Towards God Through the Joyful Acceptance of Madness: Wittgenstein’s Religious Search for Purity

Abstract Although Wittgenstein claimed that he was not a religious man, in this paper I comment on the deeply religious conflicts that can be found in his diaries during the first trimester of 1937 – and which found an echo in subsequent observations until nearly the end of his life. Keeping in mind that Wittgenstein took for granted that vanity can prevent knowledge of each individual’s nature, which dictates how such individual must act, I start by explaining how Wittgenstein finds that the only solution to this problem is to fervently humiliate oneself before God and withstand His scrutiny in order to know and thus to accept one’s own nature. Subsequently, I show how Wittgenstein is inspired by Kierkegaard’s work to remain humiliated before God, which led the former to focus on the way in which he used his intelligence to avoid the scrutiny of God. Against this background, I indicate that Wittgenstein decides to guide his life by divine inspirations and, most importantly, I show how he adopts the joyful acceptance of madness as the criterion to determine whether he has actually been able to maximize his humiliation before God, thus becoming pure of heart.