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

Abstract

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’.

1. A Strange Claim

Drury reports Wittgenstein “near the end of his life” 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” (Drury 2017, p. 206). A strong claim, and strange. Wittgenstein isn’t just characterising some general attitude to life unconnected to his philosophical work, but the spirit of that work itself.1

There’s no uncontroversial humdrum meaning of either ‘religious’ or ‘philosophical’ that could make sense of Wittgenstein’s remark. To explore its possible meaning, I’ll take what seems the only workable course, first considering the meaning Wittgenstein gives to the characterisation ‘religious’ in speaking of questions he explicitly designates as such, and then seeing how that (sort of) meaning could also apply to the (other) characterisations he provides of his philosophical work. This task turns out to be quite demanding, however, both because Wittgenstein’s views on these intertwined matters changed over time, and because, as we’ll see, insight mingles with confusion in his remarks on them, especially as regards the ‘religious side’ of the issue. Furthermore, making sense of what he says, and showing where he (as it seems to me) fails to make clear sense, demands some discussion of matters that at first might seem unrelated to the task of understanding his remark to Drury, and for which Wittgenstein’s own texts offer only scant support.

The upshot of my main inquiry, and what I regard as Wittgenstein’s central insight, is that he takes both religious—which for him in practice means Christian—and philosophical thinking to be characterised by the same kind of difficulty. Both have their roots, often deep and tangled, in the moral–existential confusion(s) of despair, the despair over finding sense in one’s life with others, or rather of welcoming and confronting, instead of evading, perverting and denying the undeniable but often unpalatable sense one finds there, a sense ultimately pertaining to love and our difficulties with it.2

The paper is structured as follows. Section 2 gives an initial characterisation of Wittgenstein’s use of ‘religion/ous’, while Section 3 characterises despair as a giving-up-on-love and indicates how despair is inherently confused, whether expressed in religious terms or not. The two next sections consider the question why Wittgenstein, despite viewing problems from a religious perspective, nonetheless did not consider himself ‘a religious man’. I suggest that there are two quite different sides to this: on one hand, a confused fantasy of ‘religion’ as an object of longing (Section 4); on the other, a well taken critique of religious belief in the collective, ideological sense (Section 5). Section 6 shows that Wittgenstein views philosophical confusion, too, as ultimately issuing from struggles with despair.

The next three sections discuss the changes over time in Wittgenstein’s ‘religious point of view’ and in his (other) characterisations of his philosophical perspective. Section 7 indicates how the metaphysical worldview presented in the Tractatus—which is also the first specific form taken by Wittgenstein’s ‘religious point of view’—can itself be seen, particularly when read in conjunction with the coded (private) entries in Wittgenstein’s WWI diaries, to exemplify the rootedness of philosophical and religious pictures in despair. The Tractatus presents a strict I–world perspective, one in which there’s no You; in Biblical terms, no neighbour to love. Section 8 outlines how in Wittgenstein’s later work, an I–You perspective starts emerging, where the question of sense arises in the encounter between human beings, and how there’s a related reframing in certain later explicitly religious remarks which present despair, in my view rightly, as essentially despair over love. However, as Section 9 documents, there are also very different late remarks in Wittgenstein, where ‘commitment’ to a system of religious belief rather than love is emphasised. I suggest that this bifurcation corresponds to an unresolved tension in Wittgenstein’s late thinking generally between an I–You orientation and a lingering focus on collective normativity.

Section 10 moves the discussion in a direction Wittgenstein himself doesn’t pursue, although his late remarks both on religion and more generally seem to invite it; I suggest that the foregrounding of love in Christian thinking (as in some of Wittgenstein’s late remarks) tends to undermine the very idea of specifically ‘religious’ problems or solutions. This leaves us with a broad, unresolved question about how to understand religion (Christianity) as such, and, as explained in the brief concluding Section 11, a narrower question about whether we can, in the end, give coherent meaning to Wittgenstein’s idea that his point of view is specifically ‘religious’.

2. What Wittgenstein Means by ‘Religious’

“To believe in a God”, Wittgenstein says in an early remark, “means to understand the question about the meaning of life”, and “to pray is to think about the meaning of life” (Wittgenstein 1979, pp. 76, 73 [8.7.16, 11.6.16]).3 This remains the self-evident starting-point throughout his remarks on explicitly religious themes up to his last years. “A religious question is either a question of life [Lebensfrage] or it is (empty) chatter: This language game—one could say—gets played only with questions of life. Much like the word ‘ouch’ does not have any meaning—except as a scream of pain” (Wittgenstein 2003b, p. 211 [1937]). Wittgenstein’s religious thoughts, then, are essentially moral–existential. He said he could understand “the conception of God, in so far as it is involved in one’s awareness of one’s own sin and guilt” but not “the conception of a Creator” (Malcolm 1984, p. 59). “The thought of God”, he also said, “was above all for him the thought of the fearful judge” (von Wright 1955, p. 543). “When we meet again at the last judgement” was “a recurrent phrase with him”, the words spoken “with an indescribably inward-gazing look in his eyes” (Engelmann 1967, pp. 77–78). What God judges is one’s life, one’s orientation, one’s actions and attitude towards others; whether one has “a pure heart”—and Wittgenstein cries out: “why don’t I have one? […] why are my thoughts so impure! In my thoughts there is again and again vanity, swindle, resentment. May God steer my life so that it becomes different” (Wittgenstein 2003b, p. 225 [1937]). And near the end of his life, he wrote: “God may say to me: ‘I am judging you out of your own mouth. Your own actions have made you shudder with disgust when you have seen other people do them’” (Wittgenstein 1980, p. 87 [1951]).4

Wittgenstein insists that what religious writers—at any rate, those that interested him—offer is “less a theory than a sigh or a cry” (Wittgenstein 1980, p. 30 [1937]). That is, they offer “a description”, in a sense in which a description may itself be like a cry, “of something that actually takes place in human life”; “For ‘consciousness of sin’ is a real event and so are despair [Verzweiflung] and salvation through faith. Those who speak of such things (Bunyan for instance) are simply describing what has happened to them” (Wittgenstein 1980, p. 28 [1937]). ‘Hell’, for example, need not, Wittgenstein says, be taken to name a mythological (doctrinally posited) place of “unending torment”; “If you want to imagine hell […] I would rather say: Do you know what unspeakable dread a human being is capable of? Think of that and you know what hell is”; “in hopelessness one does not think ‘it lasts so long already!’ for in a certain sense time does not pass at all in it” (Wittgenstein 2003b, pp. 179–81 [1937]). And he adds, “Now, can’t one say to someone and I to myself: ‘You are doing right to be afraid of hopelessness! You must live in such a way that your life can’t come to a head in hopelessness, in the feeling: Now it’s too late’” (ibid.). Wittgenstein views religion—the religion that concerns him—as a response to the desperate premonition of this ultimate hopelessness. “The Christian religion”, he writes, “is only for one who needs infinite help [unendliche Hilfe], that is, only for one who suffers infinite distress [unendliche Not]”, that is, for someone “who feels that he is lost”, a lost soul; “wenn sich ein Mensch verloren fühlt, so ist das die höchste Not” (Wittgenstein 1980, p. 46 [1944]).

As is obvious in many of these remarks, Wittgenstein is speaking from personal experience and reflecting on his own life; he is trying to find a way to live with others and himself. He famously said that Tolstoy’s The Gospel in Brief had “kept him alive” during WWI, had kept him from madness or suicide (Monk 1990, pp. 115–16; cf. Wittgenstein 2022, p. 61 [11.10.14]).5 He was close to madness and suicide on many later occasions, too, and tended to formulate his desperate hope for being saved from ruin in religious and, more specifically, Christian language. He told Drury in 1929 that since childhood he had suffered from morbid terrors—and then he “suddenly stopped still and looked at me [Drury] very seriously” and said “You will think I am crazy […] when I tell you that only religious feelings are a cure for such fears” (Drury 2017, p. 95).

For Wittgenstein, then, the religious dimension is essentially one of struggle with and salvation from despair, the despair over finding a way to go on living, a way of changing so that one’s life doesn’t end in hopelessness: “sound doctrines are all useless” he says, “you have to change your life. (Or the direction of your life.) […] you need something to move you and turn you in a new direction” (Wittgenstein 1980, p. 53 [1946]).

So far, the picture that emerges of Wittgenstein’s view of religion—religion in the sense that concerned him, that he would have had in mind in characterising his own point of view on philosophical problems as ‘religious’—seems tolerably clear. However, a closer look reveals problems and confusion. This confusion, I will suggest in the next section, is inherent in the reaction of despair itself, and is also crucially related to the sense—or rather, as we’ll see, to one of the two distinct senses—in which Wittgenstein thought of himself as not a religious man, but rather (in this first sense) as one longing for ‘religion’, fantasising about ‘it’ and investing his existential hopes in it ‘from the outside.’ The confusion of that fantasy is discussed in the Section 4.

Wittgenstein’s failure to see, or at least to clearly grasp, this confusion is related to his general tendency, in discussing religion explicitly, to ignore or not fully appreciate the inextricable entanglement of despair with confusion that he himself points to in other contexts. That entanglement means that even if those who speak of sin and salvation through faith are, as Wittgenstein said, “simply describing what has happened to them”, what they say may still be, and indeed will be confused, even if it also contains elements of truth, precisely to the extent that they speak from within a struggle with despair—and Wittgenstein insists that “if you want to stay within the religious sphere you must struggle” (Wittgenstein 1980, p. 86 [1950]).

3. Love–Despair–Confusion

Despair isn’t like a physical illness that attacks a person wholly against (or at least independently of) their will, but an affliction of the will itself, a moral–existential difficulty in how one relates to oneself and others (cf. Kierkegaard 1980). Unlike practical or purely intellectual problems, moral–existential difficulties generally aren’t ‘out there’, in front of us; rather, the attitude we assume to ourselves and others is the problem; we ourselves are the problem. Furthermore, an essential part of the problem is that we don’t want to see that, or how, we are the problem (cf. Backström 2023b). This means that despair is inherently confused and self-deceptive. Sorrow and grief can, like joy and other expressions of love, be without confusion, despair not; whatever real terrors one reacts to, one’s despairing reaction misrepresents that reality, obscures its actual sense and one’s own role in it.

‘Confusion’, here, shouldn’t of course be taken in some primarily or merely intellectual sense, but in the moral–existential–emotional sense that manifests also, and equally, in confused thoughts, in terrifying, emotion-laden nonsense of the kind “that can keep horror bristling round the head” (Graves 1999).6 This horror arises, I suggest, in desperate, self-destructive response to the difficulties we have with opening ourselves to others, to the sense and promise, the joy and pain of life with them, and is produced through a kind of unhappy self-suggestion. In a simile Wittgenstein himself used in speaking of despair, it’s as though one were sitting in front of a black door, repeating “That door is black! That door is black!” until one’s whole world seemed black (Gasking and Jackson 1999, pp. 144–45).

This is a first sense in which despair as such is confused: one feels, desperately gets oneself to feel, that ‘reality itself’—the world, other people, and/or one’s own ‘objective’ character—is simply and unavoidably such that, whatever one does, there’s no hope for one. Whereas what actually happens is that one gives up hope (‘despair’ comes from de-sperare, ‘to be without hope’). The confusion here isn’t that one mistakenly thinks there isn’t, when ‘objectively’ there is, hope. Objectively determinable facts or probabilities aren’t at issue, but hope (or: faith) in love, for despair means giving up on love. If that claim—one that is intimated in some late remarks by Wittgenstein, as we’ll see, and that will become clearer as we go—sounds overblown, consider whether it makes sense, or what kind of sense it might make, to say that one’s life is devoid of love, yet that one finds nothing despairing in this. If someone said that, wouldn’t that in itself be despairing?

Now, hope/faith in love belongs to, and in fact makes sense only from within, the orientation of love itself. To love means opening oneself to and inviting the loving response of the other; their love, not their mere appreciation, admiration, liking, or dutiful ministrations, say. And only love dares to open itself to the response of love, dares even to ask, and to see, what that response, and what opening oneself to it, really entails. Where one doesn’t dare this—that is, where one despairs of love—one will either claim, in openly avowed cynicism or in acute despair, that there’s no such thing as love, or else one will misrepresent love as, and strive to replace it by, some ultimately trivial, loveless substitute, such as (mere) appreciation or emotional dependability.7

The possibility of trivialising responses alerts us to a second aspect of the confusion(s) of despair, namely, that while despair may be acutely felt—as it tends to be in Wittgenstein’s characterisations of the situation where ‘religion’ may appear as a real need—the despairing one may also be unaware of, and may deny, being in despair.8 Thus, people can claim to be happy, to have all they want and need, if they have the admiration of others, say, and their behaviour may seem to confirm this—even though someone who loves them will grievingly see, and try to make them see, that they are in despair. Consider vanity; an existential affliction with which Wittgenstein, according to his own testimony, constantly struggled. However self-satisfied, and in this sense ‘happy’, we may feel when our vain hopes are gratified, vanity is ultimately itself a form of despair, in which, in one’s fear of revealing oneself to others, one exchanges knowing and being known by them for a “completely chimerical” game (Wittgenstein 1980, p. 58 [1947]) where one presents one’s persona—the mere appearance of a person—for the appreciation (not love) of people one doesn’t even care to know, and finally comes to confuse oneself with this apparition; I “watch the other watching me” and “look […] away from myself”, as Wittgenstein says (Wittgenstein 2003b, p. 139 [1931]). Could there be anything more despairing, more vain in the sense of: an ultimately meaningless, empty and unhappy waste of life? And yet, to be vain means to suicidally (in the existential sense) ‘choose’ this vain game over real contact with others and oneself, that is, to flee such contact; the contact that love is and longs for and that ultimately is the only alternative to despair.

Of course, in ‘choosing’ the vain game of vanity one isn’t making a clear-sighted, ‘rational’, choice, and speaking of a ‘choice’ in connection with vanity and other destructive, despairing, attitudes and orientations, is indeed misleading. No one chooses to be, goes in for being, vain. Yet people are vain, and it’s not as though some external force makes them, makes us, vain against our will; our vanity is our own, and that means that nothing prevents us from freeing ourselves from vanity, letting go of it. And to the extent that we love wholeheartedly, we will be free of vanity, for the truthful interpersonal contact for which love wholeheartedly longs would be blocked by vanity’s focus on affirmation of appearances (for the vain, such affirmation provides an illusory, loveless ‘substitute’ for loving contact).

So the question is: do I want to be free of vanity, do I love? As Wittgenstein realised, the answer may be, ‘not really’, even if I present myself as struggling with my vanity. He confesses that his own struggle with vanity was “yet again only a sort of vanity”, driven by his vain wish to appear a ‘humble’ person: “I am vain and insofar as I am vain, my wishes for improvement are vain, too. […] As long as one is on stage, one is an actor after all, regardless of what one does” (Wittgenstein 2003b, p. 139 [1931]). And, of course, Wittgenstein’s saying that was part of the same vain confusion, for as he himself says, “When you bump against the limits of your own honesty it is as though your thoughts get into a whirlpool, an infinite regress: You can say what you like, it takes you no further” (Wittgenstein 1980, p. 8 [1930]). This is a third aspect of the confusion of despair: that even our struggles with despair, whether articulated in religious language or not, are themselves entangled in and expressive of the despair and its confusion, to an extent not clearly surveyable by us, because only at the end of the struggle could there be such clarity. Until, unless, one attains it, one will partly—even if it generally doesn’t feel that way—be struggling against clarity and for one’s own continued self-imprisonment in despair’s confusion.

But doesn’t that mean that the situation of someone struggling with despair is hopeless? No. You are, after all, the only one who can place limits on your own honesty and (or: that is) on your own love; the very limits you then ‘bump against’. And if you can impose these limits you can also lift them; indeed, you are the only one who can do so, as no one can be forced to be loving or honest. (They might find themselves forced, for various reasons, to ‘be nice’ or to admit to particular facts in certain situations, but that’s different.)9 To think that one is hopelessly lost is the very confusion, the very lie, of despair. And one succumbs to that confusion, tells oneself that lie, because, at bottom, one refuses to (will not) open oneself to others in love—which is the very possibility that one despairs of, that one gives up on. Again, it doesn’t feel like a refusal but rather like hopeless ‘fate’, yet this very feeling is part of the lie, of the refusal.

A fourth aspect of the confusion in despair—the final one I’ll distinguish, although these mutually implied layers of confusion could be articulated in further and different ways, too—is this. While in our despair we may be, as Kierkegaard says, acutely conscious of “that which we despair over”, that is, of “that which [we feel] binds us in despair”, which is generally some particular misfortune, what we “despair of”—in other words, “that which, rightly understood, releases us from despair”—“evades” us (Kierkegaard 1980, pp. 60–61 [footnote]). Thus, a vain person may feel acute despair if their vain aspirations fail, if they fall into social disgrace, say, yet they do not (want or dare to) see that this failure feels despairing, devastating to them only because they have given up on love. If they didn’t despair of love, of the one thing that is ‘wholly other’ than social success, social disgrace wouldn’t make them feel hopelessly lost. Again, I would say (as Kierkegaard does not) that what we despair of is, essentially, love—and that means that, in despair, we do not see or feel love as it actually is; the reality, the hope and promise of love in and between us.

4. “Then Everything Will Be Different”: Religion as an Object of Fantasy

Existential difficulties and change have a strange grammar, then. The difficulty, for me (for each one of us), is that I have to change; I must open myself to the other, receive the love they offer me and remain open and loving even if they turn away from or against me in lovelessness. That is, I must free myself from, let go of, my own lovelessness, my fear of, and lack of faith in love, in the other—which is also a fear of and lack of faith in myself, and which can manifest in countless surface forms: as vanity, arrogant pride, envy, self-pity, self-loathing, disgust with the other, etc. But precisely because I myself must change, it may in a certain—but ultimately confused, self-deceived—sense seem impossible for me, as I am, with all my vanity and fear of love, to do anything about my situation, for everything I do will, it seems, come out of and disappear back into the same whirlpool of deceit and despair that Wittgenstein describes. And so, insofar as “a bad tree cannot bear good fruit” (Matthew 7:18), it may now seem—this is what it means to be tempted by despair—that I’m helplessly lost, that I cannot do anything about my situation but that help must come to me ‘from outside.’ Not, however, from other human beings, for in my despair I feel that no one loves or could love me, just as I cannot love, but only soil, others. So, help must come, I might think, ‘from God’, from ‘religion’. As we’ll see in this section, Wittgenstein was tempted by this idea, or rather, this confusion.10

When he said that he was not a religious man, Wittgenstein seems to have meant his claim in two different senses. The first sense, which we’ll discuss in this section, is directly related to the confusion just mentioned. Wittgenstein thought that there were truly religious people, people who had found faith such that they had become clear, in a way he never had, about themselves in their relation to life, to others, and so could also “see directly into the souls of other people”; “there really have been people like that”, he insisted, people “like the Elder Zosima [in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov]” (Drury 2017, p. 156). Such clarity wouldn’t make one complacent—that would be the opposite of understanding anything—but in some sense free from despair even in one’s struggles with life; “religion is, as it were, the calm bottom of the sea at its deepest point, which remains calm however high the waves on the surface may be” (Wittgenstein 1980, p. 53 [1946]). Wittgenstein imagined this point of deepest calm, thought that he could detect its radiant presence in certain others, but didn’t regard himself as having reached it, despite his claim, in the Lecture on Ethics, to have had experiences of feeling “absolutely safe […] whatever happens” (Wittgenstein 1965, p. 8).

Now, Wittgenstein’s idea that he himself hadn’t yet attained ‘religion’ in the true sense was combined with, was the other side of, the idea, or rather the fantasy, that religion, if one attained it, would have an extraordinary capacity, unlike anything else, to change one—or, that ‘religion’ would be the proper name of such an extraordinary change. If you have religious (Christian) faith, he says, “you no longer rest your weight on the earth but suspend yourself from heaven”, and then “everything will be different and it will be ‘no wonder’ if you can do things that you cannot do now” (Wittgenstein 1980, p. 33 [1937]). And he suggests that “only religion would have the power” to “destroy vanity”, to really penetrate into “all the nooks and crannies” of our being, thus stilling our “doubts” about ourselves and our motives—and here Wittgenstein was speaking for himself: “only if I were able to submerge myself in religion [nur wenn ich in Religion untergehen könnte] could these doubts be stilled” (Wittgenstein 1980, p. 48 [1946], emphasis added).

The grave confusion of this idea, this fantasy, becomes obvious when one reads the whole remark I just quoted from, where Wittgenstein, speaking of the supposed difficulty of self-knowledge—or, as he claims, its ultimate impossibility in the absence of religion—says that “one may be acting in such and such a way out of genuine love, but equally well out of deceitfulness, or a cold heart” (ibid.). The absurdity of Wittgenstein’s suggestion that we don’t know our motives becomes evident if we turn the example around: instead of someone worrying about whether their love is genuine—which sounds commendably ‘humble’ and ‘truthful’—imagine that you were really cold and deceitful to someone, but then told yourself that maybe you acted out of love, after all, ‘because it’s hard to know one’s motives.’ No one would credit that, yet why not, if Wittgenstein’s suggestion were right?

The temptation that drives Wittgenstein’s suggestion—the existential function of this self-obfuscation, this self-deceptive self-estrangement—has been trenchantly analysed, with regard to this very remark of Wittgenstein’s, by Nykänen (2025). The need for self-estrangement, he says, “signals that one is tempted by lovelessness”; one claims not to know whether one feels and acts out of love or not precisely because one actually knows, but cannot stand to admit, that one is closing oneself to the other, to love, and “this ‘not knowing’ is [thus itself] an aspect of closedness” (Nykänen 2025, pp. 5–6). The point is, as Nykänen shows, that when we start turning away from others, deserting them and treating them as strangers, this gives us bad conscience, insofar as the other is not in fact a stranger, but our neighbour, whom we cannot help but love and care about even as we desert them, and so to numb and repress our bad conscience, we must estrange ourselves from ourselves and start pretending that we don’t know what this ‘stranger’ we’ve turned ourselves into does or feels; a pretence, a fantasy that we also use to deny that others, those who in our lovelessness we betray, can know our motives, know us. The apparent opposites, ‘I don’t know what I feel’ and ‘You don’t know, no one else knows, what I feel’, both perform the same defensive function, to deny the openness and contact between us, to deny that you feel and understand me, and I you. Our need for this denial in fantasy reveals that we cannot bear, even in thought, to look the one we betrayed in the eyes and ask their forgiveness. And so we perpetuate our betrayal, our cutting ourselves off from them, through our denial. Again, this is what despair looks like; this anguished fear and refusal of what is actually—that’s the despairing thing—goodness itself: to look into another’s naked face, to be with them.11

That Wittgenstein was aware of the crucial connection between the repression of bad conscience and despair is perhaps indicated by a remark he made about insanity, which he viewed as the ultimate form of despair: “Madness is a form of bad conscience”, “Der Wahnsinn ist eine Form des bösen Gewissens” (Wittgenstein 2015, Ms 132, p. 191 [1946]). Alas, the idea of God as a Judge, so dear to Wittgenstein, itself contains an element of self-estrangement, of repression of conscience. Wittgenstein does say, as we saw, that God judges you “out of your own mouth” (Wittgenstein 1980, p. 87 [1951]), and that would mean that ‘God’s judgement’ is simply your own conscientious judgement of yourself, of the lovelessness (the spite, envy, etc.) you know in conscience that you have indulged, even if you tried to repress that knowledge—and one can repress only what one knows one wouldn’t want to know, as we might say. But Wittgenstein also says that “how God judges a man is something we cannot imagine at all”, for if God “really takes strength of temptation and the frailty of nature into account, whom can he condemn?” (Wittgenstein 1980, p. 86 [1950]). And that remark betrays what, from the perspective of love appears as a moralistic confusion and self-estrangement in the idea of moral judgement as condemnation by a judge (whether human or divine), with people separated into ‘innocent’ and ‘guilty’. For understood as an expression of love, conscience simply means the sense, the understanding, one has of having acted lovelessly—even if ‘only’ in thought—towards someone else. Unlike a court of law (with which conscience has so often, but confusedly, been compared), conscience provides no comparisons between oneself and others in terms of who is more or less guilty, praise- or blameworthy, and no judgements about ‘strength of temptation’ or ‘frailty of nature’. It simply alerts one to—that is, it shows itself in the fact that one feels terrible about—one’s lovelessness towards the other, and it does that by awakening in one the longing to reunite with them in love through asking their forgiveness (cf. Backström 2007, pp. 343–69; Nykänen 2014).

Now, in terms of the longing for, the fantasy of having, religious faith of the kind Wittgenstein expresses, the point is that the more one has repressed conscience and estranged oneself from others and from oneself, the stronger may become one’s sense that, if ‘left to one’s own devices’, one is lost, and so ‘religion’ is one’s only hope. If that is what one imagines, however, ‘religion’ won’t solve one’s difficulty but merely add one more layer of self-deception, insofar as one calls in ‘outside help’—turning not to other human beings but to ‘God’—to solve a problem that consists precisely in one’s having given up, and given up on, oneself and others.

In some remarks from the time of his intense struggles with religious faith in the 1930s, Wittgenstein seems dimly aware of, but deeply confused about, this problem. “I always feel”, he says, “what no pious person ever feels, that God is responsible for what I am. […] Again and again, I want to say ‘God, if you don’t help me, what can I do!’” (Wittgenstein 2015, Ms 120, 17r-v [1937]).12 Yet he says he “can’t—or not directly—fight” this feeling, but must “patiently endure [his] own confusion [Unklarheit]”, while “striving”, “never mind God”, “to behave decently, not meanly, cowardly, badly [ungut]”. “And if I succeed in doing that, then my way of thinking might also change—my use of the word ‘God’” (ibid.). This is a strange passage in many ways, most obviously because Wittgenstein seems to think that the essential thing isn’t how he relates to others—lovingly or lovelessly, closing himself to them in mean and cowardly fear—but a changed relationship to God; one for which a change in his way of relating to others may, for some here unexplained reason, pave the way. As we’ll see in Section 10 below, such an ‘order of priorities’ is wholly confused—even as it remains unclear how one should or could lucidly relate the love of ‘God’ to the love of other human beings.

Wittgenstein is also aware of the confusion involved in the whole idea of ‘longing for religion from outside’, but again his awareness seems confused, and so his longing, his fantasy, persists. In 1937, once again struggling with suicidal despair, he writes that he is “buzzing around the New Testament like an insect around the light”, adding, some days later, “I don’t have a belief in salvation through the death of Christ; or at least not yet […] but I consider it possible that one day I will understand something here of which I understand nothing now […] that I will then have a belief that I don’t have now” (Wittgenstein 2003b, pp. 177, 201–3). Alas, the idea of placing one’s hopes in something of which one ‘understands nothing now’ is inherently confused, as Wittgenstein realised; “I am not good and not happy. I am not saved [erlöst]. And thus how can I know what I would envision as the […] image of the world order if I […] lived completely differently. I can’t judge that. After all, another life shifts completely different images into the foreground […] Just like trouble teaches prayer […] if one lives differently, one speaks differently” (Wittgenstein 2003b, p. 169 [1937]).

Indeed, as we’ve seen in the discussion above, there’s an element of confusion in the whole attitude of hoping and even struggling for change—‘a new life’—rather than actually changing. If I don’t change my life, my way of relating to others, as I say I wish I could, doesn’t this show—insofar as we’re talking about moral–existential change rather than changes in external circumstances—that I don’t fully want to? And, in fact, even Wittgenstein’s longing for religious release and rebirth was, as he himself admits, in a fundamental sense illusory no less than his struggle with vanity, for it was actually premised on a refusal to explore what he claimed to long for. As he confessed, he was afraid to explore it: “I cannot kneel to pray because it’s as though my knees were stiff. I am afraid of dissolution (of my own dissolution), should I become soft” (Wittgenstein 1980, p. 56 [1946]). This means, I would say, that Wittgenstein wasn’t really clear about—that is, didn’t want to know—either what he was longing for or what the ‘dissolution’ he feared would dissolve.

In my view, all these confusions are related to a basic problem in Wittgenstein’s reflections on ‘religious’ matters, which is that, while he freely admits to his own confusion, his lack of faith, he doesn’t appear to consider that there might be confusion in the very idea—the idea he has—of faith, of a ‘genuinely religious’ attitude. We’ll return to this problem below (towards the end of Section 6, and again in Section 10).

5. Sinister Spirits: Religion as Collective Ideology

In the contexts discussed in the last section, Wittgenstein’s claim that he was not a religious man relates to his fantasy of an existential possibility that he himself hadn’t realised and couldn’t really even comprehend, yet found wonderful in those he thought had attained it. Thus, he clearly thought of himself—even if that though itself was very far from clear, as we’ve seen—as someone longing for religion as it were from the outside. The other sense in which he was ‘not a religious man’ is quite different. It concerns belonging to a Church, a community of believers, and that possibility Wittgenstein emphatically rejected, at least for his own part. He thought that a confession of faith where one says, as in the creeds of churches one does, “I believe X” in the sense of “…as one of us who believe X”, implied a conscious or unconscious limiting of one’s freedom of thought and response to fit the demands and sensibilities of the community. And he would absolutely resist that. He told Drury that while “the symbolisms” of Catholicism were “wonderful beyond words”, he liked “to feel free to discuss anything with anyone I am with”—as he felt he wouldn’t be able to do if he entered the Church (Drury 2017, p. 96).

Communities of belief need not be organised, although Christian churches typically are, around explicit confessions of the things ‘we’ believe. And whether there are explicit creeds or not, ways of speaking and thinking spread effectively by largely unconscious and disowned processes of collective pressure and osmosis, and they are more deeply constricting than particular enforced ‘opinions’, insofar as they give our thinking a form, “completely controlling the expression of all opinions”, as Wittgenstein says, so that “people will live under an absolute, palpable tyranny, though without being able to say they are not free”; in his view, “the Catholic Church does something rather like this” (Wittgenstein 1980, p. 28 [1937]). Obviously, however, communities of belief with their tyrannical tendencies aren’t limited to the realm of what would ordinarily be called religion. Wittgenstein objected to Rhees’s plan to join the communist party on essentially the same grounds as to Drury’s becoming a priest (cf. Rhees 1984, pp. 207–8), and he rejected ‘communities of belief’ quite generally. The philosopher isn’t, he says—that is, anyone who wants to think clearly must constantly fight against the temptation to become—“a citizen of any community of ideas [Bürger einer Denkgemeinde]. That is what makes him into a philosopher” (Wittgenstein 1981, §455).

If people simply agree about some question, that isn’t yet a ‘community’ of ideas/belief in the problematic sense; that arises only where there’s pressure to agree, to protect the agreement that makes the ‘community’, however subtly and unconsciously the pressure is exercised, and, crucially, whether it’s exercised by others or by oneself. When Drury said he “could be happy working as a priest among people whom I felt shared the same beliefs”, Wittgenstein objected: “Make sure that your religion is a matter between you and God only” (Drury 2017, p. 96). The point of that admonition was, I take it, that the real danger to one’s freedom of thought and response isn’t posed directly by others who may expect and pressure one to agree with them, but by one’s own wish to share the same belief, to belong.13

To the extent that the members of a community allow their thinking to be determined—whether they admit it or not—by a wish to belong, they form a mendacious community, a community fearing the truth. Anscombe reports once saying to Wittgenstein, in discussing some topic, “But of course everybody understands that in such and such a way”—to which he responded, “If everybody understands a thing in a certain way that is sure to be false!” and then quoted Nietzsche: “If something true receives public acknowledgement, ask in the interests of what lie this has happened”14

In line with this sensibility, Wittgenstein regarded the so-called ‘scientific world-view’, the secular ideology that dominates modern Western culture, as no better than the religions it combats; “Russell and the parsons between them have done infinite harm, infinite harm” (Drury 2017, p. 96). ‘Religion’ and ‘science’ can combat each other directly precisely to the extent that they are competing collective ideologies, competing ways of organising social power and collective pressure. When Wittgenstein said that “all genuine expressions of religion are wonderful, even those of the most savage peoples” (Drury 2017, p. 160), he didn’t mean ‘pretty’, and in his Frazer-remarks he especially emphasises the “sinister spirit” evident in much ‘primitive’ religion, e.g., in the rituals and symbolism of human sacrifice. His point, however, wasn’t to contrast us civilised moderns with those sinister savages, but to underline that we recognise and understand this savagery—“the deep and the sinister” in these practices, which may attract as much as repel us—“from an inner experience”, “through all the strange things [we] see, and have seen and heard about, in [ourselves] and others”; which shows that we ourselves are essentially ‘savages’, that is, human beings in their ‘primitive’ (original) form, which, again, isn’t a pretty sight, but full or wonder and desperate terror (Wittgenstein 1993, pp. 147, 151).

Wittgenstein seems to have viewed our civilization’s collective belief in science- and technology-driven ‘progress’ as a sinister destructiveness; Beltane fires built on an industrial scale. He didn’t deny the “extraordinary scientific achievements” of our age, “Only, extraordinary scientific achievements have a way, these days, of being used for the destruction of human beings. (I mean their bodies, or their souls, or their intelligence)” (Wittgenstein 2008, p. 390 [1945]). This destructiveness operates through the frantic progress in productivity, apparently endless both in time and in terms of lacking “goals”, because “progress”—understood here as “building an ever more complicated structure”—is its very “form”, its logic of movement, mercilessly destroying everything that gets in its way, so that “the age of science and technology [may well be] the beginning of the end for humanity” (Wittgenstein 1980, pp. 6–7, 56 [1930, 1947]).

This collective destructiveness can itself be seen, with Walter Benjamin, as “an essentially religious phenomenon […] perhaps the most extreme that ever existed”; “the expansion of despair until despair becomes a religious state of the world in the hope that this will lead to salvation” (Benjamin 1996, pp. 288–89). To view the place of science and technology in our civilization in the way Wittgenstein, or Benjamin, does is one example of ‘seeing every problem from a religious point of view’, that is, seeing things in terms of an existential problematic to which religion—whether it calls itself that or not—is a response; a response, however, that’s inextricably part of the problem rather than its solution.

Wittgenstein’s critique of the idolisation of techno-scientific ‘progress’ and of “the spirit in which science is carried on nowadays” is in no way directed towards what he called the “real work” of science: impartial, patient investigation into how things actually work empirically (Wittgenstein 1980, p. 5 [1930]; Drury 2017, p. 107). That is one manifestation of the kind of “unpoetic [Undichterische] mentality, which heads straight for what is concrete” and strives to place things “right in front of our eyes, not covered by any veil”, that Wittgenstein viewed as “characteristic of [his own] philosophy” and, he says, of (biblical) “religion” (Wittgenstein 1980, p. 6 [1930]).15

An ‘unpoetic’, anti-mythological, unceremoniously direct attitude of exploration is anathema to ‘religion’ understood in a collective, ideological sense, but it’s quite compatible with an existential attitude of humility, gratitude for and sense of wonder at this life, this world—this Creation, to speak religiously—that Wittgenstein regarded as characteristically religious (cf. Wittgenstein 1980, pp. 29, 30; Wittgenstein 1965, p. 8). When Faraday in The Chemical History of a Candle, a book Wittgenstein admired, “takes a simple phenomenon like a candle burning, and shows how complicated a process it really is” (Drury 2017, p. 107), this doesn’t detract from the wonder of the fact that such a thing as candles exists, that there’s light in the darkness—and our ability to understand and explain some of the workings of this is itself one more source of wonder.

In Wittgenstein’s view, just as science doesn’t have to be carried on in the now dominant sinister spirit, a religious orientation needn’t involve the collectivism of “belonging to a Church”; he envisaged a “religion of the future […] without any priests or ministers” that would be “extremely ascetic”, not in the sense of “going without food and drink” but precisely in the sense, it seems, of renouncing the “consolation” of belonging to a community of belief, of having a collective ideology—a lie ‘we’ all cling to together that assures us of being on the right side of history or eternity (Drury 2017, pp. 104–5). Being religious in Wittgenstein’s ‘ascetic’ sense would mean, simply, that one’s “manner of life is different”, that one realises “that only if you try to be helpful to other people will you in the end find your way to God”, and it was in the context of this discussion that Wittgenstein told Drury: “There is a sense in which you and I are both Christians” (Drury 2017, p. 105).16

6. The Despair of Philosophy

It’s now time to explore the way in which philosophical difficulties might exhibit the same existential dynamics of a struggle with despair as religious difficulties do, and so how it could make sense for Wittgenstein to see philosophical problems, too, ‘from a religious point of view.’

Wittgenstein’s conception of difficulties and clarification in philosophy is set apart from standard notions, most obviously, by an emphasis, common to his early and late work, on the deep and essential confusion of philosophical debates. The natural response to a philosophical question—say “Do we have free will?” or “What are the ultimate constituents of reality?”—is to try to find the right answer among various competing philosophical ‘positions’ and ‘theories’. However, there’s no sense in arguing the merits of ‘answers’ to ‘questions’ we can’t even formulate; that would be like arguing about the shortest way to a house that doesn’t exist. And what Wittgenstein’s investigations reveal, again and again, is precisely that our philosophical—or ‘metaphysical’, in his critical-diagnostic sense of that term—questions don’t really know what they’re asking for; that apparent opposites or alternatives are really indistinguishable; that we cannot give content to ‘possibilities’ we thought obvious while supposed ‘impossibilities’ turn out to be easily imaginable; that supposed ‘explanations’ presuppose what’s to be explained, etc. Philosophical questions and claims are not false, then, but nonsensical; their apparent sense dissolves on closer contact, and what Wittgenstein teaches is precsiely, he says, “to pass from unobvious nonsense to obvious nonsense” (Wittgenstein 2009, §464; cf. §118–119 and Wittgenstein 2001, 4.003). Otherwise put, Wittgenstein “hoped to show that you had confusions you never thought you could have had” (Gasking and Jackson 1999, p. 144, quoting what Wittgenstein said in lectures).

Now, that we are confused in philosophy means that, in a crucial sense, and just as in the case of our existential struggles with despair, we ourselves are the problem. That is, philosophical problems aren’t caused by the phenomena but by how we approach them, by our own confusion about what we want and fear from them. This is why philosophical clarification is really, as Wittgenstein famously said, “a working on oneself. […] On one’s way of seeing things. (And what one expects of them.)” (Wittgenstein 1980, p. 16 [1931]; cf. Wittgenstein 2005, p. 300). The task and the difficulty is—again, just as for moral–existential difficulties—to change, to turn around, to start relating differently to life; for our life and our conceptions of it are what our difficulties and confusions are about. As Wittgenstein says, “I don’t try to make you believe something you don’t believe, but to make you do something you won’t do” (Wittgenstein 2015, Ms 155, p. 42r; written in English). Having turned around, one will see a door out of the philosophical difficulty that one previously could not see; could not because one would not turn, “turn around and open [the door]” (Gasking and Jackson 1999, p. 144).

Now, these similarities between philosophical problems and life-problems, including religious difficulties, might seem merely formal and superficial, for the confusion in the two cases is surely different: intellectual in one case, moral–existential in the other. So it might seem—only Wittgenstein doesn’t think so. The “difficulty of philosophy”, he says, is “not the intellectual difficulty of the sciences, but the difficulty of a change of attitude [einer Umstellung]”; “resistance of the will must be overcome” (Wittgenstein 2005, p. 300). Philosophical clarification must be striven for in the face of an “an urge [Trieb] to misunderstand”, in other words, against our own wish to misrepresent central aspects of our own thinking, of our life; aspects that evoke “deep disquietudes” in us (Wittgenstein 2009, §109, 111). “What makes a subject hard to understand—if it’s something significant and important—is not that before you can understand it you need to be specially trained in abstruse matters, but the contrast between understanding the subject and what most people want to see. Because of this the very things which are most obvious may become the hardest of all to understand” (Wittgenstein 2005, p. 300; quoted in the translation from Wittgenstein 1980, p. 17 [1931]). As we saw above, a specific characteristic of moral–existential difficulties is precisely that, whatever one imagines, one’s will to ‘solve the problem’ is, if not completely lacking, at least compromised, whereas (merely or simply) ‘intellectual’ or ‘practical’ problems are ones we want to solve, although perhaps we fail in doing so, due to lack of intelligence or skill.

It might be said that I’m still conflating different things. There are indeed temptations and resistances in philosophy, but these too are intellectual, rather than moral–existential in nature; one is intellectually drawn to or repelled by certain ways of thinking—that’s all. I find the notion of purely intellectual temptations confused, however. That is, it seems senseless to suppose that someone would simply insist on, or refuse to look at things in a particular way in philosophy (I mean in a way where one sees no valid, true grounds for their attitude), with this having no connections to anything in the way of wishes, fears, anxieties related to what is, in some sense, of central concern in this person’s life. That would be incomprehensible, some kind of meaningless brute reflex; the intellect, here, would be pictured as a kind of machine that can randomly get stuck in idiotic ‘loops’. And if it’s suggested that intellectual temptations have to do with abstractly ‘aesthetic’ considerations such as a wish for completeness, simplicity or symmetry in proposed explanations, I can only say that, where problems are of that kind (if their description isn’t connected to further difficulties of another order), they are too trivial to have anything philosophical about them, precisely because they are disconnected from the striving for, and the difficulties of, self-understanding, that is, of understanding what’s important in life—which is what gives philosophy its characteristic depth (cf. Wittgenstein 2009, §111; 583; II:i, §2–3).17

For his part, Wittgenstein stresses the connections between thought and life in the case of his own thinking: “The movement of thought in my philosophizing should be discernible also in the history of my mind [der Geschichte meines Geistes], of its moral concepts and in the understanding of my situation” (Wittgenstein 2003b, p. 133 [1931]). And of philosophical difficulties generally he says that we are “deeply imbedded in philosophical […] confusions” because our ways of thinking are tied through “immensely diverse associations” to how we live, to what concerns us and, in particular, to our instinctive tendency (Neigung) to immerse ourselves in the “herd” (that is, the collective), unthinkingly accepting “the oldest thought habits […] the oldest images that are engraved into our language itself” precisely because that language has been created by, and to fill the needs of, this “herd” (Wittgenstein 2005, p. 312). Philosophical clarification thus presupposes “extricating” oneself from these associations (Verbindungen) of thinking, which are at the same time social associations, connections, ties and chains between us, and this “only works with those who live in an instinctive state of dissatisfaction” with these collectively inherited and insisted-upon ways of living-and-thinking (ibid.).

In contrast to whatever may be described, in a morally neutral way, as mere preferences or inclinations, temptations—‘difficulties of the will’—are by definition moral–existential, that is, they reveal a refusal of truthful relations to self and others. To be tempted isn’t just to have a particular, neutrally characterisable, preference, but to be tempted away from the truth by something destructive and deceptive. We can speak sensibly of ‘intellectual temptations’ only in the sense of (moral–existential) temptations that manifest themselves in intellectual contexts; say, in what we are tempted to think or refuse to see in doing philosophy. When we succumb to temptation, however, we use our intellect to avoid, obscure and distort the truth rather than to find and elucidate it, while denying to ourselves that that is what we do—of course, since otherwise the whole thing wouldn’t ‘work’, no false appearance of truth would be created.

Suppose that I’m drawn to a certain way of thinking, to a certain metaphysical picture of things, because it provides a view I find somehow comforting; that is, because it allows me to deny or look away from aspects of life I find too terrible, or, again, ‘too good’, insofar as they evoke feelings of tenderness, joy and sadness that threaten to overwhelm me—which is why one can find comfort in grim and hopeless pictures of life, despairing ones allowing for no good possibilities, just as easily as in prettified, sentimentally hopeful pictures. If this is what draws me to the metaphysical view, it will be part of my attraction that I cannot (fully) admit to it’s real character, for the view wouldn’t provide comfort, wouldn’t protect me from acute despair, if I acknowledged it simply as the falsifying fiction it is. And if I’ve got myself into this bind, if I’ve indulged my wish to be comforted, I cannot argue myself out of it; on the contrary, all my arguments, my protestation, will—this is the ‘whirlpool’ of dishonesty Wittgenstein talked about in the quote above (Wittgenstein 1980, p. 8 [1930])—be geared towards ensuring that I get the comfort I wish to have (and one can comfort oneself with self-pitying thoughts about how there’s no comfort to be had in this cruel world, too). What I say will not lead me to clarity because I don’t want clarity; I want to keep my comforting lie. If I’m looking for comfort in philosophical ideas, then, I don’t need arguments, I need honesty, I need to stop; stop pitying myself, give up my false comfort. That’s the kind of ‘working on oneself’ that philosophy demands.

As I understand it, then, Wittgenstein’s radical suggestion is that a desperate fear of truth, and an equally desperate need to uphold the false appearance that hides the fear along with the truth, is what gives philosophical thinking its main charge, its characteristic lack of open-mindedness and impartiality, all our posturing as pure, disinterested inquirers notwithstanding—as shown, say, in how giving up a philosophical idea can be, as Wittgenstein notes, as difficult as “hold[ing] back tears, or an outburst of rage” (Wittgenstein 2005, p. 300), or, again, in the incredible obtuseness that otherwise intelligent thinkers often display when confronted with a thought, a possibility, they are unwilling to entertain (cf. Wittgenstein 2015, Ms 158, 34r–v). The metaphysical ‘must’, the sense, arrived at not as a result of investigation but given as an instinctive, a priori demand that things must or couldn’t possibly be like this or that (cf. Wittgenstein 2009, §101, 107), arises, starts insisting, when one is, in one way or other, brought up against one’s hurting points. Isn’t it precisely when one feels that it would be unbearable—too humiliating or too challenging—to admit that things are not as one would wish them to be, that one feels the need to insist or deny in this absolute way? And isn’t that the situation we face when we find ourselves facing moral–existential life problems—not coincidentally, but as an essential aspect of the kind of difficulties these are? Aren’t these the situations when thinking clearly becomes painful, perhaps unbearably painful?

As Wittgenstein wrote to Malcolm, it’s “difficult to think, or try to think, really honestly about your life and other peoples lives. And the trouble is that thinking about these things is not thrilling, but often downright nasty. And when it’s nasty then it’s most important”; “You can’t think decently if you don’t want to hurt yourself” (Wittgenstein 2008, p. 370 [1944]). To be sure, in his letter to Malcolm Wittgenstein contrasts this often nasty thinking about “serious non-philosophical things” with explicitly or specifically philosophical thinking, but he also exclaims: “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 impr[ove] your thinking about the important questions of everyday life” (ibid.)? Thus, he clearly doesn’t regard philosophical thinking, either ideally or in fact, as disconnected from thinking about one’s life and relationship to others. Again, if there were such a disconnect, philosophy—both in the sense of the impulse to come out with metaphysical nonsense, and in the sense of attempting to clear up the resulting confusions—wouldn’t be deep or important in the way Wittgenstein finds it is, but a curious kind of intellectual parlour game that some people might perhaps take an obsessive liking to, as others do to solving sudokus.18

Echoing what he told Malcolm about the difficulty or thinking, Wittgenstein wrote to Rhees: “Thinking is sometimes easy, often difficult but at the same time thrilling. But when it’s most important it’s just disagreeable, that is when it threatens to rob one of one’s pet notions and to leave one all bewildered and with a feeling of worthlessness. In these cases I and others shrink from thinking or can only get ourselves to think after a long sort of struggle. I believe that you too know this situation and I wish you lots of courage! though I haven’t got it myself. We are all sick people” (Wittgenstein 2008, p. 367 [1944]). That last sentence is significant with regard to the question of Wittgenstein’s ‘religious point of view.’ People are religious, he wrote, “to the extent that they believe themselves to be not so much imperfect, as ill [krank]. Any man who is half-way decent will think himself extremely imperfect, but a religious man thinks himself wretched [elend]” (Wittgenstein 1980, p. 45 [1944]). He also, famously, wrote that a philosopher “treats a question; like an illness [eine Krankheit]” (Wittgenstein 2009, §255), and he connected such “diseases of the understanding”, Krankheiten des Verstandes (Wittgenstein 1980, p. 44 [1944]), to the way we live as individuals and as societies: “The sickness of a time [die Krankheit einer Zeit] is cured by an alteration in the mode of life of human beings, and it was possible for the sickness of philosophical problems [die Krankheit der philosophischen Probleme] to get cured only through a changed mode of thought and of life” (Wittgenstein 1978b, II §23 [1938]).19

In sum: the problem with philosophical problems, in Wittgenstein’s view, isn’t that we’re not clever enough to solve them or that we suffer from ‘local’ confusions of thought; those would be mere ‘imperfections’ (which exist, too, obviously). Rather, Wittgenstein’s sense seems to be that the whole orientation of our thinking is perverted because the orientation of our life is perverted, that in some deep way we don’t want the truth, don’t want to face our life, this life we share, as it is. Philip Shields, whose interpretation of Wittgenstein’s ‘religious point of view’ differs from most others in foregrounding the ‘difficulties of the will’-problematic, rightly notes that Wittgenstein’s view can in this regard be characterised as “Judaeo-Christian” rather than “Greek”; “The distinctive status of philosophical problems for Wittgenstein is similar to the status of evil and sin for Augustine […] they represent the perversity of the human will” (Shields 1993, pp. 55, 64).20

Wittgenstein’s approach to philosophical problems, his attempts to reveal and clear up the mess of confusion we make for ourselves, are marked by a vivid sense of this ‘perversity’ or ‘sickness’ in our ways of being and (so also in) our ways of thinking; a sickness that reveals a latent despair over the sense of life even as it tries to hide it, for we need our manufactured confusions, our illusory ‘certainties’ and false ‘doubts’ only to the extent that we find facing reality unbearable. This vivid sense is, I suggest, what makes Wittgenstein a great and radical philosopher, and it is also what makes his perspective on philosophical problems, in his own view, a ‘religious’ one. He sees philosophical problems as ultimately springing from, and in more or less despairing and confused ways trying to evade or respond to, the despair over the sense of life, of what one has made, or failed to make, of one’s life with others—just as religious struggles and thinking do. Significantly, he says that the philosopher—not, now, the metaphysician, but someone like himself, who tries to expose and clarify metaphysical confusion—“strives to find the liberating word”, das erlösende Wort, “that finally permits us to grasp what until then had constantly and intangibly weighed on our consciousness” (Wittgenstein 2005, p. 303). In religious (Christian) contexts, erlösen means to save, to deliver from sin, from existential death to life, and thus to liberate from despair.

This doesn’t mean, of course, that Wittgenstein regards philosophical thinking, either in the ‘metaphysical’ or anti-metaphysical sense, as simply the same as religious thinking. These are heterogeneous responses to—and, pervasively, of—despair, among endless others, including many that have little or no ‘intellectual’ content or form at all, such as filling and killing one’s time with mindless gossip, or with fussing over trivial practicalities.

More importantly, and in my view very problematically, Wittgenstein doesn’t seem to view metaphysical and religious beliefs in the same light. While he sees the former as disguised nonsense, thus as mere inverted-comma ‘beliefs’, as self-deceptive make-believe—this is what defines them as ‘metaphysical’ in his sense—he tends to view religious beliefs as genuine beliefs, that is, as not nonsensical, even if he always stresses that they are categorically different from factual and from theoretical beliefs (see, e.g., Wittgenstein 1978a, pp. 53–72). Obviously, he doesn’t deny that confusions often creep into religious thinking, as into scientific or any other kind of thinking, but he seems to take it for granted that there is also (there can be) genuine, that is, unconfused, religious thinking, a thinking that informs and is informed by a genuinely religious life and that he indeed, as we saw, takes to provide the only true deliverance from life’s despair. Alas, we also saw that Wittgenstein’s remarks on these matters provide no clarity, but only interminable confusion, about what, exactly, such religious thinking/living is supposed to be.

As I indicated above, in my view the basic problem with Wittgenstein’s attitude to (what he calls genuine) ‘religion’ is precisely this taking-for-granted-that-it-exists, even in face of the fact that he himself is, as he admits, quite unclear about what ‘it’ is or could be; how ‘it’ might be conceived at all. And this is where the contrast with his attitude to ‘metaphysics’ in philosophy is significant. For in the context of philosophy, he doesn’t say “I admit that I can make no sense of what an answer to this metaphysical question [e.g., what the ultimate constituents of reality are] would even look like, that is, what the question is really asking—and yet there must be an answer.” Rather, he urges himself, and us as his readers, to ponder the fact that we have no clear idea here, and to step back and consider why it nonetheless seems to us that there is a question and so must be an answer. What are we presupposing, secretly wishing for or evading, when we pose this ‘question’ and assert this ‘must’? When Wittgenstein reflects on ‘religious’ matters, by contrast, he admits to his own confusion, yet doesn’t appear to consider that there might be confusion in the very idea—the idea he has—of ‘genuinely religious’ questions and answers.21

I find this unquestioning attitude strange: it seems to me an index not of faith in any good sense—I find no clarity, no trust or hope in it—but of an anxious investment in and credulousness toward a fantasy of ‘religion.’ In Section 10, below, I’ll outline certain further difficulties in thinking of the soul-sickness and despairing struggles we’ve been discussing—which are, ultimately, concerned with the difficulty of opening oneself in love—as specifically ‘religious’ at all.

7. Escaping the Intolerable Other: The Religious Point of View of the Tractatus

In philosophy, Wittgenstein says, we’re constantly making “misfiring attempt[s] to express what can’t be expressed like that”, and that they misfire “can be shown”—unobvious nonsense can be made obvious—but, he adds “that isn’t the end of the matter” (Wittgenstein 1975, §37). We still need to find, and face, “the source of [the] puzzlement” (Wittgenstein 1969, p. 59), the motivation, the disquieting wishes or fears whose implied demand came to expression in the apparent question which prompted the metaphysical claim as its apparent answer. Because until we do, we’ll be left with a frustrating sense that there was something important and right that we meant to express, only we couldn’t formulate it quite correctly. The problem is, of course, that we don’t want to ‘find’, that is, acknowledge and look squarely at, those motivations, those wishes and fears (again, I mean this not as a speculative psychological claim but as a characterisation of the ‘grammar’ of moral–existential, and philosophical, difficulties).

Wittgenstein clearly saw this kind of dynamics at work in the creation of philosophical problems and metaphysical pictures. However, he provides hardly any analyses of such motivational dynamics in actual cases, that is, characterisations of what is or may be tempting in various metaphysical pictures—in contrast to the many analyses in his later work revealing how such pictures dissolve or get stuck when one tries to actually apply, make concrete sense of, them. Even hints of the motivations that may be involved are rare.22

One can imagine many reasons for this reticence; one was likely that Wittgenstein, who in any case took a bleak view of the nature of his philosophical influence on students and (future) readers, could foresee how any such analyses would encourage facile, morally false and philosophically sterile hunts for the ‘hidden motivations’ supposedly driving other philosophers; the kind of “foul” practice that Freudian psychoanalysis so often led to.23 Such dangers are real enough, but as far as I can see, they can ultimately be avoided only at the cost either of purposely reducing philosophy to the level of trivial formalities, so that there’s no substance to one’s thinking that could be abused, or by deliberate mystification, obliquely gesturing at things one never says and keeping back when one approaches the heart of the matter.24

In this section, I’ll run the danger, discussing early Wittgenstein’s own invocation of the idea of the world’s independence of my will, and its setting within the general metaphysics of the Tractatus, as an example of the use of metaphysical pictures for false existential comfort. In this case, the metaphysical picture is also explicitly—or implicitly, but in a very marked sense—a religious one. Discussing it, and subsequently how Wittgenstein’s later conception differs from it, will help us see more clearly what Wittgenstein’s ‘religious point of view’ actually amounts to and how it may have changed. While his focus on our struggles with despair over the sense of life remained constant, what Wittgenstein understood this to entail seems to have changed over time.

“The world is independent of my will”, the Tractatus proclaims (Wittgenstein 2001, 6.373; cf. Wittgenstein 1979, p. 73 [5.7.16]). The thought is that “I cannot bend the happenings of the world to my will: I am completely powerless” insofar as “there is no logical connexion between the will and the world”, no necessary link between what I will and what happens (Wittgenstein 1979, p. 73 [11.6.16]; Wittgenstein 2001, 6.374). My suggestion is that this idea, and the general Tractarian view of the relation between ‘I’, ‘the will’ and ‘the world’ within which it is set, are ‘metaphysical’ in the later Wittgenstein’s diagnostic sense. That is, they present their author’s thinking—and this ultimately means: his life—as other than it actually is, which results in a general failure of what is said to make coherent sense.25 The dynamics driving these failing claims becomes clear, I further suggest, by reading them against the coded entries on the left-hand pages in the wartime Notebooks in which, in plain script on the right-hand pages, Wittgenstein worked out the philosophical ideas that went into the Tractatus. This juxtaposition reveals how their author’s actual existential problematic is covered over and misrepresented by his metaphysical claims, which function as a fantasised consolation for the actual problem by presenting an illusory solution of it. Ironically, the coded entries present that problem, that desperate existential confusion, plainly enough, whereas the plain-script entries in the Notebooks and their reformulation in the Tractatus are ‘coded’, that is, disguised and distorted misrepresentations, mystifications of it.26

The coded entries document Wittgenstein’s struggle with suicidal despair, a struggle couched in religious terms: “Perhaps the closeness to death will bring me the light of life! May God enlighten me! I am a worm but God will make me into a human being. May God be with me. Amen” (Wittgenstein 2022, p. 171 [4.5.16]). The Other most insistently present in Wittgenstein’s struggling diary isn’t God, however, but his fellow human beings; not the enemy, but those on his own side, who appear as the real menace. One of the first things he wrote down in code was his initial impression of the crew on the river patrol boat where he served. It reads as follows: “the crew are a bunch of swine! No enthusiasm, incredible brutality, stupidity & malice!” (Wittgenstein 2022, p. 35 [15.8.14]). From here to the last entry in code two years later (Wittgenstein 2022, p. 191 [19.8.16]), the left-hand notebook pages are filled with constant complaints about the character of the people around him; “These are wicked, heartless people. It’s all but impossible for me to find a trace of humanity in them. God help me to live” (Wittgenstein 2022, p. 169 [27.4.16]). The question for Wittgenstein was how he should “relate to all of this”, and he soon decided “not to resist at all. To make myself quite light outwardly, as it were, so as to leave my inner being undisturbed”, “for I’m after all quite powerless against all these people. I wear myself out uselessly if I defend myself” (Wittgenstein 2022, pp. 39, 43 [25.8.14, 26.8.14, 6.9.14]). “Again and again”, he says, “I repeat Tolstoy’s words to myself: ‘Man is powerless in the flesh but through the spirit he is free’” (Wittgenstein 2022, p. 43 [12.9.14]; cf. Tolstoy 1896, p. 23). Yet Wittgenstein found non-resistance and indifference—this ‘freedom in the spirit’—impossibly difficult:

How hard it is not to be annoyed with people! How hard it is to tolerate them. […] Whenever I come into contact with these people at work I find their meanness so terrible that rage threatens to overcome me & break out. Again and again I resolve to tolerate it calmly & again and again I break my resolution. And how this happens I don’t really know myself. It is so enormously hard to work with people and yet not to have anything to do with them.

(Wittgenstein 2022, p. 97 [17.11.14])

The metaphysical idea of the world’s independence of one’s will—in religious terms, the idea that ‘Man is powerless in the flesh but through the spirit he is free’—tempted Wittgenstein, I suggest, because these desperate interpersonal difficulties plagued him. He struggled to actually make himself independent of the people around him—that is, to kill or make himself indifferent to his own responses to them—but he presented this struggle as concerned with realising that this independence, this ‘powerlessness’ in relation to others, is already, ‘metaphysically’, there, so that raging against it, behaving as though the situation could be otherwise, is essentially a misunderstanding. In his first plain-script notebook-entry that discusses explicitly religious-existential matters, Wittgenstein asks “What do I know about God and the purpose of life?”, and one of the things he lists in answer is that “I cannot bend the happenings of the world to my will: I am completely powerless. I can only make myself independent of the world—and so in a certain sense master it—by renouncing any influence on happenings” (Wittgenstein 1979, pp. 72–73 [11.6.16]). This is immediately followed in the notebook, a few days later, by “The world is independent of my will” (Wittgenstein 1979, p. 73 [5.7.16]). He wrote that close to two years after he had first formulated the same idea, the same psycho-existential survival strategy, as we might call it, in code (cf. the quotes above).27

I’m not saying that his interpersonal difficulties caused Wittgenstein to be tempted by the metaphysical idea of the world’s independence of the will, in the sense of an ‘external’ psychological explanation. The point is rather that in the coded entries we may see what that metaphysical fantasy comes to. That is, by reading the Tractatus against the coded entries, we bring its words “back from their metaphysical to their everyday use”, as the later Wittgenstein puts it (Wittgenstein 2009, §116). As he explains, “When you are tempted to make general metaphysical statements, ask yourself (always): What cases am I actually thinking of?”, adding that “something in us resists this question for we seem to jeopardize the [metaphysical] ideal through it”, the “sublime conception” by means of which we move away from the “simple, homespun cases [that] are the original picture of this idea […] into an ethereal region” (Wittgenstein 2003b, pp. 171–3 [1937], emphasis added).

It might be asked, however, why I speak of a ‘metaphysical fantasy’. Isn’t it true that the world is independent of my (of anyone’s) will in the general sense that, whatever I resolve to do, I cannot guarantee that I can actually do it, or achieve any result at all, for that depends on factors I don’t control: on how others respond to what I do, on my own body continuing to obey me, etc. In this sense, any success I may have is indeed “a favour granted by fate” (Wittgenstein 2001, 6.374). And, focusing specifically on one’s relations to others, in a way that Wittgenstein himself, significantly, doesn’t do either in the Tractatus or the plain-script notebook entries, but which is centre-stage in the coded entries; isn’t it also true that the idea that one could somehow make others fit one’s wishes is confused insofar as the otherness of others consists (not only, but essentially) in their acting and responding not according to my will, but to their own. If I could will them to act as I want, they would cease to be others; they wouldn’t then act, I would act through them.28 This isn’t to deny, of course, that in the ordinary sense of these words, we often manage to do what we intend and to control others and make them bend to our will, but the point is to mark a different sense in which we are ‘powerless’—a ‘grammatical’, or again ‘nonsensical sense’, insofar as it makes no sense to imagine ‘the alternative’, for it’s part of the very definition of ‘reality’ and ‘the other’ that they are there, are as they are regardless of what I might wish them to be. And so it may certainly have point to say that “The world is given me, i.e., my will enters into the world completely from outside as into something that is already there” (Wittgenstein 1979, p. 74 [8.7.16]).

It may have point. ‘Points’, however, point only when someone uses them to make a point, that is, to point towards—or, again, to point one away from—something. Praising isolated ‘points’ in philosophy is like praising isolated patches of colour in a painting, disregarding the whole to which they belong and in which they have their real point and effect. Now, what in my view makes young Wittgenstein’s use of those grammatical points about the world and the will metaphysical—that is, confused and obfuscating—is that he places them in the service of a picture that falsifies reality by presenting other people as being ‘really’ of no concern to him, allowing him (as he hopes) “not to have anything to do with them”, that is, to “leave [his] inner being undisturbed” by them even when he’s with them outwardly (Wittgenstein 2022, pp. 39, 97). He insists that it’s a requirement of logic that nothing in the world can have any special status; “A stone, the body of a beast, the body of a man, my body, all stand on the same level. That is why what happens, whether it comes from a stone or from my body is neither good nor bad” (Wittgenstein 1979, p. 84 [12.10.16]). It would be, he says, “intolerable” (unerträglich) if “one part of the world were closer to me than another” (Wittgenstein 1979, p. 88 [4.11.16]). But that’s precisely what his fellow crewmembers were: intolerably close to him, already ‘under his skin’, invading his inner world, impossible to get out in a way that only human beings can be; stones or tables don’t cause the kind of panic of intimacy that other human beings can evoke in us—which shows that others are, precisely, not mere ‘objects’.29

The young Wittgenstein tries—this is my suggestion—to make himself invulnerable to the overwhelming presence of others, of the other person, of ‘you’, by fantasising a world without ‘you’. The metaphysics of the Tractatus in effect presents the individual human beings, whose very presence Wittgenstein felt made his life unbearable, in a depersonalised light, as simply elements of “the world” in which “no value exists” and all happenings are wholly “accidental”, so that “How things are in the world is a matter of complete indifference for what is higher” (Wittgenstein 2001, 6.41; 6.432). This is the solipsistic world30 of which young Wittgenstein, in the depersonalised persona of “the metaphysical subject”, can say “the world is my world” (Wittgenstein 2001, 5.641; 5.62). It is that precisely because it is, all of it, ‘independent of his will’, that is, because no ‘part’ of the world stands apart, approaches and addresses him, which is just what ‘you’ do, what makes you you. This is a world that he can contemplate, undisturbed, as “as a limited whole” and thus touch “the mystical”—which is how the Tractatus refers to the religious, to reaching clarity about “the sense of life” (Wittgenstein 2001, 6.45; 6.521). In this world without others he can, in the words of the later ‘Lecture on Ethics’, “wonder at the existence of the world” and can feel “absolutely safe”, telling himself that “nothing can injure me whatever happens” (Wittgenstein 1965, p. 8).31

Considering that Wittgenstein had carried Tolstoy’s The Gospel in Brief with him “like a Talisman” when developing these ideas at the front (Wittgenstein 2022, p. 61 [11.10.14]), it’s striking that love plays no role in his thinking, or rather, that his whole thinking is structured so as to avoid the question of love, as in a conception of life where there’s no you there’s no one to love. For the core teaching of Tolstoy’s book, his take on the teaching of Jesus, is that “The true life is that now present to us, common to all, and manifesting itself in love” (Tolstoy 1896, p. 3); “The teaching is summed up in this—Love one another” (Tolstoy 1896, p. 141; paraphrasing John 15:15–17); “man feels in his soul that love and goodness towards his fellow-men is the only true, free, eternal life […] Only through love can we know that we are at one with God” (Tolstoy 1896, pp. 160–62; cf. 1 John 2:3–11). And this focus isn’t, of course, an idiosyncrasy of Tolstoy’s, theologically controversial as his views may otherwise be. Christian theology, while it “has given many answers to the question of the being of God […] has always assigned unconditional primacy to this one: God is love” (Jüngel 2014, p. 314). Rightly so, insofar as Jesus himself says that “all the Law and the Prophets hang on” the double commandment to love God and one’s neighbour (Matthew 22:34–40; cf. Mark 12:28–34), a teaching the Apostle glosses as: “He who does not love does not know God, for God is love” (1 John 4:8).

As we’ll see, the claim that God is love conceals perplexing questions about how to understand ‘love’ and ‘God’ if they are to be related like that—that is, if ‘God’ is not simply to be another name for love, but should also, in some sense, mean something over-and-above ‘human love’. We’ll come to that; the present point is simply that love plays practically no (acknowledged) role in Wittgenstein’s early reflections. There’s a very brief, unclear and inconclusive discussion in the (plain-script) Notebooks of how the question of willing and of the right attitude to the world should be related to “loving one’s neighbour”, interrupted by the exclamation “Here I am still making crude mistakes! No doubt of that!” (Wittgenstein 1979, pp. 77–78 [29.7.16]). But that’s it. I thus see no grounds for claiming that early Wittgenstein’s central concern was articulating “the moral perspective of selfless love” (Dilman 1974, p. 181). Rather, his whole endeavour is to avoid the challenge of love—which is the challenge of the other person, of ‘you’, as such.

Philosophically speaking, the main effect of centring one’s thinking on love is that it explodes the core Tractarian ideas that ‘I’ face ‘the world’ as a whole, no ‘part’ of which is ‘closer’ to me than any other, and that what actually happens is completely contingent, “accidental”, and “a matter of complete indifference for what is higher” (Wittgenstein 2001, 6.3, 6.432). That idea is, as the Tractatus itself observes, fundamentally defining of philosophy as classically understood (so verhält es sich in der Philosophie überhaupt): “the individual case turns out to be unimportant, but the possibility of each individual case discloses something about the essence of the world” (Wittgenstein 2001, 3.3421, emphasis added). Whatever happens could have happened otherwise (Wittgenstein 2001, 5.634), and in comparison to the philosopher’s a priori investigation into the possibility of every conceivable happening, it appears a trifling matter whether this or that actually happens. But the perspective—or, better, the reality—of love explodes this complacency of speculative indifference. For love isn’t some general attitude towards ‘the world’ as a whole, but a concrete orientation—of longing, compassion, forgiveness, etc.—towards concrete others; the openness of love is always an openness to individuals.32 And from love’s perspective, what actually happens between us, what we do to each other, whether we open ourselves in love or close ourselves to the other, is the opposite of indifferent; everything hangs on it.

Love—in the Gospels’ sense, but also in plain truth, I would say—is love of neighbour, that is, of the human beings, whoever they may be, that life puts in your path, where this very fact reveals that your path isn’t ‘yours’ in an exclusive sense, but only and precisely in the sense that it crosses the path of your neighbour, and you’re thus invited and called upon, in one way or other, to travel it together.33 The Samaritan on the road to Jericho (Luke 10:25–37) came across the wounded man who needed help—his help, simply because he happened to be there—and so ‘his road’ wasn’t really, as he had assumed, the one leading him to Jericho on whatever business he had there, but the one leading him to this human being, his neighbour in need, who by his very presence became his (the Samaritan’s) ‘destination’, in relation to which (to whom) the other aspects of the situation—the fact that there was an inn where he could take him, that he had money to pay, etc.—gained or lost whatever relative importance they now had. The Priest and the Levite found themselves on the same road and were led to the same human being in need, but they passed him by, choosing to continue on their private business—and so lost their way, whatever they imagined, taking the road of death and not of life.34

It might be said that I misread the Tractatus; Wittgenstein’s point isn’t that it doesn’t matter ethically what we do, but that whatever the facts in the world happen to be, one’s ethical task—to do right in the situation which these contingent facts create—is there: “The facts all belong to the task set, and not to the solution” (Wittgenstein 2001, 6.4321).35 The problem, however, is to understand how, if it’s indeed “a matter of complete indifference for what is higher”, whether things go this way or that in the world, there could be ethical tasks at all, for if it doesn’t matter, ethically, whether this wounded man (or anyone else) lives or dies, then how could it be anyone’s task to help him live? And, in fact, “the ethical will” (der Wille als Träger des Ethischen), the ethically “good or bad exercise of the will” (das gute oder böse Wollen) of the Tractatus doesn’t effect any changes in the world, in “the facts”; rather, it turns the world of the ethical subject—incomprehensibly, in a way about which nothing can be said, as Wittgenstein himself insists—into “an altogether different world” (Wittgenstein 2001, 6.423–6.43).

This ‘good will’ seems simply to be the will of someone who—in some sense, whatever this is supposed to mean—accepts and affirms the world as it is, all of it, however it is; “In order to live happily I must be in agreement with the world. […] I am then, so to speak, in agreement with that alien will on which I appear dependent. That is to say: ‘I am doing the will of God’” (Wittgenstein 1979, p. 75 [8.7.16]). Whereas the ‘bad will’ belongs to a person who in some sense or other refuses to accept that the world is as it is. To see the problem with this general framing, we should consider, as the Tractatus doesn’t, the difference between, say, someone who turns to injustice because they refuse to accept that they didn’t get their way, and someone else who refuses to accept the injustice.

In the Notebooks, Wittgenstein speaks of the general acceptance-of-the-world in terms of “the life of knowledge”: “How can man be happy at all, since he cannot ward off the misery of this world? Through the life of knowledge. The good conscience is the happiness that the life of knowledge preserves” (Wittgenstein 1979, p. 81 [13.8.16]). This may sound high-minded, but to me, it again seems to be simply a metaphysical fantasy-picture put up to defend against the overwhelming presence—or, in the pain of grief, the absence—of others. Philosophers and intellectually minded religious people have been especially prone to this particular form of false comfort, which can be had equally by viewing all happenings as necessary (Spinoza) or as purely accidental (Tractatus). Either way, we can do nothing about it, and we can retreat to the “coolness” of “the temple”, to a comfortably contemplative view from “eternity” provided by “the way of thought” (der Weg des Gedankens), which “flies above the world and leaves it as it is—observing it from above, in flight” (Wittgenstein 1980, pp. 2, 5 [1929–30]).36

8. The Dawning of an I–You Perspective

I would characterise the most radical aspect of the movement of Wittgenstein’s thought in the Investigations and other later writings as a reorientation from the essentially metaphysical I–world perspective of the Tractatus37 towards an I–You perspective—a conception that allows us to articulate, rather than repress and ignore, the question of the ‘you’. As we’ll see, this reorientation is never fully and self-consciously achieved by Wittgenstein, yet the movement in this direction—as undeniable as it is unfinished—is responsible for the most radical and fruitful aspects of his later thinking.38 A corresponding movement is intimated in some of Wittgenstein’s later remarks on religious matters, although, as we’ll see, things appear confused and contradictory on this point, even more so than in his later thought otherwise. Discussing both the reorientation and the lingering confusion will add new and crucial aspects to our understanding of what Wittgenstein’s ‘religious point of view’ on philosophy entailed.

Both the Tractatus and the Investigations are concerned with the question of “the essence of human language” (Wittgenstein 2009, §1), but they approach it in radically different ways. The Tractatus asks what it is for language/thought to be about the world, how my words/thoughts can “reach right out to reality”, can “actually touch the object” to which they refer (Wittgenstein 2001, 2.1511, 2.15121). The Investigations asks, rather, what it is for human beings to understand each other, to reach one another when they (we) speak. In the Tractatus, there is Language (singular) with its Logic and its Propositions describing the World; propositions formulated by the ‘I’, the ‘metaphysical subject’, which is simply the (formal) subject of these ‘utterances’ (cf. Wittgenstein 2001, 5.6–5.641). But these Propositions are not addressed to anyone, which means that they are not really spoken by anyone. No one is speaking in the Tractatus—or, to borrow Heidegger’s formulation, “Die Sprache spricht”, Language itself speaks (cf. Heidegger 1985, pp. 10–17, 243–44). The Investigations, by contrast, is full of scenes of people addressing each other, starting with the book’s opening scene from Augustine.

Variations in aspectual detail aside, the upshot of Wittgenstein’s discussions is that, while people do understand each other—pupils do learn from teachers, etc.—and so their language makes sense, every proposed explanation of this basic fact, in the absence of which there would be neither human life nor language, turns out to secretly presuppose the very understanding between people one pretends to explain.39 This is so whether the would-be explanation refers to some kind of ‘objective’ grounding of meaning (brain-states, Rules, etc.) or to a ‘subjective’ Meaning (a ‘private ostensive definition’). In both cases, we imagine that there’s Something There that determines meaning independently of our understanding each other. But as Wittgenstein shows, this double fantasy, of a ‘view from outside’ or ‘from inside’, dissolves. There’s no ‘Something’—that’s a nonsense—there’s just the sense we make of and to each other, and “If God [himself] had looked into our minds, he would not have been able to see there whom we were speaking of” (Wittgenstein 2009, II:xi, §284). If God wanted to know, he’d have to join our conversation.40

To put this point, as Wittgenstein often does and his commentators endlessly repeat, in terms of ‘language-games’, whose existence must always be presupposed, is totally misleading if one forgets that we don’t understand each other because there are language-games; rather, there are language-games because we understand each other. Our understanding expresses itself in—among other things—the existence and evolution of these games, and this understanding is articulated and elaborated, we find ever new ways of expressing it, through them. Children (or adults) can learn and be taught to play these games only insofar as they understand that others are addressing them—want to teach them something, for example—and insofar as they feel addressed by and respond to others. Otherwise, they wouldn’t hear the words addressed to them as words addressed to them, but as mere sounds. And obviously, you cannot by means of sounds make someone understand that these are not mere sounds—unless they hear your address to them in these sounds you make.

Furthermore, ‘addressing and being addressed’ is possible (there is such a thing) only within an overall matrix of concern, of longing for and interest in the other. The welcoming smile, the embrace, the joy and grief and offering of care and interest of all kinds; all these expressions which show the openness and connection between us, between souls, come before words, chronologically and logically, even as this concern and longing for the other is also offered with, in our words (that’s what turns sounds into words)—if only, all too often, in perverted ways, as it were alluded to in their denial or refusal. As Wittgenstein says, such things as our responses to another’s pain or joy are “so many natural, instinctive kinds of behaviour towards other human beings, and our language is merely an auxiliary to, and further extension of, this relation” (Wittgenstein 1981, §545, emphases added). And also: “Anyone with a soul [Seele] must be capable of pain, joy, grief, etc. etc. And if he is also to be capable of memory, of making decisions, of making a plan for something, with this he needs linguistic expression” (Wittgenstein 1992, p. 67).

Because words are embedded in this context of concern, with all its difficulties, they can also, as Wittgenstein notes, “be wrung from us—like a cry” and “can be hard to utter”, as when one confesses a weakness (Wittgenstein 2009, §546). While ‘meaning’ in the sense of the dictionary meaning of individual words is different from ‘meaning’ in the sense of “that which matters” (das, worauf es ankommt) (Wittgenstein 2009, §545), the former, and the fact that there is such a thing as meaning at all, can ultimately be understood only in the context of the latter. And it is because our speech, our thoughts, arise from within this context of caring and love between us—which is also the context of despair over the difficulties we have, we make, in our life together—that words can be used to express philosophical and religious ideas, can provide the medium in which our existential longings and confusions are made manifest even as we try to pretend they aren’t there.

On later Wittgenstein’s conception, then, sense is made and found, understood and elaborated, by us—by you and me—as part of the relationship between us, which is never ‘purely linguistic’, merely formal, but always a lived relationship, within which we address each other: “Conversation flows on […] and only in its course do words have their meaning”; “words have meaning only in the stream of life” (Wittgenstein 1981, §135; Wittgenstein 1988b, §687). What has meaning, what makes sense to us, isn’t determined in advance by ‘logic’ or by ‘communal agreement’; it’s for us to find out. To find out, not to declare by fiat, for sense cannot be made by fiat, or by mere wish; it must really be made, and finding and making sense are two sides of the same movement. The essential thing is that there’s an activity on our part; we must open ourselves to certain possibilities, test, explore and respond to them, which includes acknowledging where we cannot make sense of something, rather than evading and disguising difficulties and disagreements with vagueness and ambiguity, or with demands and prohibitions ex cathedra; the ‘metaphysical must’.

The difficulties here are unavoidably moral–existential, to do with the difficulty of truthfully facing and revealing oneself to those with whom one speaks. We are tempted to flatter, hurt, cajole, to obey, show ourselves clever, get sympathy, get or avoid attention, agree or disagree (‘be together’ or ‘assert our independence’), etc., and what we can, what we will allow ourselves to make sense of is inextricably entangled with such temptations. To the extent that we indulge them, our failures to see and make sense, to understand each other, are not a mere, passive failure, but an active—if, typically, ‘unconscious’, because denied—refusal to understand the other and ourselves in our relation to them and to what they’re saying. Which means that our difficulties of understanding will be of the type Wittgenstein (as we’ve seen) took to be central in philosophy; namely, a desperate, instinctive resistance to a sense, a perspective, to a way of being, an openness embodied by the other, by which one feels threatened. One then denies the actual sense, the truth, the opening onto something that one senses, and makes up a fake sense, a metaphysical comfort story instead—metaphysical, or mythological, in the sense of being illusory, a story that one would wish one could believe, but actually knows to be a lie, even if, just for that reason, one passionately clings to it.

Again, this is what despair looks like: one finds it unbearable to fully take on the sense of life that one actually senses in one’s relations to others, to face the challenges; particularly, the challenge of facing the lovelessness, the ruthlessness, the weakness and the self-loathing in oneself, and to open oneself to the possibilities; particularly, to the love and longing for others that one also feels, however harshly one may try to repress it. Unless Wittgenstein’s thought travelled in something like these directions, I don’t see how he could have said things like the following—clearly speaking (also) of his philosophical work: “My soul is more naked than that of most people and in that consists so to speak my genius” (Wittgenstein 2003b, p. 147 [1932]). Not great intelligence, but a naked, defenceless soul as prerequisite to philosophical insight; that’s very far from the conventional way of conceiving of such things.

In some of Wittgenstein’s later remarks on religion, a similar emphasis appears; that is, the difficulties of love and I–You relations move centre stage—although, as we’ll see, these remarks are often ambiguous and in tension with other late remarks. In a letter to Drury, who was having self-doubts, feeling unhappy and inept as a starting doctor, Wittgenstein wrote: “Don’t think about yourself, but think about others […] Look at your patients more closely as human beings in trouble and enjoy more the opportunity you have to say ’good night’ to so many people. This alone is a gift from heaven which many people would envy you. And this sort of thing ought to heal your frayed soul, I believe. […] I think in some sense you don’t look at people’s faces closely enough” (Wittgenstein 2008, p. 265 [1938], emphasis added; cf. Drury 2017, p. 162). While Wittgenstein’s younger self would have agreed (officially, as it were) with his statements, in this same letter, that the task is “to live in the world in which you are, not to think or dream about the world you would like to be in”, his sense of what that means now seems transformed; the task isn’t to make oneself independent of—that is, inwardly indifferent to—others, but to open one’s heart to them, to look into the other’s naked face, in the paradigmatic way in which one human being turns to another. And, as the Investigations emphasise, it’s in such turnings-to-the-other that talk of ‘human being’, or of a ‘soul’ is given meaning (cf. Wittgenstein 2009, §283–7).

Similarly, in the 1944 passage partly quoted above, where Wittgenstein says that Christianity “is only for those who suffer infinite distress”, he goes on to say that “Someone to whom it is given in such distress to open his heart instead of contracting it, absorbs the remedy into his heart”; “The one who in this way penitently opens his heart to God in confession lays it open for others too”, and “you can open yourself to others only out of a particular kind of love”, a love through which you “lose the dignity that goes with personal prestige and become like a child […] without official position […] or disparity from others” (Wittgenstein 1980, p. 46 [1944]). Otherwise put, in love you are naked, you face the other openly, without defences—but as Wittgenstein notes in the same remark, that is what, in our lovelessness, we fear the most; “Hate between human beings comes from our cutting ourselves off from each other. Because we don’t want anyone else to look inside us, since it’s not a pretty sight in there” (ibid.).41

Now, if what saves from despair is love, this means that despair is, essentially, despair of love; it is precisely this cutting ourselves off from others, whatever its mode, whether metaphysical speculation or numbing oneself through intoxication or work, and whatever its mood; miserable loneliness or smug self-satisfaction, say. And so it’s fitting that one of the stories by Tolstoy that Wittgenstein especially recommended to a friend (in the 1930s) as giving “the essence of Christianity” (King 1984, p. 72) ends with this summing up: “Though it seems to men that they live by care for themselves, in truth it is love alone by which they live. He who has love, is in God, and God is in him, for God is love” (Tolstoy 1960, p. 81).42

9. The Split in Later Wittgenstein

To recapitulate, for Wittgenstein, seeing problems ‘from a religious point of view’ seems to mean connecting them to our moral–existential struggles with life’s meaning and despair, and in certain late remarks he intimates that such struggles are essentially concerned with the difficulty of opening oneself to others in love. However, a crucial double question has been left open up to now, namely, how to understand the idea of adopting a specifically religious orientation, a ‘religious point of view’ in such struggles, and, secondly, how to understand the claim, often repeated by religious believers and sometimes by Wittgenstein, that religion has a special power to change one and save from despair, as nothing else can. I find exceptionalist claims of the latter sort unintelligible, and the whole question of the ‘specifically religious’ extremely unclear, easy as it may seem to answer in terms of external, conventional markers of ‘the religious’. I will discuss these questions in the next section. In this section, I focus on a tension in Wittgenstein’s late thinking about religious and (other) philosophical matters that invites these very questions, makes them acute.

Two incompatible ideas of ‘the religious’ appear to coexist in Wittgenstein’s late remarks; an incompatibility, or at any rate a kind of split and tension, mirrored in his (other) late philosophical writings. While some ‘religious’ remarks point towards an I–You perspective, in others Wittgenstein seems to embrace an idea of religion—a common one, tailored to the needs of religion understood as collective ideology—not as a struggle with love but as passionate devotion and submission to a particular system of beliefs and practices. “A religious belief”, he says, “could only be something like a passionate commitment to a system of reference [ein Bezugssystem]”; “although it’s belief, it’s really a way of living, or a way of assessing life […] passionately seizing hold of this interpretation” (Wittgenstein 1980, p. 64 [1947]). Thus, “believing means submitting to an authority [Autorität]” and “if I rightfully speak of an authority [Obrigkeit] I must also be dependent upon it” (Wittgenstein 1980, p. 45 [1944]; Wittgenstein 2003b, p. 213 [1937]). To be sure, Wittgenstein holds that this must not be blind submission to an external authority. If one learnt of the Bezugssystem from others, it would have to be “as though someone were first to let me see the hopelessness of my situation and then show me the means of rescue [das Rettungswerkzeug]”, which I then “passionately take hold of” for myself (Wittgenstein 1980, p. 64 [1947]).

Now, this fairly describes religious belief as very often conceived, but it appears incompatible with love, even if no blindly unthinking submission is involved. For if I insist on putting myself under the rule of a ‘system of reference’ of whatever kind, whether it’s the collective order of my culture or peer-group or an order devised by myself—my founding of my own little collectivity, my own ‘rules-based order’—I thereby also submit anyone with whom I enter into close relations to the same order, insofar as, by limiting what I can allow myself to do, think and feel, I limit what I can ‘accept’ from them, and the kind of contact they can, and especially cannot have with me. And this means restricting—hence, in essence refusing—the wholehearted freedom and openness of love. If one makes ‘love’ conditional on the other person being, behaving, or believing in some particular way—as in our fear and despair we’re ever tempted to do, consciously or unconsciously—one doesn’t really love. And love has neither place nor need for Rettungswerkzeuge, for particular ‘instruments’ or ‘means’, for in their wholehearted longing for contact and openness, lovers freely take hold of, and can also freely let go of, any particular ‘mediation’. Thus, any words are fine that you speak to me in love, that is, simply and fully addressing them to me, so that they will reach me, touch my heart, if I dare receive them in the same loving way. There’s no special vocabulary of love, no incantations, curses, or shibboleths. Where we give our words this ritualised, ‘magical’—that is, manipulative, instrumental, werkzeughaft—character, we speak lovelessly, we’re trying to tie each other to determined ‘positions’ and to force concessions from each other, or from ourselves, or again trying to give ourselves a free pass because we didn’t use certain words (“I never said…”, spoken in a lawyerly fashion).43

In Wittgenstein’s late manuscripts, then, we have two essentially different ways of conceiving of religion (or Christianity), one centred on opening one’s heart to others, the other on a system of beliefs, an interpretative schema, and Wittgenstein gives no indication of which view corresponds to his ‘religious point of view’, or that he’s even aware of any conflict between them. Indeed, the 1944 remark about opening one’s heart in love belongs in a discussion that starts with an admonition to himself, “Go on, believe! It does no harm”, after which he defines believing as “submitting to an authority”, and when he says that the one who opens his heart receives “the remedy” into his heart, the German word he uses is Heilmittel, which can also be translated as “the means of salvation”, as Winch indeed did in the first edition of Culture and Value; this was changed to ‘remedy’ in the revised edition (Wittgenstein 1980, pp. 45–46; Wittgenstein 1998, p. 52; cf. Wittgenstein 2015, Ms 128, pp. 49–50). So even though Wittgenstein speaks of love here, we’re still also in the world of means-end instrumentality (Werkzeuge) and of an authority (Autorität) which calls us back to, and holds out an anxious hope for, collective religious order.44

Now, this unresolved and unrecognised tension, or something closely akin to it, is present also in Wittgenstein’s last philosophical writings on certainty and on the philosophy of psychology.45 On the one hand, there are discussions of the culturally elaborated certainties, the unquestioningness, pertaining to our basic expectations about how the world works and to our various practices of enquiry, production, etc., which form a “world-picture”, a Weltbild, and, indeed, as Wittgenstein says, a Bezugssystem, a “system of reference” for our collective activities (Wittgenstein 1975, §93–5; 83).46

On the other hand, Wittgenstein’s last writings discuss (among other matters) certainty of a very different kind, related to the understanding two people have of each other. Here, one’s certainty, or again one’s doubt and distrust of the other, of their sincerity, of what they feel or mean, depends crucially on how well one knows them in a sense lacking agreed criteria and irreducible to what one knows about them (cf. Wittgenstein 1992, pp. 86–90). Most importantly, my certainty, distrust, etc. are morally determined in the sense that they manifest my attitude towards you, which determines what I ‘can’ and ‘cannot’, that is, will and will not allow myself to, understand. Thus, if I distrust you, I find everything you do suspicious; if I envy you I cannot stand to recognise anything good or sincere in your actions, I’m enraged that people fall for what I see as your ‘flattery’, etc. Indeed, insofar as I assume any particular attitude to you, this means—that’s what characterises attitudes as the particular attitudes they are—that I’ll project my own particular concerns, fears and wishes on you and so will see your expressions only in terms of, limited and distorted by, these concerns. Whereas if I approach you openly, lovingly—which means, precisely, without any particular attitude, simply with a longing to know and be known by you—I won’t project anything on you, I will be with you, I will understand, feel, see, listen and respond to you. And so, our understanding of each other is fundamentally a moral–existential affair formed, from the very beginning, by the dynamic play between our longing for openness and our fearful refusal of it, as discussed above. (Cf. Backström 2019a).

Wittgenstein himself doesn’t make clear, and seems uncertain about, how these two dimensions of understanding investigated in his late manuscripts—the collective and the strictly interpersonal—are related, and he seems reluctant to fully explore the ways in which the I–You perspective might challenge the framing of traditional philosophical questions about knowledge, justification, relativism, language, the mind and ‘other minds’, etc., much more radically even than the explorations published in On Certainty do.47

There is, then, a split in Wittgenstein’s late thinking, both in his remarks explicitly on religious matters and in those concerned with (other) philosophical questions, between an I–You perspective and one focused on collective normativity and the general intelligibility of our practices, with Wittgenstein wavering between perspectives; a wavering that can also be seen—it could hardly be otherwise—in the very discussions where he provides his, in an I–You sense, most radical formulations, just as we saw the authoritarian conception of religion creep into even his remark on opening oneself in love as the essence of faith. The fact is that “Wittgenstein did not seem to have any consciously elaborated idea about I–you understanding”—even if it is also “clear that in his later philosophy he everywhere makes use of […] I–you understanding”, which is precisely what makes his thinking so radical in relation to the philosophical tradition (Nykänen 2025, p. 12).

10. The Unresolved Tension Between Love and ‘The Religious’

Before ending this already very long paper, I want to move the discussion to a more general, but it seems to me crucially important question that Wittgenstein himself doesn’t pursue, even if, in the light of our discussions above, his late remarks on religion invite it, and making sense of the very idea of a ‘religious point of view’ ultimately depends on one’s answer to it. The question is whether fully exploring the I–You perspective undermines the very idea of a specifically ‘religious’ conception of our moral–existential struggles, if that conception centres on love. This might seem a bizarre question, given that Christianity has indeed tended to make love—God’s love for us and ours for God and for each other—its central concern. A closer look reveals a series of perplexing problems, however.

The first commandment for Jews and Christians is, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength” (Deut. 6:5; Mark 12:30). Or, as Wittgenstein paraphrases what he regards as “the sum of the Christian doctrine”: “You must love the perfect one [der Vollkommene, i.e., Christ] more than anything, then you are blessed” (Wittgenstein 2003b, p. 243 [1937]). Yet, the Bible also tells us this: “If someone says, ‘I love God,’ and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen, how can he love God whom he has not seen?” (1 John 4:20) Now, doesn’t that mean that whatever we imagine under the heading ‘love of God’ is given sense and content only by what we—I mean, we human beings, you and I—know and understand about love from our life together, and, further, that it’s only by actually loving each other that we can know anything about love, can know love in the relevant sense? Isn’t the Apostle’s point, then, that one can ‘love God’ only by loving one’s neighbour, for as soon as one tries to make ‘loving God’ as it were a private affair between oneself and God, one doesn’t in fact get love at all but ‘hate’: hate towards one’s neighbour, whom one cuts out because one ‘wanted time alone with God’—this God whom one hasn’t seen but rather imagines as the ‘perfect being’ precisely because he’s a creature of one’s own fantasy, created, just as the metaphysical comfort stories considered above, in order to be a more palatable substitute for one’s unbearable neighbour, whom one refuses, in one’s frustration and despair, to love.

And here, it’s essential to remember that love isn’t only about ‘being good to others’, crucial as that is, but just as essentially about what for us, in our pride and self-loathing, is often the most difficult part: letting others love us, embracing, welcoming them, body and soul, to be with us, to touch and know and help reveal us in the openness of love—and this is what being good (as opposed to merely helpful) to others actually requires, too. This reminder is especially important in our context, because much Christian thinking has tended to present love—what it pictures as ‘pure’, ‘divine’ love, that is—as, essentially, sacrificial service. Thus, Tolstoy says that “man’s life must be devoted to […] doing good from love”, and that “love is to sacrifice one’s own bodily life for another’s sake”; love “has no other definition” (Tolstoy 1896, pp. 160–62, 213). But that’s not true. While out of love one will certainly make sacrifices—even lay down one’s life—for others if need be, love itself isn’t a sacrifice, but a longing to be with the other in openness, in joy and truth, without limitations.

To ‘elevate’ love into sacrificial service is actually to replace it with a much ‘safer’, if also, ultimately despairing, undertaking, where one can do good for others—“be helpful” to them, as Wittgenstein said (Drury 2017, p. 105)—without ever revealing and opening oneself to them; one can, as it were, disappear into one’s service, thus keeping them at arm’s length. In this way, one can appear (to others and oneself) to be ‘loving’ to others, always self-effacingly helpful and considerate, while actually pursuing young Wittgenstein’s dream “to work with people and yet not to have anything to do with them”, thus leaving one’s “inner being undisturbed” (Wittgenstein 2022, pp. 97, 39).48 Making ‘love’ central in this way actually contributes to the repression and confusion surrounding love and the I–You perspective, as does the interminable debate around the misguided eros-agape contrast, which might also be called the self-fulfilment-or-sacrifice debate (cf. Nygren 1953); a wholly spurious either-or, as love is neither sacrifice nor self-fulfilment in the ego-centred sense presupposed in that debate, but a being-with-and-joy-in-the-other (see Backström 2007, pp. 55–64, 177–200, for further discussion).

I’m not saying that the idea of ‘God’ and his ‘love’ must be used in such ways, to escape the other, only that, as the Apostle reminds us, this is how ‘God’ and ‘love’ will in fact be used by us to the extent that we don’t actually love—even if we claim to ‘love’—our neighbour. Like the portrait of Dorian Gray, that is, the ‘God’ we ‘love’ will be a picture of whatever there is of love and lovelessness in our actual relations to other human beings.49 Jesus says the same thing differently. If the Tractatus declares that “God does not reveal himself in the world” (Wittgenstein 2001, 6.432), Jesus in effect says that God reveals himself to you in the face of your neighbour; at the Last Judgement, God himself will tell those who rejected their neighbour in need, “I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in” (Matthew 25:42–3, emphases added; cf. the whole 25:31–46).

At first, this might seem to answer perfectly our question about what a religious conception centred on love looks like: to love God is simply to love others, to love one’s neighbour. Nothing more, nothing less.50 But if so, doesn’t the idea of ‘loving God’ in a way ‘cancel out’? Doesn’t ‘God’, this ‘God of love’, in fact become simply another name for the love we express and experience with others, in loving them and in receiving their love—or, in unfortunate cases, ‘God’ becomes a name for our own lovelessness, even if we won’t admit it. And then what does it add to speak of God at all, rather than just of love and lovelessness? I don’t know. It might of course be said, as the Apostle indeed does, just before the passage about the liar who claims to love God but hates his brother, that love “comes from God”; that only because “God loved us” can (and should) we “love one other”; “We love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:7; 10–11; 19). But as far as I can see, this postulation of ‘God’ as the source of all love remains wholly abstract—we might say ‘metaphysical’—insofar as it doesn’t change the point we’ve been discussing (made by the same Apostle) that whatever we can understand of ‘God’s love’ or ‘love of God’, we understand from our human experience of and struggles with love, and how much we understand depends on how much, or little, we love each other.51

What, then, could something ‘specifically religious’, whatever that would be, add to whatever a human being does who doesn’t speak of, or to, God, but simply loves—which is in one sense (namely, to the extent that one actually loves) indeed the simplest thing, in another (to the extent that one fears love) the most difficult? Again, I don’t know. To be sure, Christians who proclaim their belief in a God of love speak of “the unique redemptive worth of the death [and resurrection] of Jesus Christ” (Ellul 1986, p. 105). They believe, that is, that when it comes to the life and death of the soul—where, since we’re supposed to be speaking of a world created by a God of love, ‘life’ would be a life of love, ‘death’ lovelessness—only their religious faith can deliver “the one thing necessary” (Luke 10:38–42); as Christ himself says, “No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6). And that would seem to mean that whatever love we ourselves, as mere human beings ‘on our own’ can express and receive from each other will finally amount to a despairing nothing. As we’ve seen, Wittgenstein was tempted to agree with this; “What inclines even me to believe in Christ’s Resurrection”, he says, is that if Jesus didn’t rise, he’s just “a teacher like any other and can no longer help; and once more we are orphaned and alone” (Wittgenstein 1980, p. 33 [1937]).52

My question is what can be meant by this claim to unique saving power that’s made for Christian faith—given that we’re indeed supposed to be talking about our struggles with love and lovelessness. And I don’t understand what it could mean. I can make no sense of the suggestion that one could fully open oneself to other human beings in love, yet still miss some supposedly more ultimate truth about oneself and others revealed only in some specifically ‘religious’ way. That would imply that one could somehow perceive an existential limit to love’s openness, beyond which something else and more profound, something ‘religious’, would unfold, and as far as I can see, such a perception of a limit to love, to its challenge and promise, can only mark a fearful refusal to open oneself in love (cf. Nykänen 2025, p. 16).

It might be objected that the Christian claim isn’t that there’s any limit where ‘human’ love ends and a higher, ‘divine’ love enters, but rather that, when human beings open themselves in love, to whatever extent they dare to do so, this itself is God in action, for God is love, and so the task is “to discover God’s love in the love between human beings, and the love between human beings in God’s love”; to recognise that “the spirituality of the love of God is to be found in the vitality of true human love” (Moltmann 1992, pp. 248, 250). This might indeed be said. But the question is how such talk is to be given specifically religious content, other than in the vacuous sense of containing the word ‘God’. For while ‘love’, used as a predicate of God, “may not contradict what people experience as love”, theologically speaking it would also have to “do justice to the being of God which remains so distinctive from the event of human love that ‘God’ does not become a superfluous word” (Jüngel 2014, p. 315). And it’s the articulations of this supposed distinctiveness that I find either lacking or confused, so that ‘God’ either ‘cancels out’, adds nothing to whatever non-religious understanding of love one may attain, or else becomes a name for ‘religious’ matters—actions, feelings, thoughts, demeanours—that are claimed to be ‘beyond’ and ‘higher’ than ‘mere human’ love, but which are actually, precisely because of this claim, forms of, and alibis for, lovelessness.53

It’s certainly part of love’s self-understanding that I, to the extent that I love, don’t view love as my ‘private achievement’, as an ‘attitude’ I decide to ‘adopt’ and now project onto the other, for love is my response to, my welcoming of and opening my heart to you, and so ‘my’ love is all about you; it’s not something I create out of myself, but rather your presence is what opens me to you in love, and so the love I give you is, at the same time, a gift I receive from you (and the same is true, mutatis mutandis, for the love you give me). One who loves would also never claim to be ‘all and only love’, to love as much as it’s possible to love, for love is a longing to love ever more, and so implies an ever deepened sense of how one fails in love, and so also fails in one’s understanding of what love is—‘and so also’, because ‘understanding’, here, isn’t some mere intellectual grasp of a concept of love, but means opening oneself to love’s reality and possibilities, opening oneself to another person, rather than merely imagining that one has done so, while one is still actually keeping oneself back, closed, in one or other of a myriad ways. This means that there’s no uncontroversially given, shared ‘non-religious understanding of love’; rather, to try to understand ever more deeply and fearlessly what love is, is an essential aspect of love itself, for each one of us. Furthermore, insofar as there are no ‘proofs’ of love, objective or otherwise (as there are proofs of devotion or subservience, say), to love is essentially to believe, to have faith in love; to bear personal witness to a ‘revelation’, which may be called a wonderful mystery insofar as there can be no explanation of the fact, on which our whole life and all our explanations ultimately rest, that we mean everything to each other. The wonder of love is there: we can neither ‘produce’ nor eliminate it, however lovelessly and destructively we may act, nor can we change it to our private or collective liking, however hard we try; we can only open ourselves to love, and in this sense it is true, as Jüngel says, that “one can, in fact, do nothing at all for love, although one can do everything out of love” (Jüngel 2014, p. 342). But contrary to what Jüngel appears to imply, this faith and witnessing isn’t, as such, religious faith or witness, nor does any of what I just said—even if I’ve deployed words that are central to Christian thinking, precisely because and insofar as it, too, speaks of love—mean that one must think that love ‘comes from God’, or that ‘God’s love is the only true love’, etc.

Now someone might respond that there’s, of course, nothing that people must say, but there are many things we—those of us who wish or feel compelled by our sense of life to do so—may and do say: for instance, that ‘God is love’, and similar things. And that’s fair enough: I’m not trying to legislate about what people may say, or claiming that those who speak of love in religious terms must be confused, or casting doubt on the sincerity of believers who say that through their faith and their prayers they have found humility, strength, and clarity to love and not despair (cf. Gipps 2025 for a perceptive discussion of prayer in this vein). I’m simply asking what we are to understand by this in philosophical terms—and reporting that I can see no clear answer. And I insist that whatever truth there may be in what believers say will be decided, shown—and this holds for the words of non-believers, too, of course—by how what they say concretely relates to, illuminates and clarifies or obscures and perverts, their sense of their relations to the people, including themselves, they have (or had) difficulties loving. This is how I would give concrete content to Wittgenstein’s oft-quoted remark that “what matters” when it comes to seeing what ‘religious belief’ means for someone, is not “the words you utter […] so much as the difference they make at various points in your life” (Wittgenstein 1980, p. 85 [1950]).

11. In Conclusion: A Lesson and a Question Left

To return to the main concern of this paper, with regard to Wittgenstein’s ‘religious point of view’, the discussion in the last section leaves us with the question of whether it ultimately makes sense, or what kind of sense it might make, to take a specifically ‘religious’ perspective if one also seriously explores an I–You perspective (and I would suggest that, if one doesn’t explore that, nothing will ever make any real sense). As we’ve seen, Wittgenstein’s own remarks on the matter don’t reveal any clear sense, but rather wavering confusion—and the confusion about what ‘the religious’ signifies is, if anything, even deeper in remarks (early and later) where the I–You perspective is wholly absent or denied. In my view, what’s nonetheless crucially important in what Wittgenstein calls ‘seeing philosophical problems from a religious point of view’ is that he turns our attention to the heart of the matter: the moral–existential difficulties, the despair, out of which—surface appearances and conventional notions to the contrary—philosophical confusion issues. What he doesn’t see clearly, it seems to me, is that the specifically ‘religious’ impulse—the impulse to formulate one’s predicament in religious language—is itself deeply entangled in our despairing confusion; it isn’t ‘the cure’ but a symptom of our ‘illness’ in need of ‘treatment’ as much as (other) ‘metaphysical’ impulses are. That we are ‘ill’, that is, grievously confused by our weakness in love, I would not deny. I might thus say about religious thinking as such what Wittgenstein said about people going into monasteries: “Well, if people […] found they needed to take such [desperate] measures in order to be able to go on living, the problem cannot be an easy one” (Wittgenstein 1980, p. 49 [1946]).