IV. Wittgenstein’s Account of Religious Practice

“One must start out with error and convert it into truth. That is, one must reveal the source of the error, otherwise hearing the truth won’t do any good. The truth cannot force its way in when something else is occupying its place. To convince someone of the truth, it is not enough to state it, but rather one must find the path from error to truth.”

-Wittgenstein, Philosophical Occasions, p. 119

These mysterious words open Wittgenstein’s reflections on Frazer’s Golden Bough. Their purpose is to establish both the tone of Wittgenstein’s engagement with Frazer and his engagement with the subject matter, or religious practices. With respect to Frazer, Wittgenstein wants to show that the whole notion of religion involving an error in opinions or beliefs is wrong, and he wants to show this with a methodological reflection on the subject of religious practices writ large. His methodology will be to show what happens when we use fewer scientific assumptions in our interpretation and instead rely on what seems apparent from the facts of the matter itself. Ordinary interpretations are resources for coming to correct ones. And, to Frazer, Wittgenstein states, you are in error when you accuse the religious practice as being based on an error, in fact, it’s about something completely different than “error” and “truth” altogether. Further, he might continue, I am going to show you the path from your error to the truth of the matter, which will involve identifying the blockages along the path, and clearing the way to a clarified picture of the phenomenon.

This metaphor of the “path” from error to truth is why it’s so futile to “debate” religion with people — simply stating your opposing views doesn’t get you anywhere. Actually convincing people is much harder, and involves locating the “source” of the belief and finding common ground on which to articulate a common understanding sufficient to move the believer towards a different conclusion. This, as we know, is quite difficult to do, whether we’re debating politics or religion. So take “debate” and “convincing” off the table for now — right now, Wittgenstein wants to draw our attention to “the things themselves,” much like the phenomenologist would, so that we can have a better sense of what we’re even talking about. “Nothing is so difficult as doing justice to the facts” (p. 129).

Wittgenstein gets quickly to the point: “Frazer’s account of the magical and religious views of mankind is unsatisfactory: it makes these views look like errors…The very idea of wanting to explain a practice…seems wrong to me. All that Frazer does is to make them plausible to people who think as he does. It is very remarkable that in the final analysis all these practices are presented as, so to speak, pieces of stupidity. But it will never be plausible to say that mankind does all that out of sheer stupidity” (p. 119). Wittgenstein immediately pushes back against the “epistemological” account of religion, whereby religion is understood as a pseudo-scientific means for explaining the way the world works. But religion isn’t about that, or that exclusively. Certainly there are views that attend religious practices, views about the way the world works. But Wittgenstein says concerning such views, “where that practice and these views occur together, the practice does not spring from the views, but they are both just there” (ibid., my emphasis). Here, Wittgenstein offers a fundamental distinction between Marx’s approach and his own: the question of dialectical opposition.

In Marx, religion arises, like all things, out of a contradiction, a dialectical opposition between countervailing forces, or in this case, between the passion for relief from suffering and the material conditions that bar the way from realizing that relief. Belief and practice are also dialectically joined: it is only in terms of the practice that the belief has any content, and vice-versa. For Wittgenstein, however, instead of opposition, we have a much more subtle distinction of apposition. To be apposite to something, unlike being opposed to it, is to be alongside it, to be next to it, without necessarily standing in its way. For Wittgenstein the belief and the practice are just there, alongside one another, without a determinate relationship between them. This notion suggests that there is something else linking them or mediating them in establishing a relationship between them. But we need not think of this mediation in dialectical terms, simply relational ones.

In this piece, I am suggesting that dialectical thinking needs to be attentive to non-dialectical relationships as well as dialectical ones. And I want to further suggest that religion and Marxism are not dialectically opposed, as some Marxists would insist, but are apposite to one another, sharing a relationship through the mediation of their common grammar of liberation. The distinction between opposition and apposition is thus central to my argument of how to synthesize Wittgenstein and Marxism. But how to synthesize non-dialectical thinking with dialectical thinking?

There is no easy answer for this problem, but one route, I suggest, is in paying attention to other things that are not dialectically opposed to one another, but simply share a common space or vantage point.

This paying attention is what Wittgenstein would have us do. Frazer argues that it is difficult to detect the error in magic, because a rain ceremony to bring the rains for the crops will, eventually, appear to work. Wittgenstein responds: “But then it is surely remarkable that people don’t realize earlier that sooner or later it’s going to rain anyhow” (p. 121). The humor and sarcasm in Wittgenstein’s address to Frazer is an important element here. Simply listen to how silly it sounds to assume that religious people haven’t figured out basic weather patterns over (presumably) generations of practice. Wittgenstein ridicules Frazer’s explanations because, when looked upon in ordinary and non-scientific terms, they simply make no sense. Sure, sometimes you can convince someone that their particular practice isn’t working for the desired outcome, “But this happens only when calling someone’s attention to his error is enough to turn him from his way of behaving. But this is not the case with the religious practices of a people and therefore there is no question of an error” (ibid.). It’s simply preposterous to think that one day someone ventured a hypothesis that appeared to work and that is the only reason people continue to do it — because they have been duped into thinking about the world in erroneous terms. There’s simply no point in just ending the discussion there, as Frazer does.

Just as reasons and love don’t mix, reasons and hypotheses and explanations don’t fit with religious approaches to the world. We’re speaking on a different level here: “Every explanation is after all an hypothesis. But an hypothesis will be of little help to someone, say, who is upset because of love. — It will not calm him” (p. 123). These are simply things that don’t admit of rational explanation, such as “Burning in effigy. Kissing the picture of one’s beloved. That is obviously not based on the belief that it will have some specific effect on the object which the picture represents. It aims at satisfaction and achieves it. Or rather: it aims at nothing at all; we just behave this way and then we feel satisfied” (ibid.). Religious practices, and indeed practices we don’t typically think of as religious — such as burning in effigy or kissing a picture — are not teleological, goal-oriented, utilitarian calculi whereby we posit an end and then a means to achieve it. It is significant that Marx’s whole critique of religion centers around this point: that it (religion) fails to achieve its spiritual outcome in the material world. Yet, Wittgenstein suggests, this outcome is not what religion is (really) about.

If religion is not a utilitarian calculus, then it cannot be faulted for not achieving material ends which it simply does not posit for itself. In fact, there is so much more in religion than this hypothesis-theory of understanding it would suggest: “It goes without saying that a man’s shadow, which looks like him, or his mirror-image, the rain, thunderstorms, the phases of the moon, the changing of the seasons, the way in which animals are similar to and different from one another and in relation to man, the phenomenon of death, birth, and sexual life, in short everything we observe around us year in and year out, interconnected in so many different ways, will play a part in his thinking (his philosophy) and in his practices, or is precisely what we really know and find interesting” (pp. 128–129). In other words, everything we normally find interesting and compelling about human life, our actual life-worlds and life-practices, manifests itself in religious practice. It is about this dimension of religious life with which we are fundamentally concerned, how it integrates a whole range of practices and experiences.

“…[N]o phenomenon is in itself particularly mysterious, but any of them can become so to us, and the characteristic feature of the awakening mind of man is precisely the fact that a phenomenon comes to have meaning for him. One could almost say that man is a ceremonial animal. That is, no doubt, partly wrong and partly nonsensical, but there is also something right about it.” (p. 129)

For Wittgenstein, “An entire mythology is stored within our language” (p. 133), ours as much as anyone else’s. He describes religious customs as “an extremely developed gesture-language” (p. 135), and it is this concept of gesture that is so fundamental here. Religion gestures towards its ends without attempting to realize them materially; it aims to communicate something about the structure of human life to something that is beyond the “normal” (here I simply mean, secular, mundane) capacities for communication within human life. One cannot have a conversation with an illness. But one can perform a religious healing ritual that gestures or communicates towards the illness what it is you desire of it to do. “With the magical healing of an illness, one directs [beduetet — means or indicates to] the illness to leave the patient. After the description of any such magical treatment, one always wants to say: If the illness doesn’t understand that, I don’t know how one should tell it to leave” (p. 129).

Again, this is funny, or at the very least humorous. Certainly the joke is not at the expense of the religious adherent — it is precisely this person who Wittgenstein is defending. But it is funny to point out that, with such an elaborate means of communicating an intention as a healing ritual, can you really fault the person for performing something that so completely encompasses the desire for liberation from a suffering condition (illness) and communicates it so clearly to the world? How else would one go about doing that, if not religiously? The desire to communicate something to an otherwise un-hearing world makes sense — when that world won’t listen to normal means of communication, you have to invent more interesting and elaborate ways of communicating your intentions and bringing them about in the world. And if the response (by the religious skeptic) is that, simply, you should stop trying to communicate with a spiritless world that doesn’t give a shit about you anyway (as some atheists like to remind us), it turns out that this approach doesn’t work either. As Wittgenstein states, we are fundamentally ceremonial animals, down to our very understanding of our bodies: “When a man laughs too much in our company (or at least in mine), I half-involuntarily compress my lips, as if I believed I could thereby keep his closed” (p. 141). Another funny example, in fact my favorite example in this text, of “religious” behavior in otherwise non-religious contexts. What is important to note is how Wittgenstein is drawing our attention to the ways in which religious activities are somehow written into our bodies and our gestures to such an extent that they are “half-involuntary”.

One could easily object that an unconscious verbal tic is hardly “religious” even in the sense we are proposing, having to do with veneration and reverential piety. But I think to do so is to miss a deeper connection between gestures such as this and the religious, however it is defined. Their similarity lies not in their content but in their form, a form of indicating or dictating to reality the shape of the inner spirit that is concealed in human existence, our subjectivity being communicated to the objective world. That almost starts to sound Marxist, put this way. The general structure or form that Wittgenstein proposes for understanding religion is veneration; before wrapping up this section it is useful to look at the entire context for the quotation (which appeared above), although, as we shall see, there is much that remains problematic about this context:

“It was not for a trivial reason, for really there can have been no reason, that prompted certain races of mankind to venerate the oak tree, but only the fact that they and the oak tree were united in a community of life, and thus that they arose together not by choice…One could say it was not their union (the oak and the man) that has given rise to these rights [sic], but in a certain sense their separation. For the awakening of the intellect occurs with a separation from the original soil, the original basis of life. (The origin of choice.) (The form of the awakening spirit is veneration.)” (p. 139)

Now, while this passage is one of the most important in the “Remarks,” it is also one of the most confusing and problematic. Precisely which “races of mankind” is Wittgenstein talking about? Why does he deal with them in such abstract terms when he otherwise is very specific in responding to Frazer’s references to concrete practices? Just what exactly is going on here?

While it is certainly an ethical and political problem to simply erase the context of the peoples whose practices you are referencing (and one that runs counter to Wittgenstein’s own injunction to look at the whole context in understanding a particular practice), we can also ask the much more basic question of what precisely is trying to be communicated here. The reasons why Wittgenstein chose this example (the “community of life” which apparently evolved around oak trees) may remain mysterious to us, but his reasons for stating the above at all can become more clear to us upon a closer reading. There are two countervailing moments here: one in which the subject and object (human community and oak tree) are “united in a community of life,” and one in which they are (in fact) “separated” from each other. In the first place, we note the resemblance between Wittgenstein’s (earlier) term “community of life” with his (later) term for the totality of linguistic relations and social practices that unify a particular community, or “form of life”. This similarity indeed gives us a hint that Wittgenstein is indicating that we should be attentive to the whole context that gives rise to particular practices in the “form of life,” or implicit structures of agreement, the “grammar” a particular people share. But it also draws our attention to the failures of this implicit agreement, that in fact there is trouble here, a trouble Wittgenstein describes as “separation”. Next to this term, I put the Marxist term “alienation,” and I ultimately claim to draw significant parallels between these usages.

So, one is connected to some “source of life,” in profound and determinative ways, but one is also “separated” from this very source, the thing that gives rise to one’s very being in the world. This formula, evacuated of its specific content of oak trees and soil and other images — images that no doubt matter, but from which we can derive a broader philosophical claim that does not necessarily rely on such images — reflects the general attitude of the religious or venerative approach to the world. The separation from the very thing that gives you life and reason for existing, indeed the very means for your existence, is at the heart of this venerative approach. Religion is revealed to be, in this account, a profound and complex meditation on the distance between subjective consciousness and the objective world which stands over against it: it is an account of the impotence of the human imaginary to transform the world by means of the imaginary alone. For Marx, we must ally the human imaginary to labor in order to bring about the transformation of the world: “A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every labour process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the labourer at its commencement” (Capital, 188). The dialectical relationship between the imagination and the material world is mediated by the labor process which brings about the realization of intentions and subjective dispositions in the objective world. For religion, however, this is not the point.

The point is instead to meditate, as stated above, on the impossibility of crossing this divide in any final and complete way. For better or for worse, we are stuck with a world in which one needs to work to see the image in one’s mind become reality. This description is simply a description of the human condition more generally: we are not omnipotent, and the limits of our powers do not reflect the limits of our passions, our sufferings, our strivings. Our passion exceeds the limits of what we can do; we desire things we know we will never be able to achieve (at least, not on our own). This desire includes within it the desire for liberation that is central to both Marx and Wittgenstein’s problematics.

Religious traditions might propose different solutions to this central problematic, that of the impossible subject-object divide; but religious practices defined as venerative or reverential practices, meditate upon this central problem in common. Even things we don’t define as religious — kissing the photo of one’s beloved, burning in effigy, etc. — deal with this central question of how the world does not reflect our desires, and communicating to that world what those desires are, directing and gesturing towards fulfillment without achieving it, and so on. Venerative practices are about communicating with an otherwise indifferent world, and imagining a world which wouldn’t be so indifferent to our needs in the first place.

The consequences of such a development of religious practice are, among other things, a new understanding of the so-called “failures” of religion (for Marx, Marxists, atheists, and others), and recognizing, fundamentally, that these “failures” only fail because of an outside rubric being imposed on them by the kinds of thinkers I have parenthetically noted. In other words, they are not really failures, but a failure by the religious critic to understand the fundamental purpose of religious activity in the first place.