Gordon Graham: Wittgenstein & Natural Religion

Abstract

The concept of ‘‘true religion’’ is out of vogue with philosophers today, but it was once common and important in the discipline. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Hume, Spinoza, Mill, Reid, Schleiermacher, Kant and others engaged lively and interesting discussions about the grounds of religion in human nature, and the forms that ‘‘true religion’’ might take in happy and healthy human lives. They regularly used the expression ‘‘natural religion’’ to refer to faiths properly grounded in human nature, a use quite different from today’s, and they tried to map the features and possibilities of authentic faith. Hume et al. were also interested in the sort of theological and metaphysical questions that interest contemporary philosophers, but not to the exclusion of questions of the first sort. In his latest book, Gordon Graham tries to revive philosophical discussion of true religion by way of Wittgenstein. He argues that Wittgenstein’s later philosophy alerts us to religious sensibilities that are natural to human beings, but which can be stymied or fostered, much the way that our musical sensibilities can be dampened or cultivated. To neglect the development of our spiritual sensibility is to be impoverished, to some extent, as one would be impoverished by a profound insensitivity to music. Thus do ‘‘Wittgenstein’s philosophical investigations ... reveal interesting dimensions of human nature that speak to the proper role of religion’’ in lives that are both personally and socially well-ordered, according to Graham (7). In fact, Graham is bitterly opposed to any and all readings of Wittgenstein that claim him as ally or adversary in debates of theistic metaphysics, that is, in philosophy of religion of the sort commonly practiced today. Graham believes that Wittgenstein has no bearing whatsoever on those debates, and he devotes about half of his book to arguments