Wittgenstein, mysticism and the ‘religious point of view’: ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent’

Abstract

the religious and spiritual aspects of Wittgenstein, his understanding of ‘das mystiche’ and his philosophy understood against the background of German mysticism has been commented on by authors to help explain the ethical aspects of the early Wittgenstein (1922), particularly the Tractatus, and also his later work. Some maintain that the mystical is an element uniting his philosophy and that the Tractatus is a work of mystic or negative theology in the tradition of Meister Eckhart. Wittgenstein remained an intensely religious and ethical man despite his remark to his friend Maurice drury (2018: 151) to whom he said ‘i am not a religious man, but i cannot help seeing every problem from a religious point of view’. there is a sense in which Wittgenstein can be regarded as religious, as man of religious disposition, and in relation to mysticism and the mystical experience, even though he was not Catholic and rejected Catholic dogma. there is no evidence that he was a Christian although he followed Christian practices such as confession and he held Christian values. He talked of religious feelings rather than belief and thought they might ‘cure’ morbid fears.1 as Charles taliaferro (2013) puts it ‘when speaking of God and religious forms of life, ... Wittgenstein seems to assimilate believing that there is a God to living life a certain way (with humility, wonder, grace)’.2 on Wittgenstein’s view religious belief is a commitment grounded in a religious practices and a form of life that is not open to evidence or argument and incommensurable with atheism; the one does not contradict the other but religious feeling may also be the basis of a mystical experience that transcends the world in an ethical relation to God (Mcdonough, 2016). Wittgenstein was completely taken by leo tolstoy’s The Gospel in Brief, a synthesis of the four gospels written in 1902 into one narrative account based on the life of Jesus that jettisoned much of the supernatural elements. it was originally titled ‘a criticism of dogmatic theology’ and like A Confession written in 1882 was tolstoy’s answer to the meaning of life (if God does not exist). Wittgenstein described tolstoy’s work as a ‘magnificent work’ and after discovering it in a Polish bookshop near the front carried the book around with him ‘constantly, like a