Anglo-American Philosophical Culture: Religion and the Reception of Wittgenstein

Abstract

It will be no surprise at the close of the present collection, to say that the majority of philosophers in our Anglo-American culture probably view Wittgenstein’s remark as itself bordering on madness. They are heirs to Hume’s devastating critique of religion in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion and Kant’s demolition of the traditional proofs of the existence of God. Most philosophers do not pause to ask whether religious belief need take the form which lays it open to such critiques. If they do, it is usually to denounce as reductionist any suggested alternatives which do not conform to what philosophical theism says theism must be. In the wake of the philosophical critiques, the persistence of religious belief is explained, through the combined efforts of anthropology, sociology, psychology and psychoanalysis, as the survival of the primitive in us, despite our advanced culture. Political fundamentalism and the headline-catching suicides in sects apart, the net effect is the relegation of religion, by the philosophical intelligentsia, to a regrettable superstition on the margins of our culture. Many of our most well-known philosophers write of how belief in God is impossible for us, confidently appropriating the plural while safely ignoring those to whom their remarks do not apply.

Religion as madness is a madness springing from irreligiousness. (Wittgenstein)²⁰⁵