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Wittgenstein on religion provokes disagreements, September 9, 2009
This outstanding volume contains ten essays by scholarly interpreters of Ludwig Wittgenstein (LW) who offer interpretations of religion that can be related to and teased out of LW's work. The range of variations is broad and colorful.
Best illustrated are the usefulness and the pitfalls of the key notion of "language-game," when religion becomes the topic of the language-game. Some argue that LW views the form of life of religion as a type of expressiveness. Iakovos Vasaliou offers a helpful examination of some of LW's concepts, such as "picture of the world," "system of reference," and the differences between ordinary empirical propositions and M-propositions (named after GE Moore's list of commonplace propositions whose status escapes LW's categories). He also adds, "A third attitude towards religious belief might maintain that [the belief] is a `metaphor' or `symbol'(...) I can find no evidence that Wittgenstein ever discusses this sort of view (...)." -p 30.
While a belief can be distinguished from a ritual, an essay by Alan Bailey offers an indication of how varied the interpretations of LW's comments on religion can be, when Bailey writes, "Wittgenstein (...) consequently offers an alternative account of the [religious] rituals in question in favour of the suggestion that they have an expressive role."--p 124.
Others stress LW's insistence that language-games are autonomous; that is, they are exclusive, so that they are independent of each other. That means one language-game may not be used to critique another language-game. If so, then religion is not available to those unwilling to play that specific game. References can be found to the work of Wm. P. Alston who, it seems, disagrees and advocates mutualities between identifiable language games, but his work is not otherwise directly represented here.
If religion is a language-game to be played only by those who join the game, then faith is best understood as something only available to the players and can only be evaluated by them. An essay on "reformed epistemology," indentified with the work of Plantinga, defends such an exclusive view. The essay distances itself from the work of D.Z. Phillips since he refuses the designation of LW's philosophy of religion as "fideism," even while such a label would provide a theologian with a full acceptance of faith.
The most compelling issue then is whether such wide disagreement about religion as a language-game implies that the concept of language-game may be just as slippery in all its, now many, other applications. If so, then its attraction for prominent philosophers such as Gadamer and Mark Taylor, among many others, leaves one to wonder if it is cure or curiosity.
LW saw his work as therapeutic, helping us to avoid confusion by understanding how we put language to use. The essays in this volume, while exemplary in their explanation of some of LW's central ideas, evidence wide disagreement such that it leads this reader to ample confusion. Is the problem with LW's conceptualization? Or is it a problem of his interpreters? Or both? Since he can no longer answer for himself, only time will tell.
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