You are viewing a free preview of this lesson.
Subscribe to unlock all 10 lessons in this course and every other course on LearningBro.
Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein (1889–1951) was an Austrian-British philosopher widely regarded as one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century. Born into one of the wealthiest families in Vienna, he trained as an engineer at Manchester before turning to the foundations of logic under Bertrand Russell at Cambridge. His two major works — the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) and the Philosophical Investigations (published posthumously in 1953) — set out two radically different philosophies of language, and the gap between them is itself one of the great dramas of modern philosophy. For AQA A-Level Religious Studies (specification 7062), Wittgenstein is essential to the debate about religious language: whether talk of God is meaningful, what kind of meaning it has, and whether it can be assessed by the standards of science. The early Wittgenstein places God beyond the sayable; the later Wittgenstein, through the idea of language games, suggests religious language is meaningful within its own practice — a view developed (controversially) by D. Z. Phillips.
This lesson sets out the Tractatus and its picture theory, the "mystical," and the closing silence; the turn to the later philosophy of language games, meaning-as-use, forms of life, family resemblance and the private-language argument; the application to religious language and "Wittgensteinian fideism"; and the major criticisms, before weighing whether treating religion as a language game protects it or trivialises it.
The Tractatus (1921) is among the most compressed and enigmatic works in philosophy — drafted partly while Wittgenstein served as a soldier in the First World War, and built as a austere hierarchy of numbered propositions (1, 1.1, 1.11 …) descending from a few master theses. Its aim is to fix the logical structure of language and thereby the limits of what can be meaningfully said.
Its core is the picture theory of meaning:
Key term: saying vs showing. For the early Wittgenstein, factual propositions say how things are; but logical form, value, and the mystical cannot be said — they can only show themselves. This say/show distinction is the hinge of the whole Tractatus and the key to its treatment of religion.
The picture theory rests on a metaphysics of logical atomism: the world is the totality of facts, not of things; complex facts decompose into simple states of affairs, which are configurations of absolutely simple objects; and language, fully analysed, decomposes into elementary propositions that are concatenations of names standing for those objects. A proposition is a truth-function of elementary propositions — which is why genuine sense is possible only where there is something contingent to picture. The most extraordinary turn comes at the very end: Wittgenstein declares that his own propositions are, strictly, nonsensical. They are a "ladder" one climbs to gain a clear view of the limits of sense, and then "must throw away." The reader who has understood him will see that the deepest truths of the book — about logical form, about value, about the mystical — cannot themselves be said but only shown. This self-cancelling humility is precisely what the positivists ignored when they conscripted the picture theory for an anti-metaphysical crusade: they kept the verification-friendly half (only facts can be said) and discarded the reverent half (and the unsayable matters most).
The book closes with one of the most famous sentences in philosophy:
"Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." — Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 7
For the philosophy of religion this cuts two ways. Negatively, it appears to consign God-talk to the unsayable, and the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle (Schlick, Carnap, and in Britain A. J. Ayer) seized on the picture theory to argue that only empirically verifiable statements are meaningful — making religious and ethical claims literally meaningless. But this was a serious misreading of Wittgenstein's own intent. Positively, Wittgenstein regarded the mystical — ethics and the religious — as the most important dimension of life, precisely the part that lies beyond the reach of factual language. In a famous letter to his prospective publisher Ludwig von Ficker he explained that the book's point was "ethical," consisting of two parts, "the one presented here and everything I have not written. And it is precisely this second part that is the important one." Silence, for Wittgenstein, is not dismissal but reverence: some things are too important to be reduced to factual assertion.
The contrast with the positivists is therefore instructive and examinable. A. J. Ayer, in Language, Truth and Logic (1936), pressed the verification principle — that a statement is factually meaningful only if it is analytic or empirically verifiable — to conclude that "God exists" is not even false but literally meaningless, since no observation could count for or against it; theology was thereby reduced to disguised nonsense. Ayer drew confidence from the Tractatus, yet he amputated exactly the dimension Wittgenstein cared about. For Ayer the unsayable is empty; for Wittgenstein it is sacred. Recognising this difference is crucial: it explains why the early Wittgenstein is sometimes enlisted for the verification challenge to religious language and yet was, in spirit, its opposite — and it sets up the later Wittgenstein's decisive break, in which religious language is restored to meaning not by passing the verificationist's test but by dissolving the assumption that one test fits all language.
Believing he had solved the problems of philosophy, Wittgenstein abandoned the subject for a decade, working as a village schoolteacher in rural Austria, a monastery gardener, and the architect of his sister's house. He returned to Cambridge in 1929 and gradually came to reject the central assumptions of the Tractatus. The result was the later philosophy, published posthumously as the Philosophical Investigations (1953) and regarded by many as the most important philosophical work of the century. Where the Tractatus sought one hidden logical essence beneath all language, the Investigations abandons the search for essences altogether and turns to the endless variety of language as it is actually used.
Why the reversal? Wittgenstein came to think his earlier self had been bewitched by a single, oversimplified picture of how language works — what he calls (opening the Investigations with a quotation from Augustine's Confessions) the "Augustinian picture," on which every word is essentially a name and the meaning of a word is the object it stands for. This picture, he now held, fits a tiny corner of language (labelling objects) and is then illegitimately stretched to cover all of it, generating pseudo-problems. Most philosophical confusion, he argued, arises exactly here: "philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday," idling out of its ordinary working contexts. The remedy is not a better theory but a therapy: to bring words "back from their metaphysical to their everyday use," to look at how they actually function rather than to posit a hidden logical machinery beneath them. "Don't think, but look!" he urges — describe the diverse uses of language instead of legislating in advance what meaning must be. The philosopher's task becomes diagnostic and descriptive: "to shew the fly the way out of the fly-bottle." This therapeutic conception is itself relevant to RS, because it reframes the whole "is religious language meaningful?" debate as a question about use rather than about conformity to a single master-criterion.
In place of the picture theory Wittgenstein puts the concept of language games (Sprachspiele). Language has no single function (picturing); it is woven into countless different activities, each with its own purposes and rules. He offers a deliberately heterogeneous list:
Each game has its own rules and its own criteria of sense; what counts as a meaningful move in one need not in another. A move in chess cannot be judged by the rules of football, and a prayer cannot be judged by the standards of an empirical hypothesis. To grasp the meaning of an utterance is to grasp the game in which it has its home. Hence the slogan that overturns the picture theory: meaning is not a relation between word and object but a matter of use.
"For a large class of cases — though not for all — in which we employ the word 'meaning' it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language." — Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §43
Key term: meaning is use. The later Wittgenstein's central thesis: the meaning of a word is not an object it names nor a private idea it labels, but the role it plays in the rule-governed practices of a linguistic community. To ask for the meaning is to ask how the word is used.
Two clarifications help avoid common errors. First, "language game" is not a derogatory term implying that the activity is trivial or "merely a game" — Wittgenstein chooses the word to highlight that speaking is rule-governed activity, woven into a practice, the way moves in a game are. Second, the rules of a game are not arbitrary inventions one could revise at will; they are sustained by a shared practice and by agreement in judgements, not in opinions. To follow a rule is itself a practice, and "to obey a rule" cannot be a private matter (this connects to the private-language argument): there must be a community and a regular use against which "right" and "wrong" application can be measured. Applied to religion, this means the criteria of sense for words like "grace" or "atonement" are set by the living practice of a community of believers — which is why, on this view, the meaning of God-talk cannot be settled by an outsider armed only with a dictionary and a verification test.
Language games are not free-floating; they are embedded in forms of life (Lebensformen) — the wider patterns of human activity, culture and practice in which language is interwoven with what we do. "To imagine a language is to imagine a form of life." Language is not an abstract calculus bolted onto behaviour; speaking is itself a kind of acting, and a word's sense depends on the form of life that surrounds it.
Two further tools from the Investigations are heavily examined.
Family resemblance (Familienähnlichkeit) attacks the assumption that everything covered by a single word must share one common essence. Consider "games": board games, card games, ball games, athletic games, children's games. What do they all have in common? Wittgenstein answers: nothing single — not all involve winning and losing, not all involve competition, not all involve skill or amusement. They form instead "a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing: sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities of detail" — like the resemblances among members of a family (build, eyes, gait, temperament) where no one feature runs through all. The concept "game" has blurred edges, and Wittgenstein insists this is no defect: a blurred concept can still do its work, just as an indistinct photograph can still be a picture of someone. Applied to religion, this suggests there may be no single essence of "religion" that Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism and the rest all share — some are theistic, some not; some have scriptures, some rituals, some mystical disciplines. They may be related by overlapping resemblances rather than a common core. This cuts two ways for RS. It unsettles confident definitions of religion and any attempt to judge every tradition by one criterion (Hick's "transformation from self-centredness," say, would itself be just one strand). But it also warns against assuming the word "God" carries one fixed sense across, or even within, traditions — a caution directly relevant to debates about religious pluralism and the analogical or symbolic character of God-talk.
The beetle-in-a-box (§293) is part of Wittgenstein's wider private-language argument. Suppose everyone has a box containing something they call a "beetle," and no one can look into anyone else's box. Then the word "beetle," as used in the shared language, cannot get its meaning from the object in the box, since that object is in principle inaccessible to others and might even differ from box to box, or be absent. "The thing in the box has no place in the language-game at all." The lesson is that meaning cannot derive from purely private, inwardly-inspected items.
Subscribe to continue reading
Get full access to this lesson and all 10 lessons in this course.