The Philosophical Investigations in Philosophy of Religion

Book image from Wikipedia

With last year being the 70th anniversary of the publication of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, the Journal of Mind, Language, and the Arts (JoLMA) has been putting together a thematic issue on the legacy of this core work of Wittgenstein’s. I've got an article forthcoming in the issue. I'm looking forward to reading the other pieces when the issue comes out.

My article concerns the way the text has been read in philosophy of religion (to date) and considers some possible new ways in which the text might be explored in the field.

Rereading the book again in working on my article, I was reminded that this is one of those philosophy texts that has been with me most of the way through my philosophical education and development. I first read the work closely in a Wittgenstein seminar taught by Saul Traiger during my final year at Occidental College. I’m not sure exactly what I gleaned from the text at the time, but I sensed in Wittgenstein’s writing a certain depth and impatience with nonsense that was very appealing if also slightly frightening as well.

In that course, I attempted to write a final paper on ethics and the PI. I say “attempted to write” because I am certain the paper must have failed to grasp what “the ethical” might mean in connection with that book. Yet, this was a question present in my mind and one that has stayed with me over the decades. Even as I was then seeking to see the relevance of Wittgenstein to mainstream topics in analytic philosophy—such as meaning and reference, truth, the possibility of private language—I also was then beginning to think about and am now very interested in considering the bearing of this work on questions in theory of value, philosophy of religion, and comparative/cross-cultural philosophy.

It was to my great surprise then that I discovered more or less by accident that there were figures who had considered how ideas in the PI might be relevant to philosophy of religion. While not exactly encouraged at either Occidental or San Francisco State, I began to become interested in analytic philosophy of religion. I first read Alvin Plantinga and William Alston during the years of my Masters program at SFSU and while I found them refreshing for seriously engaging with philosophical questions concerning Christianity, I also found them to be more theologically conservative than my own philosophical and perhaps even “spiritual” sensibilities about religiosity. I think it was in a piece by one of these two that I came across a critical remark about a certain D. Z. Phillips and his “Wittgensteinian fideism.” That stuck with me. It seemed like an inadvertent recommendation.

(Incidentally, during these years I had the chance to meet Plantinga, Alston, and Phillips, who were each very generous with their time and patient with my questions. That really meant a lot to me at the time, and still does.)

During my time at Boston University, I came to have my own views on “Wittgensteinian fideism,” and the overall inadequacy of the expression in academic discourse. Nevertheless, it is not for nothing that there has been confusion about how Wittgenstein's philosophy bears on problems in philosophy of religion. Since Wittgenstein did not develop a philosophy of religion per se, the work falls to students, later interpreters, and critics to piece together what a philosophy of religion after Wittgenstein might look like. That is where my article picks up. Since the PI was the first work of Wittgenstein’s mature thought to see publication, it has had a very significant influence on how Wittgensteinian philosophy of religion developed and came to be perceived. My contribution to the JoLMA issue aspires to offer a portrait of how some philosophers of religion interacted with the PI and the ideas contained within it.

I was reminded a few years ago, when watching the presentations from a conference on the Swansea “school” of Wittgenstein interpretation, that in addition to what is published is what is written but left unpublished, and in addition to that is what is discussed in seminars and informal settings and never put down in writing. This too is part of the history of philosophy although it shadows the better known byways. Within history, there are always many more voices who could and should figure into the stories later generations tell about earlier times. I know there is much that is not included my portrait; it is a gesture towards that larger history of reception of Wittgenstein’s ideas and arguments among philosophers interested in religions. And, of course, this reception is still ongoing.

Writing a new book

I’ve been very busy the last few months, hence the gap in posts. To a large extent, this was due to teaching a revamped class on Technology and Ethics. While the class has been deeply rewarding, it's also been very time intensive given the relevance of current events and technological developments (e.g., AI chatbots). I plan to write more about this course in the future, but today I want to post about the research project that has been occupying my thinking the last several months.

I’ve been working on a new book, Rethinking Philosophy of Religion with Wittgenstein. It builds on my previous book, Wittgenstein within the Philosophy of Religion. WWPR developed my reading of Wittgenstein on religion in light of studies of Wittgenstein’s corpus alongside biographical and historical studies of Wittgenstein’s life and social/historical contexts; the core idea that emerged from WWPR is that Wittgenstein’s philosophical sensibility—what I call his “ethic of perspicuity”—is the lens through which his remarks on religion should be read. Here's how I put it:

Thus, Wittgenstein's remarks on religions—mainly in sources like the "Lectures on Religious Belief," "Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough," various private diaries, and Culture and Value—should be read as clarificatory remarks on religion (often with an imagined interlocutor who has perhaps mischaracterized some feature of religion). Wittgenstein’s remarks on religion thus often emphasize the ineptitude of evidentialist approaches to epistemology (whether religious or not) for grasping what is important about religious beliefs; in addition, Wittgenstein is often strongly critical of the unwarranted arrogance that can enter into critiques of religious ideas and practices. Above all, one sees Wittgenstein reminding interlocutors (including perhaps himself) of the importance of looking to the actual contexts in which people say or do the things that one is trying to investigate. 

For the new book, I’m working on articulating some new insights about the application of Wittgenstein's ethic of perspicuity to rethinking philosophy of religion, focusing on two somewhat narrow topics:

(1) the very idea of philosophy of religion in China, & 

(2) the intertwining of religion and racism in the United States. 

Paying close attention to these two areas has the potential to significantly alter how one frames the field of philosophy of religion, and indeed how one goes about doing philosophy of religion. It also alters which areas of philosophy one might see as adjacent to or potentially cooperative with philosophy of religion (e.g., Chinese and comparative philosophy, political philosophy and philosophy of race). As a result of working on this book, I remain convinced--perhaps more than ever--that philosophy of religion has the potential to be one of the critically important areas for philosophers and others seeking to understand better culturally and religiously diverse societies. There is both intrinsic and instrumental value in that understanding.

While some of the material making up the new book has already been published, most of it has not (for example, on Chinese religious diversities). In many ways, I have been thinking about the ideas for the new book since WWPR was published. Close in my mind have been questions like: 

• How might Wittgenstein's ethic of perspicuity be helpful for cross-cultural, comparative, and inter-religious encounters and conversations? 
• How can it help one understand religions or borderline forms of religiosity in particular cultural contexts, such as China or the United States? 
• How might Wittgenstein's philosophy be helpful for thinking about critically important concepts such as "race" and "religion"? 
• What is ethical about searching for perspicuity when it comes to religions or forms of religiosity? 

Along the way, I have frequently remembered a remark from Wittgenstein's diaries from the 1930s (now known as "Movements of Thought"):

The new book is my attempt to listen those "soft voices" when it comes to contemporary philosophy of religion and religiously and culturally diverse social contexts. 

Baldwin and Wittgenstein on White Supremacism and Religion

Display on James Baldwin at the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC

My article, “Baldwin and Wittgenstein on White Supremacism and Religion,” has just been published on the JAAR website; I’m not sure when it will be assigned to an issue, but I guess it will be within one of the (somewhat delayed) issues of 2023.

The article is an exploration of the relevance of Wittgenstein’s remarks on forms of knowledge and certainty in On Certainty (1969) to understanding the intertwining of white supremacism and religion in the United States, especially as understood by James Baldwin in The Fire Next Time (1963). In so doing, the article also lays out some possibilities for the relevance of Baldwin to philosophy of religion.

Here is the abstract:

This article contends that James Baldwin’s exploration of racism and resistance to it in The Fire Next Time may be put into conversation with Ludwig Wittgenstein’s consideration of fundamental epistemic commitments in On Certainty. Out of this constructive engagement, I argue that white supremacism in the United States may be interpreted as being like a Wittgensteinian grounding or “hinge” commitment and that this viewpoint illuminates some of the ways in which white supremacism may interact with various kinds of religious commitments. This combined analysis depicts, first, the extent to which fundamental commitments about race deeply affect people, including the formation of their ethical and civic values, existential and religious commitments, and range of empathetic capacity and, second, similarities between Baldwin and Wittgenstein when it comes to their contentions that there is ethical value in the clarification of language and work on oneself.

Wittgenstein’s grave at Ascension Parish Burial Ground, Cambridge, U.K.

To a significant extent, the article orbits around two quotations, one from Baldwin and one from Wittgenstein.

Wittgenstein’s remark from the Investigations conveys a picture of philosophical problems and their origins that I have long found illuminating. Philosophical problems are not simply given or classic; they arise out of particular circumstances that lead to “not knowing one’s way about.” Baldwin’s remark from The Fire Next Time draws out both his robust sense of moral faith—in the possibility of becoming “a truly moral human being,” one who is “larger, freer, and more loving”—as well as his stringent, prophetic critique of Christianity, especially in the ways it has embraced white supremacy or otherwise been indifferent to white supremacy (particularly but not exclusively in the United States).

This article has been in the works for a good while. I wrote the preliminary version in 2021, a pivotal year in American society, and added a few revisions the following year. The re-emergence in the last decade or so of right-wing populism in the U.S. and elsewhere and the related appeals to racism and white supremacism have left me feeling perplexed and dispirited. While ideas relating to what would become the paper have been with me for some time, the paper took this form because it was the paper I needed to write, in striving to imagine what it might be to find “one’s way about” in times of crisis.

Two sources of inspiration for the paper I’d like to mention are a discussion that took place on Duncan Richter’s blog Language Goes on Holiday in 2020 titled “Absolute Guilt” and an interview with Eddie Glaude on The Religious Studies Project podcast in 2021.

References

Baldwin, James. 1998. James Baldwin Collected Essays. Edited by Toni Morrison. New York: The Library of America. 

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 2009. Philosophical Investigations. 4th ed. Revised edition by P. M. S. Hacker and J. Schulte. Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, and J. Schulte. London: Blackwell Publishers.