Wittgenstein on Religion

[Music] nietzsche's proclamation of the death of god marks the beginning of the modern age the age in which science and technology have largely replaced religion as the bodies of knowledge and the activities that society depends on and lives by at least one traditional understanding of what god means was at an end yet the theme wasn't novel as we've seen it's been building up for centuries even as far back as galileo the idea was already coming in that the way the world works is neither moral nor purposive but simply mechanical a mechanical universe no longer reveals

any guiding hand at work in it so the new secular scientific worldview cannot give the old kind of support to religious belief it seems that faith must be separated from cosmology our theory of the world and become more inward and ethical as we've seen in this series many christian thinkers have been attempting just that pascal turned away from the objective god of the philosophers and sought a new way to a hidden god known by the heart kierkegaard sought to keep god's transcendence but within the sphere of the spiritual life jung's god was an image buried

deep in the psyche of the whole self that we are to become albert schweitzer's god was an ethical inspiration the ground of the will to love these thinkers were moving away from the old cosmic literal theism instead they saw god as hidden in the heart by which they meant perhaps as the soul's guiding ideal a new idea of god has been slowly taking shape but perhaps nobody yet had managed to spell it out entirely satisfactorily well with one more thinker still to meet as remarkable a character as perhaps anyone else in this series in the

autumn of 1908 he came here to manchester university's aeronautical engineering laboratory he was 19 years old and his name was ludwig wittgenstein he was an impulsive sociable character at that time still very well to do he was highly musical he made many friends but he didn't have much to say about his exotic background [Music] wittgenstein was a product of vienna in the last days of the austro-hungarian empire his father was its leading steel magnate the nine talented children grew up in surroundings of the utmost opulence but they belonged to a new generation which rejected this

high bourgeois culture preferring modernism in art puritanism in morals and truth and simplicity in all things [Music] this outlook shows in wittgenstein's early choice of engineering as an honest profession in manchester he designed and then began to build a jet reaction engine that would deliver the thrust at the tip of the blades over thirty years later aircraft such as the fairy gyrodyne were built on this principle but 1910 was too early and in any case wittgenstein's life was about to change to design his propeller he needed mathematics now any ordinary mathematician just does mathematics but

wittgenstein asked himself the fatal question what is mathematics why is it so powerful and what are numbers by the autumn of 1911 he'd found out who was the best philosopher of mathematics alive and he simply presented himself as a student to bertrand russell at cambridge he was queer and his notions seemed to be odd he came to me and said will you please tell me whether i am a complete idiot or not because if i am a complete idiot i shall become an aeronaut but if not i shall become a philosopher i told him to

write me something during the vacation on some philosophical subject after reading only one sentence i said to him no you must not become an aeronaut although wittgenstein spent so many years in cambridge he was never at ease with the clannish ritualistic and enclosed side of academic life in fact he thought it corrupt and much preferred the town to the gown like nietzsche he had a great need for freedom he never married nor owned a house he liked to live in digs which he kept changing and he frequently vanished altogether when war broke out he volunteered

for the austrian army now i should have the chance to be a decent human being for i'm standing eye to eye with death may the spirit bring me light understand people whenever you feel like hating them try instead to understand them be at peace within yourself but how do you find this peace in yourself only if i live in a way pleasing to god only so can one bear life the war destroyed the world wittgenstein had grown up in his life changed he gave away his money and became a country school teacher in austria [Music]

at the same time he published the tractatus logico philosophicus this famous book is the last great attempt to defend the traditional view that language can copy reality precisely and completely what can be said can be said clearly what cannot be said clearly is not in the world and one must be silent about it when a few years later wittgenstein designed and built this house for his sister he gave his teaching visible form fitkinstein's approach to architecture was stringently functional everything had to be redesigned for the utmost simplicity right down to this window latch then precision

engineer and the result is not inhuman windows and doors match the shape of the human body they're double for silence and insulation and there are heating grills below them the whole thing is exact and spare and sublime like wittenstein's philosophy and as with this philosophy what's left out is even more important than what's left in [Laughter] the sense of the world must lie outside the world in the world everything is as it is and everything happens as it does happen in it no value exists god does not reveal himself in the world feeling the world

as a limited whole it is this that is mystical what did wickenstein mean by god in his early philosophy the house gives a clue after a while the geometrical tranquility of this place begins to remind us of a mosque a place where god is so exalted and transcendent that no image at all is possible can you imagine an idea of god so exalted that the sense of the presence of god and the sense of the absence of god coincide or put it another way by its extreme rigor the house creates a sense it gives a

hint of an absolute standard of purity by which human life should be guided and assessed wittgenstein once said he liked the idea of a silent religion silence tells no lies silence does not deceive we feel that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered the problems of life remain completely untouched of course there are then no questions left and this itself is the answer the solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of the problem what we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence in 1929 40 years old now

wittgenstein unexpectedly reappeared in cambridge after a 16-year absence and soon began teaching from 1933 word went round that in his classes in trinity college he was developing an entirely new philosophy the classes were held in this room at the head of k staircase in huels court by the window his writing table the shoe boxes in which his notes were stored and the deck chair in which he habitually sat the austerity and bareness of the room which was his own living room as well as his teaching room reflects his tolstoyan personality and style of life as

each student arrived he or she collected a wooden folding chair from the landing outside it was unwise to be late the class met twice a week for a gruelling two-hour session we know wittenstein planned these sessions carefully because the published students notes of them tally with his own unpublished manuscripts but during the class wittgenstein thought aloud and occasionally terrified the students by questioning them what is philosophy here's an example every day we ask each other the time and answer without any hesitation but suppose one day we ask ourselves what is time now we suddenly seem

to be landed with a genuine classical philosophical problem a very difficult one wittgenstein says that these problems arise through a disease of language a myth has held us captive we're caught up in the idea that words and names and that the meaning of a word is the thing that it stands for and then we start investigating what that thing can possibly be figure standard himself held such a view but now he was trying to shake it off instead he asks us to see words as doing jobs words are tools of many different kinds words are

like chess pieces the meaning of a piece is its powers the party can play in furthering the game all language is like that we play games with language our language is a function of the way we live it's a tool of social interaction now this may sound rather abstract but in fact it changes everything the old theory of meaning summoned up great nebulous abstractions which philosophers then worried about but wittgenstein's new point of view is strictly practical look at the grammar he says look at the way the language works if only you can see that

clearly you'll see all there is to see look at the grammar of ethical terms and such terms as god soul mind one of the chief troubles is that we take a substantive to correspond to a thing the words soul and mind have been used as though they stood for a thing a gaseous thing what is the soul is a misleading question so what will become of morality and religion on this new point of view i think you can guess figenstein has a deep respect for the practice of morality and religion but like tolstoy he's deeply

mistrustful of the theory on the whole he thinks of religious beliefs not as being factual but rather in terms of the job they do in shaping our lives until recently not much more was known than that but now a lot of fragments of wittgenstein's observations and his private notes on religion have come to light they show how deeply his thought about religion was embedded in everyday life one of my pupils on my advice has gone to work at woolworths now that is the sort of thing you should do try and get a job in some

large store where you will meet ordinary people what is the use of studying philosophy if all that it does for you is to enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic etc and if it does not improve your thinking about the important questions of everyday life it is if possible still more difficult to think really honestly about your life and other people's lives and the trouble is that thinking about these things is not thrilling but downright nasty god grant the philosopher insight into what lies in front of everyone's eyes not

how the world is is the mystical but that it is to renounce the pomps and vanities of this wicked world just think what that would really involve who of us today even thinks of doing such a thing we all want to be admired saint paul said i die daily just think what that must have meant for all you and i can tell the religion of the future will be without any priests or ministers 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 [Music] christianity is not a doctrine not i mean a theory about what has happened or will happen to the human soul but a description of something that actually takes place in human life for consciousness of sin is a real event and so our despair and salvation through faith perhaps we can say only love can believe the resurrection this can come about only if you no longer rest your weight on the earth but suspend yourself from heaven then everything will be different and it will be no wonder if you can do things that

you cannot do now a man who is suspended looks the same as one who is standing but the interplay of forces within him is nevertheless quite different so that he can act quite differently and can a standing man an honest religious thinker is like a titra parker it almost looks as though he were walking on nothing but air his support is the slenderest imaginable and yet it really is possible to walk on it when in 1949 wittgenstein learnt that he was fatally ill with cancer he told his doctor that he did not want to die

in hospital his doctor offered a room in his own home when it should become necessary [Music] over a year went by and then a few months before his death wittgenstein arrived to take up residence in this room here he continued working until two days before the end [Music] wittgenstein like nietzsche was a solitary passionate and compelling figure both of them were tormented by the ultimate questions of life nietzsche broke his mind trying to force a new way through them wiggenstein took a different route he sought a cure thirty years before he'd written that the answer

to the riddle of life lies in the disappearance of the question so he patiently unravels our illusions and forces us to return to the ethical reality of the everyday when we see that our common life is all that realization is religion wickenstein's point of view is very down to earth and very agnostic all we can see clearly is the way our language works in the games we play so we can see how belief in god works and how he taught to shape our lives but then we must stop at that to this day many people

find this new point of view unnerving wittgenstein so clear that belief in god requires conversion of life truthfulness inner integrity he's equally clear that that's all there is to be said we must be cured of the old speculative metaphysical impulse so what would you call him would you say this is religious agnosticism or a mysticism of the everyday or simply that it is and always was just the truth of the matter [Music] [Music] so [Music] what have you made of the story we've been telling in this series about how the modern crisis of faith developed

science first mechanized nature and then invaded us in it biblical criticism demythologized the bible radical humanism argued that the only world that can possibly be for us is our own human world and then the study of other religions suggested that no one religion not even christianity is likely to be absolute finally we came to our fluid uncertain modern world where there are as many points of view as there are people and there seems to be no center anymore no absolute standard or reference point now to many people this must seem the story of a long

decline sea of faith the tide going right out as they see it any faith or philosophy of life must start from a set of big reassuring answers to the big questions that's the basis and when those answers and even the questions begin to look rather shaky people feel that religion's becoming impossible i don't agree skepticism as well as certainty can drive you to faith we saw that as far back as pascal only it leads you to see religion in a different way not as a set of grand answers but simply as a spiritual path when

i look into the void of the modern situation and i see that it's entirely up to me what i'm to make of myself and my life then i find i need religion to give me a path to give my soul shape to give me categories to live by goals to pursue i'm a priest in the church of england and i practice in a rather traditional way but when i say the creed i regard it not as giving me supernatural information but as showing me a way to walk in you may not agree but in a

way that's only to be expected for our whole message has been that in the modern situation the individual stands absolutely alone with his freedom before the ultimate questions of life you must decide we finish now it's over to you