This article will bring together and explore the relations between four aspects of Wittgenstein’s remarks on, and his relation to, religious language. The first is his sense of the special role that religious language can play in the lives of people. The focus is not on traditional issues in the philosophy of religion—not the Ontological Proof of the existence of God; not any of Aquinas’ Five Ways; not the argument from Design or the Cosmological Argument; and not any other philosophico-religious matter concerning arguments for the existence or non-existence of any deity. His interests lie elsewhere. Second, we see that what Wittgenstein is centrally concerned with is the life-structuring power that religious language can possess and exert; it concerns both the sense-making power of pattern-lives in religious narratives and the metaphorical content of religious ways of thinking and perceiving. The third aspect is the distinctive, and in its way transcendental, way of seeing the world and existence sub specie aeternitatis, that is, under the aspect of eternity. Or, I will suggest, under the aspect of timelessness, or of having the sense of being above and outside of time. Wittgenstein said that he was not a religious person, but that he could not help but to see every problem from a religious point of view. In this third theme of the article, I will attempt to explicate what that remark can mean—how it reveals what Wittgenstein elsewhere in his work calls “a way of seeing.” And then fourth, this article will connect these three aspects to the special, non-pragmatic (and often in the above sense, transcendental) way that we view works of art. In his Notebooks of 1914-16, Wittgenstein wrote, “The work of art is the object seen sub specie aeternitatis; and the good life is the world seen sub specie aeternitatis. This is the connection between art and ethics.” At the close, I suggest that the way we learn to see the world through and within religious language (again, apart from any theological claim concerning divine existence or not) is parallel to one important way of seeing art—where the parallel is one that casts light from each side to the other. Along with some other works, my most central example in art will be the paintings of Morandi: in conveying an unmistakable sense of timelessness, they both convey, and in viewing them invite us to enact, the special way of seeing objects sub specie aeternitatis.
Garry Hagberg (Fri,) studied this question.