On “Seeing Every Problem”—And Art—From Wittgenstein’s “Religious Point of View”

Abstract

This article will bring together and explore the relations between four aspects of Wittgenstein’s remarks on, and his relation to, religious language. The first is his sense of the special role that religious language can play in the lives of people. The focus is not on traditional issues in the philosophy of religion—not the Ontological Proof of the existence of God; not any of Aquinas’ Five Ways; not the argument from Design or the Cosmological Argument; and not any other philosophico-religious matter concerning arguments for the existence or non-existence of any deity. His interests lie elsewhere. Second, we see that what Wittgenstein is centrally concerned with is the life-structuring power that religious language can possess and exert; it concerns both the sense-making power of pattern-lives in religious narratives and the metaphorical content of religious ways of thinking and perceiving. The third aspect is the distinctive, and in its way transcendental, way of seeing the world and existence sub specie aeternitatis, that is, under the aspect of eternity. Or, I will suggest, under the aspect of timelessness, or of having the sense of being above and outside of time. Wittgenstein said that he was not a religious person, but that he could not help but to see every problem from a religious point of view. In this third theme of the article, I will attempt to explicate what that remark can mean—how it reveals what Wittgenstein elsewhere in his work calls “a way of seeing.” And then fourth, this article will connect these three aspects to the special, non-pragmatic (and often in the above sense, transcendental) way that we view works of art. In his Notebooks of 1914-16, Wittgenstein wrote, “The work of art is the object seen sub specie aeternitatis; and the good life is the world seen sub specie aeternitatis. This is the connection between art and ethics.” At the close, I suggest that the way we learn to see the world through and within religious language (again, apart from any theological claim concerning divine existence or not) is parallel to one important way of seeing art—where the parallel is one that casts light from each side to the other. Along with some other works, my most central example in art will be the paintings of Morandi: in conveying an unmistakable sense of timelessness, they both convey, and in viewing them invite us to enact, the special way of seeing objects sub specie aeternitatis.

1. Wittgenstein’s Language-Based View

Although Wittgenstein was not, as he plainly and powerfully asserted, a religious person, he was certainly a person with a deep and abiding interest in religious ideas and what one might call a religious mode of perception (see Malcolm 1994a, p. 1). But to capture the character of this special interest is not a straightforward matter. Much philosophy of religion has been devoted to analyses of the arguments for God’s existence. These have included the ontological argument of Anselm and others, concerning the necessity of a being greater than which cannot be conceived; or the five ways as articulated by Aquinas; or the argument from design and the cosmological argument; and others. The idea of a proof for the existence of a divinity has historically been taken as the sine qua non of religious reflection from the ancient world to the present; a central methodological presupposition has been that without any such powerful or convincing proof, religion would have no firm epistemological foundation and would remain merely speculative—the often unspoken fear being that religious claims would stand epistemically parallel to either creative writing or science fiction. And then a good deal of religious thinking has been devoted to the problem of the compatibility of the classical divine attributes (omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence), as well as to the problem of the compatibility of any one of those attributes with defining features of human existence, e.g., the conceptual tension between divine omniscience and human free will.

Anyone hearing a description of a person as deeply interested in questions and issues of religion might reasonably assume that at least some of these ideas, if not all, are fundamental to that person’s interests. Wittgenstein, so far as the writings on the subject that he left behind show, is interested in none of them whatsoever. So, with the classical problems removed from any attempt to fathom the depth and describe the character of his religious interests, where then do we start?

As is so often the case in understanding Wittgenstein, where to begin is more a matter of exposing and articulating the conceptual presumptions buried beneath the formulation of a given problem or issue rather than accepting that issue unquestioningly and then starting to work toward an answer to it. So, another way to proceed is to ask: of precisely which presuppositions, both methodological and substantive, is Wittgenstein’s overall approach to religious considerations free? What presumptions have been excavated, articulated, and removed as conceptually directing, or even misleading, forces?

In his article “Religion in Wittgenstein’s Mirror”, D. Z. Phillips writes, “The language we use in religious practices may confuse us. We have seen already how we may be tempted to look for the object which the word ‘God’ stands for. To rid ourselves of these confusions we must unearth the tendencies which lead to them.” (Phillips 1991, p. 140). What Phillips is referring to is the presumption, unearthed and subjected to scrutiny throughout Wittgenstein’s Blue Book and Philosophical Investigations (L. Wittgenstein 1960, 2009), that the meaning of a word is most fundamentally found in the object to which it refers. This reductive model of meaning holds that ostensive definition is primary, or that linguistic meaning is in essence a matter of naming. This model, this philosophical “picture” in Wittgenstein’s special sense, underwrites the definition of what the word “God” means in terms of reference to the three divine properties as exemplified in a supreme being mentioned above. Just as this picture of meaning underwrites the definition of the word “God” as referring to a being greater than which cannot be conceived, or to a being that designed the universe. And so, when seen in linguistic terms the classical problems and issues reveal themselves as theological manifestations of this underlying model of meaning. The question “Does God exist?” is implicitly pursued in terms of “What is the meaning of the word “God”, which is then in turn pursued as “What does the word ‘God’ refer to?” Wittgenstein, of course, sees the question of meaning in language in vastly more complex, vastly more sophisticated, expansive, and nonreductive terms. An awareness of his removal of this presumption and his philosophically earned freedom from it is thus the starting point for understanding his remarks on religion.

Wittgenstein’s conception of what it is to understand a person’s words is similarly complex and irreducible to any simple conception of understanding a word. If we think of a case such as “Do you know the meaning of the word ‘giraffe’, we often think of being able to point to a picture of a giraffe, being able to describe it to an extent, being able to identify it at the zoo, etc. And from such simple cases, we then tend to think that the understanding of all words is in essence like this. But Wittgenstein observes, most fundamentally, that understanding a word or a phrase or a sentence does not come to one thing; we often employ spatial metaphors here, speaking of differing depths of understanding or differing levels of understanding. When we look into the details of cases in life within which questions or considerations of understanding arise, we see that we may understand in one sense and not in another, or superficially but not deeply. The word “God”, Wittgenstein is observing, is in this way complex, not simple. In his lectures on religion, Wittgenstein said, “The word ‘God’ is amongst the earliest learnt—pictures and catechisms, etc. But not the same consequences as with pictures of aunts. I wasn’t shown [that which the picture pictured]” (L. Wittgenstein 1972, p. 59). Wittgenstein’s observation here is important for understanding the larger point to which we are coming. We may as children learn the word “God” by being shown pictures of an old white man with a long white beard seated on a large throne wearing white flowing robes. And when the child asks where that God is, we may point to the sky and say “in heaven, up there.” So far, that corresponds to the simple picture—which is why (some of us) speak to children in this way. But this would be elementary to the point of ridiculousness for any adult serious thinker about religion; we adults know that these images are not the referent of the word “God”, a referent that in a singular and referentially contained way gives the word its meaning. We know that what is one of the most widely known paintings of God, Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam, is not a painting of God in the way that a portrait is the painting of the sitter. And we know that we can show the child a photograph of their aunt, and then later introduce the child in person to their aunt. No such introduction, and no such fixity of reference, is possible with the word “God”; it never has been, and it never will be. The older child realizes this at a certain age and discards those childish images and that childish meaning of the word. So, does the child understand the meaning of the word or not? The answer, given the differentiation of levels of understanding, is yes and no. Wittgenstein continues, “The word is used like a word representing a person. God sees, rewards, etc.” (L. Wittgenstein 1972, p. 59). This remark is highly compressed, but what Wittgenstein is capturing here in the course of his lecture is that we come to understand the meaning of the word by understanding the ways in which it is used (this of course being one of the most familiar of all Wittgensteinian ideas), and in religious language the word “God” is used in a manner directly parallel to the way we speak of a person, their thoughts, their speech, and their actions. One could say that in grasping the concept “God” we borrow from the sense of terms employed in the everyday descriptions of persons and then transmute that sense into the description of a divine, transcendent, and absent (in the sense that the aunt is present) entity. We borrow from the everyday or the visually familiar in visual art in a way exactly parallel to what Wittgenstein is observing that we do in language. In addition to Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam just mentioned, we might also consider his The Creation of the Sun and Moon, Guercino’s God the Father and Angel, Cima Da Conegliano’s God the Father, Joseph Van Fuhrich’s God Writes the Ten Commandments on Two Stone Tablets, Jacob Herreyns the Elder’s God the Father, Girolamo dei Libri’s God the Father with His Right Hand Raised in Blessing, and William Blake’s Ancient of Days. Each visual portrayal is different, each distinct in content, but the content of all of them is an invented image of God as drawn from human facial expressions and gestures, the physique of the human body, and worldly artifacts. Creating God in our image, these are the kinds of pictures to which Wittgenstein refers. And so, Wittgenstein imagines the question being asked, “Being shown all these things [the pictures of God, catechisms, etc.], did you understand what this word meant?” Wittgenstein answers, “I’d say: ‘Yes and no. I did learn what it didn’t mean. I made myself understand. I could answer questions, understand questions when they were put in different ways—and in that sense could be said to understand.’” In that sense he (or the child) understands. But in what sense does he not understand, what does a discussion along the foregoing lines at its level miss? What does it, perhaps inadvertently, exclude? Here we might ask: How does Wittgenstein himself use the word “God”? We find two fairly early uses in the preface to his Philosophical Remarks. He writes,

I would like to say ‘This book is written to the glory of God’, but nowadays that would be chicanery, that is, it would not be rightly understood. It means the book is written in good will, and in so far as it is not so written, but out of vanity, etc., the author would wish to see it condemned. He cannot free it of these impurities further than he himself is free of it.

The phrase, “to the glory of God”, in what he saw as his contemporary milieu, would be situated within, webbed within, a network of cultural relations that would inflect the word “God” in such a way that would only convey distortion. This observation itself emphasizes that meaning is not a matter of assembling composites of isolated or independently contained word-meanings that add together to make a sentence or assertion. And the way he describes his actual meaning of the phrase, his intended meaning, is miles away from the meaning we might have seen in it when coming to the issue of religious language with the embedded presumptions considered above. He wants a book written in good will, and not written out of vanity. This way of saying it evokes or awakens the notion of the spirit of an undertaking, a project, a book, or as we will see shortly, a way of life as determined by a distinctive way of seeing. And so, Wittgenstein a moment later adds,

This book is written for such men as are in sympathy with its spirit. This spirit is different from the one which informs the vast stream of European and American civilization in which all of us stand. That spirit expresses itself in an onwards movement, in building ever larger and more complicated structures: the other in striving after clarity and perspicuity in no matter what structure.

(L. Wittgenstein 1975, p. 7)

What one cannot miss here is that for Wittgenstein—as is true for so many of us—it is the spirit of the undertaking that is central to the determination of its meaning. It is this fundamental point that is missed, that is all too easily inadvertently excluded in any discussion of meaning. Given what we have seen so far concerning the need to avoid, to transcend, the simplistic model of meaning, the fact that this kind of spirit is difficult to define succinctly, difficult to point to ostensively, and difficult to define within the constraints of a dictionary-style definition are all every bit as much arguments for including this kind of consideration in any investigation into meaning as they are arguments against it or for methodologically excluding it. The consideration of the spirit of an utterance, or a piece of writing, or a project, will only seem seriously doubtable to a mind wedded, explicitly or implicitly, to the simplified name-and-referent model.

In Culture and Value, we find a number of passages directly addressing this point. They interweave the concept of truth with this concept of spirit as an ineliminable aspect of meaning. Having mentioned Kierkegaard and his writings on the matter of the personal content of religious language, Wittgenstein writes,

God has four people recount the life of his incarnate Son, in each case differently and with inconsistencies—but might we not say: It is important that this narrative should not be more than quite averagely historically plausible just so that this should not be taken as the essential, decisive thing? So that the letter should not be believed more strongly than is proper and the spirit may receive its due. I.e. what you are supposed to see cannot be communicated even by the best and most accurate historian; and therefore a mediocre account suffices, is even to be preferred. For that too can tell you what you are supposed to be told. (Roughly in the way a mediocre stage set can be better than a sophisticated one, painted trees better than the real ones, —because these might distract attention from what matters.).

(L. Wittgenstein 1980, p. 31e)

What you are supposed to see (that is, to see in a metaphorical sense, and not merely to propositionally formulate) is not epistemically usual or commonplace content of a kind that has clear and evident verification conditions. It is not of a kind captured by the most accurate historian. (But the most astute historian might well capture it—but that crosses over to the other side of the distinction that Wittgenstein is drawing here.) If the lesser stage set serves to cast the important message in higher relief, then the lesser, as he rightly says, can be the greater. And so, we turn to the character and function of religious narratives as they can deliver this distinctive kind of content.

2. “Only as the Result of a Life”

In the same set of remarks, Wittenstein writes,

Christianity is not based on a historical truth; rather, it offers us a (historical) narrative and says: now believe! But not, believe this narrative with the belief appropriate to a historical narrative, rather: believe, through thick and thin, which you can do only as the result of a life. Here you have a narrative, don’t take the same attitude to it as you take to other historical narratives! Make a quite different place in your life for it.—There is nothing paradoxical about that!

(L. Wittgenstein 1980, p. 32e)

Not: “the belief appropriate to a historical narrative.” That is to say (and now belief too is emerging as anything but a uniform concept reducible to a single set of justifying criteria), do not presume that the only form of belief is the one that is illustrated by, for trivial example, my belief—although I am unsure, or it would already be a case of knowledge—that my car is in the front parking lot, a belief that turns into knowledge when I walk out and see that it is there where I half-remember parking it early this morning. The nature of religious narrative is different from any such case—including standard historical narratives. If I encounter a narrative that is based on the claim that George Washington was not the first President of the United States, I of course detect its falsity from the start and my disbelief aligns with that detection accordingly. In a related but different kind of case, if I hear a long-form narrative of a person’s life that centers on cruelty and nastiness when I know that person to be unfailingly kind and charitable, I challenge that false narrative with facts. No such immediate detection of falsity, and no such challenge based on what I know of the person, are possible with religious narratives. They require what Wittgenstein calls a different attitude. That is, our normally established patterns of verification and falsification do not fit the case. But this seems dangerously close to saying that one should believe demonstrable falsehoods in an epistemologically reckless way, or worse, systematically obliterate the distinction between fact and fiction. It may initially seem so: yet this is not at all what Wittgenstein is suggesting. Rather, he is suggesting that the truth of the narrative will be found in a different place in our lives. And with that different place, what can initially appear as a p and not-p paradoxical contradiction is not actually that, because p and not-p do not meet head on, they do not collide. But we now ask, why not?

A moment’s reflection on the distinction between fact and fiction can prove helpful here. No one will claim that, for example, the novels of Henry James are true. Of course not. But that is a quite different point from one’s saying that they found a good deal of truth in a Henry James novel. One can see truths concerning human relations and verbal interaction, just as one can see psychological verisimilitude. Religious narratives can be of that broad kind. In the Christian case (the one Wittgenstein is discussing), one can see what have been called pattern lives. We might read Augustine’s Confessions, follow his life’s progress, take in the long-form narrative, and in some ways construe our own life narrative, or parts of it, on that model. We may see religious stories concerning conversion, or redemption, or resurrection, or transcendence, or the striving toward an ideal of purity (this one in particular certainly describes a fundamental component of Wittgenstein’s inner life), and employ those concepts, as altered to suit our own case, within the process and progress of self-reflection. And one can do this in, indeed, a literally non-believing way—as, for example, in recognizing the truth in a metaphor. This kind of truth is not precluded by the falsity of the narratives or the sentences within which these concepts reside.1

But then also, Wittgenstein’s other words were only as the result of a life. At first glance, this phrase strikes one as almost oddly out of place. But that sense of oddness derives from the underlying presumption that can easily manifest itself here again, that is, that the word “belief” refers in its essence to one thing—an occurrent cognitive phenomenon. We know that Wittgenstein heard a good deal about American pragmatism and C. S. Peirce from his close friend and colleague Frank Ramsey, and that Wittgenstein read William James (Misak 2020). The pragmatic idea of belief is dramatically different from a traditional analytic analysis of the concept. Belief of this kind is shown as often as it is said, and it is embodied in habits and patterns of action and behavior as much as in declarative propositions. If, as Wittgenstein is saying, one preserves within oneself a sense of the transcendent through thick and thin, one is indeed living, and not just saying, a belief. As a soldier in the war Wittgenstein repeatedly volunteered for an extraordinarily dangerous post, that of front-line artillery observer. As he headed into action, he would say, “God be with me! The spirit be with me!” (Malcolm 1994b, p. 9; McGuinness 2005, pp. 239–40). Those words have the depth of meaning that they do because of their embeddedness in seriously courageous and character-defining human action. If one were to ask, is the belief expressed in the words or the action, the pragmatists would immediately see this as a false separability. This is not to claim that Wittgenstein was a pragmatist or that he should be counted as one by virtue of the full expanse of his work—indeed he clearly asserted that he was not a pragmatist.2 And one has to consider as well the strong influences on his thought about meaning as it manifests in the way we live and structure and narratively recount our lives of non-pragmatist philosophers such as Kierkegaard and Augustine, among others. One could as easily read Wittgenstein’s words “only as the result of a life” in Kierkegaardian terms. And the influence that Tolstoy’s The Gospels in Brief also exerted on his thinking and being was profound. But the affinities to pragmatism are there, and it is clear that he is as aware of any such false separability between language and action as were the pragmatists.

The sense of appealing to the transcendent, of desiring to maintain a consciousness mindful of that sense as he headed into dangerous positions in the war, also emerged, also powerfully, in his work:

Is what I am doing really worth the labor? Surely only if it receives

a light from above. And if that happens—why should I worry about

the fruits of my work being stolen? If what I writing is really of value,

how could anyone steal the value from me? If the light from above

is not there, then I cannot be any more than clever.

Quoted in (Malcolm 2001, p. 18)

3. A Sense of the Transcendent

How then do we more fully and more deeply understand Wittgenstein’s sense of the transcendent, what he calls the light from above, and our lived (and not merely spoken) relation to it? His sense of the transcendent—which he sometimes referred to as the mystical—was a thread that wove itself throughout his life and writings. In the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, he wrote, “It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists.” (L. Wittgenstein [1921] 1974) remarks 6.432 and 6.44. What this strongly suggests is that, at least for him, the experience of the mystical is not located in one temporally bounded experience (as some claim to have experienced a decisive moment of union with a divinity yielding sudden conversion), nor is it in any sense geographically located. Indeed, the location—if one can speak of this at all—is the entire existent world. The phrase “how things are” invites further description of experienced particularities; the phrase “that things are” does not invite this in the same way. As one sees so often in Wittgenstein’s work, a small grammatical difference can make a large conceptual difference. What these reflections are pointing toward is that what emerges as central here is a way of seeing the world, and not a determinate experience within it. In his notebooks of 1914–1916, he writes,

What do I know about God and the purpose of life?

I know that this world exists.

That I am placed in it like my eye in its visual field.

That something about it is problematic, which we call its meaning.

That this meaning does not lie in it but outside it.

And a few lines later, he adds,

The meaning of life, i.e., the meaning of the world, we can call God.

(L. Wittgenstein 1961, pp. 72–73)

His point would be much simpler if this were merely a restatement of the Cosmological Argument, i.e., that the world exists and thus so does God. This, as we saw in the first section above, is not his concern. And that is not his conception of God, not the meaning of the word “God” as this word takes its place and functions within his larger context of usage, with distinctive sets of connotations and implications inflecting its content.3

To answer a question about the purpose of life with the phrase “the world exists” would seem either a non sequitur or a blunt rejection of the question. But for Wittgenstein, it is neither. Contemplating the existence of the world in a certain light awakens a sense of the mystical, of the transcendent. And to be put into that frame of mind is for him powerful enough to change, to elevate in a special sense, our entire way of seeing. It is for this reason that in his next line he likens his placement in the world to his eye in its visual field. This is not a small matter; it is like his eye in its visual field—but this is not literal vision any more than religious narratives must be about, or confirmed by, literal truths. In its way, this anticipates an observation he will make much later in his Philosophical Investigations, where he draws a distinction between two kinds of perceptual cases. The first is to look at a drawing of a face and then to look at another drawing of a face next to it. The second is to notice the similarity between the two faces. The first is empirically solid in a way that the second is not; we can point directly to each of the two faces. But we cannot point to the similarity in the same direct or simple way—although the similarity is certainly as real as the independent faces themselves. One could express this (he does not) by saying that the perception of the faces is concrete while the perception of the similarity is abstract. The kind of perception of the world to which Wittgenstein is referring here is in this sense abstract. The problem of the world he calls the world’s meaning, and of that meaning, it is not in the world (again, one cannot point to a determinate object or event or place within it); rather, it is, like the abstract rather than concrete perception, outside of it. And so, crystalizing his thoughts about this kind of transcendent gaze upon the world as a whole, it is for him this that we can call God. For Wittgenstein, it is the deep sense of wonder, of the mystical, of transcendence that constitutes the content of the word “meaning” in this entire area of human experience, and again it is this, rather than any divine entity, that, as he importantly says in a small grammatical detail, we can call “God.” Conceptually speaking, this is miles away from the philosophical attempt to make divine attributes compatible, or to construct a logical argument that concludes with necessary existence, or to preserve free will against the challenge of omniscience. Rather, as with the comparison to the pragmatists above, it is to investigate and articulate how it is that a way of seeing is lived out across the course of a life.

During the same few days as the passages above, Wittgenstein also wrote in his notebook,

To believe in a God means to understand the question about the meaning of life.

To believe in a God means to see that the facts of the world are not the end of the matter.

To believe in God means to see that life has a meaning.

(L. Wittgenstein 1961, p. 74)

We are now in a position to grasp how easy it would be to completely misunderstand these remarks. Without knowing that the concepts of belief, of God, of meaning, have all been articulated in the ways discussed above, one would naturally take these terms in conventional senses: that would be, “God” names an entity with divine attributes; one believes in that entity in the conventional sense of belief based on normal reasons and verification conditions; the meaning of the world is one ordained by that existent omnipotent creator-entity. Again, none of these have a home within Wittgenstein’s reflections on religion. The context is changed, the nature of the relevant perception is redescribed, and thus the meanings of each concept are inflected accordingly.

In his lectures on religious belief, he said, “I think differently, in a different way. I say different things to myself. I have different pictures.” Imagining a conversation with a traditional believer, he also said, “In one sense, I understand all he says—the English words ‘God’, ‘separate’, etc. I understand. I could say: ‘I don’t believe in this,’ and this would be true, meaning I have not got these thoughts or anything that hangs together with them.”4 This first remark is confirming; the second is revealing. For all the considerations above, we know that he does indeed think not only differently, but as he says he thinks in a different way about the mystical, the transcendent—broadly speaking the religious. But the characterization of his imagined disagreement reveals a deeper way of understanding what he here means by disagreement and how he conceives of it within this larger subject. He knows what his imagined interlocutor means by “God” and related words, and so he understands that speaker. But, importantly, disagreement in these matters is not for him a matter of one person believing proposition P and the other believing not-P. It is not the familiar matter of assertion and negation, not the atheist versus the theist. It is not that one party claims to know that something is the case, while the other party claims to know that something is not the case. Instead, “I don’t believe in this” means “I haven’t got these thoughts or anything that hangs together with them.” This both personalizes and contextualizes. It personalizes because this way of putting the matter brings out how disagreement can be far more intricate, far more nuanced, and far more a result of personal psychology or personal cognitive content than any model of strictly external-world disagreement could capture. The question is not, Do we have a verification of a propositionally encapsulated assertion concerning an entity in the universe or not? The questions, rather, are, How are these words being used, what role do they play in a person’s life, and then also, Are the words the only relevant things in play—are actions, a way of living, a way of seeing, and a way of living based on that way of seeing actually more important to the determination of meaning? And with those alternative personalizing questions in focus, we can now readily see how this contextualizes as well: the important words in play here will be inflected, as are Wittgenstein’s, by the context of thought, by dialog, and—again as both the pragmatists and Kierkegaardians observe—by meaning-determining and life-shaping action.

In a particularly helpful presentation of Wittgenstein’s religious thinking, William Child writes (quoting Wittgenstein along the way),

‘In a religious discourse’, Wittgenstein says ‘we use such expressions as ‘I believe that so and so will happen.’ But we ‘use them differently to the way in which we use them in science’ (LC: 57). In particular, we do not use those words to express the belief in the future occurrence of an event of a particular kind. Rather, we use them to express our commitment to a certain way of seeing things and a certain way of living. Thus: ‘Suppose somebody made this guidance for this life: believing in the Last Judgment. Whenever he does anything, this is before his mind’ (LC: 53). Such a person, Wittgenstein thinks, would be said to believe in the Last Judgment. But the difference between the person who believes in the Last Judgment and the person who does not is not a disagreement about the occurrence of a future event. It is the difference between seeing the events of one’s own and other people’s lives in terms of the concepts of divine judgement, reward, and punishment, and not seeing them that way.

(Child 2011, p. 222)

This captures the point here well. And if one were to ask, Well, wait—is not this view compatible with atheism?, the answer is probably yes. And if one were to ask, Is not this view compatible with agnosticism, the answer is certainly yes. Although initially counterintuitive, given all the considerations so far, a sense of religiosity and transcendence, as it becomes increasingly clear, is detachable from an assent to dogma and doctrine of any “I believe that P”, factually assertive kind.5 In his lectures Wittgenstein said, about the employment of a religious concept in the context of living a life, “Anything that I normally call evidence wouldn’t in the slightest influence me.”6 And even if there were, as a remote hypothetical, indubitable factual support for the claim of a divine entity of the Christian kind, “the indubitability wouldn’t be enough to make me change my whole life.”7 It is the substantial change in one’s way of seeing, informed by the sense discussed above of the mystical, the transcendent, that is the one thing that can make that change. And so, we turn to how to describe and illustrate that way of seeing. As we shall see, the answer interconnects language, life, and art.

4. Timelessness and the Work of Art

In what is perhaps his most densely compressed statement of what he has in mind concerning the special way of seeing discussed thus far, Wittgenstein writes, “The work of art is the object seen sub specie aeternitatis; and the good life is the world seen sub specie aeternitatis. This is the connection between art and ethics.”8 The phrase “under the aspect of eternity” functions as an invitation to lift one’s vision to a position above time.9 Or one could equally say, to lift one’s vision out of the sense of linear time. Placement in time conceptually requires that any such placement be made inside the three temporal divisions of past, present, and future. To picture this different kind of vision over time is to look down on from above, and to look across the broad sweep of all three divisions. Wittgenstein wants to say that the special way of looking at, of experiencing, a work of art is captured in these terms. He refers here explicitly to the connection between art and ethics, but given all the reflections we have considered so far, he might well have also referred to the connection between art and a broadly religious way of seeing or, in his phrase, a religious point of view. He writes in the next line, “The usual way of looking at things sees objects as it were from the midst of them, the view sub specie aeternitatis from outside.”

This distinction between inside and outside calls for explication. Inside perception could be characterized as relational perception; it is to see an object as an artifact that is positioned within a perceptual web of contextually situated other things around it. This would apply to actions as well as objects or artifacts. This is indeed what he calls the usual way; it is instructive that when we walk through the world seeing all kinds of things we so easily forget them within this usual perceptual genre (ask yourself to describe in some detail the built environment through which you walked but did not stop to scrutinize yesterday). But when we are utterly and powerfully struck by, for example, the beauty of an object, artifact, human action, facial expression or bodily movement (as in dance), melodic line, graceful painterly line, and so forth, the word “struck” actually refers to the perceptual act of separating out, of lifting out, of severing the usual webbed relations in which that perceived thing is enmeshed and then mentally “spotlighting” it. And when such a moment happens with sufficient power, we often remember it vividly years later, and perhaps forever. This is Wittgenstein’s “outside.”

Underscoring the point, he adds next, “In such a way that they have the whole world as background.” A strikingly beautiful arched architectural doorway can be so powerful as to make the rest of the entire façade recede as background. We can then glance over that façade, as the visual equivalent of a supporting cast, but the way we see it, because of the striking power of the doorway, is different. All of the arts can produce this effect, just as can the ethical acts of persons. And the perceptual process of lifting out can be incremental and thus not invariably sudden. An analogy (Wittgenstein does not use this) is the technique used by some sculptors of submerging a model in water, and then inch by inch lifting it out so that only the next layer of the model is visible, sculpting that layer and then repeating the process. The perception of the special beauty of a person can be particularly like this, but here again this can occur throughout the arts and ethics. Pursuing the thought, Wittgenstein next queries himself, “Is this it perhaps—in this view the object is seen together with space and time instead of in space and time?” And so, with the preceding remarks in mind concerning the inside and outside categories of perception, he writes, “As a thing among things, each thing is equally insignificant; as a world each one equally significant.” With these reflections behind us we can better understand his phrase, “The work of art is the object seen sub specie aeternitatis.” Of this perceptual genre and things as specially seen within it, he also uses the evocative phrases, “it was my world, and everything else colorless by contrast with it”, and memorably (in, indeed, a very striking phrase), the object emerges as “the true world among shadows.”

Works of art, in capturing the sense of timelessness—still an underdiscussed aesthetic feature or quality—exhibit the power to bring us into this perceptual (or perhaps better, cognitive-perceptual) category. J. M. W. Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire is famous for so strongly evoking the quality of timelessness. Commentators discuss the sense of an ending of an epoch—the age of sailing ships is here being replaced by steamships, and that is correct. And they rightly discuss its elegiac quality. But the painting does much more: the great wooden ship, distinguished by its service in battle, appears as a ghostlike visage within the painting. And although the steam tug pulling it in to be scrapped is painted as real compared to the ghostly presence, incredibly in Turner’s hands it is actually the latter that emerges as, in precisely Wittgenstein’s sense, the true world among shadows. But then that is still the more literal aspect of the painting. Its true content concerns timelessness: the setting sun coloring the clouds above; the receding water that does not seem to really end against any landscape; the atmosphere as a receding perceptual wash that also seems to go on forever beyond the bounds of the painting; the indistinctness of the built environment that is therefore not really focused on this world; and most importantly, the overall composition of the painting that is so much a world without closure. It is difficult to view this great painting without feeling somehow transported into Wittgenstein’s “outside” perceptual genre.

Georges Seurat’s most famous painting, like Turner’s, is famous because of its evocation of timelessness. Seurat stated that it was his desire to capture this sense (as he said, in a way reminiscent of some Egyptian and Greek sculptures), and he achieves exactly that—however, in a way utterly different from Turner. Employing pointillism, his riverside scene is full of people—but they all seem frozen in time. And this is to depict them as outside the flow, outside the temporal trajectory of the present incessantly pressing into the future. This perception of frozen time is of course not possible, not available, in what Wittgenstein called the usual perceptual experience; we have never, and will never, see this in life. Yet this representational work lifts us into that atemporal place. So in fact, to say that this is a moment frozen in time, although in a sense serving as a “doorway” into a fuller description of this painting, is misleading: it is actually, precisely in Wittgenstein’s sense, presented together with space and time instead of in space and time.

Caspar David Friedrich’s Moonrise over the Sea achieves something similar, but here again it does so in its own aesthetically distinctive way. We see three persons, seated on a rock, observing the captivating beauty of the scene before them. That scene shows moonlight breaking through distant clouds on the far side of a body of water. But it is the lighting of the water that is centrally important in terms of the effect of timelessness. The water is lighted from above, and only selectively, producing a transcendent glow that seems not entirely of this world; it is a kind of light coming from a higher place. Like Turner, the skies seem to reach infinitely beyond the painting, and that too is certainly part of the effect. But there is much more here. Richard Wollheim (Richard 1987, pp. 101–86) wrote of what he called the spectator in the picture—the sense of us, as viewers, being present within the painting, but as spectral or ghostly or disembodied presences that float above the painted ground. We do not see the contour of the land rising in a way that would be supportable to any embodied presence. So, in Wollheim’s sense we are brought into, pulled into, this almost eerie transcendent landscape. And so, as if inside the painting, in a fairly straightforward sense we are experiencing a visual depiction of what Wittgenstein referred to as the light from above by which he most wanted his writing to be illuminated. But more importantly and less straightforwardly: We are looking not only upon a transcendently evocative seascape. We are seeing persons seeing that transcendently evocative seascape. That places us in a position above our own embodied humanity: we now view them, dark silhouettes, from a vantage point floating behind them. We are viewing them, all of them contained within the temporal frame of past, present, and future, from a perspective above and beyond that frame. Friedrich places us as viewers in a sub specie aeternitatis location—precisely what Wittgenstein discussed as the special elevated way of seeing an artifact. It is as if Friedrich, from a time well before Wittgenstein, had already expressed in painting what Wittgenstein was to go on to say verbally.

Photography can achieve these distinctive artistic results as well. Both gelatin silver prints and photogravure seem especially well suited to the task, but all photographic techniques and technologies can achieve it. One remarkable image in terms of the preceding themes is by Gordon Coster, in his 1927 The Spigot and the Shadows. It is a photograph that places the spigot as the real entity among shadows. But that, here again, however memorable an illustration, is fairly simple. We see two gradations of shadows: a colander is literally absent but present in its shadow stretching across the left of the photograph, with the shadow of the spigot being the light-carried result of the present spigot. But the reading of the photograph that I want to suggest is quite different from these aspects of the photograph that function as mere illustrations. Rather, the essence of the work is found in the ontological contrast between the pot (collecting water) below and the spigot above. There is an unmistakable sense in which the pot is in space and time, and so seen in an easily dismissible way; that photographed artifact asks us to perceive it in Wittgenstein’s “usual way.” The spigot, however, emerges as an image that awakens an entirely different perceptual category: it is an artifact that is here together with space and time, but not in it. It is easily seeable—indeed it seems to demand to be so seen—in Wittgenstein’s special way; it is as if it came from a place of a higher stillness, higher quiescence, and non-temporality. The photograph itself makes the essential contrast; in drawing the distinction, it defines its meaning.

All of these works of art collaborate nicely with the topics discussed within and emerging from Wittgenstein’s remarks on religion. But it is perhaps the work of Giorgio Morandi that stands apart. Exquisitely capturing a sense of the transcendent, Morandi’s works instill, often immediately, the mood of contemplation. It is as if they throw a switch in the mind of the viewer, changing one’s psychology from the bustle and ever-forward movement of a life lived in time to an imperturbable place of psychic peace and quiescence outside of it. Morandi’s works have of course been seen in connection with the aesthetic movement of Italian Metaphysical Painting, but while the label is often attached, a fuller account of what “metaphysical” means here is less often provided. There are more immediately available ways of describing this (“timeless”—then not saying anything else), but the ideas and distinctions we have seen from Wittgenstein’s remarks on religion go a good way toward filling the explanatory lacuna.

Morandi’s Still Life 1960 (in the Tate Gallery; one has to specify the location, because so many of his works are titled Natura Morta, meaning Still Life) shows a canvas divided into two horizontal segments, pale green on the top and lavender-gray below. Within this completely visually silent atmosphere we see a white vase, a circular container, and a cone-topped bottle lined up front to back, visually blending into each other. We do not see them, at all, for their function. We see each, in Wittgenstein’s sense, not as a “thing among things” where each is “equally insignificant,” but rather we see that the phrase “each one equally significant” somehow applies with considerable descriptive force. This lifts the objects into a meditative space, indeed a metaphysical space where chronological or linear time seems alien to the representation. Perhaps the most still of all still life painters, this work shows yet another transcendent world, one where what one might call atmospheric silence is only subtly inflected by hue, tone, and compositional balance.

We see this quiescent equipoise also in his Natura Morta of 1951, but with an importantly different feature coming to the fore. We see here five objects (white vase and other containers), arranged in a balanced and intricate composition—so far, like the previous painting. But here what we see is that, while there are five objects, they are all lifted above any set of relations into which they might normally enter. Each can serve a function, but they are not serving, nor so much as minimally intimating, any such utilitarian aspect here. They are at home, together, all doing the same non-functional thing, all detached from the world in which they normally reside. This is metaphysical, and they, together, here again demand that the viewer see them in Wittgenstein’s non-usual perceptual category. Even more so than the works considered above, they insist that the viewer see them as not obviously within space and time.

Morandi’s Still Life with Bottles and Pitcher of 1946 (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) achieves something else yet. Like the spigot photograph, it situates itself at the crossroads of Wittgenstein’s two modes of perception; there are two paintings in one. In one sense, we can imagine reaching into the painting, picking up an object, and putting it to use in daily life without really or attentively looking at it. But also, we can see, switching our perception, a separateness from that world; we leave them in the higher world from which the light emanates. The objects themselves exhibit two aspects; like Wittgenstein’s duck-rabbit and like the spigot versus the pot, they seem to live on two separate metaphysical planes.

So, Morandi’s artifacts are, with a rare economy of means yielding a sense of atmospheric space that serves the purpose with a focused power, beyond this world. And they elevate the viewer’s mind accordingly. But there is more—much more—aesthetically in play here. And as a supplement to all of the foregoing this will further help fill the explanatory lacuna. Morandi’s paintings are not about any of those vases, containers, cups, bottles, tabletop items. The paintings are not about what they represent. Or, that is: they are not about what they represent in any simple or straightforward terms. What they actually represent is psychological, where the meaning is not only distinct but of a different ontological kind from the representational content.

Viewed within this context, Morandi’s paintings, employing artistic rather than linguistic means, reveal that they are about the same things that Wittgenstein’s reflections are capturing. They are not about how anything looks, but about how things are, or can be, seen. Morandi’s paintings represent nothing less than the way we see art; they are works not of external-world realism, but of psychological realism—they mimetically answer not to things, but to the mind of the beholder.

To sum up: Wittgenstein’s remarks on religion have given rise to a fairly expansive range of issues. They have included the following:

• The kind of explanation we often look for is not provided by determining the referent of a name, but rather by the role that the concept in question plays in our lives. “God” is one such concept; “Art” is another. The understanding of a word or concept as used is not reducible to knowing its referent.
• The spirit of a piece of writing, of an utterance, of a project, of a work of art, can be hard to narrowly define but is much more important to grasping its meaning than any narrow definition could provide. The spirit of an utterance, or a work, is not a mere adjunct to its meaning.
• Narratives within their contexts convey meaning, and not all narratives have similar verification conditions. What role do they play?, and what forms of significance do they capture?, are the important questions. Works of art live inside narratives as well, and similar or parallel questions are given rise within them.
• Finding truth in a text, or in a work of art, is epistemologically different from asserting that the text, or the art, is itself true. This is like the truths we find in metaphor.
• The pragmatic character of living a belief is epistemically and experientially different from proving an assertion. In this connection, Wittgenstein spoke of making a narrative true, in a non-reductive way, within the longer-frame of living a life. Living a life with, and in, art can be, and very often is, parallel.
• Perception itself does not reduce to one uniform experience, and it is certainly not reducible to immediate sensory experience. Religion (in Wittgenstein’s distinctive sense) and art both show this.
• The sense of religiosity or transcendence does not require a preconditional belief in dogma or doctrine. The recognition of, and experience of, transcendence in the arts shows this as well.
• To view the world sub specie aeternitatis generates the human experience of the mystically transcendent. To view the work of art sub specie aeternitatis lifts the object into a similar or parallel perceptual plane, wholly distinct from what Wittgenstein called “the usual,” where the inside/outside distinction helps to articulate the nature of this special mode of aesthetic perception.

All of these provide the background—which is to say, the meaning-determining context—of the differing ways that these last seven works of art we have considered representationally capture, aesthetically convey, and psychologically instill in the viewer the sense of timelessness. And these works, taken together, open the door to something of an aesthetic irony on a rather grand scale. In comparison to the paintings of God mentioned above, it is the works of art conveying and instilling this sense of timelessness and sub specie aeternitatis perception that are the truer works of religious (in Wittgenstein’s sense of that word) art. None of the paintings of God mentioned above deliver that to a viewer’s mind. I asked above, in discussing Wittgenstein’s remarks, what it was that the child’s understanding missed. One could say: what works of this kind—Morandi in particular and as exemplar—capture is precisely the essence of the matter that conventional theological painting misses.10 Although a topic for another day, it is plausible to suggest that religious architecture often captures significantly more of this sense than does the painting within it; here the spirit of place, by analogy to the spirit of an utterance as mentioned above, would come into play (Palladio’s Church of the Redentore in Venice or Brunelleschi’s Basilica of San Lorenzo in Florence could initiate the conversation). And like the works considered here—all of them technically non-religious art, secular architecture and landscape can mark the same contrast (e.g., what a Japanese rock garden—often called a Zen garden—quietly evokes that an eighteenth-century English garden does not). A close look at the photographs of the interiors of the house Wittgenstein designed with Paul Engelmann in Vienna will make a strong case that Wittgenstein’s entire sensibility concerning these matters is manifest in that house—its spaces, its dimensions, its internal formal interrelations, its rigorous beauty, and its fine details (Wijdeveld 1993).

In closing, if only as the briefest suggestion, we can expand the scope of the discussion. All of the foregoing thoughts, taken together, can fundamentally transform our way of seeing religious art. We can imaginatively, reflectively, and seriously enter into it without any dependence on literal belief; we can imagine the roles these images and metaphors and narratives played, and play, in the lives of people without an ontological or cosmological argument or anything of the kind. One contemporary example of this approach may be seen in the way we can speak of the soul of a person without any theologically grounded dualistic beliefs: the sense of our talk in this usage comes from our recognition of a human sensibility, a set of human virtues such as kindness and emotional sensitivity and responsiveness to others, and not from a metaphysical belief concerning post-mortem disembodied selfhood.

Wittgenstein said in conversation that while he was not a religious man, he could not help but to see every problem from a religious point of view.11 Although, for reasons we have seen, this could be the easiest claim to misunderstand, if we place sub specie aeternitatis perception and the inside/outside distinction at the center of our thoughts, we can start to grasp what it would mean to say that—even if we are entirely non-religious persons—that we cannot help but to see, if not all, at least many works of art from a religious point of view.