Private Religion: Reading Wittgenstein on Religious Experience, Language, and Subjectivit

The primary aim of this project is to show that the critique of radical privacy developed by Ludwig Wittgenstein in his Philosophical Investigations can be applied to theories of private religion and the rhetoric of experience that underlies them. Such theories of private religion, which understand religion essentially as the expression of private, ineffable experiences, were once standard in the study of religion. These models have been widely rejected on the basis of constructivist critiques of the possibility of unmediated experience. I argue that constructivism relies implicitly on arguments drawn from the Investigations, but that because this Wittgensteinian heritage has gone unacknowledged, constructivist arguments that unmediated experience is impossible suffer from a fatal overreach. Wittgenstein does not seek to refute the possibility of private experience. Instead, he leads his readers to see that this notion is nonsense that has never been imagined by its proponents. If theorists of private religion were really thinking of religious experience and language as radically private, they would have to imagine human beings as subjects entirely divorced from broader shared forms of life, but this is exactly what they never do.;Since I argue that Wittgenstein's role in debates about private religion has to this point been only implicit, I first examine, in chapter one, the prevailing picture of Wittgenstein's thought in the study of religion. Using William James' The Varieties of Religious Experience as a touchstone, I show that in his private, unpublished remarks on religion, Wittgenstein characterizes true religion as a matter of feeling or passion, which is rooted in direct, individual experience. In the second chapter, I argue that this account of religion reflects the assumptions of a tradition of theories of private religion according to which religion has its origin in immediate private experience. Such theories of private religion have recently faced many lines of critique, preeminent among which are constructivist critiques that seek to demonstrate that the unmediated experience at the heart of private religion is impossible because experience is always constructed.;I argue, in the third chapter, that constructivism depends implicitly on Wittgensteinian arguments against radical privacy. The constructivists use forms of the so-called private language argument to demonstrate that the unmediated experience that theories of private religion require cannot be an element of a public discourse. In the fourth chapter, I argue that relying on these arguments secondhand rather than reading the Investigations has crippled constructivism. Recent, "resolute" interpretations of the Investigations show that, while Wittgenstein does undermine theories of radical privacy, he does not employ demonstrative arguments to do so. Finally, in chapter five, I show that constructivist arguments against unmediated experience actually contribute to giving substance to nonsensical notions of private religion. In demonstrating that private experience cannot function discursively, constructivism reifies the rhetoric of experience that supports private religion. My resolutely disciplined critique of private religion instead highlights the inability of theories of private religion to imagine religious experience apart from the shared context they seek to deny. Private religion shows itself to be manifestly absurd. This claim represents two major advances. First, my explicitly Wittgensteinian intervention in constructivist debates about unmediated religious experience shows a way out of what has been an intractable debate. Second, my resolute critique models a philosophical methodology that is constitutively interdisciplinary for the study of religion.