There is a great deal to get through here, so I will try to make every point brief (tractatus style again). There are three topics; (i) Wittgenstein’s experience of religion, (ii) Wittgenstein’s rejection of Metaphysics, (iii) Wittgenstein’s defence of non-sense and the Mystical.
1.1 Wittgenstein was born in Vienna, 1889, the 8th child of Karl and Leopoldine.
1.11 Karl’s parents were Jewish, but converted to Protestantism, Leopoldines father was Jewish and her mother was Roman Catholic.
1.12 Ludwig Wittgenstein was baptised as a Roman Catholic, as were his siblings.
1.13 Upon his death Wittgenstein was buried according to the rites of the Catholic church.
1.14 There is no evidence that Wittgenstein practised Catholicism.
1.15 Wittgenstein wrote the Tractatus-Logico Philosophicus whilst fighting in the Austro-Hungarian army in World War I. Following the war, he gave away all his money (he was a millionaire by inheritance), considered becoming a monk, before designing and building a radically modernist house for his sister.
1.2 His favourite book (which he always carried with him) was The Gospel In Brief by Tolstoy. He often said how moved and impressed he was by the book.
1.3 With regards his lifestyle (especially at Cambridge) it seemed that he was intent of living something like a religious life.
1.4 He once commented regarding fellow Christians that although being a baptised Catholic he could not bring himself to believe the same things they did.
1.41 He rejected Metaphysics, but not all forms of religion.
1.42 Pre-World War I he was an atheist. His reading of Tolstoy saw him embrace a form of Christian existentialism.
1.43 He was influenced and referred often too, Augustine of Hippo, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy and Soren Kierkegaard (whom he called a ‘saint’).
1.44 By 1937 the form of his belief had become less Christian and more or less deist. He would have rejected the notion of Ignosticism, but others may have characterised him thus.
2.1 Analytical philosophy is concerned with language.
2.11 Specifically the misuse and misunderstanding of language.
2.12 Metaphysics was criticised as a misuse of language.
2.13 Analytical philosophy became a critique of religious language.
2.14 It is not concerned with the truth or falsity of a claim in religious language.
2.15 Religious language is impossible to understand.
2.16 Religious language is unintelligible, not because it is complex or difficult but because they are without and outside of sense.
2.17 Religious statements are not strictly statements at all.
2.2 Pigs eat corn, is true.
2.21 Pigs fly by flapping their ears, is false.
2.22 Pigs gorban tove, is neither true nor false, it is nonsense.
2.23 Religious statements take the form of pigs gorban tove, but sometimes less obviously so.
2.24 Pigs gorban tove is nonsensical on the face of it.
2.25 My feelings weigh 1.74 pounds, is less obviously nonsensical.
2.26 As is the statement: the inflation rate is bright yellow.
2.27 ‘God sees everything’, is less obviously nonsensical than pigs gorban tove.
2.3 If ‘God exists’, is nonsense, so also is ‘God does not exist’, and ‘I do not know if God exists’.
2.4 When explicit thought is applied to the statement ‘God sees everything’ its nonsense becomes more obvious.
2.41 Seeing is a function, it involves persons seeing from a perspective viewpoint. All of which is incompatible with the concept of God as a non-physical being.
2.42 To say that something sees, and something is non-physical, appears to be a contradiction.
2.5 We can talk of a metaphor or a simile.
2.51 We talk of a CCTV camera ‘looking at you’, or of ‘Big Brother watching you’.
2.52 But as Wittgenstein states “A simile must be a simile for something. And if I can describe a fact by means of a simile I must also be able to drop the simile and to describe the facts without it.” (Lecture on Ethics 1929)
2.53 A CCTV camera does not literally ‘see’ but functions in a way which is certain respects is analogous to what human beings do, when they see.
2.54 One can drop the simile ‘the CCTV sees’ by explaining the function of photosensitive cells, impulses transmitted through wires, image projections onto a computer.
2.55 One can describe the actions of a CCTV camera by means of metaphor or fact.
2.56 One cannot factually describe what God does when he ‘sees’.
2.57 It is seemingly impossible to translate alleged metaphysical facts into non-metaphorical descriptions.
2.6 Religion is awash with imagery.
2.61 It seems that religion gains a certain vitality from its use of suggestive, metaphorical pictures.
2.62 Man through the ages, as witnessed by their burial customs, seems concerned with the concept of the ‘other world’, a world beyond this world.
2.63 Vikings (for example) laid their warrior dead within a long-ship, surrounded by provisions such as food, drink, clothes, weapons. The metaphor is about the journey from this world to the ‘other world’.
2.64 The metaphor is characterising the ‘other world’ in picture ideas similar to the ‘real world’.
2.65 Xenophanes (570 BCE) describes religion thus. “The Ethiopians make their gods black and snub-nosed; the Thracians say theirs have blue eyes and red hair. And if oxen and horses or lions had hands, and could paint and produce works of art as human beings do, horses would paint the forms of gods like horses, and oxen like oxen, and make them in the image of their several kinds.”
2.66 Metaphors in connection with Metaphysics are misleading.
2.67 The ‘other world’ is conceived of as a world of the spirit, a non-physical world.
2.68 It would be impossible for the Viking burial ship to literally sail from this world to another world, from the physical to the non-physical, as though it were crossing the sea from one shore to another.
2.69 Even Vikings must have been aware of this non-literal fact as they burnt the boat, that no actual physical journey was occurring.
2.610 The difference between the physical world and the spiritual world is an ontological one. It is a completely different type of being. Moreso than say a rock and a mathematical equation.
2.611 The Vikings can invoke the image of a journey in order to attempt to describe what they believe happens to the dead in the after-life, but the metaphorical image can only be maintained in the absence of critical scrutiny.
2.612 Once we ask questions concerning the nature of the ‘other world’, all descriptions concerning the ‘other world’ become meaningless and confusing.
2.613 This does not render the ‘other-world’ non-existent, it renders it as unintelligible as trying to imagine seeing without eyes, walking without legs, describing red to a blind man and music to someone who is deaf.
2.614 The unthinkable cannot be thought.
2.615 The questions for example between theists and atheists concerning the existence of a transcendent reality have not been solved but have been dissolved.
2.616 Statements such as “God exists”, “God does not exist”, “I do not know if God exists” cannot even be formulated into a question, they are but empty word shells. “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent“.
3.1 A rejection of the Metaphysical is not a rejection of religion.
3.2 “There is the inexpressible. It shows itself; it is the mystical” (Tractatus 6.522).
3.3 Wittgenstein in published conversation with Friedrich Waismann: “Is talking essential to religion? I can easily imagine a religion in which there are no doctrines, in which, therefore, no talking occurs. Obviously, the essence of religion cannot have anything to do with the fact that talking occurs, or rather: if talking occurs, the this is itself part of the religious act, and not a theory. And it does not matter, therefore, whether such words are true, false, or nonsensical.”
3.31 Religion is not a theory, it is a practice, an activity, a way of life.
3.32 Religion is not based on a theory, on a belief or a system of beliefs, but emanates from pre-rational and non-rational attitudes and dispositions.
3.33 People have the desire to worship.
3.34 The already existent desire is justified by stories that explain that desire.
3.35 Subsequent religious doctrines of beliefs are based on what people do, or what people want to do.
3.36 Religious practise:- rituals, prayers, fasts, meditations, are that beneath which one cannot go; religious practises and experiences are more primal than explanations and theological justifications.
3.37 Tolstoy has Jesus say “You do not believe me, because you do not follow me.”
3.38 Wittgenstein rejects that you must first have belief in order to act upon belief. In the beginning is not the word, but the deed.
3.39 Much human activity occurs independent of reason and language.
3.310 Wittgenstein paraphrases Nietszche by saying that humans are primarily physical organisms with largely non-rational needs and expressions, and only secondarily and even then in extraordinary circumstances are rational beings who follow their reasoning.
3.311 Despite the rejection of Metaphysics, the primacy of practise gives potential meaningfulness to religion.
3.312 Religious statements are not the foundations upon which religious life is based.
3.313 Religious statements can be understood as being like a ritual act within religion itself. Thereby rendering any attempts at a cognitive understanding of it as a fundamental misunderstanding of their nature.
3.314 A religious utterance is worthless as an attempt to describe transcendent concepts in a factual way.
3.315 A religious utterance is effective as an expression of feeling, a prompter of ecstatic experience, as an inspiring tool for social communion.
3.316 A religious act is not a theological speculation.
3.317 A religious act is not a metaphysical belief.
3.318 A religious act is an experience, the content of that experience is that which Wittgenstein calls “the mystical”.
3.4 Wittgenstein did not reject Logical Positivism for back-door metaphysics.
3.41 Logical positivism is concerned exclusively with those areas of life where scientific enquiry and rational calculation is most appropriate and relevant.
3.42 Wittgenstein was interested in those areas of life that are the domain of the artist, visionary and mystic.
3.43 Myths, poems, visions, symphonies, rituals of “primitive cultures” are neither true nor false, rational or irrational, but expressions of a different kind altogether.
3.5 The “mystical” is an openness to the world that is different from that of science and analytical enquiry.
3.6 From a letter by Wittgenstein to his publisher Ludwig von Ficker: “Once I planned to add something to the preface (of the Tractatus) which now is not in it. I wanted to write that my work consists of two parts: of the part which is actually there, and the other part which I have not written. And it is the second part which is the most important one.“
Your response to this idea should be interesting…
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