The Ordinary as Ceremony: Wittgenstein on Language and Religion

This paper examines Wittgenstein’s shifting engagement with religion, from the early emphasis on the limits of the world in the Tractatus to the later attention to the ordinary and to the ways religious expressions inhabit forms of life. An analysis of later Wittgenstein shows that the religious functions within ordinary language-games, in which expressions tied to religion have established places and contexts of use. These uses, in turn, are intelligible against the background of many kinds of talk and observation that are not ordinarily characterized as religious. At the same time, Wittgenstein is concerned with the way in which words can be intensified through personal use, acquiring an inflection that responds to individual experience and is exposed to the possibility of acknowledgment or failure. What emerges is a way of inhabiting language in which the religious is understood as a renewal of one’s gaze upon the everyday. This is the region in which philosophy and religion meet in Wittgenstein: the work of finding again the words that speak for us, allowing them to regain their depth and to return us, moment by moment, to ordinary life.