[Wittrs] Re: [C] Re: Wittgenstein on Religious Belief
- From: CJ <castalia@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: wittrsamr@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 28 Nov 2009 14:28:38 -0500
On Nov 27, 2009, at 3:50 PM, Sean Wilson wrote in regard to the Martin piece:
> (Stuart)
>
> The piece is atrocious. It doesn't understand Wittgenstein or his views.
If this group is to be a group devoted to Wittgenstein, it would appear
somewhat shameful that the most active participants make no effort to actually
rely on the Wittgensteinian texts but instead utilize this forum as some sort
of "support group" for their own personal ends----while inflicting endless
streams of groundless blurting having nothing to do with Wittgenstein at
all....unless, one concludes that, ironically, the therapeutic eliminiation
peculiar "itch" to blurt nonsense unthinkingly is considered one of the goals
of Wittgenstein's lifework.
For those readers who are interested in more than their own narcissistic
opining and would rather view Wittgenstein's "situation" in regard to religious
belief, not in terms of mediocre third and fourth person and third and fourth
rate accounts by pathetic propagandists such as Martin, with his own atheistic
axe to grind, or in terms of their own somewhat duller "half-axed" needs to
blurt out what's almost on their mind before they consider the actual
Wittgenstein texts, here are a couple of interesting comments by those who
have actually spend some time and care on the matter, and who can point us to
the fact that for Wittgenstein, the question of religious "belief" was very a
recognition of a "form of life" and one which, he admittedly had difficulty in
coming to terms with as a participant in our culture.
Indeed, if one takes, what seems, on the basis of the participation of some of
the chronic "spam" generation of this list, to be the unusual step of actually
engaging in a careful reading of Wittgenstein's lectures on religious belief,
rather than relying on the reading of a grotesquely flawed critique, one can
see that Wittgenstein's statements in these lectures, although not articulated
in the depth of his arguments in the Investigation, in regard to this
fundamental, almost 'instinctive" notion of "belief in" are parallel to and
much akin to his arguments in regard to a private language and , indeed,are
even more akin to his arguments in regard to the notion of 'pain".
Of course, it would probably be expecting too much to discover any actual
followups and discussions of Wittgenstein's texts or of these central concepts
on this forum in any depth, other than those provided by Sean.
But I provide these two interesting points of view nonetheless for those
readers who aren't here to vent some curious, ungrounded personal spleen by
diminishing Wittgenstein without actually understanding ...or even
reading....his words.
CJ.
Book Review: Wittgenstein: A Religious Point of View? by Norman Malcolm
(edited with a response by Peter Winch copyright 1993 by Ruth Malcolm Cornell
University Press, Ithaca, New York ISBN 0-8014-2978-1 (hardback) 192pp incl.
index
Malcolm begins: "When Wittgenstein was working on the latter part of the Philo-
sophical Investigations, he said to his former student and close friend M. O'C.
Drury: 'My type of thinking is not wanted in this present age; I have to swim
so strongly against the tide.' In the same conversation he said: 'I am not a
religious man but I cannot help seeing every problem from a religious point of
view.' For a long time I have been puzzled by this second remark. My
understanding of Wittgenstein's thought seemed to be threatened. For the
'problems' to which he was referring were not the problems of poverty, disease,
unemployment, crime, brutality, racial prejudice, war. .... The problems he
meant are philosophical: those very perplexities and confusions with which he
grapples in the Investigations."
Malcolm next offers a disclaimer: "I am going to present an interpretation of
what it could mean to say that there is, not strictly a religious point of
view, but something analogous to a religious point of view, in Wittgenstein's
later philosophical thought." In the following chapter, he unpacks the
statement "I am not a religious man".
He begins by recounting anecdotal evidence from the memoirs of various people
(including himself, Drury, Pascal, and Rhees). These show that Wittgenstein had
a genuine and profound concern for what we call matters of conscience. He
prayed, made confessions, believed in a last judgement, had a stern sense of
duty, and so on. He once said to Drury, before Drury was to be sent to the
front as a medic in WWII, "If it ever happens that you get mixed up in hand to
hand fighting, you must just stand aside and let yourself be massacred."1
Malcolm next considers a number of remarks from Wittgenstein's journals, pub-
lished in English as Culture and Value, which explicitly deal with such topics
as Chris- tianity, the Gospels, faith, the last judgement, the resurrection,
and so on. Malcolm writes:
"He thought that the symbolisms of religion are 'wonderful'; but he distrusted
theological formulations. He objected to the idea that Christianity is a
'doctrine' .... For Wittgenstein, the emphasis on religious belief had to be on
doing -- on 'amending one's ways', 'turning one's life around' ....
Once I quoted to him a remark of Kierkegaard which went something like this:
'How can it be that Christ does not exist, since I know that he has saved me?'
Wittgenstein's response was: 'You see! It isn't a question of proving
anything!'"2
Malcolm notes that "his religious sense was Christian; but he distrusted
institu-tions" [RPV, p. 21] and he refers to another remark Wittgenstein made
to Drury: "...one of the things you and I have to learn is that we have to live
without the consolation of churches."3 "Wittgenstein had an intense desire for
moral and spiritual purity," Malcolm continues [RPV, p. 23], but never felt at
home in any established religious institution, church, or doctrine. "We can say
with confidence that he knew the demands of religion" [RPV, p. 23] Malcolm
concludes; what he leaves unsaid is that one of the things that troubled
Wittgenstein throughout his life was the realization that he could not, or
would not, meet those demands: "I cannot kneel to pray," Wittgenstein wrote,
"because it's as though my knees are stiff."4
"Religious belief could only be something like a passionate commitment to a
system of reference, ... a way of living..."5 Wittgenstein wrote. It must be no
mere detail in your life, but the purpose which informs it--otherwise it isn't
religious, but something else (however intensely you may feel it). Evidently
Wittgenstein did not commit his life to a system of reference, such as Roman
Catholicism, and that is the sense in which he was not a religious man.
In the second piece, those who are inclined can take a look at the distinction
between "believing in" and "believing that" which is drawn by the author.
Wittgenstein and the Possibility of Religious Belief
Patricia Sayre, Notre Dame
Contemporary philosophers of religion delimiting their field often distinguish
between belief in and belief that, and then focus on the latter as more
pertinent to a philosophical investigation of religious belief. The believer's
relationship to a proposition, and the relationship between that propo- sition
and reality is of primary concern. The epistemology of religious belief has
thus tended to be approached as a species of justification theory; its task is
to provide a satis- factory account of our acceptance or rejection of various
religiously relevant propositions. It is against this back- ground that some of
the more well-known discussions of Wittgenstein's philosophy of religion have
taken place. Hence one much belabored question has been whether standards for
the justification of religious belief can only be determined within the context
of the language-game played by the community of religious believers; another
has been whether religious beliefs are even the kind of thing open to
justification, for it may be that the language in which they are framed is
expressive rather than proposi- tional.
While these are interesting issues, and one can see how various strategies and
techniques employed by Wittgenstein in his later work gave rise to them, they
seem curiously bloodless when held up against his terse, intensely passionate,
writings on matters of religious belief. The reason for this, it seems to me,
is that when Wittgenstein thinks about religious belief, he does so against a
very different set of background concerns than most philosophers of religion
bring to the table. That is, while mainline philosophy of religion is almost
exclusively focused on belief that, Wittgenstein is more concerned with belief
in. Hence the questions that disturb Wittgenstein have less to do with the
epistemic status of religious belief than they do with the spiritual status of
the religious believer, where what is crucial is believing in one's own
redemption, passionately embracing a "system of coordinates" so as to radically
reorient your life. (Wittgenstein 1998, 73e)
Let us begin with the provocative comments with which Brian Clack concludes his
helpful overview in An Introduc- tion to Wittgenstein's Philosophy of Religion.
Elaborating on points similar to those made above, Clack writes that while "the
mistake made by philosophers of religion em- barked on a justificatory project
is that of envisaging relig- ion as something which possesses explanatory power
and which rests on intellectual foundations...religion is pre- sented by
Wittgenstein as something like a particular perspective on the world; a means
of assessing life and of judging one's actions, a way of living." (Clack 1999,
109) In fleshing out his account of this way of living, Clack looks to
Wittgenstein's 'Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough.' There we learn that a
religious form of life has "its roots in in- stinctive human behavior....[and]
this primitive behavior is definitive of humanity, filling as large a role in
the natural history of human beings as does eating, drinking, procrea- tion,
playing games, singing, making art, and so on." (ibid., 123-124)
But how, if religion is rooted in instinct, can one experi- ence an incapacity
to passionately embrace a religious point of view? If we possess primitive
instincts of this sort, shouldn't it come naturally to us to adopt a religious
stance? As Clack is quick to point out, primitive instinct is only part of the
story. Human instincts typically play out within the context of human
communities, and cultural practices can be powerful inhibitors of instinct. If
we are to understand how belief in could become a genuine problem for a person,
we need to take into account culture as well as primitive instinct. Thus, when
reflecting on the "two determining features of Wittgenstein's approach to
religious belief: first, the extent to which he was drawn with awe toward the
religious view of the world; and second, his own inability fully to share in
that perspective," Clack suggests that it might be "something about the
character of 'this age' which constrained his religious impulses." (ibid.,
126-127)
Wittgenstein often seems to write from the perspective of one who longs to
believe in his redemption, but finds he cannot honestly lay claim to the status
of a religious be- liever. The problem is not that his intellect rejects the
belief that redemption of human persons is possible, for this, he writes, is
"something that actually takes place in human life." (ibid., 32e) The problem
is a matter of will, of finding within himself the capacity to passionately
embrace his own redemption. "I cannot kneel to pray," he writes, "be- cause
it's as though my knees were stiff. I am afraid of dissolution (of my own
dissolution) should I become soft." (ibid., 63e) Problems of this sort tend to
be dismissed by philosophers of religion as beyond the reach of philosophy.
Important as they may be, they are pastoral, spiritual, or psychological
difficulties, not epistemological ones.
All this may seem simply to strengthen the case for there being something about
our age prohibiting religious belief, but Kierkegaard draws a different
conclusion. The character of our age, far from ruling out religious belief,
simply throws into starker contrast what such belief requires, namely, that
each one of us, for ourselves and without expecting our culture to do the work
for us, leap passionately into the arms of God. Here we have a leveling which
places the same religious requirement before us all, and while the abstract
leveling of our age can obscure the leveling involved in a religious point of
view, there is no in principle impossibility in the passionately interested
indi-vidual discovering the difference. For Kierkegaard, then, although the
spirit of our age may bear a different relation to the spirit of religious
belief than that of other ages, the task that faces the individual believer is
a task of the same infinite difficulty whatever the historical era.
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