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Understanding the Question: Wittgenstein on Faith and Meaning
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2008
Extract
The role of belief in religion is always the subject of the greatest misunderstandings, as well as some of the subtlest meditations. The student of religion may be drawn to those direct expressions of spiritual insight with regard to which belief seems abstract and superfluous; and yet when one wants to indicate the religious attitude, the commitment to ‘something higher’, as a fact of personal significance, few notions seem more apt than belief or faith. The peculiar logic of religious faith is that unlike beliefs which are held in lieu of verified knowledge, faith is often valued precisely because it is faith, and does not concern the objectively verifiable.
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- Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1990
References
1 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Notebooks 1914–1916, edited by von Wright, G. H. and Anscombe, G. E. M. (translated by Anscombe, ) (New York: Harper and Row, 1961), p. 74Google Scholar.
2 Cf. the first sentence of Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1921Google Scholar.
3 Culture and Value edited by G. H. von Wright, translated by Peter Winch (University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 85Google Scholar.
4 Notebooks, p. 73; Tractatus, 6.43.
5 Notebooks, p. 78.
6 Notebooks, p. 74.
7 ‘Remarks on Frazer's The Golden Bough’ – notes from the early 1930's, published in Synthese vol. XVII, 1967 (the translation is from a privately circulated copy made by A. R. Manser)Google Scholar. ‘If in that time I began to speak of the “World” (and not of this tree or table) what could my intention have been other than to bring something higher under the sway of my words?’
8 Culture and Value, p. 57 (my translation).
9 It does not indicate an objectification of the ‘source’ of grace, but belongs with the notion that a piece of philosophy is only valuable for someone who is ready to receive it, or that ‘No one can speak the truth if he still has not mastered himself’. (Culture and Value), p. 35.
10 Tractacus, 6.44.
11 He does not conceive of the question, Why is there something rather than nothing?
12 Tractacus, 5.552.
13 Notebooks, p. 74.
14 Notebooks, p. 79.
15 The term is Jaspers', but it fits perfectly here.
16 Notebooks, p. 76.
17 Culture and Value, p. 27 for the following quotes.
18 Culture and Value, p. 86.
19 Notebooks, p. 76.
20 Kierkegaard, Soren, Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing (New York: Harper & Bros., 1938)Google Scholar.
21 Cf. his remarks recorded by Friedrich Waismann in 1929: ‘I can only say: I don't belittle this human tendency; I take my hat off to it. And here it is essential that this is not a sociological description but that I speak for myself. For me the facts are unimportant. But what men mean when they say “The world is there” lies close to my heart.’ All this is in the background of the statement that the Philosophical Investigations gets its ‘light, that is to say, their purpose’ from the philosophical problems.
22 Culture and Value, p. 32.