WITTGENSTEIN`S INTEREST IN KIERKEGAARD

I want to begin my reflections on Wittgenstein`s interest in Kierkegaard with a lengthy quotation from O.K. Bouwsma`s journals in which he kept track of discussions he had with Wittgenstein in the years 1949-51.

Yesterday about noon we went for a ride to Mount Tom reservation. On the way up he began talking about teaching ethics. Impossible! He regards ethics as telling someone what he should do. But how can anyone counsel another? Imagine someone advising another who was in love and about to marry, and pointing out to him all the things he cannot do if he marries. The idiot! How can one know how these things are in another man`s life?

I suggested: ``No man is wise from another man`s woe, nor scarcely from his own.`` But he said: ``Oh no, not quite that. I can only imagine a teacher who is in some way higher than those he teaches and who suffers with those in respect to whose sufferings he is to give counsel.`` (Who was this teacher but Jesus Christ?) And the taught must confess to him the innermost secrets of his life, holding nothing back. This would be teaching in ethics.

Later as we stopped on the hill looking down over the city, he asked me: Had I read any Kierkegaard? I had. He had read some. Kierkegaard is very serious. But he could not read him much. He got hints. He did not want another man`s thoughts all chewed. A word or two was sometimes enough. But Kierkegaard struck him almost as like a snob, too high, for him, not touching the details of common life. Take his prayers. They left him unmoved. But he once read the prayers and meditations of Samuel Johnson. They were his meat. ``The violent incursions of evil thoughts.`` (I`m not sure about his judgment here of Kierkegaard.)

(Wittgenstein Conversations, 1949-51 ed. Craft and Hustwit 45f)

One cannot tell from these remarks the extent to which Wittgenstein admired and learned from Kierkegaard. We can tell from other remarks made to friends and from writings and lectures where he speaks of religious belief just how much he did admire and learn from Kierkegaard. I will cite some of those remarks made to friends about Kierkegaard later to demonstrate that affinity. I will also cite later some ideas from Wittgenstein`s lectures to enhance what I have quoted from Bouwsma`s journals. What strikes me now about the quoted remarks is the way in which the remarks about Kierkegaard follow on the heels of his thoughts about teaching ethics and the obvious allusion to Jesus as the model of a teacher of ethics.

I want first to try to bring out the connection that I see between these ideas in the remark to Bouwsma and then to try to develop more of the same idea by looking at additional remarks of Wittgenstein about Kierkegaard. I am, in this exercise, not much interested in the comparison of two philosophers. I am interested in understanding Wittgenstein and, particularly, in what he derived from reading Kierkegaard. Much of what I am writing is guesswork and ``following hints.`` Perhaps I have some of it wrong in my speculations, but following the hints is the likely path of gaining some new understanding.

I will begin, then, by developing the connections that I see in the above remark Wittgenstein made to Bouwsma. I assume that when the conversation started, Wittgenstein was thinking about a professor of ethics teaching ethics. The idea of teaching ethics is ridiculous to him. A professor of ethics might find himself in a position that seemed to require that he teach others what is right and wrong – ``telling someone what he should do.`` And he might be taken in by the illusion that such an undertaking made sense. But as Wittgenstein fills in the thought, he thinks that it is ridiculous because it would be ridiculous for any ordinary man to teach any other ordinary man what is right and wrong and what he should do. I take it that it is not ridiculous for one person to remind another of what is right and wrong in such a case where the other has behaved badly and does not see what he has done. But this is not a case of teaching ethics as Wittgenstein is thinking of it. It is a case of reminding someone of what he already understands to be wrong. Teaching ethics is telling someone what is right and wrong – ``telling someone what he should do`` and why.

Why is it ``Impossible!`` or ridiculous, as I have called it, for one person to teach ethics to another person in this sense? First, I should think that any adult speaker of a language, having come to maturity in a community, would have already acquired the fundamental judgments of ethics. Kindness, honesty, and repaying one`s debts are accepted as prescriptions over against cruelty, lying, and failed promises. How these judgments are acquired may require a longer account. How these virtues are actually acquired may also require a longer account. But that the judgments are acquired by the time of adulthood precludes the necessity of teaching them.

Another aspect of the idea of one person teaching ethics to another is that an ordinary person lacks the authority to teach another right or wrong. Wittgenstein starts the thought seemingly thinking of one person`s being able to understand how another person`s life looked to him. ``How can one know how these things are in another man`s life?`` But when Bouwsma picks up on this inability as the meaning of Wittgenstein`s remark, Wittgenstein pushes the remark to a deeper level. One cannot know how it is in another person`s life because one is not God. Only God could have the point of view to know how it is in someone`s life. Only God can judge another`s heart; ordinary humans are admonished against judging.

Wittgenstein describes the only imaginable teacher of ethics, then, as someone who is higher than the ordinary human being who is being taught, as someone who has suffered with the one whom he has taught in respect to what he is giving counsel, and as someone to whom the taught must confess the innermost secrets of his life. ``Who is this teacher,`` Bouwsma observes, ``but Jesus Christ?``

The idea that only God can ``teach ethics`` meets the criteria for an authority that entitles one to tell another how to live. If an ordinary human has acquired the fundamental moral judgments by virtue of his having learned a language in some human community, then no other ordinary human may be said to be his teacher. These moral prescriptions are not the property of one ordinary human or another or of one community or school of ordinary humans. Their obligation comes somehow from beyond the ordinary, or it does not come at all. These teachings, if they are binding, must come from God.

God has the authority to ``teach ethics,`` also, because He has not remained an abstraction apart from human life and suffering. He has suffered as an ordinary human in Galilee – been moved by the sickness and death of those around Him, suffered the wrongs and temptations of ordinary life, and suffered the fear of death and of the meaninglessness of human life. Aristotle`s unmoved mover has nothing to say to a human being, but if it did, like Wittgenstein`s lion, no one would understand it. Neither would it have the moral authority to speak.

Finally, only God has the authority to ``teach ethics`` because only God has the point of view from which to judge a human being. One human cannot judge another because a mere human does not know the secrets of another`s heart. One person can only form a reasonable hypothesis (or form an ``approximation,`` as Kierkegaard says) of the springs of action of another. There are two theaters in which humans play. One theater – a private theater – is the one to which only God has access, and in this theater the ethical life of the individual is played out. The other theater is a public theater, and it would be an illusion to suppose that one may judge another in it in the matter of the ethical. This same illusion permits one to suppose that one could teach another ethics. As only God has access to the ``private theater,`` to continue the allusion to Kierkegaard, it makes sense that it is only to God that a confession of one`s shortcomings would be possible. And it is only by God, then, that it could be required.

Confession of the innermost secrets of one`s heart seems to have been personally important to Wittgenstein. From all accounts of those who knew him, he strove for honesty in their communications and sought to rid himself of being misunderstood and of the guilt of certain secrets. He was raised as a Roman Catholic, and the model of confession must have been shaped by that training. If he was to improve as a human being (live ethically), he would have to confess the secrets of his innermost heart – the secret springs of his actions. And, of course, who would have the authority to hear such a confession, judge such a confession, and require such a confession? Who other than Jesus Christ?

These thoughts about teaching ethics and about God as the only appropriate teacher of ethics led Wittgenstein to ask Bouwsma if he had read any of Kierkegaard`s works. The remarks that Wittgenstein makes here about Kierkegaard do not, at first glance, show the depth of attraction which Kierkegaard had for Wittgenstein. While he says that Kierkegaard is very serious, an expression of approbation which Wittgenstein reserved for only a few, he goes on to describe Kierkegaard in terms of what must be his, Wittgenstein`s, personal reaction to having read Kierkegaard with interest. What he now got from reading Kierkegaard were ``hints,`` but he did not want ``another man`s thoughts all chewed.`` In other words, Wittgenstein, not a Kierkegaard scholar, had his own work to do, and wanted to read Kierkegaard for the stimulation of his own thoughts along paths to which Kierkegaard pointed. As readers of Kierkegaard know, he has great patience with himself in developing a theme. Is this the chewing to which Wittgenstein refers? I doubt it. I also doubt if Wittgenstein meant that Kierkegaard chewed and then produced developed theses in a philosophy of religion. Wittgenstein was too good a reader and too consciously aware of style to miss Kierkegaard`s indirection. Whatever ``chewed up`` meant for Wittgenstein, it must have included his determination that he needed none to do his thinking for him. He continues that Kierkegaard is like a snob, is too high for him, seems detached from common life. He contrasts Kierkegaard`s prayers, which do nothing for him, with Samuel Johnson`s prayers, which appeal to Wittgenstein`s own spiritual needs. Johnson`s prayers, Wittgenstein says, treat of such real passions as ``The violent incursions of evil thoughts.``

Each of these thoughts about Kierkegaard, but especially the last one, shows us more of Wittgenstein`s relation to Kierkegaard. Did Wittgenstein have violent incursions of evil thoughts? And should prayers not have personal efficacy? From those who wrote of personal contact with Wittgenstein, we learn of a man who sought salvation – sought in his thinking to lead a new life. In this remark admiring Johnson`s prayer of protection from the sudden incursion of evil thoughts, reflecting prayer as a personal struggle with oneself before God, there is a picture. The picture is much like that which Wittgenstein has presented in his previous remarks about ``the teacher of ethics`` who must have had the sufferings of the one whom he is to teach and to whom the learner must confess all the innermost secrets of his heart. Christianity, for Kierkegaard, was a way of life and not a doctrine – not a set of propositions about the way things stand in the world. Christianity is personal salvation in which one is redeemed by the only possible teacher of how one must live and to whom one must confess and petition for strength to fight against the sudden incursions of evil thoughts. And while Kierkegaard`s prayers left Wittgenstein unmoved, it is this very picture of Christianity which Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein share and which draw Wittgenstein to Kierkegaard as ``serious`` and as one who had profound and suggestive insights into the true nature of religious experience.

I have collected several other remarks that Wittgenstein made to friends and students about Kierkegaard. I want to present some which show not only the regard which Wittgenstein had for Kierkegaard, but remarks which also show a connection between ethics and Kierkegaard, as these made to Bouwsma do.

To Maurice O`Connor Drury, Wittgenstein mentioned Kierkegaard in connection with a discussion of the Moral Sciences Club at Cambridge. When Drury, later, could not find anything of Kierkegaard`s translated into English, he pushed Wittgenstein to say more about Kierkegaard. Wittgenstein said in reply: ``Kierkegaard was by far the most profound thinker of the last century. Kierkegaard was a saint.`` Wittgenstein went on to describe some of Kierkegaard`s project in the stages on life`s way. At a later date, Wittgenstein told Drury that one of his students had written to him saying that it was Wittgenstein`s recommendation that he read Kierkegaard which led, at least in part, to the student`s becoming a Roman Catholic. (Monk identifies this student in his biography of Wittgenstein as Yorick Smythies. Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius 464.) Drury goes on to say that Wittgenstein responded to his student saying: ``If someone tells me that he has bought the outfit of a tight-rope walker, I am not impressed until I see what is done with it`` (Ludwig Wittgenstein: Personal Recollections ed. by Rush Rhees 102-104).

Notice the explicit recommendations of Wittgenstein to these two students (Smythies and Drury) to read Kierkegaard. Notice how Wittgenstein understands Christianity in ethical terms: i) ``Kierkegaard is a saint`` – not just another writer on the subject of religion. A saint, presumably, is one whose life or thought is a model for Christian life or thought. And: ii) ``If someone tells me that he has bought the outfit of a tight-rope walker, I am not impressed until I see what he has done with it`` (A comment made in response to Smythies` letter that he became a Roman Catholic, attributing his conversion partly to his reading of Kierkegaard). Wittgenstein`s remark is marvelous as it exhibits his idea that Christianity must be understood by how Christian categories are appropriated. Maybe Smythies` claim that he has become a Roman Catholic will mean that he will accept the form and discipline of that church and its teachings. Maybe he will now confess his sins and seek renewal at the Eucharist regularly and his life will look quite different as the result of such practices. Maybe Smythies will be aided in his struggle to fight off sudden incursions of evil thoughts. Or, maybe he will cast the whole thing aside in a short time as one who having fantasized about being a tight-rope walker might cast off a newly purchased uniform, after seeing how difficult it really was to walk on a wire. One must wait and see, Wittgenstein says, to know whether Smythies` becoming a Roman Catholic means anything at all.

In his Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir, Norman Malcolm writes that Wittgenstein responded to his question of whether he had read Kierkegaard`s Works of Love : ``I`ve never read the Works of Love. Kierkegaard is far too deep for me, anyhow. He bewilders me without working the good effects which he would in deeper souls`` (62).

In Wittgenstein: A Religious Point of View, Malcolm writes: ``Once I quoted to him a remark of Kierkegaard`s which went something like this: `How can it be that Christ does not exist, since I know that he has saved me? Wittgenstein`s response was: `You see it isn`t a matter of proving anything!` He thought the symbolisms of religion are `wonderful,` but he distrusted theological formulations. He objected to the idea that Christianity is a doctrine, i.e. a theory about what has happened and will happen to the human soul . . .`` (19).

Finally, here is a remark of Wittgenstein`s from Culture and Value: ``I believe that one of the things Christianity says is that sound doctrines are all useless. That you have to change your life. . . . But here you need something to move you and turn you in a new direction. – (i.e. this is how I understand it.) Once you have been turned around you must stay turned around. Wisdom is passionless. But faith by contrast is what Kierkegaard calls a passion`` (53). Culture and Value contains a number of such remarks in which Wittgenstein continually stresses that Christianity is not a doctrine, but an idea or a picture of what one may be able to do with one`s life. An interesting and typical instance of this sort of remark relates to the doctrine of predestination. Wittgenstein says that to him it is ``ugly, nonsense, and irreligious,`` but that for someone at a ``quite different level`` it could be a ``godly picture`` and that such a person might be able to use it in his life. Wittgenstein always asked in connection with a Christian doctrine: What would it do for me? or What would it do in someone`s life? This is a Kierkegaardian idea (subjective truth), and Wittgenstein sometimes identified it explicitly with Kierkegaard.

Each of these remarks suggests that Wittgenstein associated Kierkegaard with the idea that Christianity was not a philosophical doctrine but a way of life. To Malcolm he expresses the thought that Kierkegaard is ``too deep`` for him. He reacts this way not because Kierkegaard`s writing is too difficult – that Kierkegaard`s philosophical views are too obtuse. Wittgenstein is saying that he, Wittgenstein, is not spiritually deep enough to make use of Kierkegaard`s guidance in Christianity. If he were deeper, he could appropriate more Christianity. The latter remark about predestination in Culture and Value may provide an example of his concern. Wittgenstein is unable to use the doctrine of predestination in his personal struggles. His idea of an ethical teacher, remember, is one to whom he can confess everything and who will give him direction with authority. This concern, for Wittgenstein, must have presupposed an ongoing sense of guilt and an ongoing struggle to live differently, both of which would have been quelled by the idea in predestination that the question of his salvation had already been settled. But perhaps someone who was further along in his spiritual struggle, someone with a struggle whose form took that of believing that he could never be forgiven or never do enough to deserve the favor of God, perhaps such a ``deeper soul`` might have need of the doctrine of predestination. So the truth of predestination is assessed in the light of the needs of the soul. It cannot be assessed as a philosophical doctrine about the world. The idea here is pure Kierkegaard – subjective truth vs.objective truth.

In both the remark to Malcolm about Christianity not being a matter of proving anything and in the remark from Culture and Value about sound doctrines being useless, the insight into the nature of Christianity is the same. Christianity looks as if it were a set of beliefs about the world, God, and the soul. And if it were that simple, then the ordinary considerations about beliefs would be in place. What we believe would be taken as a true description of the world as created by God, the human soul as immortal, and so on. Under this misunderstanding, or ``illusion`` as Kierkegaard might call it, one would seek for proof and evidence of the truth of the propositions believed. Kierkegaard`s works might be read as the attempt to dispel this very illusion. And it is this illusion, too, which Wittgenstein, at least, has seen through in these various remarks to friends. ``You see it isn`t a matter of proving anything!`` This is Wittgenstein`s approving remark to Kierkegaard`s: ``How can it be that Christ does not exist, since I know that he has saved me?`` Wittgenstein sees that Kierkegaard is using the word ``know`` here in a markedly different way than one uses it outside of religious belief. For example, in the religious use there is no explaining how one came to find out. There is no defense, proof, or evidence. Instead, faith is justified as a ``passion`` – something ``takes hold of you`` or ``grasps you.`` Religious belief, faith in Jesus Christ (in this case) enables you to pray, to ask and to give, to follow, to confess ``the innermost secrets of your heart,`` to fall down and rise up again, and so on. When non-believers ask of believers whose intelligence they respect, ``How could you, an educated person, believe such things?`` they are not thinking of faith as a passion that takes hold of one and enables one to navigate on his own troubled sea. They are thinking rather of Christianity as a set of doctrines about the world and the soul, and these doctrines then appear to them as preposterous. Who could accept them as true other than someone never exposed to the rigors of scientific thinking – someone uneducated?

I should now like to return to the remark Wittgenstein made to Bouwsma in which Wittgenstein connects teaching ethics to Christianity and to ideas in Kierkegaard. I want to develop these ideas by using some more organized thoughts of Wittgenstein on these subjects, namely those organized in two lectures which he gave: ``A Lecture On Ethics,`` which was given to The Heretics Society at Cambridge in 1929 and ``Lectures On Religious Belief,`` which was a set of lecture notes taken by a student at Cambridge about 1938. These lectures develop the same themes expressed in the above-collected remarks to friends, and further show the strong influence Kierkegaard had on Wittgenstein`s thinking. Again, I want to follow hints and make connections on my own.

The remarks to Bouwsma about ``teaching ethics`` again show a connection in Wittgenstein`s mind between Christianity and a manner of living. Ethics is connected with Christianity and must be connected with Christianity because ethics must rest on God. Only God would have the authority to prescribe how one should live, and only God has the perspective to judge and to hear the confession of a human being. This connection between ethics and religious belief is developed in both lectures, and we find Kierkegaard`s imprint on both with veiled allusions to Kierkegaard in the ``Lectures On Religious Belief.``

In ``A Lecture On Ethics,`` Wittgenstein`s ideas are captured in the sentence: ``Ethics, if anything, is supernatural and our words will only express facts . . . .`` Ethics is teaching someone how he should live and explaining the reasons why he should live in that way. For this teaching, one needs a special kind of authority, which a human being does not have, as discussed in the remarks above. But also one needs a language other than a human language. Put aside for now Wittgenstein`s vestigial expression ``our words will only express facts.`` What he means is that our language can only express human thoughts from a human perspective. One cannot put the justification for how we should live into a human language. It could, in the end, only rest on what lay outside of human experience, thoughts, and perspective – outside our scope of familiarity. Call what is outside our familiarity, with Kierkegaard, ``the Unknown.`` Call the Unkown, with Kierkegaard, ``the God.`` Our words, then, can express neither ``the God`` nor the way of life founded upon the God – ethics.

But the words of religious belief, the words that present the ``great allegory`` of God – the creator of the world, the one who directs Abraham and presents Moses with the commandments, the redeemer of sinful man – are words that do attempt to express about ethics and God. Wittgenstein suggests that we might try to understand such language by seeing it as an attempt to describe certain human experiences. Wittgenstein mentions three personal experiences that this great allegory might be describing, but does not want to limit the allegory to these three. The first is an experience of awe about existence itself – ``how extraordinary that anything should exist.`` Why should there be something rather than nothing? A second experience is that of being absolutely safe – the experience of feeling that ``nothing can injure me whatever happens.`` And, later, Wittgenstein refers to a third experience – one that we know from other contexts was also personal – the experience of feeling guilty. The words of the great allegory of the Hebrew and Christian Scripture might be taken to describe such experiences as these. As to the experience of awe at the existence of the world, the words of the allegory present God as creating the earth and humans from the earth. As to the experience of feeling absolutely safe, the allegory speaks of a loving God who promises to care for his people and fulfills promises. And the language of the allegory of the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ, the sacrificial lamb, who takes upon himself the sins of the world, together with the symbols of the body and blood taken in remembrance of him, relates, in part, to the description of the experience of feeling guilty. The above is only a sketch of the description of such experiences in the Christian allegory.

Now, the account here would seem to reduce religious language to the expressions of these experiences, so that the meaning of the language would be the experience that corresponds to it. But Wittgenstein rejects that move. Rather, he says that where ordinarily we should ask for the description of the facts for which a simile is a simile, it will do no good in this case. The description of the facts, or in this case, the expression of the experiences itself is nonsense.

In both lectures, Wittgenstein is concerned with the question of the sense of religious propositions. To believe that I am ``absolutely safe`` or that ``nothing can harm me`` is, it would seem, to rule out the contradictory proposition that there are things in this life that can harm me. I know, however, that there are things that can harm me. Ordinary contradictory evidence is being excluded in believing the proposition ``Nothing can harm me.`` Believing ``Nothing can harm me,`` then, is not believing an ordinary proposition. A criterion for sense in the case of an ordinary proposition has been violated in connection with such a religious belief as ``Nothing can harm me,`` in that evidence for the contradictory proposition is not acknowledged. When the contradictory proposition makes no sense, neither does the proposition itself. Wittgenstein expresses the same idea in connection with the statement of the first experience as well. He says: ``If I say `I wonder at the existence of the world` I am misusing language`` (41). The verbal expressions of this experience are ``nonsense,`` because one cannot imagine their opposite. What would it be like to imagine the non-existence of the world? Wittgenstein says in various places that when one cannot imagine the opposite of a proposition, one cannot imagine the thing itself. It makes no sense then, Wittgenstein believes, to express the wonder at the world`s existence (42).

We see the same idea being expressed again in his ``Lectures on Religious Belief.`` If someone says there is a German airplane overhead, another could reply ``Possibly, I`m not sure.`` But how unlike this response is to someone who said that he believed in the Last Judgment. One does not weigh this with the detached opinion of ``Possibly`` – as if to say ``We need more evidence, and then I will make up my mind.`` Weighing evidence does not play a role in such religious beliefs as it does in scientific beliefs. There is evidence for whether or not an airplane is a German airplane. The concept of ``evidence`` makes no sense in connection with the Last Judgment nor generally in connection with religious belief. The opposite of believing in a Last Judgment is thinkable, but there is no one who has returned from the grave who will testify to a Last Judgment or its opposite. No one expects an ordinary experience of a Last Judgment or its opposite. A person dies and is never seen or heard from again. This is neither evidence for, nor evidence against a Last Judgment, which makes no claim about what one should expect to see happen in the world after a person has died. Again, propositions that claim a Last Judgment can live in the presence of their opposites without evidence which supports or contradicts either one. An ordinary criterion of sense is violated with such propositions of religious belief.

Of course, if one believes in a Last Judgment, the world will look different than it does if one does not believe in a Last Judgment. And this is true of other propositions of religious belief. The world looks different to one who believes that God is the creator and redeemer of the world. Nature as creation is totally different from nature as a blind mechanical progression of matter following the course prescribed by causal laws. A world in which one can pray is vastly different from one in which prayer is not possible. A world in which one can confess one`s sins and take on a rule of life is different from one in which there are no sins, where guilt is a baseless burden and impossible to be rid of, and where no rule regulates one`s practices and relations to others. And living in a world where nothing can harm you will produce a very different person from living in a world where the fear of death, ill-fortune, and the inevitable progression of scientific laws reign. The world of the religious man is a different world from the world of the secular man. These differences do give an opposition between religious propositions and their negations. They set aside religious propositions from ``nonsense.`` That they make a different world full of different possibilities for the believer – that he may worship, kneel to confess, rise up in strength, etc. – gives sense to what would, by other considerations, be nonsense. While Wittgenstein did not put it in this way, perhaps because he was still struggling with shadows of his Tractarian theory of the proposition, he did see a distinction between the nonsense of philosophical propositions and the ``nonsense`` of religious belief. The language of ethics and the language of religious belief, insofar as both are attempts to say something about the meaning of life, are both ``tendencies in the human mind,`` which Wittgenstein could not ``help respecting deeply`` and would not for his life ``ridicule`` (44).

This same tension between claiming that religious beliefs are nonsense and yet not nonsense is present everywhere in Kierkegaard as well, reflecting a similar understanding of the philosophical issues. In the Philosophical Fragments and in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Kierkegaard works to show that religious beliefs are ``paradoxical.`` Christ, the ``Absolute Paradox,`` is, on the one hand, an ordinary historical fact and, on the other – that God became a man – could not possibly be an ordinary historical fact. There could be no evidence for such a fact because everything and nothing would be compatible with it. Kierkegaard`s distinction between subjective truth and objective truth also captures the distinction between kinds of nonsense as well. `` . . . it is only in subjectivity that its truth exists, if it exists at all; objectively, Christianity has absolutely no existence`` and `` . . . an objective acceptance of Christianity is thoughtlessness`` (116). One can hear the same tension in Kierkegaard immediately in remarks such as the following two: i) ``. . . Christianity is the absurd . . . Suppose it refuses to be understood, and that the maximum of understanding which could come into question is to understand that it cannot be understood`` (191f); and ii) ``Nonsense therefore he [the believing Christian] cannot believe against the understanding, for precisely the understanding will discern that it is nonsense and will prevent him from believing it; but he makes so much use of the understanding that he becomes aware of the incomprehensible, and then he holds to this, believing against the understanding`` (504). Calling Christianity ``paradoxical,`` ``incomprehensible,`` and ``nonsense`` creates a puzzle for anyone trying to comprehend and to express what Christianity is. Yet this is what both Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard have attempted to do. The telling of this account is conceptually intricate, but it is the account, I believe, that is essential for understanding Christian belief. Kierkegaard devoted his life to perfecting this account. Wittgenstein`s life work, too, was aimed at articulating the boundaries of sense and nonsense, but his was a more general task than Kierkegaard`s, which was focused primarily on understanding Christianity. Kierkegaard called philosophers back from abstracted Christian concepts (objectivity/nonsense) to the ordinary use of those concepts in the life of the believer (subjectivity/sense). In this more specialized task of Kierkegaard`s, Wittgenstein saw, I believe, the same understanding of the concepts of religious belief at which he was arriving through his more general interests in the boundaries of sense and nonsense. And this, I believe, explains their affinity and Wittgenstein`s attention to Kierkegaard.

The observation of my paper is that Wittgenstein`s thoughts about religious belief show great affinity with those of Kierkegaard. And further, Wittgenstein`s propensity to cite Kierkegaard and to recommend reading him to his friends indicates that he owes a debt to Kierkegaard to the extent that any original thinker could owe anything to anyone. I will not press the idea of a debt in the realm of thought, because I do not really know what it means. But I have pressed the affinity of their thought and the obvious approbation which Wittgenstein had for Kierkegaard. I should add that the ``Lectures On Religious Belief,`` also, has several allusions to Kierkegaard that a reader unfamiliar with Kierkegaard would not notice. His illustration of the point about ``evidence`` is that of evidence for the existence of Napoleon, which is the very example Kierkegaard gives for this same point in Philosophical Fragments. And Wittgenstein`s allusion to ``a great writer`` who tells of a father who sets a task for his son, the duty for which not even death could remove, is Kierkegaard`s own story. These allusions, together with all the accounts of Wittgenstein`s acquaintances and with the affinity of the thoughts themselves, make it abundantly clear that Kierkegaard was one of the very few philosophers that influenced Wittgenstein`s development in general and specifically on the subject of religious belief.

WORKS CITED

Bouwsma, O.K. Wittgenstein Conversations, 1949-51, ed. J.L. Craft and Ronald E Hustwit. Indianapolis: Hackett Pub. Co., 1986.

Drury, M. O`C. ``Conversations With Wittgenstein`` in Ludwig Wittgenstein: Personal Recollections, ed. Rush Rhees. New Jersey: Rowman and Littlefield, 1981.

Malcolm, Norman. A Memoir. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984; 2nd ed..

–––––. Wittgenstein: A Religious Point of View?, ed. Peter Winch. Ithaca: Cornell University Press,1994.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Culture and Value, trans. Peter Winch. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.

–––––. ``A Lecture On Ethics`` in Ludwig Wittgenstein: Philosophical Occasions, 1912–1951.

–––––. ``Lectures On Religious Belief`` in Wittgenstein: Lectures & Conversations, ed. Cyril Barrett. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967.

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