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Context: This page supplements the translated selections of Franz Parak's Wittgenstein at Cassino about when at the end of the First World War the author of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus was a prisoner of war in Italy, which is an historical aside to Wittgenstein's Logic of Language.

How did Wittgenstein view religion and religious belief? Was he himself a Christian? [Skip to Conclusion.] There follows is a discussion of Bertrand Russell's view of this "singular man" and his work in philosophy.

What must the man be called, who cannot understand the concept 'God', cannot see how a reasonable man may use this word seriously? Are we to say he suffers from some blindness? (RPP i § 213 [circa 1946-1947])

[Wittgenstein to Drury, c. 1930] 'God' is a word in my vocabulary. (Letter to Rhees, 16 October 1966)

Life can educate one to belief in God ... (CV p. 86, remark from 1950)

Preface: What "manner of man" was Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951)? From the point of view of his logic of language meaning, it does not matter. The Philosophical Investigations, whether written by Ludwig Wittgenstein or by Josef Stalin ("Some of the young comrades have asked me whether grammar is a superstructure on the base"), must stand or fall on its own to the tests of reason and experience. On the other hand, we sometimes hope that the description of a man's life will somehow help us to understand his philosophy, presuming that Wittgenstein's philosophy is different from his logic.

Wittgenstein's Religion - "What manner of man was he?"

Note: There are serious limitations to our sources of knowledge about Wittgenstein's own religion. For the most part we simply don't know what he believed.

Outline of this page ...

"A singular man of ascetic faith"

Wittgenstein was a very singular man, and I doubt whether his disciples knew what manner of man he was. (Bertrand Russell [Note 1])

Wittgenstein worked as a gardener's assistant at a Benedictine monastery near Vienna after he left school teaching, and, according to von Wright, he more than once considered becoming a monk [Note 2]. Whether one finds it plausible that Wittgenstein was correctly understood by Parak may depend on the picture one has of the kind of priest Wittgenstein would have wanted to be, of what the priests he respected were like.

"... in every village someone who stood for these things." In times of superstition someone like that could do a lot of good as a teacher and as an example. But in later times maybe not. But there really have been priests like that, and in other backward places there still are priests who are able to teach that:

Religious faith and superstition are quite different. One of them results from fear and is a sort of false science. The other is a trusting. (CV p. 72, remark from 1948)

A friend of Wittgenstein's, a Dominican priest said prayers beside Wittgenstein's death-bed and at his graveside in St. Giles Cemetery, and this gave rise to gossip after Wittgenstein's death. But Wittgenstein's own attitude was, I believe, shown by what he had told Drury in 1944: "I seem to be surrounded now by Roman Catholic converts! I don't know whether they pray for me. I hope they do." (Recollections p. 148) And this was in fact one of the remarks that Drury had remembered at the time of Wittgenstein's death and that had led to inviting the Dominican. (ibid. p. 171)

Not a doctrinal faith

Although Wittgenstein said to Drury, "There is a sense in which you and I are both Christians" (ibid. p. 114) and it was the view of Wittgenstein's sister Hermine that her brother was a Christian, could someone who wrote that "The way you use the word 'God' shows not whom you mean -- but instead what you mean" (CV p. 50, remark from 1946) have reconciled himself to the Christian denominations that require assent to doctrines such as God the Creator, a doctrine which Wittgenstein said played no part in his own religious thinking (Norman Malcolm, Memoir 2e, p. 59)?

Wittgenstein said to Drury, "If I thought of God as another being like myself, outside myself, only infinitely more powerful, then I would regard it as my duty to defy him" (Recollections p. 108), which may be a rejection of theism or divine providence, of God's involvement in the natural world. (The way you use the word 'God' also shows what you don't mean by it; cf. Russell's Theory of Descriptions in the context of defining the word 'God'.)

Wittgenstein was not, of course, simply and rather naively knocking down an anthropomorphic straw-man with these remarks. He himself used anthropomorphic language when talking about God (although he said that "religious language is not metaphorical"), e.g. "God may say to me ...", that is, God the Father as judge (CV p. 87, remark from 1951). But he himself seems not to have meant by the word 'God' in any way a Person, such as one might pray to man to God.

Not only Christianity, but all religions

Although Christian religious "pictures" were those that said most to Wittgenstein [Note 3], his admiration for sincere religious faith was much broader than his respect for the Christian faith alone. To Drury he said: "All religions are wonderful ... The ways in which people express their religious feelings differ enormously." (Recollections p. 102)

Wittgenstein's own faith was austere, or, to use his word, "ascetic", that is, without ritual or doctrine, with religious stories serving only as life-guiding pictures (Religious faith is not belief that an hypothesis is true; our relationship to a religious proposition, e.g. that God is the Father or that there will be a Last Judgment, is quite different). To Drury:

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....

Of one thing I am certain. The religion of the future will have to be extremely ascetic, and by that I don't mean just going without food and drink. (Recollections p. 114, in 1930s)

The symbolisms of Catholicism are wonderful beyond words. But any attempt to make it into a philosophical system is offensive. (ibid. p. 102)

However austere it may have been, however, Wittgenstein's faith must have been deep: because it lasted to the end of his life. Two years before his death, he told Drury:

I have had a letter from an old friend in Austria, a priest. In it he says that he hopes my work will go well, if it should be God's will. Now that is all I want: if it should be God's will. (ibid. p. 168, in 1949; cf. this letter from Wittgenstein to Sraffa, and the following remark from 1947)

Is what I am doing [my work in philosophy] really worth the effort? Yes, but only if a light shines on it from above. (CV p. 57)

"To read the Gospels with the school children"

Wittgenstein often pointed out Drury's romanticism to him. But Wittgenstein himself was as romantic as anyone, e.g. reading Tolstoy on the Gospels during WW1 ("the man with the book": The soldiers referred to Wittgenstein as "the one with the Gospel", because he always carried with him his copy of Tolstoy's The Gospel in Brief) [Note 4], and wanting to emigrate to the USSR to help build a new way of life there. But, he said, "There is something childish in this, but there is also something good." [Note 5]

Alyosha in Dostoyevsky's romance The Brothers Karamazov undertakes the moral education of the boys of the village ("come maestro leggerò il Vangelo insieme ai bambini"). But it is in no way easy for an educated and cultured man to work with peasants [Note 6] if he does not have the common touch. It did not work out for Wittgenstein, and he returned to Cambridge in 1929 to think once more about philosophy. [Note 7]

[Wittgenstein in his notes and conversations often referred to himself as a Jew or Jewish thinker and called his own religion "one hundred percent Hebraic" (e.g. Wittgenstein's view: The good is whatever God commands), although he did not attend Jewish religious services. He did believe in the existence of a "Jewish race" to which he belonged and which was the source of what he said was his "non-Western" point of view; and that is more than seeing Judaism simply as a national identity ideology. Although his logic of language is thoroughgoingly rational, Wittgenstein was in some ways a pre-Enlightenment thinker, and much of his thinking is not rational; on the other hand, he classified the word 'soul' as belonging to superstition, although he did not place the word 'God' there.]

Bertrand Russell's view of Wittgenstein

Note 1: Russell made this remark in the context of polemic. He confessed to his dislike of finding himself "out of fashion", said that it was hard to accept this gracefully, and then went on to accept it ungracefully. Wittgenstein, he wrote,

was a very singular man, and I doubt whether his disciples knew what manner of man he was.

I admired Wittgenstein's Tractatus but not his later work, which seemed to me to involve an abnegation of his own best talent very similar to those of Pascal and Tolstoy.

His followers, without (so far as I can discover) undergoing the mental torments which made him and Pascal and Tolstoy pardonable in spite of their treachery to their own greatness, have produced a number of works which, I am told, have merit, and in these works they have set forth a number of arguments against my views and methods. (Bertrand Russell, My Philosophical Development, New York: 1959, p. 214-215)

Drury replied to Russell in his essay "Madness and Religion" (in DW). For a very different point of view from Russell's, see Engelmann's understanding of his friend Wittgenstein (which applies this "abnegation" also to the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus).

Conceptions of Philosophy - Russell versus Wittgenstein

Wittgenstein's impact upon me came in two waves: the first of these was before the First World War; the second was immediately after the War when he sent me the manuscript of his Tractatus. His later doctrines, as they appear in his Philosophical Investigations, have not influenced me at all. (My Philosophical Development, p. 112)

I have not found in Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations anything that seemed to me interesting .... [This philosophy] remains to me completely unintelligible. Its positive doctrines seem to me trivial and its negative doctrines unfounded. (ibid. p. 216).

In my view, Russell finds this philosophy unintelligible because -- apart of course from his not wanting to find it intelligible -- he sees philosophy as a collection of doctrines, and that is what Wittgenstein claims that philosophy is not. [Question: are "A metaphysical question is always in appearance a factual one, although the problem is a conceptual one" and "Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language" doctrines? I don't know if they're universally founded, but they certainly aren't trivial, if they're true.]

In my opinion, rather than doctrines about reality, Wittgenstein's logic-philosophy is a collection (system) of definitions, metaphors and methods -- or, in a word, Wittgenstein defined a way of looking at things (i.e. from the point of view of grammar and sense and nonsense) and of asking questions from that point of view. (But that statement is overly broad and so not entirely correct.)

In Russell's view philosophy is a collection of speculative theories closely allied to the natural sciences, whereas for Wittgenstein philosophy is what it was for the historical Socrates: criticism of what you know, or think you know, [although] with clarity [rather than truth] as its ultimate aim. [This view was already expressed in the Tractatus, which Russell should have been aware of. (TLP 4.111)] Russell wrote:

"To understand the world as well as may be"

... as with all philosophers before [Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations], my fundamental aim has been to understand the world as well as may be, and to separate what may count as knowledge from what must be rejected as unfounded opinion. (My Philosophical Development, p. 217)

But in Wittgenstein's thinking there was a shift away from asking about the truth of philosophical statements (That question was set aside) to asking about the meaning of such statements instead (CV (1998 rev. ed.) [MS 105 46 c: 1929]). Wittgenstein had already written in the TLP that philosophy does not result in a collection of philosophical propositions but in clarity [4.112]. But why? Because "philosophical propositions" -- (Russell: "a proposition is anything that is true or that is false" [The Principles of Mathematics Chapter II, p. 12-13]; Wittgenstein defined 'proposition' as "any expression that can be significantly negated") -- are not propositions but are instead misunderstandings of the logic of our language: they are expressions of conceptual confusion: they are neither true nor false. [TLP 4.003]

But for [Wittgenstein's later work] I should not have thought it worth while to state this aim, which I should have supposed could be taken for granted. But we are now told that it is not the world that we are to try to understand but only sentences ... (Russell, My Philosophical Development, p. 217)

To "understand the world as well as may be" is the task of the sciences [In religion there are religious pictures, and in philosophy there are similarly metaphysical pictures, but neither kind of picture is a proposition in Russell's sense of 'proposition']. Note that this was not Socrates' fundamental aim in philosophy (Phaedrus 229e-230a; Diog. L.), despite Russell's claim about "all philosophers".

As to separating "what may count as knowledge from what must be rejected as unfounded opinion", this is done in all the rational disciplines: it is called critical thinking; it is not a use of reason unique to the work of philosophers.

Wittgenstein's later work is foreign to Russell's "fundamental aim". And because Russell demanded that Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations be forced into a category they do not belong in ("positive and negative doctrines"), he found them uninteresting. That would be a purely philosophical reason for his incomprehension.

[Wrong category, wrong yardstick: wrong aim. But about "Wittgenstein's doctrines", I write just the opposite elsewhere: "trivial, unfounded, and pointless".]

Russell: why Wittgenstein gave away his fortune

According to Russell, Wittgenstein "gave all his money to his brothers and sisters, because he found earthly possessions a burden" (Letter from The Hague, Holland, to Ottoline Morrell, 20 December 1919, where Russell had gone to have Wittgenstein explain the Tractatus to him). Wittgenstein was never short of money, however, e.g. he was able travel to Norway, Ireland, Russia and America, frequently to Vienna (even living independently for long stretches in the first two countries), and he retired from Cambridge when he was 58 years old. If he lived simply, it was by choice, not necessity. (Wittgenstein can only have been called "poor" within the context of a wealthy social class; his life was always one of privilege.)

Based on Wittgenstein's letters, the explanation fully consistent with the facts is that Wittgenstein wanted, perhaps from vanity, perhaps from simple self-respect, to earn his own living. And that, not the Gospels or because "money is only a nuisance to a philosopher" (another way Russell told the story), is why he gave his fortune to his brothers and sisters. (On the other hand, perhaps Wittgenstein did not wish to confess his real reason to his friends, although not giving his fortune to the poor must not be overlooked when considering Parak's view either.)

Bertrand Russell was himself a "very singular man" and should not, I believe, be measured with an inappropriate yardstick. Drury wrote about Wittgenstein: "I think he was inclined to see other people in terms of black and white; though in this connection I must mention that he was fond of quoting the proverb, "It takes many sorts to make a world", adding, "That is a very beautiful and kindly saying."" (Recollections p. 148). Indeed it is. [The expression "manner of man" is from the Gospel according to Mark: "What manner of man is this that even the wind and the sea obey him?" (4.41)] [Back]

"An idea, not an intention"

Note 2: However in Russell's judgment this was "an idea, not an intention" (Letter to Ottoline Morrell, 20 December 1919; quoted Ludwig Wittgenstein: Cambridge Letters, p. 140n). There were many "ideas rather than intentions" in Wittgenstein's statements about his plans.

In any case, a philosopher could never become a monk or a priest:

'Believing' means submitting to an authority. Having once submitted to it, you cannot then, without rebelling against it, first call it into question & then once again find it convincing. (CV (1998 rev. ed.) [MS 128 49: ca. 1944])

Now, although that is not the only account Wittgenstein gave of 'believing-in' or 'religious belief' (See Note 3 below), Catholic monks and priests must take a vow of obedience. But a philosopher cannot reject an answer to a question simply because that answer is not acceptable to the authority he has vowed to obey. The spirit of philosophy -- which is the spirit of question and cross-question all things freely -- is not compatible with the spirit of the Church.

Wittgenstein could never have become a monk or a priest. It does not follow from this, however, that he could not have been a Christian "in some sense" (as he said to Drury): authoritarian Christianity is not the only thing we call Christianity. [Back]

Religious faith = holding steadfast to religious pictures

Note 3: Compare religious belief to the role particular pictures might play in my life -- e.g. a Last Judgment -- of "constantly admonishing me". "Here, an enormous difference would be between those people for whom the picture is constantly in the foreground, and the others who just didn't use it at all." (LC p. 56; cf. Engelmann's Memoir p. 77-78: "When we meet again at the Last Judgment"; and CV p. 83 [MS 138 32b: 20.5.1949])

"I am not a religious man ..."

When he told Drury, "I am not a religious man but I cannot help seeing every problem from a religious point of view" (Recollections p. 79) -- Wittgenstein could be said to have been using the word 'religious' equivocally, on the one hand to mean adherence to a particular religion's doctrine and ritual, and on the other hand to mean what he himself described -- namely, a passionate clinging [holding fast] to a particular frame of reference (CV p. 64; cf. p. 33), which is what the above pictures would be.

Obviously, if religious pictures [ideas] guide your thinking about life [are your frame of reference], then you are by definition a religious man [or what else shall we mean by 'religious man'?], even if you fail to do what those pictures direct you to do -- so long as [provided that] you regard your failure as sinful.

Ethics was the center of Wittgenstein's life, but unlike Socrates, it was a religious ethics, not a philosophical ethics. Just as Wittgenstein's solution to the riddle of life was a religious not a philosophical solution; had it not been for this, I think, he would not have been willing to abandon his logical-philosophical work, as he so often seems to have been wanting to do.] [Back]

Wittgenstein's response to Tolstoy's The Gospel in Brief

Note 4: Russell wrote that in the days before 1914, Wittgenstein

had been dogmatically anti-Christian, but in this respect he changed completely. The only thing he ever told me about this was that once in a village in Galicia during the war he found a bookshop containing only one book, which was Tolstoy on the Gospels. He bought the book, and, according to him, it influenced him profoundly. (Bertrand Russell, "Ludwig Wittgenstein", in the journal Mind, July 1951, p. 298)

Russell wrote to G.E. Moore on 27 May 1929, when they were asked to examine Wittgenstein for the doctor of philosophy degree (to be awarded based on the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus):

I think ... that unless Wittgenstein has changed his opinions of me he will not much like to have me as an Examiner. The last time we met [This would have been in 1919] he was so much pained by the fact of my not being a Christian that he has avoided me ever since ... (Quoted in Ronald W. Clark, Life of Bertrand Russell (1976), p. 438 [p. 710])

Wittgenstein was still young when the change he described to Franz Parak as being "reborn" occurred. Such changes, of course, do not always remain unchanged as a human being ages; they may be revised, or deepened, or indeed be denounced altogether. [Back]

Note 5: Letter to J.M. Keynes, 6 July 1935 (K.26), my paraphrase from memory.

"The Danger in Writing someone's Biography"

I have relied primarily on M. O'C. Drury, 1907-1976 (see Bibliography), for this page. Rereading Wittgenstein's correspondence (Russell, Keynes, Moore, Ramsey), however, I now have a quite different impression of him. Wittgenstein was much more anxious for academic degrees, much more anxious to publish, much more of an institutional academic (involved with the administration of the Moral Sciences Club, himself applying for Moore's old professorship, attending at least one professional conference, standing as a PhD examiner) -- although never scholarly -- than I had thought. [He certainly wasn't an anarchist or opposed to institutions and authority.] It is perhaps easy to see why Wittgenstein made and wrote so many remarks about human vanity, because clearly this was a great temptation for him: "Aim at being loved without being admired" (CV p. 38, remark from 1940).

"I come not to call the righteous ..."

In the case of Drury writing Wittgenstein's biography, I think it was, rather than a dragging down, a lifting one's subject up to one's own level. And I must confess to now sharing von Wright's view of this subject: Wittgenstein "was himself an enigma", many-sided, very complicated. Was Wittgenstein "in some sense" a Christian? Perhaps in this sense: "I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repent ..." (Luke 5.32) Now that "picture" was very important in Wittgenstein's life -- and it isn't in the lives of all of us who deplore our own characters.

Wittgenstein gave Drury a copy of Samuel Johnson's Prayers and Meditations: "I believe the reason why this book appealed to him so strongly was because of the shortness of the prayers, their deep seriousness, and Johnson's repeated appeal that he might have grace to amend his life." (Recollections p. 94-95) [Back]

Wittgenstein and the Laboring Classes

Many of Wittgenstein's perceptions of humanity [about social classes (views held also by Russell and Keynes, all three children of privilege), democracy and freedom (These were not shared by Russell and Keynes)] belong to a past age (Wittgenstein was born in 1889). Thus it would be surprising if there were not dissonance between many of his views and our own.

Note 6: The poor farmers in the Austrian mountain village where Wittgenstein taught were indeed backward (or practical-minded from their point of view): "The peasants refused to supply him with milk because he taught their children sums that were not about money." (Autobiography of Bertrand Russell 1914-1944, Boston: 1951, p. 139)

Wittgenstein studied at a teacher training's college in Vienna during the academic year 1919-1920. After receiving his teaching certificate on 7 July 1920 (R.48, Ludwig Wittgenstein: Cambridge Letters (1997), p. 157n), as he wrote to Russell, he spent his "holidays as a gardener's assistant in the nurseries of the monastery of Klosterneuburg near Vienna" (6 August 1920, R.50, tr. McGuinness). By autumn he had obtained a position and wrote to Russell:

I am to be an elementary-school teacher in a tiny village called Trattenbach [bei Kirchberg am Wechsel, Nieder-Österreich ("Lower Austria")]. It's in the mountains, about four hours' journey south of Vienna. (20 September 1920, R.51, tr. McGuinness)

A year later Wittgenstein wrote to Russell that he was still in

Trattenbach, surrounded, as ever, by odiousness and baseness. I know that human beings on the average are not worth much anywhere, but here they are more good-for-nothing and irresponsible than elsewhere. (23 October 1921, R.52, tr. McGuinness)

When Russell responded that the average human nature wasn't worth much anywhere, Wittgenstein replied:

You are right: the Trattenbachers are not uniquely worse than the rest of the human race. But Trattenbach is a particularly insignificant place in Austria and the Austrians have sunk so miserably low since the war that it's too dismal to talk about. That's what it is. (28 November 1921, R.53, tr. McGuinness)

Because things did not go well in Trattenbach for Wittgenstein, he wrote Russell,

I am now in another hole [i.e. Puchberg am Schneeberg, Lower Austria], though, I have to say, it is no better than the old one. Living with human beings is hard! Only they are not really human, but rather 1/4 animal and 3/4 human. ([November-December 1922], ibid. p. 182, tr. McGuinness)

It is of course very hard for any of us to feel charitable toward those whose victims we regard ourselves as being. But these two gentlemen never felt any shame about speaking contemptuously of common men, never seeming to accept that all that divided gentlemen from common men were the opportunities gentlemen were given in their childhoods and youth, not accepting th view that "king and peasant are not conditions of nature but only conditions of society" (which is the foundation or delusion of democracy), as if gentlemen had a natural right to the privileges they enjoyed only because of the labor of common men.

Even these men who, according to Russell, were both skeptical philosophers who had no respect for authority, took social classes ("stations in life") for granted; they had no doubts about the correctness of those (Russell in deed despite his words, Wittgenstein in both deed and words). Wittgenstein seems never to have put the question marks deep enough down, to ask why the peasants were so "extremely limited, although intelligent enough among themselves" [Note 6a].

Two Counter-balancing Stories

A Cambridge Lecturer in English, F.R. Leavis (1895-1981), told a story of how, sometime after Wittgenstein's return to Cambridge in 1929, Leavis and Wittgenstein had once rented a boat to go rowing and how, when they were quite late getting back that evening, Wittgenstein had not been in the least concerned that in returning the boat late they had been very inconsiderate of the boatman, who of course would have wanted to go home to his family at the end of the day. Wittgenstein had only remarked, "I always associate the man with the boathouse." And he had even reproached Leavis for giving the boatman too high a tip. (Recollections p. 57-58)

This story is of course distasteful and perhaps not too much should be made of it, because it could be remarked that Leavis brought out an instinctive spirit of contradiction in Wittgenstein, and that this could be why Wittgenstein said what he did to him. (Indeed, much of Wittgenstein's thinking -- both about life and about philosophy -- arose from someone's assertion of p and Wittgenstein's almost perverse response of not-p!) And again on the other hand, it has to be asked why Wittgenstein was drawn to Leavis in the first place: it was because of Leavis' attitude in this case and in others which Leavis describes. Nonetheless, like the letters Wittgenstein wrote to Russell when Wittgenstein was a school teacher, Leavis' boathouse story concerns attitudes from many years after Wittgenstein had told Franz Parak that he had been "reborn".

To somewhat counterbalance the boathouse story, there is the statement Wittgenstein made to Drury when he visited Ireland (in 1934): "We must turn back [from the direction they had selected for their walk]: we mustn't holiday in front of men who are working." (Recollections p. 128, my paraphrase from memory) This may have been condescending, but at least it was not thoughtless and inconsiderate. Wittgenstein, however, was certainly not an egalitarian, and in this respect Wittgenstein (who was born in 1889) was entirely a European of earlier times. [Wittgenstein's and Russell's attitude toward the uneducated and the less clever was shared by C.D. Broad.]

Wittgenstein and the Revolution in Russia

Given Wittgenstein's attitude towards and experience with common men, it seems willful blindness that even after his visit to the Soviet Union in 1935, it was still his idea to live there in "the newly colonized parts at the periphery of the of the USSR", if necessary after studying in England to become a doctor (Letters to J.M. Keynes of 30 June and 6 July 1935). But if Wittgenstein had not been able to tolerate the backwardness of the Austrian peasants, what did he imagine the backwardness of the Russian peasants -- by far the poorest and most backward peasants in Europe -- would be like? [In his story The Cossacks Tolstoy describes men and women each thinking the way the others think, incapable of an independent thought or subtle feeling, closed-minded savages: "It is very hard, dear brother, / In a foreign land to live".] Did Wittgenstein imagine that the communist dictatorship had magically transformed the muzhiks into Tolstoyans? Why this idealization of the Soviet Union? It is not that there were no journalists who reported the massive famine in the southwest of that country in 1932-1933 (when around 25,000 people died every day) as a direct result of the Soviet government's policy of forced collectivization of agriculture. But that would only be for someone who truly wanted facts rather than a picture of his own creation. Unlike Russell, Wittgenstein was not an great advocate of human freedom (the only time he wore a tie, he said, was when he visited the Soviet embassy); even towards the end of the Second World War Wittgenstein was willing to make excuses for Stalin: Wittgenstein thought it would be more terrible if people did not have regular work than it would be if they were not free (Recollections p. 204-205). Wittgenstein's attitude toward Soviet Russia

shows how you can be persuaded of a certain thing. In the end you forget entirely every question of verification; you are just sure it must [be that way]. (LC p. 26-7)

It appears that Wittgenstein wanted to throw himself into the sea and not trouble himself about what conditions were like there until he found himself in the water, as if the faults in his character could only be corrected by a complete break with his present way of life, as entering a monastery would have been.

"There is a sense in which you and I are both Christians"

Any man who is half-way decent will think himself extremely imperfect, but a religious man thinks himself wretched. (CV p. 45, remark from about 1944)

And Wittgenstein often did think himself wretched. But the image of the high seas cannot be quite correct. Because Wittgenstein told Drury, when in 1931 the latter volunteered to "help run a club for the numerous unemployed in Tyneside", northeast coast of England (near Newcastle): "If you feel you can do that, go there. But it sounds to me like trying to climb Mount Everest." (Recollections p. 121-122). But wasn't that what emigrating to the USSR would have been? Wittgenstein said to Drury:

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. (ibid. p. 114)

It was at the end of this conversation, which Drury could date only 193?, that Wittgenstein told Drury that "There is a sense in which you and I are both Christians". This suggests the question: "In which sense"? But 'in some sense' is here a declaration of faith, not an explanation (description) of what is believed-in or indeed of what is meant by 'faith'. [But see in this connection CV p. 33 (from 1937): "What inclines even me to believe in Christ's Resurrection?"] The question is: how was Wittgenstein's life different from that of his fellow men who were not Christians, and how was it different from what Wittgenstein's own life would have been if he had not been "in some sense" a Christian?

I have been depressed in recent times too. Not that I find teaching in the elementary school distasteful: quite the contrary. But what's hard [Wittgenstein underlined this word three times] is that I have to be a teacher in this country where people are so completely and utterly hopeless. In this place I have not a single soul with whom I could talk in a really sensible way. How I shall support that in the long run, God knows! (Letter to Russell [1922], Cambridge Letters p. 178, tr. McGuinness)

For the school year that began in September 1924 Wittgenstein was teaching in the village of Otterhal. It was there, however, that the events occurred that put an end to his school-teaching. Wittgenstein resigned from his post at the end of April 1926. (ibid. p. 210n and 215n)

[What was it like for an educated man to have to deal every day with an ignorant and superstitious population? What were a doctor's frustrations with this irrational humanity that he could not reason with as he might have reasoned with educated people? (e.g. Dr. Vincenzo D'Alessandro of Gambatesa would walk into his crowded consulting room and exclaim: "What the hell are you people doing here? I'm not Jesus Christ." The poor farmers and their wives thought the doctor could cure any illness -- i.e. work miracles, so to speak.]

It is never easy for an educated man to work among uneducated men if he lacks the common touch. And on the other hand, Wittgenstein's view of his own students was no higher than his view of the working class. [Back]

Note 6a: My paraphrase alludes to an entry in Wittgenstein's WW1 diary (8 May 1915):

The people with whom I am are not so much mean as appallingly limited. This makes it almost impossible to work with them, because they forever misunderstand one. These people are not stupid, but limited. Within their circle they are smart enough. But they lack character, and thereby breadth. (Recollections p. 198, tr. Rhees)

It must be significant that Wittgenstein here refers to character ("... es fehlt ihnen der Charakter und damit die Ausdehnung") rather than to education. Did he really believe that he was essentially different from the common [presumably workers and peasant] soldiers? Shouldn't this be "But they lack education, and thereby breadth"? Is character enough to give broad-mindedness -- i.e. an understanding and acceptance of the many possible differences among human beings, and a willingness to tolerate non-conformity -- to a human being, except in the most remarkable of cases? If it was not intelligence they were limited in, then wouldn't it have been education? Did Wittgenstein really not see what the Greeks had seen millennia earlier:

When asked who was worse off -- a beggar or an uneducated man? he answered, "The latter. A beggar only needs money. But an uneducated man needs to be humanized." (Aristippus of Cyrene, from memory; cf. Diog. L. ii, 70)

"Every uneducated man is a caricature of himself" [and in Aristippus' view: also a caricature of humanity].

[Back]

At what level do we, as individuals, understand Wittgenstein?

Note 7: What "manner of man" was Wittgenstein? Although there are some very good memoirs of Wittgenstein by his friends and students, the biographies which have been published so far (with the conditional exception of McGuinness' book) are as I remember them of poor quality. As Elizabeth Anscombe said, the danger in trying to write someone's biography is that you drag your subject down to your own level (moral, cultural, and intellectual, imposing your own limitations on your subject) (cf. Engelmann's Introduction to his Memoir, p. xiv). I hope that what I have written here are the "reflections of a thoughtful philosophy", but in any case it is the view from my own level.

And it is a low level, because Wittgenstein's view of religion wasn't so simple as I have presented it here. Like Drury, at least as he was at the time, I do not understand what Wittgenstein was talking about in this story from 1951, not long before Wittgenstein died. Drury had said that there were Old Testament stories that he found offensive, e.g. the story of God sending bears out of the forest to punish children. Wittgenstein: "[very sternly] You mustn't pick and choose just what you want in that way.... Just remember what the Old Testament meant to a man like Kierkegaard. After all, children have been killed by bears." And when Drury then referred to the story about the Tower of Siloam in the New Testament [Luke 13.4: "Or take those eighteen who were killed by a falling tower in Siloam. Do you think they were more guilty than anyone else who lived in Jerusalem?" (cf. 13.1-2)] where it says that such tragedies are not a punishment from God for wrong-doing, Wittgenstein answered as follows.

That has nothing to do with what I am talking about. You don't understand, you are quite out of your depth. (Recollections p. 170)

Drury objected to the publication of Lectures & Conversations ... on Religious Belief (ca. 1938) on the grounds that, as Wittgenstein himself had said, they were not Wittgenstein's considered opinions (Recollections p. 141). I believe Drury's objection was that Wittgenstein had far more and far deeper things to say about religion than this; Drury had, after all, talked about religious questions with him for 20 years.

In a conversation in 1949 with Wittgenstein (Recollections p. 161), Drury quoted Malachi 3.2 "But who may abide the day of his coming, and who shall stand when he appeareth?", and for Wittgenstein that verse seemed to suggest the coming of a merciless judge [who will force mankind to pass through the fire as the refiner of metals does]. But as Arthur Stanton [George W.E. Russell, Arthur Stanton: a memoir (1917)] said in his sermon on Candlemas [2 February] 1873, when the "Lord came to his temple" ("The Lord you seek will come to the temple", Malachi 3.1), which is described in Luke 2.22-38, he did not come as an exacting judge but as a loving baby, the presentation in the temple being the last contact with the bright joy of Christmas before Lent. That God is a father who loves man, as Jesus said, seemed a foreign idea to Wittgenstein, as if "he daily heard the words of Christ but" heard much louder the echo of the ancient gods, and found unbearable the idea that his sins could be forgiven (Nothing less than the Last Judgment of Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel would do). If that is not "beyond just surmise", it is a possible meaning for Wittgenstein's saying to Drury "my religious ideas are one hundred per cent Hebraic" (Recollections p. 161).

G.E. Moore's first impression of Wittgenstein

When he first met Wittgenstein, Russell did not know what to make of him. So he asked G.E. Moore what he thought of Wittgenstein and why:

I think very well of him indeed. Because at my lectures he looks puzzled, and nobody else ever looks puzzled. (Autobiography of Bertrand Russell 1914-1944, p. 137; and "Ludwig Wittgenstein" in Mind July 1951, p. 298)

Wittgenstein was puzzled by philosophical questions. One ought to be puzzled by his replies to them too. That is part of what makes a good criticizer (philosopher): the capacity to be deeply puzzled. That is the problem with making biographical remarks about Wittgenstein: not being sufficiently puzzled by his life, not finding it puzzling enough. "The part that I have not written" (to Ficker: Introduction - Two Parts).

What cannot be put into words ...

If we talk about Wittgenstein's own religion, we must not forget that religion is not entirely discursive: it is not entirely "what can be put into words" nor what must be put into words (as is the case in philosophy). A man who was emotionally dry might have no use for religion, art, love -- such a man might be barely recognizable as human. A man's inner life isn't just language. Engelmann: Wittgenstein's demand for "a clean separation" -- namely that "feeling, intuition, the irrational, etc." should be excluded only where their inclusion is inappropriate, and when we move from the philosophy of religion to religion itself, we must remember that in the latter they are appropriate; and that to talk about Wittgenstein's philosophy of religion is not the same thing as to talk about Wittgenstein's own religion. It is much too easy to think that things are simple here (i.e. in biography), and that is when we really do drag things down to our own level. A man with little inner life is not likely to have a clue about a man with a rich (or subtle) inner life.

"A pool of darkness"

In order to do his best thinking about philosophy Wittgenstein sought out isolated, primitive places; for a strong sense of this see Maria Baghramian's "Ireland in the life of Ludwig Wittgenstein" (Hermathena CXLIV, 1988), which quotes a poem: "He broke prisons, beginning with words. And at last tamed, by talking, wild birds." He thought he worked best in isolated, beautiful and quiet places in Norway and Ireland, where the Philosophical Investigations were begun and finished, George Hetherington wrote:

Fr Fechín O'Doherty, who attended Wittgenstein's lectures in Cambridge, recalls his saying that he could think best in the dark and that in the West of Ireland he had found one of the last "pools of darkness" in Europe. ("Wittgenstein in Ireland" in Irish University Review 17, no. 2 (1987), p. 176)

Architecture. Humor. Decency in way of writing. Freud

Hetherington uses material from Drury and A.J. Ayer as a powerful reminder of the importance sensitivity to architecture ("Haus Wittgenstein", Vienna, 1926-1928) had in Wittgenstein's life (ibid. p. 173-175). That is something else that, like the importance of music in his life (Recollections p. 160), we have to remember when we try to think about "what manner of man" Wittgenstein was.

Wittgenstein may have written that "only in the stream of life has language meaning" (Malcolm, Memoir p. 75) in places that were most distant from that stream, but a philosopher is someone who has stepped aside [or even away] from life in order to see it more clearly. [Even in the city ("I am a lover of learning, and trees and open country won't teach me things, whereas men in the city will" (Phaedrus 230d)) Socrates could withdraw to the porch of a doorway to silently discuss within himself for an hour or even longer a thought which had suddenly struck him (Symposium 174d-175d).]

C.D. Broad wrote about Wittgenstein's sense of humor (final paragraph of Broad's review of Malcolm's Memoir). Wittgenstein seemed to agree with G.E. Moore that it was important for a philosopher to have a sense of humor (Recollections p. 122-123), and indeed he once said that a serious philosophical work could be written that would consist entirely of jokes (Malcolm's Memoir p. 27-28; much of Lewis Carroll's Alice books give, I believe, examples of these jokes, but Malcolm suggests PI § 250). Wittgenstein enjoyed P.G. Wodehouse's stories (Recollections p. 133), and he told Malcolm (Memoir, Letter no. 29) that he had especially liked Norbert Davis's detective story Rendezvous with Fear (also known as The Mouse in the Mountain, 1943). The humor in both Wodehouse and Davis springs from characters doing and saying absurd -- often because quite unexpected -- things; in both cases the humor is extremely innocent, unpretentious, boisterous and unsubtle, very unlike the humor of Trinity College's "high table" according to Broad.

[If any character in fiction suggests Wittgenstein to me it is Sherlock Holmes, for his seriousness and intensity; indeed for a time in my imagination I used to confuse the two.]

Wittgenstein described Brigadier Desmond Young's biography Rommel the Desert Fox to Malcolm as a book written in a "thoroughly decent way" because Young wrote about his enemy with respect (Memoir, Letter no. 56). The book was published in 1950 and perhaps after the many years of hate-filled war propaganda the book seemed refreshing to Wittgenstein. I myself find it glorifying war, militarism, "professional soldiering" [the pawns and playthings of politicians] and full of remarks about "national character" of the sort Wittgenstein had I thought reproached Malcolm with. This is another instance of where I do not know "what manner of man" Wittgenstein was.

Finally, there is I must confess one aspect of Wittgenstein that I find completely foreign to me. I have no understanding of -- perhaps temperamentally I cannot understand [I am mystified by] -- Wittgenstein's openness to the mythologies (or ideologies) of Weininger and Freud. I would dismiss this as "superstition", were it not for the caution that:

I wouldn't call them unreasonable. I would say, they are certainly not reasonable, that's obvious. 'Unreasonable' implies, with everyone, rebuke. (LC p. 58)

If we replace the word 'unreasonable' with 'superstitious', that is the way I remembered Wittgenstein's remark. So again, what I must confess is that: I really don't know what manner of man Wittgenstein was. There was certainly a lot I would have called "irrational", were it not that the word 'irrational' carries the same disapprobation as 'superstitious', and all I want to express is: incomprehension.

Wittgenstein is not "easily assimilable"

In Drury's view (and Malcolm's as well), Wittgenstein is not "easily assimilable" into our milieu (Recollections p. xi). Wittgenstein was not fully a child of the Enlightenment, but instead largely rejected its assertion that life and the world are rational; on the contrary, logic and natural science occupy only a small space -- or at least no more than half of human reality; and as to the rest.... "The good is whatever God commands", regardless of what God commands -- What an extraordinary statement for a philosopher to make!

"The logician who rejected philosophy (or thoroughgoing rationalism)"

Wittgenstein, the human being -- not only Wittgenstein the philosopher -- is also not easily assimilable. As Russell said, he was a "singular man", a relic of the wealth-aristocratic past. For my part, about Wittgenstein I would use his own words about G.E. Moore, that "he doesn't warm my heart". He was a very vain man. He often spoke of doing great things that he never did -- contrast that with Albert Schweitzer who actually did the things he spoke of. Wittgenstein frequently committed the fallacy of the artisans, relying on his own genius rather than on knowledge of the facts. I certainly don't understand why a cult has been built up around his personality. The truth may be that I simply don't like the man. Nonetheless, I have tried to be fair in what I have written about him. A philosophical thinker does not have to be likeable -- or philosophical -- to be worthwhile: for Wittgenstein did not live a philosophical life, at least not in the sense that Socrates and the Stoics did: philosophical ethics is rational; obeying categorical imperatives is not.

Wittgenstein and "the riddle"

There is one last point: I must regard the influence of anyone who taught that "The riddle of existence does not exist" to be pernicious to man's humanity: I would be very sorry if human beings stopped asking the eternal questions (even if the grammar of 'questions without answers' is perplexing).

Justification ... comes to an end. If it did not it would not be justification.... my reasons will soon give out. And then I shall act, without reasons. (PI cf. § 485 [cf. OC § 563d], § 211)

That giving reasons comes to an end -- doesn't make giving reasons unimportant. And it doesn't place the pictures that rule our lives above philosophical criticism. Foundations [the foundations of our lives and thinking] too can -- and should -- be questioned. But do I really believe that Wittgenstein would have disagreed with this? No.

Conclusion - Wittgenstein's Religion

Was Wittgenstein a Christian? In some sense yes, and therefore also in some sense no. Which one someone will emphasize, the yes or the no, seems to me to depend on which one wants [wishes] Wittgenstein to have been.

It was Albert Schweitzer's view that one can be a Christian without sharing Jesus' eschatological world-picture of the supernatural kingdom of God. But Wittgenstein's view of the Christian religion was very different. Wittgenstein wrote that he did not believe that Jesus would come to judge him [doctrine of the Second Coming and Last Judgment], although about Jesus' Resurrection he felt inclined to believe (CV p. 33). -- But by 'belief' here Wittgenstein meant 'religious belief', which is not belief that an hypothesis is more or less probable; it concerns the foundations of our life -- i.e. the pictures that are "at the root of all our thinking". I think that he identified holding fast to particular pictures to be essential to whether or not one was a Christian.

Did Wittgenstein himself hold fast to [any of] those pictures? What is clear is that they accompanied him throughout his life, that they held a serious and deep position in his thoughts about life and about his own life. So in some sense yes, and in some sense no: one may emphasize one or the other as one likes, as one prefers [Wittgenstein is as much a challenge to Jews who are anti-christian as he is to antisemites (because he most certainly thought of himself as being a Jew or Jewish) or indeed to anyone who is opposed to [hostile to] religion]. -- But exactly what Wittgenstein "believed", we simply don't know; he did not for instance leave behind a confession of faith such as Tolstoy and Pascal did.

Wittgenstein told Malcolm (Memoir p. 60): "I could not possibly bring myself to believe all the things that [Catholics] believe" (This should be remembered in the context of his remarks to Parak ("reborn") and to Russell above). Belief in dogma is not, however, the only form that Christian faith may take. There is again the example of Albert Schweitzer: In some sense yes, but also therefore in some sense no.

"A Christian is one who ..."

Goethe defined 'a Christian' as 'one who calls Jesus his master'. Schweitzer's definition was 'one who has the spirit of Christ' ("Blessed are the merciful, Blessed are the peacemakers"). Many other definitions are possible; there is no essence of Christianity. Wittgenstein's might have been: 'one whose life is directed by Christian pictures'. According to Justin Martyr "Christ is the Word, and a Christian is one who lives according to this Word" (including the antiquity's virtuous pagans, for moral virtue is life in accord with the Word).

Religious understanding

I have been reading Glynn's A Song for Nagasaki (1988), about the Hidden Christians of Urakami [vii, ix]. It is often a difficult book to understand, not because of the language it is written in, but because the language [thought] is deep. One must read it at one's own level, and my level is not deep. (There is understanding, but there is also the condition of one's own soul: a stone can only fall as deep as the pool into which it is dropped.) (See Cuyvers' Into the Rising Sun (1999) iv, p. 141-147, for Christianity's arrival to Japan in the sixteenth century)

What manner of philosopher was he?

What manner of man was Wittgenstein? What I really want to know is what manner of philosopher he was, and that is what I have mostly thought about. But there is one biographical question to which I wish there were an answer. Wittgenstein wrote in the Preface to his Philosophical Investigations (p. vi) that the most important help his book had received had come from the criticism of his views by Frank Ramsey (1903-1930) and Piero Sraffa (1898-1983). But it seems that about Sraffa's criticism nothing much is really known.

It may, however, be reflected in this lecture note (from ca. 1938):

If I had to say what is the main mistake made by philosophers of the present generation, including Moore, I would say that it is that when language is looked at, what is looked at is the form of words and not the use made of the form of words. (LC p. 2)

Whereas in Wittgenstein's logic of language, meaning is not a matter of form, but of use.

Appendix

Note: The following remarks were removed from or not included in earlier versions of this page. Some may be dross, as may be many above that still remain.

About the above "story of God sending bears out of the forest to punish children", and Wittgenstein's response to Drury: "That has nothing to do with what I am talking about" (Recollections p. 170). Maybe this should be seen in the light of Wittgenstein's statement that "The ways in which people express their religious feelings differ enormously" (ibid. p. 102), and then the story about God sending bears out of the forest to punish children for their misdeed [2 Kings 2.23-24] would be one of these: "After all, children have been killed by bears." But to answer "It was a punishment sent by God" to "Why were the children killed?" -- How do we distinguish here between religious feelings and superstition (for primitive man asks, not what, but who causes deaths). By 'God' Wittgenstein did not mean a Someone who holds the strings of the world as if the world were a marionette (nor by 'religion' did he mean a collection of doctrines, much less hypotheses). In what way would "God punished the children" have been called by Wittgenstein religious feeling rather than superstition?

Note: There are other pages about Wittgenstein's Philosophy of Religion, as this page mostly concerns his own religion.

What the relationship between Wittgenstein the human being and his later views about ethics and metaphysics -- whatever those views exactly may have been -- I don't know. There is the question of what he wanted philosophy to be. For him philosophy was always logic and metaphysics (and metaphysics was nonsense), and nothing more. I have often thought that, because Wittgenstein had a religion, he felt no need of a philosophy.

What must the man be called, who cannot understand the concept 'God' ...? Are we to say he suffers from some blindness? (RPP i § 213 [circa 1946-1947])

But is "concept blindness" the only possible explanation for this? For example, might not someone give reasons for finding the grammar of the word 'God' incoherent, the concept a muddle, or at best a picture with no application to our world? But what Wittgenstein meant by the word 'God' is not at all obvious.

God may say to me: "I am judging you out of your own mouth. Your own actions have made you shudder with disgust when you have seen other people do them." (CV p. 87, remark from 1951)

The picture of a last judgment was fundamental to Wittgenstein's thinking. As early as the time of the First World War, Wittgenstein would look within himself and be deeply moved when he said to his friend Paul Engelmann, "When we meet again at the Last Judgment".

What then is the point of this page? Either a man's work is to be judged independently of the man himself (as in the case with mathematical-logic e.g.), or, as in the case of Socrates, the man is an embodiment of his philosophy, in which case by 'philosophy' we mean not only a use of reason but also a way of life; even then, however, Socrates' logic must be judged independently of his life. Wittgenstein's work in "logic of language" belongs to the first category. On the other hand, is this page, as I once thought, only an historical aside? In any case in its footnotes there are a few [important] notes concerning logic of language.

Nothing I have written here is intended to belittle Wittgenstein, but his ideas about freedom -- and, importantly for his philosophy -- the anti-rationalism in many of his attitudes, I cannot be in sympathy with. My own philosophy is one hundred percent Greek, my own religion one hundred percent rational.

A recent biography [sc. The House of Wittgenstein (2008)] seems to very strongly suggest that Ludwig Wittgenstein was mentally ill. But his pupil at Trinity College, Cambridge, and lifelong friend, M. O'C. Drury, who ultimately became a Consultant Psychiatrist at St. Patrick's Hospital, Dublin, Ireland, never thought him to be so. But there seems no doubt that Wittgenstein was an extraordinarily troubled young man, maybe (but therefore also maybe not) because he made extraordinary demands on himself (and on others), far exceeding most men's demands on themselves. In any case, see the preface to these notes above: to Wittgenstein's logic of language, it does not matter whether he was ill or not -- nor indeed to his philosophy -- which, like all philosophy, must stand or fall to the tests of reason and experience. There is no other standard in Socratic philosophy, certainly not the speaker's ethical character (at times Wittgenstein's own criterion of truth).

As the following remarks may show, I myself do not know "what manner of man" Wittgenstein was.

Not following the Gospel

Contrary to what Parak wrote, Wittgenstein was not following the Gospel in giving away his fortune, because Christ said the rich man's possessions should be given to the poor (Matthew 19.21), and Wittgenstein left his inherited wealth to his own brothers and sisters, who were far from poor. In this he was a follower of Tolstoy, who gave his wealth away to his wife and children (Troyat, Tolstoy(1967), viii, 1, p. 636), rather than of the Gospel. Wittgenstein did not assign his wealth e.g. to a fund for the education of the children of the workers in the industries from which his father had acquired his wealth and his father's children their privileges, which is something he might have done.

[St. Francis of Assisi would have called this the act of "Brother Fly", a title he gave to anyone "eating the fruit of other men's labor", meaning that by giving his goods to his family (and thereby as it were keeping it himself) he was defrauding the poor. (Bonaventure's Life of Saint Francis of Assisi, v, vii)]

Wittgenstein was several times decorated for bravery in World War One, but why did he want to be a soldier at all? Unquestioning loyalty to country (because there is no evidence that he questioned whether or not it was right to participate in a war which Pope Benedict XV was to condemn as "useless carnage", "senseless slaughter"). That was part of it. But there was a deeply personal part as well: Wittgenstein entered the war for the sake of facing death, in order to be shocked into becoming the "decent human being" he wished to be (Recollections p. 194). That a man might well wish that, I understand -- but that a philosophical thinker would not question the notion of loyalty to country, I do not. His contemporaries Keynes and Russell did question it (The latter was sent to prison for opposing it).

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