[Wittrs] Re: Wittgenstein on Religious Belief
- From: "SWM" <SWMirsky@xxxxxxx>
- To: wittrsamr@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 27 Nov 2009 16:55:21 -0000
--- In Wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, gprimero <gerardoprim@...> wrote:
> How do you understand the Lectures on religious belief? Do you agree with the
> claims about the incommensurability of beliefs?
> Here is a criticism of those claims:
> http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/michael_martin/wittgenstein.html
> What do you think about this issues?
>
>
I've started to take a look at the piece (have previously read the Lectures in
question twice by the way but a while back). Though I haven't yet finished the
article it is certainly dealing with an interesting aspect of Wittgenstein's
thinking. I have long thought he was wrong on some aspects of religious belief.
He seems to say (and this is not just from his lectures but from a broader
range of his writings including his personal jottings in Culture and Value)
that religious belief is, as Sean might put it, mainly a matter of allegiance
and. when it is that, there really isn't much to debate.
But it seems to me that one cannot reduce such belief to allegiance alone, even
if allegiance is a factor. In the end, can a Catholic who doesn't believe in
the doctrines of Catholicism still be a Catholic merely because he goes through
the motions? He or she will certainly look the part to those who merely observe
him (assuming, of course, that there are no contradictions in his behavior).
But would he really be anything but a religious poseur? Would those who believe
the doctrines he only pays lip service to consider him one of their own in fact?
In my own life I have tried this and for a long time thought that
Wittgenstein's approach was the right one. Born Jewish, I flirted as a boy with
religious practice but tossed it away as I grew up. Mine was a secular
household so I could take it or leave it as it suited me. No one imposed it on
me. When I married, my wife had a religious bent but, coming from a secular
household, too, and one with less exposure to Judaism (she is also of Jewish
background), she had actually gravitated toward Catholicism for a time (before
we were married). Later, after our first two children were born and her
grandmother died she wanted to regain her lost heritage and, since I was
familiar with Judaism (though I was by then practicing Buddhism), I steered her
into Orthodox Judaism. As it happened, she decided she liked it and became a
religious Jew. Since I had absorbed Wittgenstein's attitude (and been applying
it to my Buddhism anyway), I went along with her for a time.
Judaism, like Catholicism, is very doctrinal in its Orthodox form. Although it
does not involve belief in Jesus qua God or any of the Gospel narratives, or
the idea of personal salvation as most if not all forms of Christianity do, it
does believe in the idea of a personal God. But this God's relation to the
practitioner is through the people as a whole, those who are so to speak
pledged to him, rather than directly with the ordinary individual person. (One
can argue this is different where the so-called prophets are concerned.)
Jews attain their "salvation" by being part of the Jewish people and have their
relation to God through this participation in the larger community. Thus,
Orthodox Jews must practice whatever it is that is required to be a member in
good standing of the Jewish people because God's covenant is conceived as being
with that people and not with any one individual!
While Judaism accepted the idea of a personal afterlife some time around, or
after, Christians developed their notion of it (it doesn't seem to have been
present in the cults of the Old Testament on which Judaism was later founded
but seems to have grown up after the Babylonian exile, the codification of the
Bible and the development of Greco-Roman dominance in the region), Judaism,
too, is a one-God-oriented religion as the various forms of Christianity and as
Islam appear to be. Thus, to be a practicing Jew in good standing one needs to
accept such a view, that there is the one God who does such and such and did
such and such, even if in Judaism it is differently expressed.
I explain all this by way of background to show how it is that my personal
experience seems to give the lie to a Wittgensteinian notion that religion is
JUST about allegiances or how we are committed to living our lives. Many years
ago I went with my father to the synagogue. He was not and never had been a
religious man but he was sick by then with a bad heart and I could see he
wanted to believe so I persuaded him to join me. There we were standing in the
pew, singing along with everyone else in Hebrew (I could still speak and
understand a bit of it back then having lived for a time in Israel, but it was
all Greek to him). At one poine he turned to me and, staring intently, said "Do
you really believe this stuff?"
Without missing a beat I nodded and said yes. What I meant was that I held a
kind of eclectic (and rather mystical) idea about God which I had adapted to
enable me to stand there and pray with the others and to be able to speak with
them, when it was called for, without sounding like an apostate. I too could
reference God and speak of prayer to him and of God's miracles and so forth.
But I did not mean the same thing by such terms as the others apparently did
(as any detailed and sufficiently honest discussion would, and often did,
readily bring out). In fact, I was using some of the same notions I had
developed to allow me to practice Buddhism (because Buddhism has its own
metaphysical narratives which you need to believe in in order to say and do the
things one does in that religion).
My father's question stayed with me long afterwards and, after he had died, I
realized I had lied to him and to myself when I had answered as I did that day
in the synagogue. Because, in truth, I no more believed what we were there
saying than he did. This made me realize that it's a mistake to think that
religious practice can work without belief. And belief has to be more than just
words or ritual. It has to be a commitment to the truth of the claims in
question.
Wittgenstein pointed out that one can believe or call something true in
different senses, that what is true in one game for the players need not be
true in another for the same players. My cardiologist (I share some of the same
heart problems my father had) is an Orthodox Jew, too. He is also a good
physician. Many years ago (before he was my cardiologist, when we were just
acquaintances in the same synagogue) we were in a discussion about the Talmumd,
a Jewish book which is to the Torah as the Christians' New Testament is to the
Old Testament (which itself is roughly the same as the Torah). He made the
startling, if religiously correct, observation that all knowledge can be found
in the Talmud. (That is the official position of Orthodox Judaism as far as I
know or at least it's what Orthodox rabbis teach when they teach about the
Talmud.)
I challenged him (even then I couldn't help being a bit of an apostate) as to
how he could say such a thing but, given that my knowledge of Talmud is spotty
at best, I couldn't demonstrate he was wrong. it just sounded absurd to me. So
I refocused the discussion on the question of evolution. To my surprise this
very smart guy who was a cardiologist (albeit still a young one) announced that
he didn't believe in evolution which, as near as I could tell, meant he was
denying that it was factually true because it seemed to contradict certain
Biblical teachings!
I was nonplussed but in further discussion with him realized that it wasn't so
much that he disbelieved in a fairly well established scientific theory while
practicing medicine which is based on science. It was, rather, that he had
compartmentalized two competing systems of belief about how the world is. He
simply put scientific questions into a different box in his mind than religious
questions and, when engaged in the religious game, kept the other box tightly
shut.
Was he a hypocrite, less smart than I gave him credit for, or merely doing the
Wittgensteinian thing and keeping his language games distinct? Whatever it was,
I found that I could not do the same and ultimately moved away from Orthodox
practice because, it seems to me, such practice depends on belief and it's
disingenuous to think one can believe in separate and incompatible facts
simultaneously. Yes, one can practice as though one does, but then is one being
sincere and doesn't sincerity and honesty with oneself count? Certainly it's
the very human practice to expect it of others or else to consider them phonies.
I think Wittgenstein had this one wrong, though perhaps his efforts here only
reflected his desire to reconcile his religious feelings and needs with a more
modern and secular world view. Besides, many of us seem to revert to what we
were in our youth as we grow older. He was raised a Catholic and through a
great deal of his adult life gravitated back to Catholicism in the best way he
could. I was raised secularly and went back to that. Maybe, in the end, that's
really all any of this is about?
SWM
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