Witti-Buch2 2001.qxd - Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society

Religious Truth and Realism in Wittgenstein
and the Wittgensteinians
Jacob Joshua Ross
Ludwig Wittgenstein (hereafter "LW") and some of his pupils and followers (hereafter
WNS) have been classified by many as "non-realists" in matters of religion. I want to
argue that even though this may be true of some WNS (R.B.Braithwaite and D.Z.Phillips
in particular) it would be mistaken and highly inappropriate to attribute such a view to LW
himself, particularly in his later philosophy.
A recent paper (Michael Scott, "Wittgenstein and Realism", Faith and Philosophy,
Volume 17 No. 2 April 2000, pp. 170-90) alleges that the evidence of LW's writings and
lectures on religion can be used to support two quite different and conflicting
interpretations of his views. The first is the "minimal realist" interpretation ("religious
discourse supports the use of a truth predicate that satisfies the disquotational schema
i.e. (DS) "S" is true iff S."). Scott thinks that Hilary Putnam supports this interpretation.
On the other hand we have the "non-factualist" interpretation ("religious discourse has a
different function - it is expressive rather than fact-stating"). Such an interpretation of
LW's views on religion is maintained by B.R.Tilghman and is similar to the interpretation
of LW's views of mathematics and ethics offered by Simon Blackburn. I shall argue that
these two interpretations of LW's views on religion are not mutually exclusive of each
other and that neither captures the specifically unique contribution that can be gleaned
from a close study of LW's writings on religion. This is his suggestion that religious
conviction is like being in the grip of a picture.
1. I maintain, firstly that insufficient attention has been given to the fact that LW's
attitude to religion changed somewhat during his lifetime. Though brought up by a
Catholic mother, he did not regard himself as a religious person - not even as a
Christian - in the sense of belonging to a religious community in which he was active.
However his admiration for religious ideals seems to have been strengthened by his
reading of Tolstoy's version of the Gospels in 1915. It would appear that this was
reinforced by such things as his admiration of the simple piety of the poor family
Traht with whom he ate during part of the period of his stay in Trattenbach as a
schoolteacher in the early 1920's. At any rate, during the period of his writing of the
Tractatus and in his remarks recorded in the Notebooks of 1914 -16 (see specially
N 72-75) there is a clear effort to reinstate a type of religious consciousness
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