Wittgenstein and religious belief

Rush Rhees tells us that in 1931 Wittgenstein started developing his understanding of expressions about religions and the use of the word “belief” when taking notes on Sir James George Frazer’s (1854–1914) The Golden Bough (1890), an enormous study of cultural anthropology and comparative religions (Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1979b. Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough. Edited by Rush Rhees, English translation by A. C. Miles. Retford: Brynmill Press. v.). Wittgenstein criticises Frazer, who wanted to explain religious and magical practices and worldviews as errors and as wrong behaviour. “Frazer’s account of the magical and religious notions of men is unsatisfactory: it makes these notions appear as mistakes. Was Augustine mistaken, then, when he called on God on every page of the Confessions? Well - one might say - if he was not mistaken, then the Buddhist holy-man, or some other, whose religion expresses quite different notions, surely was. But none of them was making a mistake, except where he was putting forward a theory” (ibid. 1e).

Frazer opens his exploration of early myth and ritual in The Golden Bough with a description of the pre-Roman priest-king, the King of the Wood at Nemi - a small crater lake in the Alban Hills near Rome -, who was ritually murdered by his successor (Johnston, Paul. 1989. Wittgenstein and Moral Philosophy. London: Routledge. 26). The “savages” believe “that the king must be killed in his prime because … his soul would not be kept fresh otherwise” (Wittgenstein 1979b: 1e–2e). Wittgenstein does not judge this practice or belief to be right or wrong, but recognizes a certain worldview, a particular way of understanding the world (ibid. 2e). The belief held by the “savages” does not express an empirical hypothesis, that “which can be resolved by a straightforward appeal to the facts” (Johnston 1989: 36). The foundation of this belief is to be found in human life and the contexts of individual and collective experiences. The belief is not a mistake, a misapprehension or an error, a belief has nothing to do with evidence. “The best scientific evidence is just nothing”, a belief is simply “the last result - in which a number of ways of thinking and acting crystallize and come together” (Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1966. Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief. Edited by Cyril Barrett. Oxford: Blackwell: 56). In order to understand such a belief we have to understand the role it plays in the life of an individual and the cultural context that gives meaning to a person’s actions (Johnston 1989: 37). We are only able to describe human behaviour. We are not able to explain it, and in philosophy it is not at all satisfactory to try to establish empirical hypotheses for answers to questions of existential significance, because “Every explanation is an hypothesis” and “… for someone broken up by love an explanatory hypothesis won’t help much. - It will not bring peace” (Wittgenstein 1979b: 3e). If we want to understand that “the King of the Wood of Nemi” is called “the majesty of death”, we have to look at the life of the priest-king: “The life of the priest-king shows what is meant by that phrase” (ibid.). Wittgenstein takes the expression “the majesty of death” as a symbol that is used by someone who “is gripped by the majesty of death” and practices a certain form of life with certain rituals and symbols that do not explain anything or express a certain opinion, but simply show and refer to a practice. We should describe religious symbols and not take them as scientific expressions of empirical claims: “A religious symbol does not rest on any opinion. And error belongs only with opinion” (ibid.). If we are not curious about other worldviews and forms of life, if we are not ready to understand other cultures and only judge from our point of view, then we will remain spiritually and culturally impoverished like Frazer: “As a result: how impossible for him to understand a different way of life from the English one of his time!” (ibid. 5e).

“People take pleasure in imagination,” but images and pictures, especially personifications like “ghost,” “spirit,” or “the majesty of death” also express the experience that “men (that is spirits) can become dangerous to a man and everyone knows this” (ibid. 6e). Every moment of our life a multitude of phenomena and pictures flood our senses, influence our perceptions, have an effect on our speaking and behaving. “That a man’s shadow, which looks like a man, or that his mirror image, or that rain, thunderstorms, the phases of the moon, the change of seasons, the likenesses and differences of animals to one another and to human beings, the phenomena of death, of birth and of sexual life, in short everything a man perceives year in, year out around him, connected together in any variety of ways - that all this should play a part in his thinking (his philosophy) and his practices, is obvious, or in other words this what we really know and find interesting. How could fire or fire’s resemblance to the sun have failed to make an impression on the awakening mind of man? But not ‘because he can’t explain it’ (the stupid superstition of our time) - for does an ‘explanation’ make it less impressive?” (ibid.).

Magic is not false physics, “or as the case may be, false medicine, technology, etc.” (ibid. 7e). Anthropology has to “watch the life and behavior of men all over the earth” and has to try to describe what the case is. Thereby one has to bear in mind that human imagination “is not like a painted picture or a three-dimensional model, but a complicated structure of heterogeneous elements: words and pictures” (ibid.).

Finally, Wittgenstein deconstructs the seemingly objective and scientific way that Frazer pretends to use when commenting on the life of the “savages” and their primitive rituals. Wittgenstein shows that Frazer uses a language that is full of magic expressions, spiritual beliefs and superstition. Our modern scientific cultures are not at all as alien and different from those “primitive” ones that Frazer investigates. “I wish to say: nothing shows our kinship to those savages better than the fact that Frazer has at hand a word as familiar to us as ‘ghost’ or ‘shade’ to describe the way these people look at things … What is queer in this is not limited to the expressions ‘ghost’ and ‘shade,’ and too little is made of the fact that we include the words ‘soul’ and ‘spirit’ in our own civilized vocabulary. Compared with this, the fact that we do not believe our soul eats and drinks is a minor detail” (ibid. 10e).

Wittgenstein not only pleads for understanding the worldviews and lifeforms of seemingly strange and alien cultures. He also identifies the magical and ambiguous use of expressions with the word “death” in our apparently purely rational, scientific and modern languages: “To cast out death or to slay death; but he is also represented as a skeleton, as in some sense dead himself. ‘As dead as death.’ ‘Nothing is so dead as death; nothing is so beautiful as beauty itself.’ Here the image which we use in thinking of reality is that beauty, death, etc., are the pure (concentrated) substances, and that they are found in the beautiful object as added ingredients of the mixture” (ibid. 10e). These few sentences legitimate Wittgenstein’s judgment that “A whole mythology is deposited in our language” (ibid.).

Years after his Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough we find in 1946 Rush Rhees’ notes following a conversation on Freud with Wittgenstein (Wittgenstein 1966: 50–52) critique of another modern mythology. Wittgenstein here gives testimony to the capability he thought to be necessary in order to identify modern mythologies, that pretend to have brought some scientific and empirically assessed knowledge to humanity, but in reality have not. About Freud’s psychoanalysis, he observes: “… one must have a very strong and keen and persistent criticism in order to recognize and see through the mythology that is offered or imposed on one. There is an inducement to say, ‘Yes, of course, it must be like that.’ A powerful mythology” (Wittgenstein 1966: 51–52). Wittgenstein cultivated a great respect for Freud, whose originality Wittgenstein compared to his own (Schulte, Joachim. 1989. Wittgenstein. Eine Einführung. Stuttgart: Reclam: 30). Wittgenstein’s critique of Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams originates in Wittgenstein’s perception “how much this whole way of thinking wants combatting” (Wittgenstein 1966: 50), and I am sure that Freud would have loved to work with Wittgenstein on his resistance to having his dreams analyzed. In my understanding of the psychoanalytical work with dreams, one does not want to explain scientifically why a certain dream occurred. The analytical work simply aims to help discover and make conscious some hidden experiences and feelings that hitherto did not make the long, sometimes painful, but always energy-consuming way to consciousness. Wittgenstein’s negation of the analyst’s scientific rationalizing may itself be seen as a kind of rationalization. “One may be able to discover certain things about oneself by this sort of free association, but it does not explain why a dream occurred” (ibid. 51). Nevertheless, Wittgenstein’s sharp and clear intelligence identifies the important point that psychoanalysis is an intelligent art of interpretation, but not a science of the brain. The technique of free association tries to heal by attentive listening and cautious interpretation, but is no science. Wittgenstein’s critique is fundamental and important: “Freud refers to various ancient myths in these connexions, and claims that his researches have now explained how it came about that anybody should think or propound a myth of that sort. Whereas in fact Freud has done something different. He has not given a scientific explanation of the ancient myth. What he has done is to propound a new myth. The attractiveness of the suggestion, for instance, that all anxiety is a repetition of the anxiety of the birth trauma, is just the attractiveness of a mythology. ‘It is all the outcome of something that happened long ago.’ Almost like referring to a totem” (ibid. 51).

I return to Wittgenstein’s Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough. Individual humans are impressed by phenomena like fire, but communities of humans also use fire in ritualized behavior. The context of the celebration of feasts and the rituals that are performed at these celebrations lead Wittgenstein to look at Frazer’s account of the Beltane Fire Festival, “a ceremony practiced in Europe as recently as the eighteenth century” (Johnston 1989: 32). Wittgenstein does not agree with Frazer’s suggestion that this practice is a holdover from the times of human sacrifice (ibid. 33). The modern Beltane Fire Festival presented as “the harmless practice of our time” nevertheless “gives us a sinister impression” (Wittgenstein 1979b: 14e). Since the festival as described is striking and disturbing whatever its origin, this sinister impression is not addressed by Frazer’s explanation. Johnston’s analysis that Wittgenstein relates the experience of the Beltane Fire Festival to our own experience, to impressions, thoughts and ideas that I myself have: “The connection with human sacrifice renders explicit what is sinister about the Fire Festival,” we are disturbed that people should want to take part in such a ceremony (Johnston 1989: 33–34). If we think of “horse-and-rider games,” where instead of men riding horses “slaves” were used as mounts, we would see in these games “something deeper and less harmless” (Wittgenstein 1979b: 14e). Just the same “sinister impression” as we experience when being confronted with “the facts of human sacrifices” (ibid.). This “sinister impression” leads Wittgenstein to the observation that “what is sinister lies in the character of these people themselves,” and he speaks of the modern people that participate and take part in the harmless festivals of our time: “And we should then see that what is sinister lies in the character of these people themselves” (ibid.).

“What makes human sacrifices something deep and sinister anyway? Is it only the suffering of the victim that impresses us in this way? All manner of diseases bring just as much suffering and do not make this impression. No, this deep and sinister aspect is not obvious just from learning the history of the external action, but we impute it from an experience in ourselves” (ibid. 16e). Wittgenstein turns the observation and description to the self-experience of women, men and queer, because he is interested in “what it is that gives me reason to assume” that there is a sinister impression and feeling at all. Looking at “strange” rituals like the Beltane fires where “children burn a straw man,” Wittgenstein acknowledges that it is “disquieting” to look at these rituals. My “frightening” observation of the burning of the straw man probably comes from my thought “Strange that they should celebrate by burning a man!” (ibid. 18e) that accompanies my watching the ritual. “But why should it not really be (partly, anyway) just the idea that makes the impression on me? Aren’t ideas frightening” (ibid.)? Wittgenstein ends his Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough by recognizing “that which I see in those stories is something they acquire, after all, from the evidence, including such evidence as does not seem directly connected with them - from the thought of man and his past, from the strangeness of what I see in myself and in others, what I have seen and have heard” (ibid.). Wittgenstein is interested in describing our responses to rituals, ceremonies, and religious practices, because our thoughts are interesting and worth being taken seriously, even if they are strange, disconcerting and disgusting. I understand that after having had to participate in World War I as a soldier one did not remain a witness, but was mercilessly exposed to the transformation of one’s life by the impact of terror and destructive violence. I hope I am not only expressing my own fantasy when I claim that Wittgenstein knew what abominable evil man was capable of bringing upon man. Only two years after Wittgenstein wrote Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough, Hitler was preparing to drown humanity in aggressive violence and destructive warfare by extinguishing millions of innocent women, men and queer.

Wittgenstein did not think of publishing the lectures on his attitude to life, to religious, psychological and artistic questions that he gave from 1930 to 1933 and in 1938, writes Cyril Barrett (Wittgenstein 1966: vii–viii). It is the merit of Paul Johnston that in 1989 a thorough study of Wittgenstein and Moral Philosophy was published, that presents a study on Wittgenstein and ethics when Wittgenstein was still perceived as the positivist philosopher of the two-valued picture theory of the Tractatus (Leher, Stephan. 1992. Begründung ethischer Normen bei Viktor Cathrein und Wahrheitstheorien der Sprachphilosophie. Innsbrucker theologische Studien 36. Innsbruck: Tyrolia. 160). Johnston recognized and insisted on “the fundamental differences between ethical disagreement and empirical disagreement” (Johnston 1989: 105). Empirical disagreement can be based on a two-valued logic or a set of rules following a three-valued logic that accepts besides the two truth-possibilities true and false the third truth-possibility, namely that the question is undecidable. Ethical disagreement does not know any such logical instrument or method for analyzing the dispute (ibid. 106). Johnston is right concerning ethical disagreement, but concerning his claim that “a similar point holds true with respect to religion” I want to present a different aspect that struck me as a theologian when reading Lectures on Religious Belief (Wittgenstein 1966: 53–72). When reading the notes compiled on what has been published as Lectures on Religious Belief, I read the expressions “Last Judgment,” “punishment,” “Judgment Day,” “dogma,” “faith,” “catechisms” (ibid.). These expressions are presented in the form of something like a dialogue. In my opinion, this is not a dialogue between a religious person and a non-believer, as Johnston seems to interpret it (Johnston 1989: 106). It is right that Wittgenstein uses “a believer,” saying “I believe in a Last Judgment,” but Wittgenstein’s answer is given in the first person singular and the rest of the imagined dialogue uses the personal pronouns “you” and “I” and “he” to identify the speakers (Wittgenstein 1966: 53). In these pages Wittgenstein never speaks of himself or of any other person as a non-believer. The lecture is not about the different worldviews held by believers and non-believers. The lecture is about the principal impossibility of convincing someone to believe something because convincing and the conviction do not follow from any kind of argumentation. First of all, “an unshakable belief” - like believing in the Last Judgment - will “show, not by reasoning or by appeal to ordinary grounds for belief, but rather by regulating for all in his life” (ibid. 54). The lecture is therefore not about different ways of thinking (ibid. 55). From the argument that a belief is not expressed by rational argument follows secondly, that a belief like in “a Judgment Day” cannot be contradicted (ibid.).

Persons that answer “those who believe in Resurrection” by saying: “Well, possibly” are not called non-believers by Wittgenstein (ibid. 56). “Those who said: ‘Well, possibly it may happen and possibly not’ would be on an entirely different plane” (ibid.). It is important to say that this plane is not filled with non-believers. The point Wittgenstein wants to make and communicate is a different one.

Wittgenstein turns to the first argument that the use of all these religious terms like “Last Judgment,” “punishment,” “dogma”, “faith” does not concern an “opinion”, and “we don’t talk about hypothesis, or about high probability. Nor about knowledge” (ibid. 57). Wittgenstein speaks of “religious discourse” and repeats that we use religious terms “differently to the way in which we use them in science,” although “we talk of evidence, and do talk of evidence by experience” (ibid.).

Yes, Wittgenstein speaks once of an atheist and asks, “If the atheist says ‘There won’t be a Judgment Day, and another person says there will’, do they mean the same” (ibid. 58)? Wittgenstein leaves the answer open, “They might describe the same things,” but there are no clear criteria for “meaning the same” (ibid.).

What is clear is the fact that the kind of religious discourse that Wittgenstein presents in his Lectures on Religious Belief is not between believers and non-believers. In Wittgenstein’s understanding it would be a contradiction to call the discourse partners believers and non-believers, because it is impossible for the believers to show what they say they believe. Wittgenstein tells us that he learned the word God from “pictures and catechisms, etc.,” but these pictures “had not the same consequences as with pictures of aunts. I wasn’t shown (that which the picture pictured) (ibid. 59). Wittgenstein presents a multitude of attempts by imagined or real speakers, who know for sure to convince him to believe something they believe in. The fact that Wittgenstein resists and is not convinced does not allow the one who is not convinced to be qualified as a non-believer. Wittgenstein’s part in this kind of religious discourse consists of his attempt to convince the “very credulous person” that experienced with him in Lourdes in France “blood coming out of something … that he’d seen nothing of any consequence” (ibid. 60–61).

From the testimonies of evidence and the experiences of the religious believer and of her or his argumentations, of religious teachings and persuasions there follows no consequence - neither affirmation nor negation nor contradiction nor dispute - for somebody who listens to these testimonies and observes that they cannot show what they speak of. I have the impression that the examples of religious beliefs that Wittgenstein presents come from Roman Catholics. Wittgenstein does not argue with the rational arguments of the Reformation concerning the absurdity of pictures of the rewarding and punishing God of the Last Judgment, when believing in Jesus Christ’s love as unconditional solidarity is the message of the New Testament. Nor does Wittgenstein call the Old Testament mythical. I remain somewhat gently touched by the discretion and respect Wittgenstein pays to religious experiences throughout the whole of his life. It looks to me like he did not want to offend anyone’s religious feelings. He does not offend his Catholic mother who was responsible for his Catholic education. Her father was born into a Jewish family. She died in 1926. Wittgenstein’s father Karl was a Protestant, as were most of the members of his family. In going about their daily life Ludwig Wittgenstein’s family never spoke about the fact that his paternal grandfather and grandmother were Jews. In my opinion, Lectures on Religious Belief shows very clearly that Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Catholic education was not able to make him a Catholic. Reading Lectures on Religious Belief I get the impression that Wittgenstein was tired of real or imagined discussions with Catholics, who wanted to convince him of Catholicism. Regardless of my impression, the text of Lectures on Religious Belief clearly shows that Wittgenstein does not want someone to convince him to follow a particular religious conviction. He makes clear to his listeners that from their religious beliefs there cannot follow anything concerning themselves. The religious beliefs of one person do not have any consequences for another person concerning becoming convinced of something. If I look at the expression of a religious belief from the perspectives of the Tractatus, I could say: The sentence with the expression of a religious belief shows that there is an expression of a religious belief and only says that it is true that there is a religious belief. It is no wonder that in Lectures on Religious Belief Wittgenstein reasons about the impossibility of being convinced by the religious beliefs of others. From the conviction of one person does not follow a conviction of a second person. There is also a difference if I am convinced of the credibility of a religious belief of another person or if I am convinced of the religious belief of the other. The language game with religious beliefs is not primarily about convincing, but is rather a confession that needs to be open for discussion. Anyone who deals with religious beliefs is invited to learn this lesson from Wittgenstein and to adapt speech-acts on religious beliefs and convictions according to this limitation of their use.

Austin’s distinction of three kinds of speech-acts, the locutionary, the illocutionary and the perlocutionary (Austin 1971: 102), help me to describe what I think Wittgenstein was saying with the sentence “I’d try to convince him that he’d seen nothing of any consequence” (Wittgenstein 1966: 61). Austin says that “To perform a locutionary act is in general, we may say, also and eo ipso to perform an illocutionary act” (Austin, John Langshaw. 1971. How to do Things with Words. The William James Lectures delivered at Havard University in 1955. Edited by J. O. Urmson. London: Oxford University Press. 98). I am reminded of Wittgenstein’s distinction in the Tractatus, that a sentence shows what it says, that is the sentence shows its sense and says that the picture of the sentence is true. What the sentence shows in Wittgenstein’s understanding we may - just for the case of demonstrating something like a similarity - call with Austin “the locutionary act ‘he said that …’” (Austin 1971: 102). Austin distinguishes this locutionary act “from the illocutionary act ‘he argued that …” (ibid.) and to me this illocutionary act of Austin sounds familiar to what Wittgenstein says the sentence claims to be the case, that is what the sentence says. Austin knows another important distinction, namely “the perlocutionay act ‘he convinced me that …’” and does not rule out the possibility that beside these three “different senses or dimensions of the ‘use of a sentence’ or of ‘the use of language’ … there are others also” (Austin 1971: 108–109). Performing a locutionary act “is roughly equivalent to uttering a certain sentence with a certain sense and reference, which again is roughly equivalent to ‘meaning’ in the traditional sense” (Austin 1971: 108), goes together with performing “illocutionary acts, such as informing, ordering, warning, undertaking, etc., i.e. utterances which have a certain (conventional) force” (ibid.). It is clear that the similarity between Wittgenstein’s analysis that the sentence shows its sense and Austin’s concept of the locutionary act of a sentence appears plausible. The similarity between Wittgenstein’s concept that the sentence says that what it shows is actually true and an illocutionary act such as an argumentation based on the conventional force of language is not clear at all. What Austin calls “conventional force” looks like the link between the expression and an empirical causality. I prefer to interpret the expression “conventional force” as a rule of a language game we have to follow if we want to be understood. Concerning perlocutionary acts, Wittgenstein does not explicitly reflect on what generally happens in dialogues. But it is interesting to observe that in Lectures on Religious Belief he demonstrates his arguments with examples of short dialogues and that the perlocutionary aspect of the sentences of dialoging persons constitutes an important element in his argumentation.

Wittgenstein wanted to tell the “very credulous person” (Wittgenstein 1966. 60) that the performance of his speech-act “There you are, Wittgenstein, how can you doubt” (ibid. 60)? was simply a locutionary and illocutionary performance, but failed to realize the perlocutionary aspect of a speech-act; the speech-act did not produce any consequences for Wittgenstein. We are allowed to suppose that Wittgenstein’s attempt to convince the “very credulous person” for his part realized the locutionary and illocutionary performance very well, but did not succeed in realizing the perlocutionary aspect of his attempt.

In order to follow Wittgenstein’s thoughts on religious belief in his later years we have to first take a look at his Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 2001. Philosophical Investigations. Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell)., where new aspects of his philosophy of language are presented. Wittgenstein writes in 1945 in the Preface to his Philosophical Investigations, “the thoughts which I publish in what follows are the precipitate of philosophical investigations which have occupied me for the last sixteen years” (Wittgenstein 2001: ixe). The editors’ note states more precisely that only Part I of Philosophical Investigations was completed by 1945 and “if Wittgenstein had published his work himself, he would have suppressed a good deal of what is in the last thirty pages or so of Part I and worked what is in Part II, with further material, into its place” (Wittgenstein 2001: viie). From this follows that at least about the first 500 paragraphs of Part I have to be granted the special weight of the authenticable authorisation. Part II was written between 1947 and 1949 (ibid.).

Philosophical Investigations shows continuities and developments of Wittgenstein’s thinking. The developments, especially the term language game, are still more popular than the continuities. It is right: Wittgenstein now accepts the language of ordinary language and at the same time adheres to the a priori of the sense of the sentence. The analysis of the logical order of the sentence and the sense of the sentence must go together: “On the one hand it is clear that every sentence in our language ‘is in order as it is’. That is to say, we are not striving after an ideal, as if our ordinary vague sentences had not yet got a quite unexceptionable sense, and a perfect language awaited construction by us. - On the other hand it seems clear that where there is sense there must be perfect order. - So there must be perfect order even in the vaguest sentence” (ibid. paragraph 98).

Wittgenstein recognizes, on the one hand that, “The philosophy of logic speaks of sentences and words in exactly the sense in which we speak of them in ordinary life …” (ibid. paragraph 108), while, on the other hand, Wittgenstein does not want to give up logic’s coherence or as he says the “rigour” of logic. All of a sudden, Wittgenstein changes the focus of his interest from his conviction of clarity that stems from logic’s perfect determination: “The preconceived idea of crystalline purity can only be removed by turning our whole examination ‘round. (One might say: the axis of reference of our examination must be rotated, but about the fixed point of our real need.) (ibid.). Wittgenstein ends the paragraph by saying: we talk about the “phenomenon of language” … “as we do about the pieces in chess when we are stating the rules of the game, not describing their physical properties. The question ‘What is a word really?’ is analogous to ‘What is a piece in chess?’” (ibid.).

Religious worldviews are not scientifically mistaken; they are expressions of men and women, Wittgenstein wrote in Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough. What is the task of philosophy concerning worldviews? In paragraph 109 of Philosophical Investigations we read that philosophical problems are “not empirical problems; they are solved, rather, by looking into the workings of our language, and that in such a way as to make us recognize those workings: in spite of an urge to misunderstand them. The problems are solved, not by reporting new experience, but by arranging what we have always known. Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of our language” (Wittgenstein 2001: paragraph 109).

In philosophy, it is difficult to present thoughts in a clear and comprehensible way and to make us understand or see what is shown. The difficulty of understanding in philosophy lies in the enormous variety of the use of our words. “A main source of our failure to understand is that we do not command a clear view of the use of our words. - Our grammar is lacking in this sort of perspicuity. The concept of a perspicuous representation is of fundamental significance for us. It earmarks the form of account we give, the way we look at things. (Is this a ‘Weltanschauung’?)” (Wittgenstein 2001: paragraph 122). The art of the philosopher consists of explaining the thoughts clearly. If we look at the use of a language, we look at a life-form and clarifying the use of the concepts, expressions and words in the speech-acts and language games is the right way to solve the confusions of language.

In Philosophical Investigations Part II Wittgenstein takes up the theme of religious beliefs, again thinking about different uses of the sentence “I believe it is so” in our daily life (Wittgenstein 2001: II, x). “How did we ever come to use such an expression as ‘I believe …’? Did we at some time become aware of a phenomenon (of belief)? Did we observe ourselves and other people and so discover belief?” (ibid.). Wittgenstein continues to discuss the matter of believing by looking at expressions like “I say of someone else ‘He seems to believe ….’ and other people say it of me” (ibid.). All of a sudden he turns to the expression “conviction”: “‘One feels conviction within oneself, one doesn’t infer it from one’s own word or their tone.’ - What is true here is: one does not infer one’s own conviction from one’s own words; nor yet the actions which arise from that conviction” (ibid.). If the expression of the conviction is first, the legitimation of the conviction and the discussion of its implications follow. Convictions can be seen as expressions that I speak to myself, something like thoughts. After pages investigating thoughts about speaking to myself as expressions of language investigations of the thinking experience, and after having considered thinking as “saying inwardly” and then as “saying,” Wittgenstein reaches some clarity by claiming that speaking to myself is not the question “what went on within me” (Wittgenstein 2001: II, xi. p. 189e). It is clear therefore that Wittgenstein’s interest in the investigation of the thinking experiences is not a psychological explanation of what was going on in my brain. This kind of speaking to myself and expressing thereby my convictions can be understood as something like “a confession” (ibid.). The truth of a confession does not concern the truth-value of a certain state of affairs, nor the reasons I give for my speech-act that is a confession. Confessions are to be seen in connection with the consequences that follow from the speech-act of confessing. “The criteria for the truth of the confession that I thought such-and-such are not the criteria for a true description of a process. And the importance of the true confession does not reside in its being a correct and certain report of a process. It resides rather in the special conclusion which can be drawn from a confession whose truth is guaranteed by the special criteria of truthfulness” (ibid.). Concerning convictions, “reason-giving statements cannot be reports of inner processes, for if they were, some independent means of access to these processes would be necessary to give meaning to the claim that a particular process had taken place” (Johnston 1989: 39). We are not asking an individual how it knows what she or he is thinking; we want to respect the “individual as an agent” (ibid. 41). We are capable of observing the coherence of the conviction and the behavior of the person. Credibility and trust are enforced by this coherence. Thus, the “bedrock of the language game” with confessions includes our interest in the person’s statement (ibid. 42).

The language game with sentences that speak of beliefs can be understood as something like a confession by the individual, but not as a report about an inner process. The individual speaker does not give a picture of inner processes. The individual speaker expresses his or her belief with the help of pictures. These pictures do not lack a validity-condition for what they want to say. One validity-condition of speech-acts expressing beliefs is the condition that the speakers use the first person singular. Speech-acts of personal beliefs can therefore be considered as something like a confession. To express a belief is not only to express a conviction. The truth of the expression of belief is not a truth-value that we get from a logical operation. The validity-condition of a belief that is expressed in the way we make confessions - Wittgenstein speaks of “the importance of the true confession” – instead resides “in the special conclusions which can be drawn from a confession whose truth is guaranteed by the special criteria of truthfulness” (Wittgenstein 2001: II, xi 189e). Instead of the English word “conclusions” (ibid.), the German text of Philosophical Investigations uses the word “consequences” (ibid. II, xi 189). Both words are helpful in answering the question for the validity-conditions of claims to the validity of belief and faith-sentences. How can I comply with the validity-condition of the truthfulness of the sentence of which I claim that it expresses my beliefs and my faith? The “consequences” of a speech-act of confession and the “conclusions” that can be drawn from a speech-act of faith or belief can be seen in the speech-acts that follow the confession. The most important criteria for the truthfulness of the speech-act, that is for the value judgment that the speech-act complies with the validity-condition of truth, is the social realization of dignity by the claim. The first validity-condition for a speech-act on belief or faith is identical with the validity-condition for any speech-act and sentence, that is the sentence must make sense as a language game in the institutional setting of language. The second validity-condition for a speech-act on belief or faith demands an expression in the first person singular. The third validity-condition for a speech-act on belief or faith again is identical with the validity-condition for any claim to validity by a speech-act, that is the condition that the speech-act realizes the dignity of the persons that participate in the speech-act.

In the summer of 1938, Wittgenstein gave sobering testimony to the failure of Catholic education on his behalf. The kind of religious education he had received was the kind that probably millions of Austrian Catholics had also endured. Catholics were taught by their Church to obey the hierarchy. Official religious education concentrated on indoctrination according to dogma and training Catholics to be subordinate to the rules of Church authority. No wonder, the majority of the population was ready to follow the rules of Hitler as the new, albeit secular, authority.

When reflecting on that historic situation that formed Wittgenstein’s cultural background, it strikes me that he continued to work on the possibilities and necessities of a life form that would include religious belief.

In 1947 we find this astounding testimony made by Wittgenstein:

“It strikes me that a religious belief could only be something like a passionate commitment to a system of reference. Hence, although it’s belief, it’s really a way of living, or a way of assessing life. It’s passionately seizing hold of this interpretation.

Instruction in a religious faith, therefore, would have to take the form of a portrayal, a description, of that system of reference, while at the same time being an appeal to conscience. And this combination would have to result in the pupil himself, of his own accord, passionately taking hold of the system of reference. It would be as though someone were to first let me see the hopelessness of my situation and then show me the means to rescue until, of my own accord, or not at any rate led to it by my instructor, I ran to it and grasped it” (Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1980c. Culture and Value. Edited by G. H. von Wright, translated by Peter Winch. Oxford: Blackwell. 64e).

Crisis, disease, and death are experiences that belong to our lives. The ways women, men and queer showed me how to pray and told me how they had learned to pray are helpful in finding one’s own way. The way they showed me how to love by loving and caring for me and others are constitutive elements of my worldviews and way of life. But teaching faith or religious belief in school produces nothing that I could possibly grasp. Wittgenstein writes in 1950:

“A proof of God’s existence ought really to be something by means of which one could convince oneself that God exists. But I think that what believers who have furnished such proofs have wanted to do is give their ‘belief’ an intellectual analysis and foundation, although they themselves would never have come to believe as a result of such proofs. Perhaps one could ‘convince someone that God exists’ by means of a certain kind of upbringing, by shaping his life in such and such a way” (ibid. 85e).

How to express my desire to say something about my belief in God?

“If someone who believes in God looks around and asks, ‘Where does everything I see come from?’, ‘Where does all this come from?’, he is not seeking a (causal) explanation: and his question gets its point from being the expression of a certain craving. He is, namely, expressing an attitude toward all explanations. - But how is this manifested in his life?” (ibid. 85e).

In this sense, I also note that in 1950, which is toward the close of his life, Wittgenstein’s interest turns from how to successfully teach religious faith to life:

“Life can educate one to a belief in God. And experiences too are what bring this about; but I don’t mean visions and other forms of sense experience which show us the ‘existence of this being’, but, e.g., sufferings of various sorts. These neither show us God in the way a sense impression shows us an object, nor do they give rise to conjectures about him. Experiences, thoughts - life can force this concept on us. So perhaps it is similar to the concept of ‘object’’’ (ibid. 86e).

The concept of God forced on us by life is still a concept, just as the concept of “object.” The fact that Wittgenstein ends his life and his investigations of philosophy and especially his investigations of the philosophy of religious belief shows that there is an end to saying in one’s life. One could say: The fight is over when I can no longer speak.