Wittgenstein within the Philosophy of Religion

Thomas D. Carroll

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137407894
• eBook ISBN: 9781137407900
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Analytic Philosophy

The commonly held view that Wittgensteinian philosophy of religion is fideistic loses plausibility when contrasted with recent scholarship on Wittgenstein's corpus and biography. This book reevaluates the place of Wittgenstein in the philosophy of religion and charts a path forward for the subfield by advancing three themes.

1

Problems of Interpretive Authority in Wittgenstein’s Corpus

The present study of Wittgenstein begins with texts. Wittgenstein’s first wave of influence in philosophical circles was through his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, but during his philosophical career from 1929 to his death in 1951, a second wave of influence came through his teaching, conversation, and charismatic philosophical persona. During this time he scrupulously composed and revised numerous manuscripts, typescripts, and diaries; none of these texts ultimately achieved sufficient clarity to satisfy Wittgenstein’s powerful self-criticism. Yet after his death, these texts have slowly been prepared for publication and have been issued to a larger reading philosophical public, thus instigating a third wave of influence (Kenny, 2006, pp. 382–96). Effects from these three waves continued to affect philosophers through the middle decades of the twentieth century; yet, as the first two waves have receded into history, the third wave (increasing progressively in its volume as further texts from Wittgenstein’s corpus have become more widely available and easier to access) defines the presence of Wittgenstein in philosophy today, supplemented by biographical and historical scholarship on the development and interpretation of Wittgenstein’s corpus. Secondary research on how to read Wittgenstein continues to be a vibrant area of philosophical work relating to Wittgenstein; hermeneutical work is enriching much of philosophy beyond the writings of Wittgenstein and is aiding analytic philosophers in approaching difficult and problematic texts as well as historical texts and issues. The present book is situated within this body of hermeneutical work.

Developing a principled approach to Wittgenstein’s corpus is no simple task, for while he wrote extensively on philosophical topics, Wittgenstein did not publish very much of his writings during his lifetime. The body of work scholars have been left with is made up of different genres and executed with varying levels of preparation and editing. Most of what Wittgenstein wrote does not overtly concern religious phenomena, but what does concern religion has inspired much scholarly reflection.¹ Yet how should Wittgenstein’s thought on religion affect one’s reading of the more straightforwardly philosophical material, if at all, and vice versa?

Many of the sources now available to scholars were not prepared to Wittgenstein’s satisfaction for publication, or indeed, were not ever meant for it. The need for contextual work is made apparent by the fact that generally, early interpreters of Wittgenstein in philosophy of religion were not seeking to place his remarks on religion within the context of his wider philosophical interests; far from it, the earliest group of interpreters of Wittgenstein on religion, spread across the second and third waves as we will see in Chapter 3, did not have access to some of the main sources for Wittgenstein’s remarks on religion – ‘Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough’, ‘The Lectures on Religious Belief’, Culture and Value, and ‘Movements of Thought: Diaries 1930–1932, 1936–1937’ and thus formed their interpretations based on works like the Tractatus, the Blue and Brown Books, and Philosophical Investigations. Philosophers of religion of earlier decades interpreted Wittgenstein in light of the dominant philosophical questions of their time. Now that the philosophical controversies of those days have passed to some degree, it is possible to investigate Wittgenstein’s thought on religion without being swept up into those controversies.

1.1 Sources for Wittgenstein and philosophy of religion

Despite the fact that books and articles have been written with variations on the title, it is debatable to what extent it makes sense to speak of Wittgenstein’s philosophy of religion. Since the ‘phenomena’ of religion were not obviously major topics in his philosophical output, it is better to speak of his having thoughts about religion and occasionally about topics in the area of philosophy now named as philosophy of religion.² By ‘phenomena of religions’, I have in mind not Husserlian phenomenology but the meaning the term has in the phenomenology of religions. Ninian Smart writes of phenomenology of religions as delineating ‘the various manifestations of religions in complex ways. It discusses a number of themes – about myths, doctrines, art, rituals, experiences, organizations, ethics, law – and a certain amount of religion, politics and economics.’ (Smart, 1999, p. 2) A Wittgensteinian philosophy of religion is the kind of thing that later scholars have constructed from the available source texts.

The principal sources for Wittgenstein’s thought on religion may be divided into two groups, those that deal explicitly with phenomena of religions and those that have only an implicit bearing on philosophy of religion. The first group itself also may be divided into two again; there are those sources that deal primarily with the topic of religion and those that contain occasional remarks or asides dealing with religion. In what follows, I will outline the manner in which I approach these three kinds of sources for philosophy of religion in Wittgenstein’s corpus.

1.1.1 Sources primarily concerned with phenomena of religions

The texts concerned explicitly with religions include the ‘Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough’ (Wittgenstein, 1993) and ‘The Lectures on Religious Belief’ (Wittgenstein, 1967a). These two texts provide the lengthiest treatments of phenomena of religion in Wittgenstein’s corpus and, among sources dealing explicitly with religion, have received much attention in secondary literature. However, one must be careful in studying these texts as Wittgenstein did not seek to publish the ‘Remarks on Frazer’ and the notes on the ‘Lectures on Religious Belief’ were published long after Wittgenstein’s death.

Begun in 1931 with additions in ‘not earlier than 1936 and probably after 1948’ (Rhees, 1984, p. 119), the ‘Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough’ contain numerous short critical reflections on James G. Frazer’s classic text in anthropology. A recurring theme in Wittgenstein’s criticism of Frazer is the latter’s interpretive idea that religious beliefs are proto-scientific in nature; that is, in Wittgenstein’s reading, Frazer believes that expressions of religious belief are inchoate attempts at descriptions of the forces that operate in the world. One might call magical and religious beliefs, as Frazer conceives them, folk science. Frazer understands the conceptual connection of spirits or souls with powerful forces in the world to be the beginning of science. Likewise, Frazer understands modern observers to know better and not make such elementary mistakes and simultaneously thinks it is only natural that more ‘primitive’ cultures should make blunders in their initial epistemological forays.

Frazer first published his book The Golden Bough (2 volumes) in 1890. Subsequent editions and expansions were published in 1900 (3 volumes), 1906–15 (12 volumes), and 1922 (abridged edition). The various editions of the book had a wide impact and readership. Wittgenstein would have been most likely familiar with the 1922 abridged edition, although he had some familiarity with the 1915 edition. (Wittgenstein, 1993, p. 115) In the seminal book, Frazer sought to articulate the motivation lying behind the varying manifestations of religion and guiding the evolution of this human cultural phenomenon. In the preface to the 1922 edition, Frazer identifies fear of the human dead as the primary factor driving the evolution of religion in what anthropologists then termed ‘primitive’ cultures. The idea that religions and cultures evolved from a primal state to their contemporary forms was a commonly held thesis among European and American anthropologists, historians, and philosophers of religion during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, although the nature of this development was contested among the different theories offered. Oswald Spengler, a thinker who influenced Wittgenstein’s view of the history of cultures, espoused something of an evolutionary view of the history of cultures, and such a view was defended by thinkers now recognized as among the most influential theorists in the development of the academic study of religions (for example, Herbert Spencer, and E. B. Tylor).

In holding Frazer up to criticism, is Wittgenstein rejecting whole-cloth the idea of evolution of culture or religion? Given his appreciation for Spengler, I think it unlikely. Not that evolution would insure greater sophistication or value (say, as teleological versions of the evolution of culture and religion would have it). It seems likely that the evolutionary hypothesis would be misleading by Wittgenstein’s lights insofar as the hypothesis might tempt those using it to perceive similarities where scrupulous investigation would show divergences. Also potentially problematic for Wittgenstein would be Frazer’s use of the expression ‘primitive culture’. It is not so much the descriptive use of the expression, which was quite common as an anthropological category at the time of Frazer’s writing, which would have bothered Wittgenstein as the use of it specifically to indicate the intellectual distance between primitive peoples and modern observers. As much as Wittgenstein was keen to point out differences, he was also concerned to rebuff arrogant pronouncements that a nationality, race, or epoch might immunize its people from error, stupidity, or moral failure.³ In any case, Wittgenstein’s pessimism about the modern era may have made such a comparison dubious (Klagge, 2011, pp. 70–1). Such delusions about ‘modern’ sophistication make the possibility of moral and intellectual failure all the more likely (but as discussed in Chapter 2, Wittgenstein was not free of these tendencies in his own thinking for much of his life).

In the Remarks, Wittgenstein pays particular attention to the nature of explanation. Frazer’s method comes off as roughly empirical. Frazer hopes to identify a general theory of religious development based upon study of particular cases. This will enable him to form a theory of the essence of religion as well as to trace the history of the evolution of religions than can subsequently be applied to novel cases. Nevertheless, Frazer seems to welcome the possibility of revision of hypotheses if new countervailing evidence arises.

However, Wittgenstein takes issue with what he takes to be Frazer’s myopia regarding the pervasiveness of ritual in ‘modern’ life. Wittgenstein might well have enjoyed Frazer’s attention to the details of cultural practices. Monk notes that Wittgenstein turned to reading Frazer’s Golden Bough because of Wittgenstein’s long-standing interest in magic as a primitive expression of religious feeling (Monk, 1990, p. 310). According to Monk, Wittgenstein’s interests in religion and magic can be thought of as analogous to his fascination with ‘the desire to run up against the limits of our language,’ that is, the same desire that gives rise to metaphysics (Monk, ibid.). Monk does not read Wittgenstein’s use of the term ‘primitive’ as bringing along pejorative connotations that are sometimes associated with the term or entailing an attitude of cultural superiority. Indeed, one overarching theme of Wittgenstein’s ‘Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough’ is that a strict distinction between the ‘modern’ and ‘primitive’ in human culture is not tenable. Rituals and magical thinking pervade much ordinary human experience as Wittgenstein frequently remarks.

In the Remarks, Wittgenstein repeatedly explores the nature of explanation. Frazer’s approach to the study of religions is preoccupied with explanation. Wittgenstein writes:

The very idea of wanting to explain a practice – for example, the killing of the priest-king – seems wrong to me. All that Frazer does is to make them plausible to people who think as he does. It is very remarkable that in the final analysis all these practices are presented as, so to speak, pieces of stupidity. (Wittgenstein, 1993, p. 119)

Wittgenstein observes something contemptible in Frazer’s analysis. Frazer’s explanatory project treats magic and religion as proto-scientific cultural artifacts. According to Wittgenstein, in doing so Frazer depicts practitioners of magic and of religion as unintelligent (that is, because they do not have our common-sense naturalist worldview), while Wittgenstein detects something deep in religious and magical practices.

The ‘Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough’ provides some prima facie support for the view that religious practices (and thus the beliefs they presuppose) do not need justification. Just before the passage quoted above, Wittgenstein remarks on what he takes to be a concept of error in Frazer’s interpretive epistemology:

Frazer’s account of the magical and religious views of mankind is unsatisfactory: it makes these views look like errors.

Was Augustine in error, then, when he called upon God on every page of the Confessions?

But – one might say – if he was not in error, surely the Buddhist holy man was – or anyone else – whose religion gives expression to completely different views. But none of them was in error, except when he set forth a theory. (Wittgenstein, 1993, p. 119)

Consider the final sentence of the quotation above. The sentence conveys a conception of the nature of error: theories are among the kinds of things by means of which one may be in error. Of course, one may be in error about the facts too, but the point is that truth and falsity are properties of certain sorts of expressions or thoughts. The view Wittgenstein seems to be putting forward is that religious practices are not the kinds of things one can be in error about, except when those practices do follow on an erroneous belief or theory, or unless or until one tries explicitly to form an interpretation about values or beliefs presupposed in the practices. We can get a sense as to how this criticism might go by seeing what Wittgenstein has to say further about the nature of explanation: ‘I believe that the attempt to explain is already therefore wrong, because one must only correctly piece together what one knows, without adding anything, and the satisfaction being sought through the explanation follows of itself’ (Wittgenstein, 1993, p. 121). Several remarks later, Wittgenstein adds: ‘Nothing is so difficult as doing justice to the facts.’ This seems to suggest a two-tiered assessment of Frazer’s efforts. No doubt, Wittgenstein was interested in what Frazer had to offer regarding observations of the practices of various tribes and civilizations; however, it is to the theoretical organization of those facts that Wittgenstein directs his attention primarily.

Many of Wittgenstein’s ideas recur in multiple sources, and the ‘Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough’ are not unique in this respect. While discussions of explanation and error reappear in sources such as Philosophical Investigations and On Certainty, the theme of the tenacity of religious belief is also addressed in passages from Culture and Value and implied in the ‘Lectures on Religious Belief’. While these multiple sources can and should be read in concert with one another, we should not assume that these different texts will always converge on these topics in the same way or that they present a completely synoptic view of Wittgenstein’s philosophy of religion.

That said, a common theme that emerges in these three sources is that religious belief is of a different kind than the ordinary mental states conventionally called beliefs. Wittgenstein is inspired in part by the thought of Kierkegaard, Tolstoy and others, including Lessing. The difference between beliefs that may be thought of as ‘religious’ and those that are ‘ordinary’ is developed more fully in ‘The Lectures on Religious Belief’ than in other sources, although this theme may be found in ‘Movements of Thought: Diaries 1930–1932’(Wittgenstein, 2003b) and Culture and Value. Wittgenstein suggests that religious faith is not the same type of subjective state as is historical be...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: On Reading Wittgenstein on Religion
• 1  Problems of Interpretive Authority in Wittgensteins Corpus
• 2  Wittgenstein, Biography, and Religious Identity
• 3  A History of Wittgenstein and the Philosophy of Religion
• 4  The Traditions of Fideism
• 5  On Fideism as an Interpretive Category
• 6  Religions, Epistemic Isolation, and Social Trust
• 7  Wittgensteins Ethic of Perspicuity and the Philosophy of Religion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index