The Ordinary as Ceremony: Wittgenstein on Language and Religion

Abstract

This paper examines Wittgenstein’s shifting engagement with religion, from the early emphasis on the limits of the world in the Tractatus to the later attention to the ordinary and to the ways religious expressions inhabit forms of life. An analysis of later Wittgenstein shows that the religious functions within ordinary language-games, in which expressions tied to religion have established places and contexts of use. These uses, in turn, are intelligible against the background of many kinds of talk and observation that are not ordinarily characterized as religious. At the same time, Wittgenstein is concerned with the way in which words can be intensified through personal use, acquiring an inflection that responds to individual experience and is exposed to the possibility of acknowledgment or failure. What emerges is a way of inhabiting language in which the religious is understood as a renewal of one’s gaze upon the everyday. This is the region in which philosophy and religion meet in Wittgenstein: the work of finding again the words that speak for us, allowing them to regain their depth and to return us, moment by moment, to ordinary life.

1. Introduction

This article explores Wittgenstein’s shifting concerns with religion, from the early emphasis on the limits of the world in the Tractatus to the later attention to how religious expressions and beliefs inhabit forms of life and shape our ordinary attachments. Rather than approaching religion as a separate domain, I argue that Wittgenstein’s remarks on religion must be read in close connection with his conception of philosophical work itself, understood as a practice concerned with our relation to language and life.

Section 2 addresses the question of the place of religion, ethics, and aesthetics in Wittgenstein’s philosophy, starting from the location of these evaluative spheres within the structure of the Tractatus. I argue that we cannot understand the content of Wittgenstein’s remarks on religion independently of his understanding of philosophy’s aims. His treatment of ethics and religion is inseparable from his conception of philosophy as an activity involving personal transformation, aimed at dispelling illusions and imprisonments in our ways of speaking and responding to life. The apparent gradual disappearance of explicit religious and ethical discussion from his later works must be read against the persistence of this transformative conception of philosophy.

In Section 3, I emphasize the twofold ways in which value is introduced by Wittgenstein in the Tractatus: on the one hand, as expressions that belong to ordinary language; on the other, as uses that force these expressions into a personal, intensified employment. This distinction, made explicit in the Lecture on Ethics, can be seen as operative both in the Tractatus and in his later philosophy.

In Section 4, I comment on this forcing of language as transfiguration. I suggest that Wittgenstein’s understanding of the regions of the ethical and the religious is concerned with a regained contact with familiar objects, one that requires a transformation of the everyday rather than an escape from it. This helps to clarify the shift from the Tractatus to his later work, which involves an understanding of how the dramatic contrast between the world and the Higher is later refigured as inherent in our ordinary attachment to things and people, constantly pierced by denial and moments of peace regained.

Section 5 draws out the consequences of this reading for how we should approach Wittgenstein on religion. We begin, in Section 3, from a reading of the Tractatus that requires acknowledging that value appears both as ordinary talk and as a kind of forcing of language beyond its limits. From the perspective of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, however, this twisting of our uses of language needs to be understood as internal to language use itself. What was taken in the Tractatus as a dramatic overcoming of our involvement in language—the world changing as a whole—is now seen as an internal affair of language-games. It is from the point of view of our internal ordinary involvement with specific language-games that we can make sense of the needs of religion. When Wittgenstein speaks of religion, he is speaking of religion as he was familiar with: ordinary rituals, expressions, and beliefs, which he interrogates for their capacity to remain true to the experience of loss and to the need to regain intimacy and guidance in life—experiences that belong, in his understanding, to the region of the religious.

In Section 6, drawing on Veena Das, I pursue this point and show how religious talk is embedded in ordinary language and connected to a wide range of everyday activities. Religion does not constitute a sealed-off domain shaped by a fixed set of beliefs but articulates a tension internal to ordinary life itself: the recurrent sense that our ordinary words and attitudes are insufficient, and that language finds itself forced in our responses to finitude, loss, and vulnerability. In this reading, religion gives voice to a potentiality of ordinary life, one that emerges through the transfiguration of familiar events and gestures. This brings into view a twofold perspective on religion: in one sense, as an ordinary affair that finds its footing against the background of activities and gestures that are not specifically religious; and, on the other hand, as uses that illuminate the need for a personal employment of words and gestures, expressing the sense that our inhabitation of the world is never settled. From these two directions, this reading engages critically with the apparent insulation of religion, on the one hand, from the wider territory of shared life and, on the other, from the trajectories of individual existence. From the complementary perspectives of what is shared and common, and of what is individual and eccentric, it challenges the idea that religion constitutes a closed, self-contained domain of beliefs and rituals.

Section 7 touches on the question of realism in relation to religion. Religious pictures are not fictional projections set in contrast with the real world of facts, but are part of the ways in which language, attitudes, and life are intertwined. At the same time, language is never perfectly sealed to reality, and religion can be seen as responding to this imperfect sealing and to the exposure to finitude it reveals.

Finally, Section 8 turns to Wittgenstein’s remarks in the Lectures on Religious Belief on unshakeable belief, focusing on the example of belief in the Last Judgement. I argue that the power Wittgenstein attributes to such beliefs is not unique to religion, but is prepared by many ordinary occasions in which language enables us to stand fast at decisive moments in life. Religious expressions acquire their force within this broader context, offering direction, orientation, and confidence in the future, while remaining vulnerable to distortion into magic and dogmatic certainty.

Our attachment to words, revealed in religious rituals, gestures, and language, bears the ambiguity of language itself when it condenses into expressions that interrupt the course of our lives with their transfiguring power. In moments of loss, such expressions offer themselves as a foothold from which we can take our lives up again and move toward a future yet to come. However, they can also imprison us, through the magic they play on us or through their apparent dogmatic reassurance, freezing our openness and responsiveness to life. The ceremonial character of language at the heart of Wittgenstein’s concern with religion unfolds in this ambivalent power to lead us home and to imprison us.

2. Religion and the Aims of Philosophy

Wittgenstein’s philosophy of religion brings into view a problem that we also face with his remarks on ethics, aesthetics and more broadly on cultural issues. We can focus on the personal considerations on these themes scattered throughout his manuscripts, or we can reflect on the place that these themes, and religion specifically, occupy within his philosophical treatment. From this second perspective, the Tractatus is the work in which religion is clearly positioned within the structure of the book alongside ethics and aesthetics, through terms such as God, the mystical, the problem of life, the Higher, the riddle. In the later phase, Wittgenstein devotes lectures to ethics and to questions of value that he had already linked together in the Tractatus. Yet these reflections tend to disappear from the volumes he prepared over the years. What does not disappear is the spirit with which he presented the Tractatus as a work that had an ethical point, as he writes in a letter to Ludwig von Ficker (Wittgenstein 1979a, p. 94), a spirit, or a “fervor”, as Stanley Cavell calls it, that runs through his mature thought (Cavell 1989, p. 30).

The first part of the Philosophical Investigations, which has a finished form with a dated preface introducing the volume, is an example of a work devoted to a variety of problems that are not, on the face of it, ethical or religious, in the sense that we may not immediately associate them with the characteristic vocabulary or concerns of those fields. Yet they are permeated by an ethical and religious tension, and in several passages, we encounter considerations that interrupt the movement of thought with reminders of the ethical spirit that animates the book.

Wittgenstein’s later work thus raises the problem of determining where religion is to be found. But this problem in fact concerns the other branches of philosophy as well. The answer we give to the first question goes together with the answer we give to the second. In what way does Wittgenstein deal with language, mathematics, psychology, and other domains? Does he offer contributions that can be placed within a shared conversation to which other philosophical perspectives, other intellectual interests, the sciences, and broader practical concerns also contribute? Certainly, we learn many things if we read him in this way, that is, from a perspective in which the distinctively philosophical provenance of his remarks is leveled into a debate in which his contribution amounts to presenting gestures toward philosophical views, fragments of theory, for instance about meaning and use, the nature of psychological concepts, and so forth. The many decades in which his philosophical figure enjoyed enormous influence in the analytic tradition were marked largely by this way of approaching his writings.

If instead we do not come to grips with his thought in this way, and we let ourselves be drawn by its specific and peculiar character and its aim to swim against the tide, revealed above all in the manner of writing and in the way he conceives the goals of philosophy, then it is no longer obvious what the contributions in the various areas are directed at. Are they directed toward the solution of conceptual problems in mathematics, psychology, and so on, as such? Or rather do these conceptual investigations belong to a larger philosophical problematic of which they are aspects, moments? It seems to me that Wittgenstein works within this second perspective, which clearly has precedents, even though he frames his work as a revolution in the early 1930s, in the Big Typescript, with respect to the newborn analytic tradition into which he had placed himself, and a similar attitude can be found in the Tractatus, through his peculiar positioning within that tradition, one in which the echoes of Viennese modernism can clearly be heard.

The exalted sense of revolution present in the section “Philosophy” of the Big Typescript turns very soon into the awareness that it was not going to be received by his contemporaries, as he puts it in the Preface to the Philosophical Investigations: “It is not impossible that it should fall to the lot of this work, in its poverty and in the darkness of this time, to bring light into one brain or another but, of course, it is not likely”. More than a decade later, in 1949, Maurice Drury reports him as saying: “My thinking is not wanted in this present age, I have to swim so strongly against the tide” (Drury 1984a, p. 160). The need to swim against the tide refers to many aspects of his work, and I stay here for a moment with the perhaps most prominent one, which is his understanding of what philosophy is.

Despite the sense of swimming against the current, there are precedents that bring his approach to philosophy into clearer focus, an approach that seeks to treat a problem by attending to how we conceive the self from whose point of view a given question becomes problematic. One way of putting it is that there is no problem except through the ways in which the subject comes to be touched and transformed by it. Working within a different intellectual landscape and addressing a distinct set of concerns, Michel Foucault gives a definition of what he calls spirituality that helps bring into focus a dimension also at work in Wittgenstein’s understanding of philosophy.

We will call, if you like, ‘philosophy’ the form of thought that asks, not of course what is true and what is false, but what determines that there is and can be truth and falsehood and whether or not we can separate the true and the false. We will call ‘philosophy’ the form of thought that asks what it is that enables the subject to have access to the truth, and which attempts to determine the conditions and limits of the subject’s access to the truth. If we call this ‘philosophy’, then I think we could call ‘spirituality’ the search, practice, and experience through which the subject carries out the necessary transformations on himself in order to have access to the truth

(Foucault 2005, p. 15).

A few lines later on the same page of this course at the Collège de France in 1982, he adds: “It postulates that for the subject to have the right of access to the truth he must be changed, transformed, shifted, and become, to some extent and up to a certain point, other than himself. The truth is only given to the subject at a price that brings the subject’s being into play” (ibid.).

Historically speaking, Foucault finds in antiquity a moment in which, with the notable exception of Aristotle, the two approaches were not separated, and you could not have philosophical investigation without the spiritual concern for the transformation of the subject. Foucault has his own specific way of characterizing the problematic, and I will not go into it. I would only like to draw from it the theme of how questions of personal transformation can be seen as inseparable from the philosophical manner of investigation. This conception of philosophy can be found in other episodes in its tradition, and I mention here in passing notable moments such as those represented by Spinoza and later by German idealism and more broadly by romanticism. Wittgenstein’s roots in central European modernism show a further installment of these earlier episodes.

The region of the spiritual in Foucault’s thought is not addressed to religion nor to ethics specifically, as it inherits from the ancients their foreignness to the modern departmentalization of the spheres of evaluation and attitude toward life, which is the Wittgensteinian theme in the Tractatus, where ethics, aesthetics and religion run together, and Foucault in fact draws on this conception of spirituality with specifically political aims. Spirituality taken as subjectivation is, in the first place, a locus of political interest for Foucault. I am here resorting to his useful conceptualization of spirituality as a way of reconceiving philosophy at large and will draw on it to consider Wittgenstein’s religious concerns. But we should not lose sight of the broader consequences of this reconception of philosophy. Stanley Cavell is the philosopher to look to for keeping these larger consequences in view from a Wittgensteinian perspective.

Availing ourselves of Foucault’s terminology, we could say that Wittgenstein’s concern with specific philosophical problems is never separated from his spiritual concerns, so that his philosophical investigations are better conceived as ways of dealing with the spiritual transformation of the self. Maurice Drury offers a helpful remark in the notes with which he prefaces his recollections of Wittgenstein. After quoting the letter to von Ficker about the ethical point of the Tractatus, where Wittgenstein says that the book draws limits to the ethical from the inside, Drury writes: “Now I am going to venture to state that all the subsequent writings continue this fundamental idea. They all point to an ethical dimension” (Drury 1984b, p. 81). A few pages later he also writes: “it is obvious that Wittgenstein was interested in many aspects of philosophy. The foundations of mathematics, symbolic logic, the language of psychology, etc. I am only wishing to maintain that alongside of these specific interests there is to be found an ethical demand, if we were to understand the implications of his work to their full extent” (ibid., p. 84). I would only like to partially redirect this important comment by saying that the ethical demand is not found alongside but in these specific interests themselves, as they are all aimed at drawing limits to the ethical from the inside by elucidating language in the different spheres of life.

There is no other way to attend to the goal of spirituality, as I defined it in connection to Foucault, other than by working on our involvements with language in the specific quarters of life. Spirituality does not concern a superluminiscent sphere separated and insulated from ordinary affairs; it lies in anything we do, in the sharp and solid reality of every detail that becomes our entire world, “the true world among shadows” as Wittgenstein writes in 1916 in the Notebooks (8 October 1916) preparatory to the writing of the Tractatus: “If I have been contemplating the stove, and then am told: but now all you know is the stove, my result does indeed seem trivial. For this represents the matter as if I had studied the stove as one among the many things in the world. But if I was contemplating the stove it was my world, and everything else colourless by contrast with it. (…) For it is equally possible to take the bare present image as the worthless momentary picture in the whole temporal world, and as the true world among shadows” (Wittgenstein 1979b, p. 83).

The characterization of his aim as spiritual, that is, as involving a work on oneself aimed at dispelling illusions and imprisonments of our own making tied to torment and suffocation, is spelled out clearly throughout his journey, for example in the set of sections in the Investigations dedicated to philosophy. It also appears in the various asides and breaks in his involvement with specific problems, when, in a concentrated proposition, the sense of this intricate conversation among different voices appears like a clearing after having walked in the thick green, only to disappear immediately after. This occurs, for instance, when, in the middle of his considerations on the concept of pain, he leaves the grammatical investigation and shifts briefly to the perspective of theory, in sections 302 and 308: “Aren’t you nevertheless a behaviourist in disguise?” (Wittgenstein 2009, PI, §§302, 309), and pauses immediately after in section 309 with an aphorism about the spirit of his work as a whole: “What is your aim in philosophy?—To show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle” (PI, §309)1.

These asides or moments of interruption within the tormented effort to lead words back to their ordinary use find their counterpart in his personal remarks, not intended to belong to the structure of his philosophical argument. This raises the question of how we are to distinguish these personal remarks from the philosophical work. Philosophical work is also a form of work on oneself, as he writes: “Work on philosophy—like work in architecture in many respects—is really more work on oneself” (CV, 14 October 1931, Wittgenstein 1998a, p. 24). Yet it is a kind of work that Wittgenstein presents as philosophy, whereas the personal remarks are for himself, or they are parts of philosophical work as moments of pause and concentration, aphorisms that condense his personal experience. In any case, they are not self-standing. In this sense, the ethical spirit of his work cannot be understood by following only his evocative and penetrating observations on philosophy, ethics, and religion. Rather, it emerges from within his philosophical work itself, in his remarks on pain, counting, intention, meaning, pictures, and so on. Even though the development of his thought undergoes a radical break with his return to philosophy in 1929, it would be mistaken to abandon the basic orientation of the Tractatus, according to which ethics, religion, and aesthetics form a unity and are referred back to the work and aims of philosophy. That orientation remains true to the later stages as well.

The method of philosophy changes radically after the break that followed the completion of the Tractatus. It reaches maturity in the Investigations, and it is marked by a series of shifts, before and after the Investigations. Yet within this new way of working, we encounter once again the same transformative conception of philosophy, which responds to losses and ruptures. In the Investigations, these losses and ruptures become the very site of the ordinary, as it is splendidly shown in Cavell’s work: the place to which we bring words back, and ourselves along with them—not a secure foundation but a familiarity of gestures and human responses that just as naturally becomes strange and foreign. Philosophical work concerns the many ways of addressing uneasiness and the loss of confidence in the words we use, in the things we do, and in the great constructions of knowledge, culture, and of our social life.

Ethics concerns this kind of transformative work; it addresses these losses. The language of the Investigations is the language of oppression and anxiety, and of peace attained, however momentarily, in the search for a familiarity and naturalness in how we proceed in life, a proceeding that never places us on invulnerable ground. It is precisely the idea of invulnerability that is depicted as mythological: rules that apply themselves and run along tracks already laid down, series that count themselves, the meaning of a word that appears to us as if in a flash, with nothing left to do or to discover in future applications. Mythology marks precisely the erasure of the temporal unfolding of one’s commitments, which requires work and the encounter with contingency, effacing one’s personal contribution and the work of time and chance. In this sense, there is a philosophy of mathematics, of psychology, of language, of knowledge—not as philosophical branches in the traditional sense, but as specific ways in which the spontaneous attunement to life (Wittgenstein 1998b, II, 699) is assured in the fabric of language and is lost as well in this same fabric.

3. Two Entries into Value

We should keep the Tractatus in view as we look at Wittgenstein’s later trajectory. Ethics and religion and the other evaluative spheres are all philosophical; they concern the movement of loss and recovery of language. Yet they also mark areas of discourse with their own specific contents: the morality mentioned in the Tractatus, tied to duty and retribution; religion illustrated by the concept of God, the meaning of life, and the problem of death. It is therefore important to acknowledge both the specificity of the language-games of ethics, religion, aesthetics, the meaning of life, and the fact that Wittgenstein treats them together, presenting them side by side. As I suggest, these language-games are in turn connected to the very nature of philosophical work, understood as spirituality in the specific sense given to the term by Foucault.

Starting in the early 1930s, in his lectures and in his texts—as in the Investigations—the specific words that refer to these areas of life and thought are analyzed through an illustration of their grammar. For example, take the discussion in the Investigations of how our use of words is not everywhere bounded by rules. Drawing a sharp boundary around a concept can become hopeless when its uses are varied and move in many different directions. It is like having to draw a sharp picture corresponding to a blurred one, he writes.

“Here I might just as well draw a circle as a rectangle or a heart, for all the colours merge. Anything—and nothing—is right.”—And this is the position in which, for example, someone finds himself in ethics or aesthetics when he looks for definitions that correspond to our concepts.

In this sort of predicament, always ask yourself: How did we learn the meaning of this word (“good”, for instance)? From what sort of examples? In what language-games? Then it will be easier for you to see that the word must have a family of meanings.

(PI, §77).

The line of reasoning here is shaped by his engagement with the philosophical instrument of language-games, which invites us to resist the inclination to think of our mastery of language as requiring definitions and the deductive application of concepts. He is working with this new notion of grammar that leads to dispelling the need for self-standing universals doing the job all by themselves. These are the kinds of requirements that we impose on language, he says (PI, §107), instead of setting out to describe it.

Within this discussion, we find the examples of ethics and aesthetics, associated together as in the Tractatus, as a case in which we are misguided in searching for definitions and should look instead to the language-games involving these and related words. In the lectures of the early thirties, he had pursued a similar line of reasoning, offering remarks about “the grammar of ethical expressions, or, e.g., of the word ‘God’”, as Moore puts it in his notes (Moore 1993, p. 103). Similarly, later in the Lectures on Aesthetics, he says that to understand aesthetics one must look at the language-games, that is, at the occasions and activities surrounding words such as beautiful and good (Wittgenstein 1967a, pp. 1–3). And, again, in the Philosophical Investigations praying is listed among the variety of language-games he presents in section 23—“requesting, thanking, cursing, greeting, praying”—an ordinary activity like the others in the list.

What is the relation between these considerations on grammar and those found in the Tractatus? I do not wish to venture into an interpretation of his first work, but we should keep in mind that already in the Tractatus the evaluative spheres played a double role: on the one hand, as propositions that required elucidation, and on the other, as ways of characterizing philosophical work as such, which does not occupy a specific place in language. Cavell is helpful here when he writes: “for Wittgenstein philosophy is not a culture, not one among others. It is without (no matter how persistently it craves to have) a persistently accepted and evolving language of its own, retaining only some local terms that will be disputed and repudiated by other philosophers; ‘houses of cards’ Wittgenstein will call its parade of discourses” (Cavell 2007, pp. x–xi). Cavell’s claim holds for the Philosophical Investigations, which he is discussing, and also for the Tractatus.

The Tractatus does not exclude the possibility that there are ethical propositions, by which I mean propositions that belong to our language and that we can characterize in this way within language. They have a use in which we fix the meaning of words (Wittgenstein 1961, TLP, §3.3); they do not pose a challenge to the determination of the meaning of expressions (TLP, §5.473). Therefore, when he writes that there can be no ethical propositions, he is not excluding propositions that have a use in our ordinary language. How could he? His aim is not to rule out any proposition that belongs to the intricate organism of ordinary language (TLP, §4.002). The propositions of our colloquial, common language (Umgangssprache) are in perfect logical order as they stand. We have words such as good, beautiful, God, and many other expressions that we use and that belong to ordinary language, which is in order as it is.

What Wittgenstein calls ethics and religion and so forth in the concluding propositions of the Tractatus are ways of using language such that we cannot—that is, we refuse to—fix the meaning of the words we use, because what we want to say would otherwise be lost, and what remains is this twisting of language. As Cora Diamond puts it: “We (…) recognize that the person who utters some sentence speaks with an intention that would (though he himself may not be aware of this) be frustrated by his sentence’s making sense” (Diamond 2000, p. 163). This twisting places these expressions outside the world and outside language. I am describing the situation as Wittgenstein formulates it in the Lecture on Ethics with respect to what he calls absolute value. When we are using certain expressions, such as the wonder at the existence of the world, in an absolute or ethical sense, “not only (…) no description that I can think of would do to describe what I mean by absolute value, but (…) I would reject every significant description that anybody could possibly suggest, ab initio, on the ground of its significance” (Wittgenstein 1993a, p. 44).

This seems the most direct way to read the Tractatus, where Wittgenstein writes that “all the propositions of our everyday language, just as they stand, are in perfect logical order” (TLP, 5.5563), and that our flight from language is realized in the perception of the intrinsic insufficiency of language itself—a perception that must be understood for what it is: not as a revelation about the logical nature of language, but as our own way of taking up a position, an attitude toward words and life, as he writes in the Notebooks (Wittgenstein 1979b, 4 November 1916, p. 86), which, once acknowledged, transforms the problem of life into the disappearance of the problem itself (TLP, 6.521). “The riddle does not exist” (TLP, 6.5), that is, there is no problem of the meaning of life that we confront as a formulable question for which we can seek a solution. The fact that the problem of life does not exist—revealed in its dissolution as a problem—discloses our attitude toward the world. This is what his mysticism consists of: it is not about ineffable experiences to be revealed, nor about mysterious states of reality that can be disclosed indirectly. Rather, it is the common and everyday happenings, the things we know and grasp in our daily activities, that can be transfigured and become something else (Donatelli 2005).

4. Religion as Transfiguration: A Modernist Strand

As I have said, Wittgenstein can be placed in relation to distinct strands of the earlier philosophical and cultural tradition. For my purposes, it is important to see how the Tractatus can be located within a distinctive modernist current, in which it is the literal surface of the world that is transformed into an otherness that has no space except in this “transfiguration” of the literal (to use Cavell’s expression, in This New Yet Unapproachable America (Cavell 1989, p. 43))—one that does not end in a parallel world or in a sui generis experience. Kafka is the master of this kind of transfiguration, and I would like to evoke him through the words of Peter Weiss when he describes his first encounter with The Castle and The Trial in his autobiographical book The Vanishing Point.

In this extraordinary novel, which follows the previous installment Leavetaking (both translated into English under the title Exile), he describes how he had moved to Sweden after his family fled following the German occupation of the Czech Sudetenland. In Stockholm, in a foreign land and surrounded by a language that was not his own, Weiss claims his independence from his family. He settles into a room where he arranges familiar objects: his paintings and drawings, notebooks with his first attempts at writing, letters, and books. The titles, colors, and ornamentation of the books evoke in him a web of memories—of the rooms in England, northern Bohemia, Prague, Tessin, and his parents’ houses—while their pages preserve the dreams and fantasies of his adolescence. A long list of authors and titles follows.

Only for two books in brown bindings, The Castle and The Trial could I find no room. I had received the books from Peter Kien in Prague and had often skimmed through them and tried to read them, but always lay them aside again. Suddenly I was receptive to the opening words of The Trial. Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning. This was the book I read that first night in my new room. All that I had read previously receded into the background. In all the books that had revealed their world to me so that I might identify myself there had always been some chance of retreat—into mysticism or a concept of beauty, into an idyll or illusory love. In all these books I became aware of reservations and escape clauses that no longer existed in Kafka

(Weiss 1968, p. 131).

In the previous pages, Weiss had already described his sense that mysticism was a way of stopping short in the encounter with reality. His friendship with the journalist and writer Max Barth (disguised in the novel under the name Max Bernsdorf) had shown him this: “Even when I was with Max in Prague I had discovered how oppression and uncertainty could disappear, how all things had their form, color, weight and each its name. In his presence the world was simple and matter-of-fact, full of people, animals and buildings” (ibid., p. 99). A few pages later, again in Max’s presence, he reflects on how leaving his family had brought no surge of creativity; his paintings yielded only dull remnants of the shining visions that the city could afford. Abandoning the canvas, he turned instead to an inner dialogue with Max.

What I wanted to say was just as formless as the pictures. The words that sprang to mind explained nothing. Beneath them lay an inarticulate stammer. But there was an exact term for every vague idea that haunted me, everything that had happened could be communicated. There was nothing that lay outside the realm of the comprehensible. The greatest adventure was to produce an unequivocal, exact world. I wanted to sweep away the mystical, which was nothing but ideas half thought through, feelings half thought through, feelings half felt, and experiences feebly evaded. Everything can be explained, I wanted to say, as I betook myself to Max Bernsdorf’s room. My existence, my origins, my death, eternity, for all these there is an explanation, otherwise life could not go on, I can place my faith in all things, when I am wide awake all things are understandable, even though my intelligence may not be equal to it. Everything is given, I need not put on an act, need not rack my brains, it is enough to hang onto the objectively real, on what presents itself to me, on what I can lay my hands on

(ibid., pp. 116–17).

The mystic is presented in this passage as ideas and feelings half thought through and experiences feebly evaded, the impression of another world, the sense of a mysterious reality lying behind the appearance of objects and people, cities, happiness and horror. This refusal of mysticism as the reign of half-thought ideas and feelings leads Weiss to a renewed faith in ordinary objects, which turns mysticism upside down and finds it in the very same objective reality—in people, animals, and buildings—that had been evaded by the fascination with the confused evocation of another world. Later, the encounter with Kafka presents him with a writing that offers no easy escape into an illusory mysticism exempted from the responsibilities of life. These intense pages by Weiss are an example of Wittgenstein’s understanding of mysticism, which requires precisely overcoming the consolatory illusion of a fantastic reality in which to find respite from the burden of one’s present existence, and points instead to the need to earn a new confidence in ordinary objects, in people, animals, and buildings, a faith in the ordinary language in which they reside.

Wittgenstein remains faithful to this modernist conception of the religious, the ethical, and the aesthetic, in which the higher sphere of life (“Propositions can express nothing that is higher”, as he writes in TLP, 6.42) is taken as the transfiguration of the most ordinary things and does not occupy any other space. However, this is precisely the region of philosophy, which has no language of its own and is not a culture among others, but develops through the critique of language and of culture when they become problematic, in a transformative movement of one’s relation to words and culture, a transformative movement concerning what speaks on our behalf: the grammar of the language-games that shape us as individuals with desires and intentions, commitments, promises, hopes, and disappointments. What speaks in our name can betray us, and the evaluative spheres that are outside the world and outside language register this disappointment with our finitude (Cavell 1999, p. 454). The critique of culture that is not itself a culture, and the transformation of the self that is not itself a pedagogy, concern this movement of avoidance and recovery of the words that speak in our name.

When he returns to philosophy professionally in the 1930s, the presentation of the evaluative spheres as exemplifications of this transfigurative movement no longer carries the dramatic role it had assumed in the Tractatus. In a certain sense the higher disappears from the scene, but in another sense the explicit citation of this locus of the ethical, understood as the problem of life, surfaces at every moment in which Wittgenstein comments on what he is doing—namely, philosophy—as the attempt to bring a torment to rest (PI, §133), or when he writes that the starting point of philosophy is a loss of orientation: “A philosophical problem has the form: ‘I don’t know my way about’” (PI, §123). But, as I have said, these are moments in which the experience of loss and the spiritual sense of quest no longer take on the dramatic exposure they had in the Tractatus, and appear instead as episodes within a philosophical texture composed of many movements, strands of questions and examples interlacing, shifts of register, pauses and returns.

In this texture we find, for instance in the Investigations (§119), an assertion such as the following, “The results of philosophy are the discovery of some piece of plain nonsense and the bumps that the understanding has got by running up against the limits of language”, which in the Tractatus constituted the very structure of the work as introduced in the Preface: “the aim of the book is to draw a limit to thought, or rather—not to thought, but to the expression of thoughts: for in order to be able to draw a limit to thought, we should have to find both sides of the limit thinkable (i.e., we should have to be able to think what cannot be thought)” (TLP, p. 3), echoed in various famous propositions in the book about the limits of the world and of what is sayable. The structure of the Tractatus thus resurfaces in the Investigations as an aphorism, a parable, within a more complex texture2.

As Wittgenstein writes in sections 96 and 97 of the Investigations, if words that philosophy has treated empathically, surrounding them with an aura, words such as thought, language and world, have a use, it is the modest use that belongs to words like table, lamp, and door. In the Tractatus, the expressions that give voice to the sense in which the world as a whole becomes an object of contemplation, or in which we can experience a transformation of the world as a whole, are later recast as pictures. Taken as pictures, they have a descriptive role in our life and therefore require application in specific circumstances, since they do not carry an autonomous meaning in themselves. In this way, we can make sense of the claim that the world waxes or wanes as a whole (as TLP 6.43 puts it) by imagining the circumstances in which such an expression has a use. We can read into this picture, for example, situations in life, of suffocation, isolation or exhaustion when the world shrinks into a place we can inhabit only as ghosts. Expressions such as this one register a significant or radical turn (or rupture) in life while presupposing the persistence of many things that remain unchanged. That is, to make something of this picture, we need to bring into view the background of ordinary life in which it can find an application.

In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein asks the reader to discard what she had attempted to entertain as propositions: this is how expressions such as those in 6.43 about the world that waxes or wanes as a whole find their place within the book. Later, in the Investigations, the work becomes one of attending meticulously to the pictures that impose on us. Taken as a picture, the thought that the world changes radically as a whole requires that we explore the circumstances in which it has an application, or that we recognize the illusion it generates and the effects that this produces because the picture does not spare us the work of understanding how it is used (PI, II, VII, §55). In a sense, we do not climb a ladder out of language to experience this kind of intensification or frozen habitation in it, but descend into the details of ordinary life where these movements of words are registered, to use the powerful picture of descent offered by Veena Das in Life and Words (Das 2007).

5. Religious Language-Games

I would like to return to the question of the grammar of ethical and religious expressions. As I have said, it may seem that when Wittgenstein changes his philosophical method and begins to explore the grammar of language-games involving moral and religious words, beliefs, and rituals, the contrast he had established in the Tractatus between language and what I am calling here the transfiguration of the letter of what we say disappears. I would instead suggest that this contrast takes on a different shape. On the one hand, its explicit and dramatic expression in the form of the limits of the world and of what lies outside reappears in the aphorisms that interrupt a philosophical development. This produces an important shift, as it de-dramatizes the Ethical and the Higher of the Tractatus by bringing them back to the many little crises and deaths that mark the everyday—to recall Cavell’s characterization of the ordinary. And yet the question of the grammar of the ethical and the aesthetic remains, the grammar of the word God, for example, to which Wittgenstein devotes his lectures. And, as he writes in PI (§373), we can think of theology as a way to unfold the grammar of the word God: “Grammar tells what kind of object anything is. (Theology as grammar)”.

In the Tractatus, the issue is left to the reader to engage with. As we saw, ordinary language is in perfect logical order as it stands, and language contains a variety of propositions, including propositions we characterize as moral, religious, and so on. Wittgenstein is not ruling out propositions that have a use in our ordinary language but rather offering tools to clarify our uses when they are confused and the determination of meaning becomes an unsurmountable task. This concerns the spheres of value mentioned at the end of the book when he writes that there cannot be propositions of ethics (TLP, §6.42). The Lecture on Ethics cast the problem in these terms when presenting the distinction between relative and absolute value.

And yet it is precisely when Wittgenstein investigates the grammar of ethics, aesthetics, and religion that the contrast becomes clear: between cases in which these expressions have a use and words are at home, as he says in PI (§116), in their everyday use, and cases in which expressions run idle—as when we, that is, the philosopher, “tries to fathom the relation between name and what is named by staring at an object in front of him and repeating a name, or even the word ‘this’, innumerable times” (PI, §38). And he adds: “philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday” (§38). The circumstance in which language takes a holiday from its ordinary use is that of philosophy in its movements away from and back to the everyday; the idling of language is the mark of these movements, and as I have said, Wittgenstein inscribes the ethical and the religious in this region.

That religion requires this kind of shift of language, and of ourselves using language, recurs in various remarks about religion, as in the entry dated 15 February1937 in the so-called Koder diaries published under the title Movements of Thought. He writes that a truly just person cannot in the end come to a point of hopelessness, but requires a kind of glorification, and he continues:

But how can I imagine his glorification? In accord with my feelings I could say: not only must he see the light, but get immediately to the light, become of one nature with it now,—and the like. It therefore seems that I could use all those expressions which religion really uses here. These images thus impose themselves upon me. And yet I am reluctant to use these images & expressions. Above all these are not similes, of course. For what can be said by way of a simile, that can also be said without a simile. These images & expressions have a life rather only in a high sphere of life, they can be rightfully used only in this sphere

(Wittgenstein 2022, pp. 81–82).

And he continues worrying that his aversion to using words as they stand may itself register a temptation to flee from reality: “All I could really do is make a gesture which means something similar to ‘unsayable’, & say nothing”—which seems to lead us back to the atmosphere of the Tractatus. A similar way of putting things is found in a remark from Culture and Value, dated 5 July 1948: “The honest religious thinker is like a tightrope walker. It almost looks as though he were walking on nothing but air. His support is the slenderest imaginable. And yet it really is possible to walk on it” (CV, p. 84).

The mention of these remarks already suggests how the problematic of what in the Tractatus was characterized as the Higher is present in his later thought, religion sharing with philosophy this perception of a flight from reality, its residing in thin air, and the need to transfigure words and pictures by shifting them to a higher sphere, something that requires constant work, a discipline on the self: “if you want to stay within the religious sphere, you must struggle”, as he writes in a remark from 1950, again from Culture and Value (ibid., p. 98)—the struggle with language and with oneself, which is the struggle of philosophy. In his later philosophy, he delves into this work of attending to how religious images and expressions are shifted from their ordinary life to a higher sphere where they can be rightfully used.

Cora Diamond writes that the ethical in Wittgenstein has no content and has no words of its own.

Whole sentences, stories, images, the idea we have of a person, words, rules: anything made of the resources of ordinary language may be brought into such a relation to our lives and actions and understanding of the world that we might speak of the thinking involved in that connection as “moral.” There is no limit to be set. We cannot, that is, say that these are the words, moral words for moral subject matter, that can have this character. If a sentence or image or word has this character, it arises not through its content but from its use on particular occasions

(Diamond 1996, p. 248).

And yet a work is carried out on words and images that already have a primary use, to follow Wittgenstein’s distinction between primary and secondary sense introduced in section xi of the second part of the Investigations (see, e.g., PI, II, §276–278)3. Even in the Tractatus the ubiquity of ethics, according to which ethics consists precisely in the fact that we use signs that say nothing (Diamond 2000, p. 168), is characterized by words that prepare this kind of clarification, among others, the words value, ethics, the higher, aesthetics, good and bad willing, the world of the happy and of the unhappy, God, mystical, the problem of life, the inexpressible, the riddle. They are words that are transfigured in the trajectory of the book and that in this process take on a role they draw from the meaning they already possess in the various contexts of use. For example, the very fact of speaking of the grammar of the word God, as Wittgenstein does, rather than gods in the plural, already sets the stage for a familiarity with certain language-games, while excluding others and, with them, different understandings of the role the gods play in one’s life. As well, the very expression of the higher, central in the Tractatus and reappearing later in his writings, as in Movements of Thought or in places where he invokes the picture of God as occupying a higher position than human beings, as in On Certainty (§554), is itself tied to a specific tradition of thinking about God and to related ideas of ascent. These are taken for granted by Wittgenstein but in fact block other language-games in which these concepts are absent or have different applications that are not tied to the Christian sense of awe and wonder4.

If we do not bring out the specificity of these language-games, we take a range of examples as given and lose sight of the assumptions at work. Consequently, what one personally makes of these language-games, and what counts for us as a form of personal transformation, will also be shaped by the assumptions built into the choice of examples. Thus, already in the Tractatus the question arises about the language-games of ethics, aesthetics and religion, and about their relation to the ethical, aesthetic and religious that instead require a forcing of the language-games and the kind of struggle that Wittgenstein mentions in the passages above from Culture and Value. There is a relation between the language-games of ethics, religion, and aesthetics and the twisting of language and of life that characterizes the fervor of Wittgenstein’s philosophical activity and of what he calls the ethical and the religious.

Saying, as Diamond does, that anything can become a sign of the ethical (and the religious) helps draw attention to the act of twisting language and to the inventiveness inherent in that very act. However, it might not help us see that the ethical and religious urgency to overcome language is internal to one’s involvement with it, an involvement shaped by specific language-games, rituals, and beliefs. In this respect, the thought that anything can become a sign of the ethical risks failing to illuminate Wittgenstein’s own assumptions as he speaks of religion, tied to his upbringing and to the language-games with which he was familiar.

To clarify my point further, we need first to acknowledge the role of the expressions and language-games belonging to the different evaluative spheres that are part of everyday language. Wittgenstein appeals to these linguistic uses to draw attention to the kind of secondary employment that pertains to what he calls absolute value. We begin from religious images and we make of them a personal use that produces this twisting, an intensification of experience, as when he writes: “In religion it must be the case that corresponding to every level of devoutness there is a form of expression that has no sense at a lower level” (CV, 20 November 1937, p. 37). And likewise in the Lecture on Ethics we begin from the right road to take, we transfigure the expression, and we help ourselves with the word ‘absolute’ to indicate this transfiguration in the expression ‘the absolutely right road’. We are using the idea of taking the right road, this language-game, and we make a secondary use of it, shifting it to another level, where those words no longer have meaning, Wittgenstein writes, resuming the way he put it in the Tractatus. In this sense, we begin from a specific and ordinary knowledge of ethics and religion. The secondary use of these expressions can be taken as an instrument for describing one’s experience, as Wittgenstein does in the Lecture when he speaks of absolute value.

Secondly, we need to notice that these expressions are rooted in specific religious traditions and mark one’s personal relation to them. In this light we can consider Wittgenstein’s comments at one point on the Catholics’ appeal to natural reason, which he does not find useful for expressing his own religious experience, while other expressions and images prove more apt (Drury 1984a, pp. 107–8).

However, this way of posing the issue is very approximate and ultimately inadequate. For what Wittgenstein is elucidating is precisely religion and ethics as we ordinarily mean them: these spheres of experience and these language-games, rituals, and beliefs. This fact signals the passage from the Tractatus to the Philosophical Investigations. Even in the Tractatus the task was the elucidation of our language, but he carried it out by establishing the grand and dramatic contrast between language and what lies beyond language, the world and what is outside the world, a contrast that was then to be exploded with proposition 6.54 where he writes that his propositions elucidate insofar as anyone who understands him eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, having used them as steps to climb up beyond them.

In the Investigations and in his later work we do not find this kind of dramatization. The movements that carry words away from ordinary language and back again are continuous and minimal; they are undramatic, for this is the fabric of the ordinary. In the Investigations and in his later work, this kind of dramatization gives way to the continuous and minimal shifts that carry words away from ordinary language and back again, for this is the fabric of the ordinary. As Cavell writes: “What is of philosophical importance, or interest—what there is for philosophy to say—is happening repeatedly, unmelodramatically, uneventfully” (Cavell 1989, p. 75).

Wittgenstein elucidates the texture of life as it is shaped by words; and when we want to signal that an expression requires an individualization of understanding, because it leads us to a region of meaning that sets us apart from others and requires a more intimate understanding from them, such an expression is still part of the ordinary fabric of language and life, together with those expressions that do not make this demand on us. This continuous movement identifies the ordinary. Religious experience that demands one’s participation in a high sphere of life in order to be true to itself is part of ordinary life as much as those language-games that root religious experience in habits and ways of responding to situations that are taken as matters of course.

This kind of transfiguration belongs to our ordinary life; it runs through it and is part of it. And in this sense, when the later Wittgenstein speaks of religion and ethics, he is considering the same language-games that shape personal relations, the ways in which we give importance to things, our judgments, and the descriptive vocabulary of human actions and situations. This is, after all, the scene of the Philosophical Investigations (Cavell 2004), where our expressions are permanently fleeing from and returning to the ordinary, constantly undergoing this elusiveness that Wittgenstein expresses in the form of anguish and torment, and of peace regained, as when he writes: “The real discovery is the one that enables me to break off philosophizing when I want to.—The one that gives philosophy peace, so that it is no longer tormented by questions which bring itself in question” (PI, §133). At other times, this elusiveness takes the form of oppression and suffocation, as in PI §103: “The ideal, as we conceive of it, is unshakable. You can’t step outside it. You must always turn back. There is no outside; outside you cannot breathe”. That we cannot breathe outside expresses the sense of our imprisonment inside: what presents itself as the ideal condition of breathing turns into the suffocation of our voice, as similarly, in PI §105, through the metaphor of slippery ice, the ideal condition of movement—one in which friction is absent—turns into the impossibility of walking, as we find ourselves stuck, frozen in our words.

When Wittgenstein speaks of religion, we should therefore not imagine a special place severed from the ordinary language-games of religion and from the ordinary ways in which we speak and respond to things in life. His concern is with religion as beliefs, practices, rites, gestures, and expressions with which he was familiar, which he approached as nourishment and as a way of confronting his own torments and joys, accompanying his daily path in life5. His remarks often have a personal character, as in the diaries Movements of Thought, and they do not immediately belong to the texture of his philosophical writing. But they are connected to it. Speaking to himself, Wittgenstein seeks in religion and ethics a form of thought and writing that acts upon him as his philosophical work does, which is also a work on himself, though addressed to the public.

6. Religion and Ordinary Life

There is a comment that Veena Das makes about Wittgenstein’s Remarks on Frazer’s The Golden Bough that is very helpful at this juncture. Das responds to the following considerations in the Remarks:

I would like to say: nothing shows our kinship to those savages better than the fact that Frazer has at hand a word as familiar to us as “ghost” or “shade” to describe the views of these people.

(For this surely is something different from what it would be if he were to describe, say, how the savages imagined that their heads would fall off when they have slain an enemy; in this case, our description would have nothing superstitious or magical about it.)

Yes, the strangeness of this relates not only to the expressions “ghost” and “shade,” and far too little is made of the fact that we count the words “soul” [Seele] and “spirit” [Geist] into our own civilized vocabulary. Compared to this, it is a minor detail that we do not believe that our soul eats and drinks

(Wittgenstein 2018, §23, p. 48).

Veena Das writes:

What I take from this remark is that the familiar word ghost gestures to the fact that an understanding derived from the common background of our lives as humans is implicated in the description of “savage” customs. The fact that Frazer can use such words at hand as ghosts and shade connects our life to that of the so-called savages, gives us a footing in that life: their customs can be imagined within our form of life as a “human” form of life

(Das 2020, p. 252).

If someone reported that the so-called savages believed their own heads would simply fall off their bodies when they killed an enemy and are put back when the need arises, we would not know how to make sense of such a description, and it would fail to offer a connection to our sense of the magical or the sinister; it would not find a footing in our form of life. (Or perhaps their ideas of what heads are, and where they belong in the body, are themselves in need of different descriptions, as Das suggested to me). Frank Cioffi comments in this vein about the Fire-festivals: “Our response, our impression of the inner character of the festival, rests on the assumption that cakes play the same role in their lives as in ours. If we learned that the only purpose to which they put cakes was for choosing the Beltane victim and that they were considered inedible for normal purposes, this detail of the ritual would look very different to us” (Cioffi 1998, p. 92). As Das argues, the feeling of dread that the story of the fire festivals elicits lies in the spirit in which it is told. The spirit in which we describe a situation creates a space for our imagination and understanding to work their way into it, a footing in our actual world from which we can enter the story and be struck by it. The words ‘ghost’ and ‘shade’ already have a place in our language; they point to a host of connections that belong to our sense of life, to the facts and the mystery of it, and these are shared by Frazer and his readers.

Wittgenstein writes: “what I see in these stories is something that they acquire, after all, from the evidence, including such evidence as does not seem to be directly connected to them—[they acquire it] through the thought of humans and their past, through all the strangeness of what I see in myself and in others, and what I have seen and heard about it” (Wittgenstein 2018, §45, pp. 68–70). This sense of life and of its strangeness offers the footing in our reality for imagination to be drawn into these stories and to take hold of them. Frazer declares a distance from the savages that is overturned by his own formulation when he presupposes a life with words such as ‘ghost’ and a participation in what provokes a sense of strangeness and the sinister which actually prepare the space where his story can be followed and taken in, eliciting questions, provoking wonder, and striking us with a sense of dread. As Cioffi writes: “It is the space which the story finds already prepared for it that has to be scrutinised and understood, and not the space which the events themselves may occupy” (Cioffi 1998, p. 105).

The important point Das makes for what I am doing here is that a perception of the extraordinary finds its footing in a sense of things and of life that is familiar and inhabits ordinary acts and gestures.

For all our worldliness, then, we might never be fully at home in any particular world. Might one then think of ritual as one way of imagining, What if the world was otherwise? In my reading, this thought could morph into the deep skepticism that might destroy my everyday life or, conversely, it might show that the ability to imagine a different everyday (or eventual everyday) is part of the actual everyday

(Das 2020, p. 259).

When Wittgenstein reflects on his own religious concerns, the space for his sense of elevation or misery is prepared by very ordinary expressions and rituals familiar to him from the Catholic Viennese world in which he was raised, by his closeness to the religiosity of some of his friends, and by his reading of the scriptures and of texts in which he could recognize a form of deep spiritual involvement, together with a consciousness of his Jewish roots—as Maurice Drury reports him saying in 1949: “my thoughts are one hundred per cent Hebraic” (Drury 1984a, p. 161). The familiarity with such language-games offers the space in which his imagination of a higher sphere finds a footing. The way language is re-employed, inflecting its ordinary use in ways that attach intimately to one’s experience, speaks against the idea of flattening the uses of language into a single mold, but it also connects these secondary uses to the linguistic resources on which they draw; it shows possibilities inherent in them, and this is Das’s point.

Religious talk is part of ordinary language; it plays a role in everyday life, where it has connections to all sorts of activities, and yet we can make a use of it that attunes it to the experience and thought of a different everyday in contrast with our actual everyday. We can see such experience and thought as rooted in our actual everyday, as an eventuality folded into it, requiring this transformation of language and life. Philosophy, as Wittgenstein conceives it, is related to this kind of transformation. Any sort of language can be so turned and inflected, as Wittgenstein writes, and this connects with Diamond’s point about the ubiquity of ethics. It must be so, because the transformation of how we see and respond to things concerns the description of our ordinary life as it is, in its detailed texture, transfigured as shown in the modernist strand I evoked above with the help of Weiss. The transcendence of the everyday is in the everyday.

However, we can see how the very pictures Wittgenstein employs, tied to what is higher, can obstruct the recognition that transfiguration concerns how things are in the world. To return to the way he put it in the Tractatus, the picture of the higher, or that of viewing the world from the outside as a limited whole, are useful only insofar as they are overthrown. But once again we must explore how these very pictures, once overcome, prove useful to us. I have emphasized that in the Investigations the drama of the limits of the world is brought back to what happens repeatedly and undramatically, and that the very structure of drawing limits to the world appears as a picture, a parable among others that he offers about our wandering lives as linguistic beings. In this context the picture of a god who knows what we cannot know, that sees in the future and in the consciousness of human beings would be useless or worse misleading (PI, §426). But if we consider Wittgenstein’s difficulty with religious pictures that he draws from the Christian tradition in this perspective, we might recognize how they belong to a mythology buried in language that made it hard for him to acknowledge that what he needed was another ordinary habitation in this same world, something that is, however, clear in his remarks that are not about religion.

The religious so interpreted can be placed within the wider phenomenon of the intensification of language, the reign of the gestural, the perception of the singularity of words that accounts for their soul so that we cannot replace one with another without losing their touch (PI, §530). This is connected to the ceremonial character of human action and gestures, to their acquiring significance for the awakening mind (Wittgenstein 2018, §15, p. 42; see Gargani 2007). Wittgenstein brings the example of the ancient king who was obliged to sit still on the throne without stirring either hands or feet, head or eyes, as it was thought that peace was preserved by his posture. To counter the temptation to read this as a superstitious causal reasoning he remarks: “When someone in our (or at least my) society laughs too much, I press my lips together in an almost involuntary fashion, as if I believed I could thereby keep his lips closed” (Wittgenstein 2018, §34, p. 56). As Das argues, the idea that he could preserve peace by sitting motionless is not a delusion exposed by the superior knowledge of the social scientist; it is a gesture that we can understand against the background of a form of life in which such gestures, or similar ones, have a place and a meaning. By juxtaposing this ritual with the quotidian gesture of pressing one’s lips when someone laughs too loudly, Wittgenstein dissolves the aura of strangeness surrounding the king’s behavior. The mystic and the religious similarly work on the gestural and ceremonial aspect of language that is everywhere present in ordinary language.

Let me bring in a passage from Movements of Thought. In his diary there are recurrent remarks about whether the sun would shine through the window of his house in Skjolden. The following is one of these:

Today I saw the sun from my window at the moment when it started rising from behind the western mountain. Thank God. But to my shame I now believe that this word was not sufficiently heartfelt. For I was quite glad when I really saw the sun but my joy was not deep enough, too merry, not truly religious. Oh, if only I were deeper!

(Wittgenstein 2022, 18 March 1937, p. 98).

When Wittgenstein asks himself whether his joy at the rising sun is deep enough, or whether it was too cheerful and not truly religious, his question makes sense against the background of attitudes and responses to things in life that call for seriousness and solemnity, as in the face of someone’s death, as well as for joy, as when one learns that one has escaped a grave danger and can rejoice in the simple fact of being alive. The space prepared for the religious attitude, and the texture of the concepts related to it, lies in our same ordinary world, where a sense of gratitude for a natural event, that is not the consequence of anyone’s action, is part of our common responses to life, just as relief is when we have escaped a great calamity. The religious attitude works on these familiar responses that belong to our language and asks of them a turn that involves the individual personally. It requires a transformation of these responses and of language that makes room for Wittgenstein’s question about whether his gratitude to God is sufficiently heartfelt.

The sense in which Wittgenstein asks himself whether his joy at the rising sun is truly religious is tied to a sense of religiosity that belongs to ordinary religious language-games, in which the very words religion, God, and the like have a place and appropriate contexts of use. In turn this use of language makes sense against the background of many kinds of talk and observation that we would not ordinarily characterize as religious. At the same time, Wittgenstein’s worry about his words is also tied to the experience of language being intensified through personal use, realizing an inflection that calls for specific ways of being expressed, shared, or exposed to the risk of going unacknowledged. These moments are jointly at stake in Wittgenstein’s investigation of religious expressions.

So what Wittgenstein elucidates are the language-games of religion, rooted in forms of life and entangled in all sorts of connections, and what he shows is the potentiality of these language-games for personal transformation, a potentiality that comes with the transfiguration of ordinary events, common gestures, the rising sun, thoughts about everyday situations. We can take his work in the field of religion, tied as it is to related evaluative areas, as resisting the inclination to treat these language-games as a fated story, as when we feel that we have nothing to contribute in following a rule because the future steps seem already taken. This sense of determinism, which drains motivation and interest, can likewise take hold of religious words and attitudes that are invoked at certain moments in life and that can shape one’s sense of life. His inquiry and personal concern in this area address the sense of exhaustion of one’s living sense of life.

Wittgenstein has remarks in which he says that religious belief is shown in a rootedness in one’s life, but we should not read this as pointing to any exemption from the personal work on oneself. Take this passage from Culture and Value:

It appears to me as though a religious belief could only be (something like) passionately committing oneself to a system of coordinates. Hence although it’s belief, it is really a way of living, or a way of judging life. Passionately taking up this interpretation. And so instructing in a religious belief would have to be portraying, describing that system of reference & at the same time appealing to the conscience. And these together would have to result finally in the one under instruction himself, of his own accord, passionately taking up that system of reference. It would be as though someone were on the one hand to let me see my hopeless situation, on the other depict the rescue-anchor, until of my own accord, or at any rate not led by the hand by the instructor, I were to rush up & seize it

(CV, 21 December 1947, p. 73).

Here, Wittgenstein brings together the instruction given by religious doctrine and one’s willingness to seize it and use it personally. The doctrine offers a system of reference that requires this work of personal appropriation, and it is therefore situated within the movements and shifts of the self, governed by the dialectic of spirituality, defined by the constant struggle against the loss of personal involvement and the pull of conformity to entrenched habits.

Connecting Wittgenstein’s concern with religion (as with everything else he discusses) to a rootedness that cannot be contested turns his preoccupation upside down, because the roots he is seeking are those of an ever-renewed gaze and response to the world. Mistaking the religious for entrenched habits and rituals is precisely what Wittgenstein is resisting. In his diary from 1937 he repeatedly asks whether his words and acts are true to himself. Is it an error to pray, to give thanks, and to speak to God when no one is before us? His first answer is that this makes sense, given that these belong to a grammar of praying or expressing gratitude to God, which is the grammar he was familiar with:

One kneels & looks up & folds one’s hands & speaks, & says one is speaking with God, one says God sees everything I do; one says God speaks to me in my heart: one speaks of the eyes, the hand, the mouth of God, but not of the other parts of the body: Learn from this the grammar of the word ‘God’!

(Wittgenstein 2022, 23 February 1937, p. 92; see also the entry dated 20 March 1937).

However, the consideration of the grammar of the word ‘God’ does not settle his worries, as it leads him to ask whether the words spoken are truly faithful to himself, whether they come from a higher sphere, whether they are genuinely heartfelt, as he writes in the passage I have already mentioned: “Thank God. But to my shame I now believe that this word was not sufficiently heartfelt. For I was quite glad when I really saw the sun but my joy was not deep enough, too merry, not truly religious. Oh, if only I were deeper!” (Wittgenstein 2022, 18 March 1937, p. 98).

In the same remarks in this diary, Wittgenstein comments on his philosophical work. He dwells continually on moments of clarity and personal happiness, as well as on phases of darkness. He also reflects on the necessity that his writing be cast in sentences and short remarks: “It is quite possible that after quite a few coherent chapters in my work I can & should write only loose remarks. I am a human being, after all & dependent on how it goes! But it is difficult for me to really acknowledge that” (ibid., 28 February 1937, p. 94). Wittgenstein thinks about philosophy in the same vein as he thinks about life from a religious perspective and, as he is reported by Drury: “I am not a religious man but I cannot help seeing every problem from a religious point of view” (Drury 1984b, p. 79). What is at stake is tracing the grammar that finds a home for the words we use, but this involves an intimacy with them that is continuously in peril. His philosophical method, described in the Preface to the Investigations, of presenting remarks meant to respond to the flights of words away from their contexts and occasions of use also traces his personal journey through moments of illumination and ease with words, and moments in which he is at a loss in language.

Christianity offers its specific language and pictures about the light shed on one’s life, and Wittgenstein gives his own beautiful reading of it. He writes:

A human being lives his ordinary life with the illumination of a light of which he is not aware until it is extinguished. Once it is extinguished, life is suddenly deprived of all value, meaning, or whatever one wants to say. One suddenly becomes aware that mere existence—as one would like to say—is in itself still completely empty, bleak. It is as if the sheen was wiped away from all things, everything is dead

(Wittgenstein 2022, 22 February 1937, p. 91).

Philosophy addresses the permanent threat of existence becoming empty and bleak. His religious concerns present another face of this threat. In his philosophical work as well as in his personal remarks written for himself, he registers how this movement from light to emptiness and bleakness is a quotidian matter—it gives life a sense of struggle, yet also reveals the need to acknowledge the little deaths that punctuate ordinary life.

To recapitulate the argument of the last two sections, we need to acknowledge the turn taken by Wittgenstein’s philosophy from the early 1930s onward, when the evaluative spheres come to be treated explicitly as language-games. This turn creates a new problematic for Wittgenstein, since he still wishes to account for the resistance that language itself offers at certain moments, when our orientation within language and culture calls for an overcoming of language and culture as they stand. His aim is clearly not to turn G. E. Moore’s ontological treatment of goodness as a property into an analysis of the linguistic uses of moral, aesthetic, or religious language (as R. M. Hare did for the language of morals). I have emphasized the fact that the later Wittgenstein speaks of the language-games of ethics, aesthetics, and religion in order to prepare the ground for what follows, namely his work on religion as a motley of words, practices, and gestures that are very common and have a life of their own.

In the first place, we need to notice how these practices make sense against the background of many other language-games and activities. Religion is not a separate realm sealed off from the wider territory of language uses and forms of life. Its words, rituals, and practices live against the background of many other activities that resist being neatly compartmentalized into potentially clashing identities, such as those we would ordinarily take to define the religious.

The second point is that it is within this understanding of religion that Wittgenstein finds language resisting us. In many of Wittgenstein’s remarks, the religious expresses the sense that our inhabitation of the world is never settled, and repeatedly becomes the scene of a quest for measuring the right word and the right attitude toward the experience of the world (as, for instance, the rising of the sun) in its singular finitude. What I have tried to show is that religion is, in this sense, a very ordinary phenomenon—language-games embedded in contexts of life—and that our sense of never being fully at home, of marveling at the rising sun, for example, is itself part of the texture of ordinary life.

7. The Reality of Religious Pictures

This transformed perception, which employs ordinary resources to yield a renewed vision, concerns this world, as I have argued. Wittgenstein emphasizes this against the tendency to play with the idea that we are entering an alternate world, a world of magic—the view that takes mysticism to consist in access to such an alternate reality. His awareness that, in thinking about the power of words to transform experience, we are tempted into imagining that we move in a different world shaped by magic is very acute, as when he writes in PI §110: “‘Language (or thinking) is something unique’—this proves to be a superstition (not a mistake!), itself produced by grammatical illusions. And now the impressiveness retreats to these illusions, to the problems”.

In the religious context, his worry that his thoughts verge toward superstition is constant, as when he writes: “I believe that I should not be superstitious, that is, that I should not perform magic on myself with words I may be reading, that is, that I should & must not talk myself into a sort of faith, a sort of unreason. I shall not sully reason. (…) I believe that human beings can let their lives be guided by inspirations entirely in all their actions and I must now believe that this is the highest life” (Wittgenstein 2022, 21 February 1937, p. 89). The power of words to offer an inspiration that guides one’s life lies nowhere else than in the very same words being used and applied to life in a way that transforms vision and motivation: “A sentence can appear absurd & the absurdity at its surface be engulfed by the depth which as it were lies behind it. This can be applied to the thought concerning the resurrection of the dead & to other thoughts linked to it.—What gives it depth, however, is its application: the life led by the one who believes it” (ibid., 1 December 1936, p. 72, trans. modified). It is language as such that has this power.

This understanding of language also counters another familiar idea: that the worlds thus created are fictional and illusory in contrast with the real world of facts, an idea that can be translated into the philosophical thesis of anti-realism. On this view, there is the hard reality offered by the sciences on one side, and, on the other, imaginative constructions (religious, but also ethical and aesthetic) that make us believe various things, attract us, and bind us to ideals, loyalties, and commitments that are not real even though they have a role in our life.

Wittgenstein is everywhere critical of the view that reality grounds language from the outside, and against this he shows how words and reality are enmeshed in life. Words, images, and gestures coil around life in constructions (Gebilde, as in PI, §108), in concretions that create the world in which we live. According to antirealism, all we can aspire to is to live with commitments that have a role even though we know they are groundless. By contrast, as I read Wittgenstein, the task is precisely to dismantle the idea of normativity as an ideal to which ordinary language can only approximate, and to lead us back to the concretions in which language and life are intimately intertwined. This applies also to his religious concerns, as when he writes: “another life shifts completely different images into the foreground, necessitates completely different images. Just like trouble teaches prayer. That does not mean that through the other life one will necessarily change one’s opinions. But if one lives differently, one speaks differently. With a new life one learns new language-games” (Wittgenstein 2022, 4 February 1937, p. 77). In these concretions, we have developed a habitation of our own, an attachment to life. They are cultural constructions, both personal and collective, in which we can find ourselves at home, and they offer us objects of love on which we can place our trust in the moment after the present, one day after another.

However, Wittgenstein is also far from portraying a peaceful agreement of language and the world, the kind that the philosophical tradition has claimed can be discerned once we achieve a properly rational view of reality (e.g., the Thomist line that some Wittgensteinians have found attractive). From the vantage point of reason so conceived, there is no longer room for the difficulties of language, for the moments of loss that punctuate ordinary life, leading words back to their everyday employment, leading ourselves back to where we can find peace and resume our life. Wittgenstein offers an entirely different view from this serene picture of a “metaphysical” reality immune from our human predicaments, safe, that is, from human subjectivity.

The sealing of language to reality is never something acquired once and for all. As Das writes, “the contact between language and reality is not a singular once-and-for-all achievement, which we either reach or fail to reach by the layering of a system of names against a system of objects”. “Wittgenstein’s later work is one of disappointment, for we may succeed and then flounder repeatedly”, and she goes on to note how his manner of writing itself is the most prominent site of this acknowledgment of disappointment in finite attempts at expression: “This is a stance mirrored in the form of writing especially in Philosophical Investigations and On Certainty, when paragraphs come to an end abruptly and then begin again later as the same thought reappears with a new example or a different formulation” (Das 2020, p. 248). We never simply inhabit our concretions; words slip out of touch with reality, and this is Cavell’s theme of the ordinary as a place of trance and loss as well as of intimacy and familiarity. So, once we have earned the right to realism, which is the reality of these concretions made of life and language, we need to see how they do not seal language to reality perfectly, nor are we ourselves perfectly sealed within them. Philosophy responds, on the contrary, to this imperfect sealing of language to reality; it shows our ways back to reality as well as our exposure to the loss of spontaneous agreement within language, installing our disappointment with language as the mark of our ordinary life. Religion, with its specificity of expressions and rituals, is about earning the right to speak about this exposure, the right to inhabit it—to speak and live outside language-games as the only way to be able to speak on their behalf.

The occasions that invite a skeptical flight from reality are found in the cracks that open at any moment in language and in life. This flight takes the form of a view from outside, from above, that registers the insubstantiality and meaninglessness of our habitation and leaves us adrift in a vast and incomprehensible world that remains foreign to our attempts at partialization, at grasping parts of it by giving them meaning through our affective investment. If we do not acknowledge that the path of skepticism is always open, we live in denial—the denial of death and finitude, and of the little deaths and the small, repetitive endings that pervade ordinary life. But the view from outside is not habitable except in superstition. The superstitious view from outside depends on this imagination of totality, on looking at the whole world from the outside, on this illusion. Yet such pictures can have a place for us, within language and within our lives; they can play a role in allowing us to move on, one step after another. These pieces of mythology can be put to use and can find an application in life.

8. Unshakeable Beliefs

The intimacy with language, as when we feel a word fits its meaning or when a sentence strikes us as a painting in words, accounts for the fact that we can inhabit language personally; we can speak from a stance that is incomprehensible from the stance of another. Religious belief places the individual in this personal use of concepts and rituals. The notion of religious belief has attracted many diverse treatments and easily lends itself to various misunderstandings, as Wittgenstein himself acknowledges: “the word ‘believing’ has wrought horrible havoc in religion” (Wittgenstein 2022, 19 April 1937, p. 106). Religious belief belongs to the entire attitude we have toward life. “I mean, my belief in providence, my feeling: ‘everything happens through the will of God’. And this is no opinion—also not a conviction, but an attitude toward the things & what is happening” (ibid., 15 March 1937, p. 97)6. Questions of complete certainty are also treated in terms of attitude in On Certainty: “it’s not that on some points men know the truth with perfect certainty. No: perfect certainty is only a matter of their attitude” (Wittgenstein 1969, §404).

These various cases concern how matters rooted in our forms of life are marked by our subjective inflections, which can make us feel either intimacy with language and other people or isolation, as when I declare my unknownness to others. That another person cannot have my pain is a grammatical proposition, one that goes to determine the meaning of the word pain, and yet I can find myself doubting that my pain can ever be known by others, as when someone says emphatically: “But surely another person can’t have this pain!” (PI, §253). The knowledge of someone else’s pain requires more than knowledge; it demands acknowledgment that someone is suffering, as Cavell argues (“Knowing and Acknowledging” in Must We Mean What We Say?), shown in our expressions of sympathy, in the willingness to help, in a host of attitudes and responses that describe a form of life around the concept of pain. “How am I filled with pity for this human being? How does it come out what the object of my pity is? (Pity, one may say, is one form of being convinced that someone else is in pain)” (PI, §287). And we may fail to be filled with pity because of indifference, callousness, coldness, or exhaustion. Or because the pain suffered requires that someone is marked by it, as in Wittgenstein’s example of feeling pain in the body of another person’s body (Wittgenstein 1958, p. 49). It calls for someone that imagines this pain in her body and allows it to happen to her (Das 2007, chap. 3).

The isolation in which we are confined by others or in which we confine ourselves bears connections with the religious examples that Wittgenstein discusses. The gulf between the believer and the non-believer that he mentions in the Lectures on Religious Belief can be understood by looking at other contexts in which understanding requires an acknowledgment of an entire way of living and responding to life: “Suppose someone were a believer and said: ‘I believe in a Last Judgement’, and I said: ‘Well, I’m not so sure. Possibly’. You would say that there is an enormous gulf between us” (Wittgenstein 1967b, p. 53). If someone said there was an airplane above our heads I might doubt it; we would not be close in our beliefs but close enough for me to consider that it could be true. But the believer in a Last Judgement and his interlocutor are neither near nor far; they are on entirely different planes. “The difference might not show up at all in any explanation of the meaning” (ibid.), because it is their personal employment of the words about the Last Judgement that creates a gulf between them. But how? As I have suggested following Das, there are all sorts of connections between them that are invisible from the point of view of their religious beliefs. A few lines below, Wittgenstein is reported as saying:

Suppose somebody made this guidance for this life: believing in the Last Judgment. Whenever he does anything, this is before his mind. In a way, how are we to know whether to say he believes this will happen or not?

Asking him is not enough. He will probably say he has proof. But he has what you might call an unshakeable belief; It will show, not by reasoning or by appeal to ordinary grounds for belief, but rather by regulating for in all his life.

This is a very much stronger fact—foregoing pleasures, always appealing to this picture. This is one sense must be called the firmest of all beliefs, because the man risks things on account of it which he would not do on things which are by far better established for him. Although he distinguishes between things well-established and not well-established

(Wittgenstein 1967b, pp. 53–54).

The whole manner this person lives is the place to look in order to understand what he means by the belief in the Last Judgement. In this sense his belief irradiates through everything he does and through the ways he responds to situations in life. Yet we can appreciate the way of living woven into his belief only against the background of many connections with the lives of people who do not hold this belief. There are shared concepts, rituals, and manners of response that prepare the space for the application of the story of the Last Judgement in his life. His unshakable belief makes sense over these shared patterns of life.

The power of words and pictures to guide life is a common experience shared across very different ways of living and diverse moral and religious orientations. For example, the words spoken by an adult to a child, the gestures, the play of the eyes, the movements of the limbs, and the tone of voice (to recall Augustine’s passage quoted at the start of the Investigations) are very little things; they are just fragments when compared to the enormity of what is learned, that is, the forms of life in which language is folded (Cavell 1999, pp. 112, 172–73). These single words and gestures carry an authoritativeness that is in them and yet also lies beyond them; they guide the child into the world, and their force and power are immensely consequential.

Wittgenstein discusses many situations in which words carry a weight that goes beyond themselves, as it were, beyond their place in the immediate context of use, and require us to look at their application which is not settled at the moment an utterance is pronounced. When we say, “Now I can go on!”, or similarly, “Now I know!”, “Now I can do it!”, “Now I understand!” (PI, §151), the meaning is determined by looking at their application in life, at the circumstances in which it makes sense to say this, and at what one will do afterwards. They are like a signal, and “we judge whether it was rightly applied by what he goes on to do” (PI, §179–180). Similarly, pictures have the power to depict an entire grammatical scene; we form a picture of inner life that guides our response to others, as when Wittgenstein writes: “‘I can’t know what is going on in him’ is, above all, a picture. It is the convincing expression of a conviction. It does not give the reasons for the conviction. They are not obvious” (PI, II, §326). Pictures can help us or stand in our way and imprison us (PI, §115). Their role too is determined by their application. “What do I believe in when I believe that man has a soul?” (PI, §422). “The picture is there; and I do not dispute its correctness. But what is its application?” (PI, §424).

The force and power of religious words and expressions find their space prepared by the many situations in life in which language is used to situate ourselves at a given crossroads and to guide how we are to go on. I will briefly offer the example of Deeti, the central female character in Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies. Deeti is a poor and strong-willed woman from a rural village. Trapped in an oppressive marriage to an opium addict, she escapes widowhood and caste bondage by joining the indentured migrants aboard the Ibis. Her journey marks a transformation from being a victim to embracing her future, embodying the novel’s broader themes of displacement, survival, and the forging of a new life. While still escaping in the company of Kalua who has saved her from the burning pyre, they stop in Chhapra where they end up begging at the temple and sleeping on the riverfront. These are a few lines from the novel: “Every night, as they made their way there, Deeti would say: Suraj dikhat áwé to rástá mit jáwé—when the sun rises the path will show itself—and so strongly did she believe this that not even at the worst of times did she allow her hopes to slacken” (Ghosh 2008, p. 214). The truth of these words lies beyond themselves. As with Wittgenstein’s example “Now I can go on!”, these words can be a moment of self-deception or can genuinely fold into one’s life, both illustrating it and guiding it, as they do for Deeti, for whom they express determination and faith in herself and in the world.

Words can play this crucial role; they have a ceremonial character. In the scene of her marriage to Kalua, right after he has saved her from the pyre, they stop at a shore for the night and she says: “We’ll go away, far away, we’ll find a place where no one will know anything about us except that we are married. Married?, he said. Yes”. She goes to the river and returns with an armful of wildflowers, which she arranges into two garlands, one for Kalua and one for herself: “Now he too knew what to do and when the exchange of garlands had bound them together, they sat for a while, awed by the enormity of what they had done” (ibid., pp. 188–89).

The enormity of what they had done is to contract marriage through the force of her words alone and through the improvised ritual; it is to escape the victimization and violence they both endured in their village; it is to embark on an unknown journey with a trust in their mutual companionship forged in the preceding hours of escape. They draw on the force that words carry within their ordinary lives, renewing rituals and paths of life in this astounding way, a story that could easily be illustrated by Das’s ethnographic descriptions. As Das writes about Asha, one of the women at the center of Life and Words: “to be vulnerable is not the same as to be a victim, and those who are inclined to assume that social norms or expectations of widowhood are automatically translated into oppression need to pay attention to the gap between a norm and its actualization. The idea of presenting a ‘case’ here is not so much to offer an example of a general rule or an exception to it, but rather to show how new norms emerge in experiments with life, in spiritual self-creation” (Das 2007, p. 63). In Ghosh’s novel, Deeti draws on the myths, legends, and rituals buried in language for her own spiritual self-creation.

To go back to the passage in the Lectures on Religious Belief, the sense in which the belief in the Last Judgement is unshakable is tied to the way pictures and words carry a force shown in how they are applied in life. The space for these uses of words is prepared by situations in which words bear this kind of force, as in the passage I have taken from Ghosh and in the many examples gathered in Das’s ethnography, where she painstakingly shows how words or silences allow life to go on in situations of great fragility or in the aftermath of excruciating disasters. It is words that carry the ceremonial character displayed in Ghosh’s passage; it is ordinary words that accompany daily chores and preserve life from the violence suffered; it is the silence of the women described by Das, who stand motionless in front of their burned houses in the streets of Sultanpuri, where the Sikh massacre had taken place two days earlier, their bodies dirty and disheveled, their hair messy. Their silence projects the scene into a fragment of the myth of Draupadī in the Mahābhārata, who proclaims her violation through the public expression of her pollution (Das 2007, p. 104).

In these different examples words are intimately attached to life; they are part of what is necessary for life to go on and yet also reveal an unexpected step taken, one that breaks a sense of necessity and opens a new, unnoticed eventuality inscribed in the present. In this range of examples, one can palpably sense how the transfiguring power of words and faith (in oneself, in the future, in other people, in the world) is tied to necessity and makes sense only over this background. It is perhaps one of Wittgenstein’s great virtues that he unfolded the vulnerable character of language and of our lives enmeshed in language while coming from a highly unprivileged condition of another sort, that of someone who could choose to renounce the astounding wealth of his family, endowed with an incomparable intellectual genius and a highly sophisticated education that allowed him to make any choice without paying disastrous consequences for it. Wittgenstein never met the necessities of poverty, nor the lack of education or of a web of supportive connections, nor was he personally involved in the disasters of Nazism. He was idolized from a very early age and never suffered from a lack of recognition or respect. What he suffered were his personal torments, which made him an exile throughout his life, from his native culture, from the culture he later inhabited, and perhaps from his own life. The pervasive and quotidian flights of words away from their daily inhabitation in ordinary activities are personally experienced by Wittgenstein through his tormented attachments to people and his persistent experience of displacement and exile. Religion, and the power it offers to transfigure what is necessary into an eventuality that one can hold onto in life, is lived in his personal torments. From this vantage point he describes the vulnerability of language and life, and the rootedness of language in life as involving experiments and spiritual self-creation, as Das writes.

The rootedness of words and pictures in our lives leaves them exposed to this vulnerability. In a passage I have quoted above from 1948, Wittgenstein writes: “The honest religious thinker is like a tightrope walker. It almost looks as though he were walking on nothing but air. His support is the slenderest imaginable. And yet it really is possible to walk on it” (CV, p. 84). It is the life of the believer that renders the belief true, and what parts of it will make it true are not decided by the content of the belief; what one can believe is only “the outcome of a life” (ibid., p. 37). The rootedness of one’s unshakable beliefs does not lie in an unassailable doctrine, nor does it confine the believer within a closed identity. What the believer will do with a belief is shown in her life, and she can use her belief to confine herself within sealed borders or to project it into uncharted territories. What Wittgenstein does with religious belief is to show its place in our life, as he does more generally with language in the different domains, describing the detailed nature of our ties and loyalties to reality and showing ways out of moments of loss and exhaustion of interest and motivation. We play magic with words as if to evade the difficult responsibility of language, which is the theme that runs through his later thought concerning the grammatical illusions in which we trap ourselves. And we construct dogmas that imprison us, preventing us from responding freely to the demands of life.

I have already mentioned the inclination toward superstition. His criticism of dogma is also very strong, as in the following passage from 1937:

If certain graphic propositions for instance are laid down for human beings as dogmas governing thinking, namely in such a way that opinions are not thereby determined, but the expression of opinions is completely controlled, this will have a very strange effect. People will live under an absolute, palpable tyranny, yet without being able to say they are not free. I think the Catholic Church does something like this. For dogma is expressed in the form of an assertion & is unshakable, & at the same time any practical opinion can be made to accord with it; admittedly this is easier in some cases, more difficult in others. It is not a wall setting limits to belief, but like a brake which in practice however serves the same purpose; almost as though someone attached a weight to your foot to limit your freedom of movement. This is how dogma becomes irrefutable & beyond the reach of attack

(CV, pp. 32–33).

Wittgenstein diagnoses here a situation that was also crucial for John Stuart Mill in his criticism of dogmas, one in which tyranny does not come from explicit prohibitions (or not mainly from them) but from an atmosphere that has drained one’s inner being of any conviction and feeling of home growth: “creed remains as it were outside the mind, encrusting and petrifying it against all other influences addressed to the higher parts of our nature; manifesting its power by not suffering any fresh and living conviction to get in, but itself doing nothing for the mind or heart, except standing sentinel over them to keep them vacant” (Mill 1988, pp. 40–41). By treating unshakable belief as a matter of the life one leads, enmeshed in connections that place the believer within shared patterns of response, Wittgenstein opens a space for the criticism of dogmatism that is true to his thought of religion as personal experience and spiritual self-creation.

The echoes of the Enlightenment that we can hear in the need to avoid unreason and in the criticism of superstition and dogmatism come from within his elucidation of the molding of life in concretions of language, rituals, and gestures that are both our home and our prison. Religion, in this sense, belongs to the texture of ordinary life, sustained by language-games that make sense against a background of countless other human activities. The stories, rites, and pictures of religion draw their intelligibility from the shared forms of response that allow imagination to find a footing in reality. Having this in view allows us to approach them as creative uses of language, resisting the sense that religious beliefs, rites, and stories impose a fixed destiny upon us.

Wittgenstein also insists on the personal connection to these language-games, on the way religion signals an attachment that carries the ambiguity of mythology. On one side lies the temptation to imagine that words and rites act by themselves, as though symbolism possessed an automatic power (the mythology of symbolism he criticizes in Philosophical Grammar: “‘That two negations yield an affirmation must already be contained in the negation that I am using now’. Here I am on the verge of inventing a mythology of symbolism” (Wittgenstein 1993b, p. 53). On the other lies the recognition that these same expressions and rituals can mark a fidelity to life, a capacity to take one step after another out of suffocation and despair. Both teachings offer a critical understanding of religion: a domain of practices and traditions read as a field of experiment and spiritual self-creation. In bringing these dimensions together, Wittgenstein shows religion to be one more instance of the difficult daily path of individual existence, a place where the struggle to remain faithful to life is carried out in the smallest turns of language and of the self.