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Wittgenstein: A Religious Point Of View?
This is Malcolm's last work before his death. It draws together a wide collection of Wittgenstein's comments on religion. Peter Winch concludes with a critical essay on Malcolm's interpretation of Wittgenstein's philosophy.
- GenresPhilosophyReligion
156 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1994
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August 24, 2014
Wittgenstein's experience during the war made him as Russell said "one with a deeply mystical and ascetic attitude" , He began to wonder about the meaning of life and God. He wrote i his notebooks "To pray is to think about the meaning of life. To believe in God means to see that life has a meaning", and that "Conscience is the voice of God".
In the Tractatus, he argued that the metaphysical propositions lack a meaning in the Wittgensteinian sense as they do not refer to verifiable in-the-world facts. So a meaning of life must lie outside the world, outside space and time, we call it God and it is source of value in our world and to our ethics.
In a ‘Lecture on ethics’ that Wittgenstein gave in Cambridge in 1929, he spoke of an experience of his which he described as ‘feeling absolutely safe. I mean the state of mind in which one is inclined to say, I am safe, nothing can injure me whatever happens’. He also spoke of another experience he sometimes had, which could be described by the words, ‘I wonder at the existence of the world.’ He thought that this experience lay behind the idea that God created the world; that it was the experience of ‘seeing the world as a miracle’. He also thought that ‘the experience of absolute safety’ was connected with the idea of ‘feeling safe in the hands of God’.
Later in his life, he wrote "Christianity is not a doctrine", "The symbolism of Catholicism are wonderful beyond words. But any attempt to make it into a philosophical system is offensive". He Criticized Paul in the same way as Nietzsche did; "In the Gospels—so it seems to me—everything is less pretentious, humbler, simpler. There are huts; with Paul a church. There all men are equal and God himself is a man; with Paul there is already something like a hierarchy; honours and offices", "For all you and I can tell, the religion of the future will be without any priests or ministers. I think one of the things you and I have to learn is that we have to live without the consolation of belonging to a church".
He was always afraid of judgment, in a letter he wrote; "May I not prove too much of a skunk when I shall be tried". Wittgenstein did once say that he thought he could understand the conception of God, in so far as it is involved in one’s awareness of one’s own sin and guilt. He added that he could not understand the conception of a Creator. I think the ideas of Divine judgment, forgiveness, and redemption had some intelligibility for him, as being related in his mind to an intense desire for purity, and a sense of the helplessness of human beings to make themselves better.
In 1950, His view was that none of the famous philosophical proofs of the existence of God could bring anyone to believe in God. "But if I am to be really saved—then I need certainty—not wisdom, dreams, speculation—and this certainty is faith. And faith is faith in what my heart, my soul needs, not my speculative intelligence. For it is my soul, with its passions, as it were with its flesh and blood, that must be saved, not my abstract mind". Either to believe in it and believe that there is no way to verify it or just not to believe in it. A Wittgensteinian may be a theist, deist, pantheist or agnostic, but certainly no atheist.
He and his friend Drury were comparing the Gospels and Wittgenstein said that his favorite was the Gospel according to St Matthew. He added that he found it difficult to understand the Fourth Gospel, as contrasted with the Synoptic Gospels. And in letters to Drury later in his life, he wrote: "But remember that Christianity is not a matter of saying a lot of prayers; in fact we are told not to do that. If you and I are to live religious lives, it mustn't be that we talk a lot about religion, but that our manner of life is different. It is my belief that only if you try to be helpful to other people will you in the end find your way to God".
In the Tractatus, he argued that the metaphysical propositions lack a meaning in the Wittgensteinian sense as they do not refer to verifiable in-the-world facts. So a meaning of life must lie outside the world, outside space and time, we call it God and it is source of value in our world and to our ethics.
In a ‘Lecture on ethics’ that Wittgenstein gave in Cambridge in 1929, he spoke of an experience of his which he described as ‘feeling absolutely safe. I mean the state of mind in which one is inclined to say, I am safe, nothing can injure me whatever happens’. He also spoke of another experience he sometimes had, which could be described by the words, ‘I wonder at the existence of the world.’ He thought that this experience lay behind the idea that God created the world; that it was the experience of ‘seeing the world as a miracle’. He also thought that ‘the experience of absolute safety’ was connected with the idea of ‘feeling safe in the hands of God’.
Later in his life, he wrote "Christianity is not a doctrine", "The symbolism of Catholicism are wonderful beyond words. But any attempt to make it into a philosophical system is offensive". He Criticized Paul in the same way as Nietzsche did; "In the Gospels—so it seems to me—everything is less pretentious, humbler, simpler. There are huts; with Paul a church. There all men are equal and God himself is a man; with Paul there is already something like a hierarchy; honours and offices", "For all you and I can tell, the religion of the future will be without any priests or ministers. I think one of the things you and I have to learn is that we have to live without the consolation of belonging to a church".
He was always afraid of judgment, in a letter he wrote; "May I not prove too much of a skunk when I shall be tried". Wittgenstein did once say that he thought he could understand the conception of God, in so far as it is involved in one’s awareness of one’s own sin and guilt. He added that he could not understand the conception of a Creator. I think the ideas of Divine judgment, forgiveness, and redemption had some intelligibility for him, as being related in his mind to an intense desire for purity, and a sense of the helplessness of human beings to make themselves better.
In 1950, His view was that none of the famous philosophical proofs of the existence of God could bring anyone to believe in God. "But if I am to be really saved—then I need certainty—not wisdom, dreams, speculation—and this certainty is faith. And faith is faith in what my heart, my soul needs, not my speculative intelligence. For it is my soul, with its passions, as it were with its flesh and blood, that must be saved, not my abstract mind". Either to believe in it and believe that there is no way to verify it or just not to believe in it. A Wittgensteinian may be a theist, deist, pantheist or agnostic, but certainly no atheist.
He and his friend Drury were comparing the Gospels and Wittgenstein said that his favorite was the Gospel according to St Matthew. He added that he found it difficult to understand the Fourth Gospel, as contrasted with the Synoptic Gospels. And in letters to Drury later in his life, he wrote: "But remember that Christianity is not a matter of saying a lot of prayers; in fact we are told not to do that. If you and I are to live religious lives, it mustn't be that we talk a lot about religion, but that our manner of life is different. It is my belief that only if you try to be helpful to other people will you in the end find your way to God".
August 15, 2020
Just finished these books, _Logic and Sin in the Writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein_, by Philip R. Shields, and _Wittgenstein: A Religious Point of View_, by Norman Malcolm, both publishes in 1993.
These are two of many books on Wittgenstein and religion, several of which puzzle about a remark he once made to his former student and long-time friend, M. O’C Drury: “I am not a religious person but I can’t help seeing every problem from a religious point of view.”
Malcolm, a colleague and very close friend of Wittgenstein, aims to discuss “*not* strictly a religious point of view, but something *analogous* to a religious point of view” (his emphases).
One very relevant theme in Wittgenstein’s writing that both Malcolm and Shields rely on is the notion that explanations, reasons, justifications, etc, must at some point, come to an end.
To wit, in his _Philosophical Investigations_, the culmination of his later philosophy, Wittgenstein says, “If I have exhausted the justifications, I have reached bedrock and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: 'This is simply what I do’” (PI #217). Indeed, one of the first remarks in PI is “explanations come to an end somewhere” (PI #1), which for me is reminiscent of the character Cleanthes in Hume’s _Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion_, in which Cleanthes and Philo argue about the design argument for the existence of God, and Philo makes the usual point that it fails in an infinite regress of causes, but Cleanthes counters that “I have found a Diety and here I stop my inquiry” (p. 32 in the Hackett 2nd ed.).
In brief, Malcolm suggests four analogies between religion and philosophy for Wittgenstein (paraphrased from Winch’s critique of the book in the appendix):
1) An analogy between his philosophy and religion in that both have a the particular above attitude towards explanation, viz, that it must come to an end somewhere.
2) An analogy (closely related to the first) between a religious wonder at the world as it is and a kind of wonder in Wittgenstein’s philosophy at the existence of the various language-games as they are in our use. Both the world as it is and our language-games as we use them are simply there – you can use them and describe them but not *explain*, really, why they are there.
3) An analogy between the religious, original-sin-type attitude of regarding oneself as imperfect or faulty, and the Wittgensteinian idea that philosophical puzzlement is a symptom of diseased or faulty thinking. “A philosopher treats a question: like an illness” (PI #255). “Our illness is this, to want to explain” (_Remarks on Foundations of Mathematics_, p 333).
4) An analogy between Wittgenstein’s insistence that Christianity is not so much a doctrine but rather a changing of one’s life, amending one’s ways, etc (Wittgenstein would have agreed, Malcolm thinks, with St. James that “faith without works is dead), and the essential notion in his later philosophy that our everyday concepts rest on a base of acting and doing, rather than on reasoning or interpreting or explaining.
Shields, by contrast, relies much more on the logic of Wittgenstein’s earlier philosophy (as the name of the book implies), from which Wittgenstein largely broke later, although Shields is right that threads continue in the later philosophy.
There is story Bertrand Russell was fond of telling about Wittgenstein, when Wittgenstein was having an intense discussion with Russell, punctuated by long periods of intense silent thinking by Wittgenstein, and Russel finally asked him if he was thinking about logic or his sins and Wittgenstein replied “both.” Although usually told as a joke, this story has for Shields a deeper meaning and importance regarding the concept of sin (again, as suggested by his title).
Shields starts, then, by focusing on the early-Wittgenstein notion of the distinction between what can be said and what can only by shown. One of the first lines of his first book, the _Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus _, is “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence” (TLP #7). Similarly, “What *can* be shown *cannot* be said” (his emphases, TLP #4.1212).
As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy explains in other words, “what cannot be formulated in sayable (sensical) propositions can only be shown. This applies, for example, to the logical form of the world, the pictorial form, etc., which show themselves in the form of (contingent) propositions, in the symbolism, and in logical propositions. Even the unsayable (metaphysical, ethical, aesthetic) propositions of philosophy belong in this group—which Wittgenstein finally describes as “things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical” (TLP 6.522).”
Although criticized by later scholars for relying too much on Wittgenstein’s early thought, Shields begins with this notion of the limits of language and thought, and then links the theme of limitation to the presence of the figure of God in Wittgenstein’s writings. In particular both this limitation and the will of God are similar in being out of our control.
From here the notion of sin becomes important for Shields insofar as we sin when we try to transgress God’s will and we “sin” when we “try to say in words what can only be shown.” Finally, he uses Wittgenstein’s comment that (in the preface to one of his books), “I would like to say, ‘This book is written to the glory of God” (“but nowadays,” the preface goes on, “that would be chicanery, that is, it would not be rightly understood”). Shields here discusses the significance he sees of Wittgenstein’s efforts to replace our modern need to seek explanations with a sense of wonder an awe that is dedicated to describing, not explaining. Focusing on two aspects of a religious point of view – 1) recognizing that things are out of our control; and 2) embracing these realities without fatalism or resignation – Shields says that’s just what Wittgenstein’s philosophy calls for, viz, recognizing the say/show distinction and accepting these conditions “before we can do or say anything at all.”
In short, Shields thinks that Wittgenstein’s writings are “fundamentally ‘religious,’” where as Malcolm sees them as more analogous (in the four above ways) to religion. Other scholars, such as Tim Labron, think that Shields misses the mark here, since he focuses too much on the earlier – largely rejected – thought of Wittgenstein, reducing his philosophy to the earlier thought, excessively associating logic with God and philosophical confusion with sin, and missing therefore the unique character of the later thought.
These are two of many books on Wittgenstein and religion, several of which puzzle about a remark he once made to his former student and long-time friend, M. O’C Drury: “I am not a religious person but I can’t help seeing every problem from a religious point of view.”
Malcolm, a colleague and very close friend of Wittgenstein, aims to discuss “*not* strictly a religious point of view, but something *analogous* to a religious point of view” (his emphases).
One very relevant theme in Wittgenstein’s writing that both Malcolm and Shields rely on is the notion that explanations, reasons, justifications, etc, must at some point, come to an end.
To wit, in his _Philosophical Investigations_, the culmination of his later philosophy, Wittgenstein says, “If I have exhausted the justifications, I have reached bedrock and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: 'This is simply what I do’” (PI #217). Indeed, one of the first remarks in PI is “explanations come to an end somewhere” (PI #1), which for me is reminiscent of the character Cleanthes in Hume’s _Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion_, in which Cleanthes and Philo argue about the design argument for the existence of God, and Philo makes the usual point that it fails in an infinite regress of causes, but Cleanthes counters that “I have found a Diety and here I stop my inquiry” (p. 32 in the Hackett 2nd ed.).
In brief, Malcolm suggests four analogies between religion and philosophy for Wittgenstein (paraphrased from Winch’s critique of the book in the appendix):
1) An analogy between his philosophy and religion in that both have a the particular above attitude towards explanation, viz, that it must come to an end somewhere.
2) An analogy (closely related to the first) between a religious wonder at the world as it is and a kind of wonder in Wittgenstein’s philosophy at the existence of the various language-games as they are in our use. Both the world as it is and our language-games as we use them are simply there – you can use them and describe them but not *explain*, really, why they are there.
3) An analogy between the religious, original-sin-type attitude of regarding oneself as imperfect or faulty, and the Wittgensteinian idea that philosophical puzzlement is a symptom of diseased or faulty thinking. “A philosopher treats a question: like an illness” (PI #255). “Our illness is this, to want to explain” (_Remarks on Foundations of Mathematics_, p 333).
4) An analogy between Wittgenstein’s insistence that Christianity is not so much a doctrine but rather a changing of one’s life, amending one’s ways, etc (Wittgenstein would have agreed, Malcolm thinks, with St. James that “faith without works is dead), and the essential notion in his later philosophy that our everyday concepts rest on a base of acting and doing, rather than on reasoning or interpreting or explaining.
Shields, by contrast, relies much more on the logic of Wittgenstein’s earlier philosophy (as the name of the book implies), from which Wittgenstein largely broke later, although Shields is right that threads continue in the later philosophy.
There is story Bertrand Russell was fond of telling about Wittgenstein, when Wittgenstein was having an intense discussion with Russell, punctuated by long periods of intense silent thinking by Wittgenstein, and Russel finally asked him if he was thinking about logic or his sins and Wittgenstein replied “both.” Although usually told as a joke, this story has for Shields a deeper meaning and importance regarding the concept of sin (again, as suggested by his title).
Shields starts, then, by focusing on the early-Wittgenstein notion of the distinction between what can be said and what can only by shown. One of the first lines of his first book, the _Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus _, is “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence” (TLP #7). Similarly, “What *can* be shown *cannot* be said” (his emphases, TLP #4.1212).
As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy explains in other words, “what cannot be formulated in sayable (sensical) propositions can only be shown. This applies, for example, to the logical form of the world, the pictorial form, etc., which show themselves in the form of (contingent) propositions, in the symbolism, and in logical propositions. Even the unsayable (metaphysical, ethical, aesthetic) propositions of philosophy belong in this group—which Wittgenstein finally describes as “things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical” (TLP 6.522).”
Although criticized by later scholars for relying too much on Wittgenstein’s early thought, Shields begins with this notion of the limits of language and thought, and then links the theme of limitation to the presence of the figure of God in Wittgenstein’s writings. In particular both this limitation and the will of God are similar in being out of our control.
From here the notion of sin becomes important for Shields insofar as we sin when we try to transgress God’s will and we “sin” when we “try to say in words what can only be shown.” Finally, he uses Wittgenstein’s comment that (in the preface to one of his books), “I would like to say, ‘This book is written to the glory of God” (“but nowadays,” the preface goes on, “that would be chicanery, that is, it would not be rightly understood”). Shields here discusses the significance he sees of Wittgenstein’s efforts to replace our modern need to seek explanations with a sense of wonder an awe that is dedicated to describing, not explaining. Focusing on two aspects of a religious point of view – 1) recognizing that things are out of our control; and 2) embracing these realities without fatalism or resignation – Shields says that’s just what Wittgenstein’s philosophy calls for, viz, recognizing the say/show distinction and accepting these conditions “before we can do or say anything at all.”
In short, Shields thinks that Wittgenstein’s writings are “fundamentally ‘religious,’” where as Malcolm sees them as more analogous (in the four above ways) to religion. Other scholars, such as Tim Labron, think that Shields misses the mark here, since he focuses too much on the earlier – largely rejected – thought of Wittgenstein, reducing his philosophy to the earlier thought, excessively associating logic with God and philosophical confusion with sin, and missing therefore the unique character of the later thought.
August 6, 2024
Malcolm’s essay is not especially compelling—lacking a lot of rigor and clearly used as a vehicle to pick some bones at various point—but it still offers some decently interesting insight into Wittgenstein. 2 stars for that. However, Finch’s postscript essay responding to Malcolm responds to most of these concerns while painting a wonderful picture of the beauty of Wittgenstein’s philosophy and drawing somewhat closer to a real sense of Wittgenstein’s meaning behind his “religious point of view.” Could be worth skipping the body to go straight to Finch.
March 8, 2024
Best to read Wittgenstein’s ‘Culture and Value’ first.
November 5, 2025
The best part of this volume is Peter Winch’s highly critical interpretive epilogue, which masterfully lays bare the flaws in Malcolm’s treatment of Wittgenstein’s understanding not only of religion but also of philosophy. Perhaps most aggravating is the fact that, in spite of Malcolm’s own suggestions to the contrary, his book tells us almost nothing about Wittgenstein’s religious convictions or “point of view.” You’re better off skipping this one.
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