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

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 talisman’ (Westergaard, 2009). In an excellent review of James Atkinson’s (2009) The Mystical in Wittgenstein’s Early Writings Nieli (2009) cites a letter from Bertram Russell to his lover Lady Otterline Morrell in 1919:

I have much to tell you that is of interest. I leave here today [December 20, 1919, from the The Hague] after a fortnight’s stay, during a week of which Wittgenstein was here, and we discussed his book [the Tractatus] everyday. I came to think even better of it than I had done; I feel sure it is really a great book, though I do not feel sure it is right…. I had felt in his book a flavour of mysticism, but was astonished when I found that he has become a complete mystic. He reads people like Kierkegaard and Angelus Silesius, and he seriously contemplates becoming a monk. It all started from William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience, and grew (not unnaturally) during the winter he spent alone in Norway before the war, when he was nearly mad. Then during the war a curious thing happened. He went on duty to the town of Tarnov in Galicia, and happened to come upon a bookshop, which, however, seemed to contain nothing but picture postcards. However, he went inside and found that it contained just one book: Tolstoy on the Gospels. He brought it merely because there was no other. He read it and re-read it, and thenceforth had it always with him, under fire and at all times. But on the whole he likes Tolstoy less than Dostoyevsky (especially Karamazov). He has penetrated deep into mystical ways of thought and feeling, but I think (though he wouldn’t agree) that what he likes best in mysticism is its power to make him stop thinking. I don’t much think he will really become a monk—it is an idea, not an intention. His intention is to be a teacher. He gave all his money to his brothers and sisters, because he found earthly possessions a burden. I wish you had seen him. [Letters to Russell, Keynes, and Moore (G. H. von Wright, Ed.), 1974: p. 82]

As Nieli (2009) observes: ‘Russell describes here a truly extraordinary personality, a God-obsessed and God-haunted man, who, as his Russian teacher Fania Pascal would remark years later, was “a person above all in search of spiritual salvation”’. Wittgenstein sought salvation and even made his personal confession to member of his family and to his friends on separate occasions (Beale, 2018; Monk, 1990; Peters, 2000, 2017). There is no doubt that Tolstoy’s The Gospel in Brief became a book that he dwelt on, kept with him and read again and again. As Greenstreet (2014) suggests:

Wittgenstein was so profoundly moved by it that he doubted whether the actual Gospels could possibly be better than Tolstoy’s synthesis. ‘If you are not acquainted with it,’ he told his friend Ludwig von Ficker, “then you cannot imagine what effect it can have on a person.” It implanted a Christian faith in Wittgenstein. Before going on night-duty at the observation post, he wrote: ‘Perhaps the nearness of death will bring me the light of life. May God enlighten me. Through God I will become a man. God be with me. Amen.’

Wittgenstein was also impressed by William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience: A study in human nature, even though he thought him conceptually confused.³ He remarks to Russell in a postcard: ‘Whenever I have time now I read James’ Varieties of Religious Exp[erience]. This book does me a lot of good’ (cited in Goodman, 2002: 12). James originally gave these as the Gifford lectures on religious experience at the University of Edinburgh in 1901–1902 a set of fourteen lectures. In lecture III ‘The reality of the Unseen’ James maintains religious experiences which cannot be apprehended through the senses but for those who have had such experiences they are irrefutable, a faith unable to be dislodged through rational discourse. A mystical experience is based on the feeling that one is encountering truth in the presence of God. The knowledge imparted by the religious feeling and experience seems to transcend philosophy: the mystical experience is ineffable. This leads Horgan (2018) to see the Tractatus as a work of negative theology in the tradition Lao Tzu and Eckhart and to argue: ‘If a mystic is someone who has been transformed by mystical experiences, then Wittgenstein was a mystic, who was exceptionally eloquent, in his own gnomic way, at expressing the inexpressible’.

Certainly, the early Wittgenstein maintained the logical form of language mirrors the form of reality which was a necessary condition if the former was to be able to depict the latter. But the sense of this isomorphism must lie outside the world; everything that happens as it does but any value must lie outside the world. The mystical and any absolute value must lie outside the world.

Some argue that Wittgenstein’s Tractatus only makes sense in terms of mysticism. McGuinness (1966) argues while Wittgenstein holds there is no such thing as metaphysics he believes:

there is a feeling which may be called das Mystische, an inexpressible feeling, to have had which is to have solved the problem of life: those who have had it feel that they know something, but cannot put it into words. (Tractatus 6.522)

The train of propositions leading to 6.522 provide a useful interpretive context to the ‘inexpressible feeling’ of das Mystische, a kind of mystical knowledge that is felt or experienced but cannot be expressed in words. They concern ‘the problems of life’ that science do not touch and cannot explain. The inexpressible, as Wittgenstein declares, the mystical exists, is real, but as an effable personal experience it is not accessible through philosophy or science, yet it’s design is implicit and shows itself in the ‘grammar’

6.52—We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all. Of course there is then no question left, and just this is the answer.

6.521—The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of this problem. (Is not this the reason why men to whom after long doubting the sense of life became clear, could not then say wherein this sense consisted?)

6.522—There is indeed the inexpressible. This shows itself; it is the mystical. (Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 1922)

McGuinness (1966) informs us that Wittgenstein has ‘a single doctrine of mysticism’ that

consists in living in the present, which will involve a grasp of the sense of the world, which will see the world as a good world and as a limited whole….

Wittgenstein’s mysticism which for him cast philosophy as a way of life and ascetic practice based on respect for Augustine, Kierkegaard, and William James, as well as the Tolstoy’s (1902) Gospels that he had read in the trenches during WWI as an Austrian soldier (Songtag, 1995). The tradition of German mysticism (Hildegard, Eckhart, Tauler, Nicholas of Cusa, Paracelsus, Boehme, Silesius, Novalis) was speculative emphasising transcendence and the search for an understanding of ‘the unity of time and eternity, of the finite and the infinite, of the visible and invisible, or of the divine one and the created many’ (Weeks, 1993: 9). Both Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein were influenced by this tradition and Schopenhauer’s ‘Indian’ philosophy based in asceticism, self-negation and world-as-appearance impacted Wittgenstein personally. He was God-obsessed and saw philosophy as both a therapeutic clarification of nonsense and the means of his spiritual salvation. In a mystical experience one reportedly experiences an extraordinary state of perception often described in terms of truth and closeness to god—a time of bliss, joy and openness.

Like Schopenhauer Wittgenstein understood that science cannot discuss or provide values: ultimate questions and the meaning of life were outside space and time and cannot be expressed in words. Schopenhauer’s idealism (‘world-as-idea’) had a strong effect on Wittgenstein’s idealism our experiences of the world and our mental representation (Vorstellung) of it with the world (‘The world and life are one’, TLP 5.621) (Schroeder, 2012). The influenced of Buddhist conceptions of ethics on Schopenhauer and indirectly on Wittgenstein have been the subject of study by a number of scholars. Vukomanovic (2004) explains that:

The first genuine spiritual encounter of India and Europe dates back from the Classical Antiquity. It was not made possible by any ‘esoteric sponsor’ but, typically, by conquest, diplomacy and trade. The peaceful Buddhist missions of King Ashoka reached the Mediterranean in the mid-third century BCE, in order to preach about ahimsâ (nonviolence) and spread the good news about the universal victory of dharma. (p. 163)

As he indicates, ‘both Nietzsche and Schopenhauer emphasized not only the philosophical, but also physiological and hygienic aspects of early Buddhism’ (p. 170). Schopenhauer was in part responsible for the rise of ‘European Buddhism’ where the doctrine of mâyâ as deception and the doctrine of will as energy of action (karma-samsara) prevails. Wittgenstein probably understood Schopeanhauer’s ‘Indian’ asceticism as both the elimination of suffering a negation of will and the elimination of all suffering even if his Christian practices of confession and abstinence prohibited suicide that Schopenhauer saw as a final act of will: Wittgenstein ethics deviated from Schopenhauer’s Buddhist ethics even if it repeated some features including philosophy as the therapeutic cure of ‘pollution’ by language and the (Zen-like) paradox of reality revealed through the tradition of koans.

It is clear that Goethe who exerted so much influence on German spiritualism and science also had a direct influence on Wittgenstein in the unity of the world, the conception of philosophy, literary form and the theory of colours (Rowe, 1991). These links should not be surprising given that they shared the same scientific, philosophical and literary tradition in German Romanticism. Richard Eldridge writes:

As a result of the fine work of Mark Rowe, Joachim Schulte, Gordon Baker and Peter Hacker, it has now been evident for some time that there are deep affinities—affinities in style and textual organization, in conceptions of elucidatory explanation via comparisons, and in a sense of subjectivity housed within nature—between the Goethe of the Farbenlehre and the Wittgenstein of Philosophical Investigations. Among the very deepest of these affinities is their shared sense of the limits of metaphysical explanation. (p. 128)

For Eldridge (2003: 128) it is ‘an affinity in their senses of what it is to be a human subject’, the question of ‘becoming present of the highest’ (not of its being present) that characterizes the Bildungsroman, ‘the novel of formation’ or the genre devoted to the development of consciousness and transformation initiated by Goethe’s depiction of Werther’s inner life that Eldridge says resembles Wittgenstein’s in the Investigations. In Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship Goethe chooses Werner as the universal subject of human development. As a rough shorthand for these literary and philosophical characteristics I call it the ‘birth of the therapeutic subject’ that is present is Goethe (Werner) and Wittgenstein in the motif of ‘genius or suicide’, both (auto)biographically and narratively in the Investigations in his search for ‘a new life’ and ideal—’A temple providing a setting for the passions without meddling with them’ (CV 2e).

There is a literature on Wittgenstein and Zen dating from the late 1950s with some sixty contributions that notes parallels between Wittgenstein’s mysticism and aspects of Buddhism although there are no known historical or literary sources tin Wittgenstein that make this connection. As Canfield (1975) begins his essay ‘Wittgenstein’s later philosophy and the doctrines of Mahayana Buddhism integral to Zen coincide in a fundamental aspect: for Wittgenstein language has, one might say, a mystical base; and this base is exactly the Buddhist ideal of acting with a mind empty of thought’ (p. 383). At issue is the difficulty of expressing truth (Cheng, 1981), of communicating mystical experience (Cox & Cox, 1976), of correct philosophical method compared with Koan sayings (Hooper, 2007), of transcending language through ethics (Sullivan, 2013), of the struggle against dogma (Johansson, 2013). McGuinness (1966) explains that the mystical manifests itself in terms of moods ‘in which one has a sense of certainty and revelation’ which is difficult to express in words but exhibits four fundamental features:

first, there is typically a belief in an insight into reality, an insight which is superior to and quite different from sense and reason, an insight common to the mystic and the poet but far clearer in the former; second, the mystic believes that reality is one, containing no opposition or division; third, he holds or feels that time is unreal; and fourth, he thinks that evil is mere appearance, or perhaps that good and evil are both illusory (in any case, his ethic involves an acceptance of the world). (p. 306)

McGuinness compares Russell’s (1914) paper ‘Mysticism and Logic’ in which he rejects mysticism with Wittgenstein’s discussion of mysticism especially in the Notebooks and Tractatus where he excepts there is a feeling ‘das Mystische, an inexpressible feeling, to have had which is to have solved the problem of life: those who have had it feel that they know something, but cannot put it into words (Tractatus 6.522)’ (p. 306). He goes on to demonstrate that all four features of the mystic are there in the Tractatus.

The world as manifestation of spirit is a common theme in early Christian mysticism where bringing one’s will into alignment with God’s is a precondition for further spiritual enhancement and the spiritual encounter such that obedience and humility are seen as foundational to the attainment of virtue (Katz, 1992). But such a position must be open to the Persian influence on Greek philosophy and Oriental influences on Enlightenment thought in the tradition that stretches from the early Christian fathers and mothers to St Francis, Eckhart, Tauler, and Ruysbroeck. Wittgenstein’s ethics is curiously expressed in the close relationship of logic and sin (Shields, 1993), his remarks on the nature of religious feeling and his own confessional practices (Peters, 2000).

Like Tolstoy, Wittgenstein has a kind of faith and a predisposition to believe but his faith is always subject to a sceptical struggle and lifelong doubt; it is always tested and measured against his own philosophy and ethics. As Richter (2012) writes:

He wrestles with God, with himself, with his faith, and with his relative lack of faith. He is clearly attracted to Christianity, but he rejects it. For instance, in February 1937 he writes that he rejects ‘the Christian solution of the problem of life (salvation, resurrection, judgement, heaven, hell)’.⁴

He has a relationship with God but not the God of that allows him to call him ‘Lord’ because he cannot use the word with meaning such as ‘that he will come to judge me’. Wittgenstein says only if he ‘lived completely differently’ could it have meaning and speak to him (Wittgenstein, 2006: 33e). This is to imply the practices and ethical form of life of a believing and practicing Christian. Yet Wittgenstein articulates the mystical in relation to ethical speech and action that falls outside the world of science and fact-stating propositions, a constructive form of deep nonsense for which there are no corelate facts; the mystical is outside language and can only be shown in the metaphysical structure that language shares and must have if it is to depict the world, or through the ladder-like propositions of the Tractatus that can be thrown away after ascending. As Wittgenstein states at 6.54 perhaps in a reference to Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript:

My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them—as steps—to climb beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.)

He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world aright.

This is the realm of absolute value. Thus Wittgenstein shifts from questions of logic and sense (Sinn) to what lies outside logic—God, the absolute good, ethics, the meaning of life, aesthetics, and mysticism. Science and logic has nothing to say here; it is debarred from making any meaningful statements for there are no facts (Mulhall, 2002).

Wittgenstein begins the Philosophical Investigations with the criticism of Augustine’s account in his Confessions of how when he was young he learned a language the essence of which that every word is correlated with a meaning which while wrong-headed was an intelligent mistake of the operation of language. Wittgenstein clearly felt a strong affinity with Augustine and refers to his Confessions as ‘the most serious book ever written’ (Egan, 2021: 25).

The mystical is not so evident in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations where he turns to philosophy as a kind of therapy ‘that brings us relief from nagging and incessant self-doubt, where clarity takes on an ethical and therapeutic aspect that brings both peace and contentment’ returning us from metaphysics to the ordinary everyday home of language. Here ‘clarity is not just a means for resolving puzzles, contradictions, confusions, or attaining conceptual clarity but becomes a meta-level goal that guides his whole therapeutic conception of philosophy’ (Peters, 2007: 3805): philosophy becomes disease and cure and is a form of self-understanding, a series of dialogues with the self, that can dispel the search for certainty and the alleviating of suffering that haunts oneself in a obsessive-compulsive manner. As he says: ‘The philosopher’s treatment of a question is like the treatment of an illness’ (1953, pt. 1, sect. 255). It seems that Wittgenstein’s private language argument and his account of language-games might relegated the mystical experience altogether along with all inner experience abandoning the philosophy of inwardness (Nieli, 1987). While there is little room for the kind of ineffability found in the Tractatus, mysticism is also a language-game and a tradition in both East and West, that often uses poetic and aesthetic language, that is non-factual language, to point to or express the mystical. McDonough (2019) in ‘Wittgenstein’s Affirmation of Mysticism’ argues that while the autobiographical mysticism of the Tractatus falls away, there is another kind of mysticism possible based on the ‘inner light’ of the mystic. Knepper (2009) also follows Wittgenstein’s description of actual language use to examine the way in which ineffability gets expressed rather than whether there are ineffable or mystical experiences. He suggests that Wittgenstein might follow ‘Wayne Proudfoot’s assertion that ineffability is a rule that governs a certain discourse about religious experience (rather than a phenomenological characteristic of that experience)’ (p. 67) and he poses the questions: ‘can philosophers of religion “bring back” ineffability from its metaphysical use to its ordinary use? And can they clear up metaphysical misconceptions of ineffability by doing so?’ (p. 67). In order to answer these questions Knepper (2009: 68) turns to actual ineffability-uses. In Wittgenstein’s rule-governed sense ‘ineffability discourses are governed by socially established rules—rules that, ironically, make it possible to speak about what cannot be spoken about’ but such rules do not ‘straightjacket’ authors. Thus, in Wittgenstein’s sense:

instead of asking whether one must pass over such objects and experiences in silence, philosophers of religion should be asking how one plays a language game with a term that is taken to denote an ineffable object or experience. (Knepper, 2009, p. 68)

Knepper (2009) asks ‘what are the everyday uses of ineffability?’ (p. 67) and identifies three such uses, including hyperbolic ineffability, experiential ineffability, ‘the inability to put certain experiences into words, especially intense or complex experiences that flood the senses all at once’ and protective ineffability, ‘the reluctance to put certain things into words due to the belief that doing so somehow distorts or sullies them’ (p. 74). Ineffability is a characteristic of mystical religious experience. Wittgenstein’s analysis in the Investigations provides a way of understanding the discourse of ineffability in ordinary language and also notionally how to bring back metaphysical ineffability to its home in ordinary everyday language. When Wittgenstein says ‘“You can’t hear God speak to someone else, you can hear him only if you are being addressed”—That is a grammatical remark’ (Wittgenstein, 1990: #717). It is a comment on the use of ‘God’ in the context of religious practice of worship and it serves to remind us how religious discourse differs from ordinary language. While ‘it is similar … to everyday discourse, and ‘it also differs from it in its deep grammar’ (Lurie, 2012: 15). Wittgenstein ascribes to Luther the idea that ‘theology is the grammar of the word “God”’ (Wittgenstein, 1982, p. 32). As Wittgenstein famously expresses the point in the Investigations: ‘Essence is expressed by grammar. Grammar tells us what kind of object anything is. (Theology as grammar) (373). Thus, standard claims of theology about God are not to be understood as factual claims but rather ‘as grammatical remarks expressing rules for the use of theological terms in everyday religious discourse’ (Arrington, 2001: 172).

It is clear that the personal mystical experience that he talked of in the Tractatus fell away. This included the meaning and the value of life, relations with God and the miracle of the world and of existence itself, that the world should exist, and while these epiphanies are banished as a result of the private language argument, its hard to believe that Wittgenstein gave them up and rather more comforting to understand him as providing a way that we can talk about such matters in a way that shows the ineffable as grammar.

Michael A. Peters
Beijing Normal University, Beijing, PR China
[email protected]

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 https://www.bloomsburycollections.com/book/the-selected-writings-of-maurice-oconnor-drury-on-wittgenstein-philosophy-religion-and-psychiatry/foreword

2 http://www.askphilosophers.org/question/5099

3 https://gutenberg.org/files/621/621-h/621-h.html—James writes: ‘we have in the fact that the conscious person is continuous with a wider self through which saving experiences come, a positive content of religious experience which, it seems to me, is literally and objectively true as far as it goes’ (p. 515).

4 Richter, Duncan (2012) Did Wittgenstein believe in God? http://languagegoesonholiday.blogspot.com/2012/11/did-wittgenstein-believe-in-god.html