fair picture of Wittgenstein’s views can emerge only by reading widely not only in the Tractatus, but also the lesser known works (such as Zettel), recollections of personal conversation and correspondence (e.g., with Maurice O’C Drury, Norman Malcolm, Rush Rhees, and others).
PPO 133.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and Rush Rhees, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1953), Pt.II, iv.
“If it is a mathematical task, you can go away and do it elsewhere….” Wittgenstein’s Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics. Cambridge, 1939: From the Notes of R. G. Bosanquet, Norman Malcolm, Rush Rhees, and Yorick Smythies, ed. Cora Diamond, Chicago (University of Chicago Press1975), 84.
Their discussion was published as Norman Malcolm, Wittgenstein: A Religious Point of View?, ed. Edited with a response by Peter Winch (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994).
“I am not a religious man but I cannot help seeing every problem from a religious point of view”. M. O’C. Drury, "Some Notes on Conversations with Wittgenstein," in Recollections of Wittgenstein, ed. Rush Rhees (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1981), 94.
Ibid.
From 1930. "Conversations with Wittgenstein," 129–130. Internal biblical reference is Matt. 6:7.
Ibid., 141. The volume alluded to was compiled by Cyril Barrett. Wittgenstein, Lectures & Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology, and Religious Belief.
See note 1.
For an account of this period see Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (New York: Viking Penguin, 1990), 91–104, 309–327, 361–384.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books (New York, NY: Harper and Brothers, 1958), 24.
See Peter Winch, "Understanding a Primitive Society," American Philosophical Quarterly 1, no. 4 (1964): 307–324.
For a convincing account of what surgeons can “see” but we cannot, see Daniel E. Hall, "The Guild of Surgeons as a Tradition of Moral Enquiry," Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 34 (2011): 114–132.
Feuerbach famously dismissed religion as merely a projection of human desire. But Wittgenstein has something else in mind by the term “projection”. Ludwig Wittgenstein, "Lectures on Religious Belief," in Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology, and Religious Belief, ed. C. Barrett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), 71–72.
Brad J. Kallenberg, "Rethinking Fideism through the Lens of Wittgenstein’s Engineering Outlook," International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion 71, no. 1 (2012): 55–73.
Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, 28–35.
Brian McGuinness, ed. Wittgenstein: A Life. Young Ludwig 1889–1921 (Volume 1) (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988), 45, 68–69. Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, 197.
J. R. Henderson, "Ludwig Wittgenstein and Guy's Hospital," Guys Hospital Reports 122, no. 1–2 (1973): 190.
Rhees himself displays a common misunderstanding about how engineering actually happens. In the introduction to a posthumous volume by Rhees, D.Z. Phillips claims that Rhees assigns a confusion to Wittgenstein that supposedly stems from remaining too much an engineer: “Rhees suggest that, sometimes, Wittgenstein confuses a particular case of application, like a proposition in engineering, and other contexts where one wouldn’t speak of the application of language at all”. (11) One of the offending passages appears to be p. 76. Rhees writes, “Wittgenstein seems to think you could learn to understand by Abrichtung [to train]; and understand in a way that does not yet allow for misunderstanding. In that case, I do not think it is [a case of] understanding what is said”. Here Rhees badly misunderstands engineering as straightforward application. That is Rhees’s error, not Wittgenstein’s. Rush Rhees, Wittgenstein and the Possibility of Discourse, ed. D. Z. Phillips (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 11, 76.
Klagge, Wittgenstein: Biography & Philosophy.
Wittgenstein, Culture and Value: A Selection from the Posthumous Remains, 24.
Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, 236.
Ibid.
Ibid., 237.
In 1936 Wittgenstein was completely satisfied with §§1–188, the only sections of the Investigations that he stopped fiddling with. He displayed this method in the lectures he delivered in 1937–1938 upon returning to Cambridge. These lectures not only include the Lectures on Religious Belief, but also Wittgenstein, Wittgenstein’s Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics. Cambridge, 1939: From the Notes of R. G. Bosanquet, Norman Malcolm, Rush Rhees, and Yorick Smythies. and "Cause and Effect: Intuitive Awareness," Philosophia 6, no. 3–4 (1976): 415–425.
Drury, "Some Notes on Conversations with Wittgenstein," 105.
Wittgenstein, "Cause and Effect: Intuitive Awareness," 420. Emphasis added.
Citing Goethe’s maxim. Culture and Value: A Selection from the Posthumous Remains, 36. Emphasis added.
Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology. Vol. 2. The Inner and the Outer, 1949–1951, ed. G. H. von Wright and Heikki Nyman, trans. C. G Luckhardt and M. A. E. Aue (Cambridge, MA and Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1993), 43.
Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology. Two Volumes, ed. G. H. von Wright and Heikki Nyman, trans. C. G Luckhardt and M. A. E. Aue (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1980), I §916. See also Zettel, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1970), §541. Emphasis added.
"Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough," in Philosophical Occasions, 1912–1952, ed. James C. Klagge and Alfred Nordmann (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing, 1993), 131.
Ibid., 129, 137.
I maintain that Wittgenstein’s subject-involving method of philosophy comes close to Kierkegaard’s “truth as subjectivity” and “reduplication”. See the pivotal chapter II of part 2 in Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. David F. Swenson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968 [1846]). It is not accidental that Kierkegaard chose Johannes Climacus as his pseudonym. St. John Climacus (lit. “of the Ladder”) wrote the seventh-century manual for personal transformation, The Ladder of Divine Ascent.
Wittgenstein associated kneeling with submissiveness, which did not come naturally to him. In code: “Kneeling means that one is a slave. (Religion might consist in this.) Lord, if only I knew that I am a slave!” (PPO 219).
Jn. 2:1–11.
The internal reference to “tickling” may be an allusion to a NT text: “For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but wanting to have their ears tickled, they will accumulate for themselves teachers in accordance to their own desires”. (2 Timothy 4:3).
The passage continues, “That made me feel at ease as if I had been enlightened in an important matter: But what it really means, I do not know yet. I feel relieved. But that does not mean, for example: I had previously been in error. For if it was an error, what protects me against falling back into it?! Thus there can be no talk of error here & the overcoming of this error. And if one calls it sickness once again there can be no talk of an overcoming, for any time the sickness can overcome me again. For after all, I also didn’t say this word just when I wanted to, but it came. And just as it came something else can come, too.-’”Live in such a manner that you can die well!” Unless otherwise noted, italics indicate portions entered in code.
Writing to Malcolm in 1948 he says “I have occasionally queer states of nervous instability about which I’ll only say that they’re rotten while they last, & teach one to pray”. Norman Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir with a Biographical Sketch by G. H. Von Wright; Second Edition with Wittgenstein’s Letters to Malcolm (Oxford: Clarendon, 1958, 2001), 106.
Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, 109.
See PPO 120. See also Wittgenstein, Culture and Value: A Selection from the Posthumous Remains, 61.
Drury, "Some Notes on Conversations with Wittgenstein," 102.
Ibid., 102–103.
“Few things are as difficult for me as modesty. Now I am noticing this again as I read in Kierkegaard. Nothing is as difficult for me as to feel inferior; even though it is only a matter of seeing reality as it is”. (PPO 185).
Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir with a Biographical Sketch by G. H. Von Wright; Second Edition with Wittgenstein’s Letters to Malcolm, 106.
Indirect discourse was a mode of showing rather than saying to which Wittgenstein was especially attuned. See PPO 131, 133.
For a brief account of Kierkegaard’s “metamorphosis” after 1847 see Walter Lowrie, A Short Life of Kierkegaard (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1942).
As told by David Cain in “Afterword,” Paul L. Holmer, On Kierkegaard and the Truth, ed. David J. Gouwens and Lee C. Barrett III, The Paul L. Holmer Papers (Cambridge & Eugene, OR: James Clarke & Cascade Books, 2012), 165.
Wittgenstein, Culture and Value: A Selection from the Posthumous Remains, 32.
Philosophical Investigations, §309.
Culture and Value: A Selection from the Posthumous Remains, 36–37.
Jesus taught that when compelled by, say, a soldier, to carry a burden one mile, his followers would be marked by volunteering to go the second mile. Matt. 5:41.
Drury, "Some Notes on Conversations with Wittgenstein," 104.
In 1920 Wittgenstein served as an elementary school teacher at Trattenbach, in rural Austria. Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, 193.
This point is made clearly by ibid., esp. 371–372.
“(An artful ethical trick is something that I perform for others, or also only for me (myself) in order to show what I can do.)” PPO 133. Internal citation refers to St. Paul’s 1 Corinthians 13:1–3, “If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing”. (NRSV).
Nor was confession private for the Jews. The practice of “Kethib-Qere” meant that every time the personal pronoun “I” appeared in the written text (Kethib), the Jewish congregation substitutes “we” in the public speaking (Qere) of the text.
James 5:16, NRSV.
Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, 93.
See ibid., 361–384.
Ibid., 368–369.
Matt. 7:3–5.
Wittgenstein, Culture and Value: A Selection from the Posthumous Remains, 24e. Emphasis added.
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Kallenberg, B.J. Wittgenstein: “I can’t believe…or rather can’t believe it yet”. Int J Philos Relig 84, 161–183 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11153-017-9655-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11153-017-9655-9