Philosophers

Was wittgenstein an atheist?

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Good question! There is reason to think that at various points in his life Wittgenstein was very much gripped by religious forms of life. According to McGuinness, during the first world war Wittgenstein was so taken by Tolstoy's The Gospel in Brief that "he read and reread it, and had it always with him, under fire and at all times, and was known by other soldiers as 'the one with the Gospels'." Long after the war he said to O.C. Dury "I am not a religious man but I cannot help seeing every problem from a religious point of view." While Wittgenstein changed his mind on various matters, he seems to have always had a kind of sacred wonder about the world (or existence) itself. In the Tractatus he wrote: "The mystical is not how the world is, but that it is." And later in his 1929 "A Lecture on Ethics" he described the experience of "seeing the world as a miracle." He noted that when he had such wonder at the existence of the world this was "exactly what people were referring to when they said that God created the world." A fine collection of some of Wittgenstein's views are analyzed in a brilliant book: The Rainbow of Experiences, Critical trust, and God" by Kai-Man Kwan. Kwan notes, for example, the times when Wittgenstein seems to explicitly invoke God as a living reality (e.g. "May God enlighten me. I am a worm, but through God I become a man") and at other times when speaking of God and religious forms of life, when Wittgenstein seems to assimilate believing that there is a God to living life a certain way (with humility, wonder, grace). So, the short answer to your question should probably be "we may never know for sure." If he was an atheist, I think we can be confident in thinking he wasn't an atheist for the reasons and in the spirit of Dawkins. And if he was a theist, he was closer to Tolstoy or Austin Farrer (an Anglican priest he admired) or Kierkegaard (whom Wittgenstein admired) rather than John Calvin or Martin Luther. And if agnostic, he might have been rather like the contemporary follower of Wittgenstein Anthony Kenney

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