“We Are All Sick People”—On Wittgenstein’s Religious Point of View

Datos Bibliográficos

ID20249761
AutoresJoel Backström (University of Helsinki, autor de correspondencia)
Año2025
Volumen16
Número11
Páginas1395
Fecha de publicación2025-11-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaReligions (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 2077-1444 • E-ISSN: 2077-1444
EditorialMDPI AG (PUBLISHER • IT)
DOI10.3390/rel16111395
OpenAlexW4415814175
IdiomaEN
Referencias citadas23

Drury reports Wittgenstein telling him, “I am not a religious man but I can’t help seeing every problem from a religious point of view, I would like my work to be understood in this way”. My paper attempts to make sense of this strange claim. I first consider the meaning Wittgenstein gives to ‘religious’ in speaking of questions he explicitly designates as such, and then explain how that (sort of) meaning could also apply to the (other) characterisations he provides of his philosophical work. I also consider the subsidiary question, and suggest two very different reasons as to why Wittgenstein nonetheless did not consider himself ‘a religious man’. While I find much confusion in what Wittgenstein says about religion, his crucial insight is that both religious and philosophical thinking are characterised by the same kind of difficulty. Both spring from our moral–existential confusion and despair over finding, or accepting the sense we find, in our life with others. In the later parts of this paper, I show how the metaphysical I–world perspective of the Tractatus (the first specific form taken by Wittgenstein’s own ‘religious point of view’) exemplifies this very rootedness of philosophical/religious thinking in despair, and how in Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, including in some of his later explicitly religious remarks, an I–You perspective starts to emerge, one where our difficulties in sense-making are seen as the other side of our difficulties in opening ourselves to each other in love. I also suggest, however, that an unresolved tension nonetheless remains in Wittgenstein’s late thinking between an I–You orientation and a focus on collective normativity. Finally, I suggest that foregrounding love tends to dissolve the very idea of specifically ‘religious’ problems quite generally, and so leaves us with a double question about how to understand religion as such, and about whether, or how, we can give coherent sense to Wittgenstein’s idea that his point of view is specifically ‘religious’

Confusion · Metaphysics · Reflexive pronoun · Religious life · Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics · Karl Barth and Christian Theology · Wittgensteinian philosophy and applications