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Wittgenstein and Theological Studies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Fergus Kerr O P
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Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations appeared posthumously in 1953. The anniversary deserves commemoration. The publication of much more of his late work, not to mention the flood of exposition and commentary, would in any case prompt reflection. But, even after thirty years, with its status as a philosophical classic securely established, the use of the book remains as difficult and controversial as ever. It is appropriate, in these pages, to concentrate on the effect the study of Wittgenstein’s later work might have in the context of theological studies — in fact as an essential therapeutic propaedeutic.

To put it like that is already to suggest that Wittgenstein’s work has had very little effect on the practice of theology in the past thirty years. That is to say, we need not linger long upon the mare’s nest of “Wittgensteinian Fideism”. This nomenclature was introduced, I think, by Kai Nielsen (in Philosophy, July 1967, if not already somewhere else). As an atheist Nielsen wants to go on arguing that religion is nonsense. He therefore objects to the way that certain Christian philosophers, or certain philosophers who are also Christians, try to make out that religion is a practice which can be understood only by the insider. Any outsider, such as a committed atheist, could not even know what he is talking about when he argues against the existence of a god or whatever. Religious language would be intelligible only to those who participate in the “form of life” in which it is at home. Religious discourse would moreover constitute a distinctive and autonomous “language game” which could be understood, let alone criticized only by adepts. This counts as Fideism, in the textbook sense: the propositions and concepts of the Christian faith would simply be unintelligible to people who have not yet been “saved”.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 63 , Issue 750 , December 1982 , pp. 500 - 508
Copyright
Copyright © 1982 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

1 Two volumes of Remarks on the Philosophy of Pychology, 1980, with two volumes of Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology due to appear this winter, all published by Basil Blackwell, Oxford.

2 F. C. Coplestone, Religion and Philosophy. 1974, p xiii

3 Malcolm's review appeared in The Philosophical Review, October 1954 and has been reprinted in his Knowledge and Certahty. 1963. as well as in George Pitcher's Wittgenstein, 1968, and elsewhere. Malcolm's incautious remark in Ludwig Wittgen. stein: A Memoir, 1958, p 72, is probably at the root of all the talk about religion as a ”form of life”. See Saul Kripke's Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, 1982, p 96.

4 Drury, however, insists that Wittgenstein could never have succumbed to Pascal's kind of Fideism; see Ludwig Wittgenstein: Personal Recollections, edited by Rush Rhees. 1981, p 108.

5 They met in 1929 when DNW was studying philosophy in Cambridge, still intending to become a priest of the Church of Ireland. He eventually trained as a doctor and became a psychiatrist in Dublin, where he died on Christmas Day 1976. He had Wittgenstein and his friend Francis Skinner to stay in Connemara in 1934 and saw him a great deal when he stayed in Dublin in 194849. Drury was present at Wittgenstein's death and took the responsibility for asking Fr Conrad Pepler O P to say the office for the dying. The two remarks quoted occur on p 94 of the Rhees book.

6 The judgment of David Pears in his Wittgenstein, 1971, p 183, is representative: “All his philosophy expresses his strong feeling that the great danger to which modern thought is exposed is domination by science, and the consequent distortion of the mind's view of itself”.

7 See Culture and Value, 1980, p 45. The remark is dated circa 1944 and presumably comes from the 52 pages numbered 128 in the Nachlass:“the most important manuscript on religion”, according to Garth Hallett — see his Companion, 1977, p 426. On the same page Hallett records an utterance by G. E. M. Anscornbe, Wittgenstein's chief literary executor and translator, to the effect that “nobody understood Wittgenstein's view on religion”.

8 See the Malcolm Memoir, p 20.

9 See the Malcolm Memoir, p 44.

10 See the Rhees book, p 109.

11 Briefe an Ludwig von Ficker, 1969, p 35; translated in Wittgenstein: Sources and Perspectives, edited by C. G. Luckhardt, 1979, p 94 f.

12 The Philosophical Review 74 (1965), p 7.

13 Cited by Anthony Kenny, in Wittgenstein and His Times, edited by Brian McCuinness, 1982, p 16; Rush Rhees published selections from the Big Typescript in 1969 — in translation as Philosophical Grammar, 1974.

14 See the Rhees book, p 99 f.

15 The quotations are from Locke's Essay Book 111, Chapter 11, and Book 11, chapter XXXII.

16 See Thought and Object, edited by Andrew Woodfield, 1982.

17 The last few quotations come from the end of Wittgenstein's Last Writings on the Philosophy Of Psychology, volume 1, 1982.Google Scholar