Is Mordecai Kaplan’s approach to religion

Wittgensteinian?

Mordecai Kaplan is the founder of a Jewish religious movement named

Reconstructionism. Rejecting both Orthodox and Reform positions, Kaplan sought
to reconfigure Judaism in order to make it suitable for people of the twentieth
century. In doing this, he sought to define it not principally as a system of
metaphysical beliefs, but rather as a way of life and means of living for the
Jewish community. His aim was to provide a method for retaining the integrity of
Jewish identity and culture in a time when traditional religious ‘beliefs’ were seen
to be increasingly untenable. Kaplan believes that because a religion is an
emergent property of a society, it cannot be preserved “as a glass-encased
exhibit in a museum”; it must evolve along with its society, and the religion
which does not will become irrelevant and inevitably be left behind.

Kaplan lived at roughly the same time as Ludwig Wittgenstein, the Austrian
philosopher who has been called the most important philosopher of the twentieth
century. Wittgenstein’s work published in his lifetime only touched on religious
issues, but posthumously there has been a wealth of material published which
has shed light into his religious ideas. However, the project is still largely one of
reconstruction: we must extrapolate indirectly what his feelings about religion
and religious language were. That a view consistent with those thoughts he
recorded is found indicates that this is no idle speculation. But it must not be
forgotten that Wittgenstein himself never systematised any dogmatic approach
to the subject. Meanwhile much research has been carried out into the wider
implication of his thought for religion. The early tendency of scholars to
emphasise the difference between his early and late thought has now been
replaced by an understanding of the continuities.

There is no recorded acknowledgement from Kaplan of Wittgenstein1 (or vice

versa), but I believe an examination will reveal some distinct similarities.

Kaplan’s The Meaning of God in Jewish Religion

The text of Kaplan's which I will use in this essay is The Meaning of God in
Modern Jewish Religion (1994). This work sets forth the principle theoretical basis
of Kaplan’s theology in several stages. For Kaplan it is crucial that we understand
the word “God” based on the utility of the term. By examining the way the term
has functioned historically, we can extract a similar use in the modern period
which will allow us to use the language of religion without committing ourselves
to a metaphysics which goes against our common-sense. Kaplan explains his
God idea by means of eight interrelated functions. These functions are:
1
Interestingly, he refers several times to Wittgenstein’s early mentor at Cambridge,
Bertrand Russell – though not in terms entirely approving; e.g. 1994:27
1. The power that makes for salvation. Salvation for Kaplan is self-fulfilment,
or self-actualization. He asks, “What more comprehensive purpose can
there be to human life than the complete and harmonious fulfilment of all
the physical, mental and moral powers with which the human self as a
social being is endowed?” (41). It is the achieving of one’s potential which
constitutes the attainment of salvation. This for Kaplan is not something
conferred: God does not save, the individual saves themselves. Salvation
must not be waited for, but worked for: it is a state of living. Further,
because the individual is ultimately constituted by their social location and
interactions, social and personal salvation are indissociable.

2. The power that makes for social regeneration. By focussing on the

sovereignty of God we assume the sanctity of personhood in general, and
in attempting to reform society along the best possible lines we are
effecting the immanent kingdom of God. God thus is that which makes it
viable to work towards a better future. “Since human life is redeemed
from its vanity and frailty through the kingship of God, then God can mean
only one thing: namely, the totality of all those forces in life that render
human life worthwhile.” (133)

3. The power that makes for the regeneration of human nature. Kaplan
reinterprets atonement as a process by which the human can restore their
harmonious relationship with the cosmos, which is damaged by our
misdeeds; by this process, we regain our integrity and moral wholeness.
This active avoidance of sin and pursuit of atonement are part and parcel
of Kaplan’s focus on individual responsibility. By remaking our natures via
repentance for our wrongs we are aligning ourselves with our sense of
what is moral and just in the world.

4. As intimately related to historical consciousness and communal identity.

By the philosophy of time embodied in Judaism’s “salvation-history”, the
self is located within a community whose identity extends over a vast time
and space. In finding personal identity as part of a culture, the whole of
that culture is integrated into the individual, and his sense of being is
given a weight and dignity which, in isolation, it could never possess.

5. The power that makes for cooperation. God being understood as the
interrelated unity of all life, our own acting-out of this unity is crucial: we
can only seek God by seeking further and closer integration and
cohesiveness of self, community, species and cosmos.

6. That felt as a presence. Kaplan locates God within subjective experience,

believing that philosophical abstraction only tells part of the story. The
experience of God is compatible with, but not reducible to, literal
reductionist explanations of the phenomena. Just as the self can be
reduced to neurons, but this literal interpretation would leave us cold and
uninspired, so the interpretation of phenomena into a figure of God assists
us, in bringing out a morality and community that otherwise would not
manifest.
 7. The power that makes for freedom. In promoting and sanctifying
individuality, the person is lifted above being merely the interaction of
impulses and desires. We develop a holistic and integrated self which
transcends the bestial, and thereby makes us free as individuals.

8. The power that makes for righteousness. By making God the epitomy of
mercy, justice, etc we are proclaiming these ideals as the principal social
virtues: we hypostasize righteousness via our conception of God, and by
seeking to attain holiness we align ourselves with our highest moral
concerns.

It is clear from even a brief perusal of these that for Kaplan the human is
essentially integrated into the wider spheres of society and cosmos. The
individual seems to exist only by virtue of the world that (s)he inhabits. In every
facet and every moment, we have a responsibility to our broader environment to
ensure a true and proper cultivation of value.

The flip-side of this is that society has as its prime motive the liberation of each
individual’s spirit: by lifting them above their base urges and desires, society
ensures that each person is provided the opportunity to realise their freedom,
and in the exercising of their free person-hood, can become the most perfect
example of themselves. If by doing what is right for the broader context of
society, man finds salvation, then it also is the ultimate goal of society to provide
that liberation from ‘atavistic passions’ which will allow humans to exercise
rational choice.

It is egocentricity (in it’s true meaning: a centring on the self) which Kaplan
blames for much of humanity’s sinfulness. This detachment from our context
leads us into ways not conducive to wholeness. He laments “the failure to
integrate our impulses, habits, social activities and institutions in harmony with
those ethical ideals that make God manifest in the world” (182).

However, this is not to disregard the human focus of Kaplan’s theology: His
Reconstructionism is fundamentally anthropocentric. The root principal and
character of any religion is located within human life. He claims, “Religion is
primarily a social phenomenon, to grasp its reality, to observe its workings and
to further its growth we must study its functioning in some social group.” (xii).
Thus, the essence of religion is not a body of belief or dogma but its practice – it
is a doing. In the practice of religion, we experience that power which we call
God, and are connected with the very real heart of the universe. “God must not
merely be held as an idea; He must be felt as a presence if we want not only to
know about God but to know God.” (244) God here is much more than a
postulate; He is experienced as a real force. Kaplan laments the naivety of those
who attempt to find knowledge of God via theoretical means, comparing them to
a scientist who intellectually understands the process by which fire happens, but
does not have as real a knowledge of fire as the child who burns his hand on a
match. For Kaplan it is the human end, that which happens in our experiential
reality which is of ultimate value, and not the abstract physical process which
leads to it. Although he respects science for its discoveries, he argues that these
can never give us the framework for understanding our place in the cosmos.

His is thus a phenomenological theology: the religious is defined from inside of

human life, rather than theorised about as an independent reality. This is not a
new concept, but Kaplan’s critical development is in his understanding that
human life is not the life of an individual. Rather, the individual is constituted
socially, and to the extent that an individual can be religious, he can only find
religious fulfilment (i.e. salvation) as part of a community of believers. Personal
religion is, for Kaplan, always subject to disintegration or corruption. Such
separation will inevitably lead the individual away from the sacred, because this
is not something within the individual so much as something found within the
active life of the community. This is evident in Kaplan’s notion of ‘Whole-souled
gratitude to God’. This is the complete fulfilment of human happiness and the
only correct way to practice religion; it “presupposes that we conceive of God as
the apotheosis of the interrelated unity of all reality” (226). By offering our
complete gratitude to God we are accepting the whole of the world as sacred. To
separate oneself from others is tantamount to separating oneself from God. This
“grateful appreciation...represents the highest aspiration of the human soul for
experiencing the goodness or godliness of life” (227). As such, it is
fundamentally immanent, for such a view of the sacred cannot be divorced from
the immediacy of life, matter and human action. It both serves to further
integrate the human into his or her context within society and the world, and
symbolises an awareness of this integration. The holistic current is ever-present
in Kaplan’s thought, and it is this which prevents him falling into reductionism: if
belief in God means to perceive “life’s creative forces, tendencies and
potentialities as forming an organic unity” then our words are more than just
empty signifiers; they point to a very definite conception, albeit not an
ontological one.

Subjectivity in Kaplan and Wittgenstein

It is immediately clear that there are strong similarities between the two
philosophers, Kaplan and Wittgenstein. In seeking to redefine our usage of
religious concepts such as ‘God’ and ‘salvation’, Kaplan is embarking on a
Wittgensteinian task of linguistic philosophy. Wittgenstein wrote that
“Sometimes an expression has to be withdrawn from usage and sent for
cleaning, - then it can be put back into circulation.” (1980:39) Kaplan’s attempt
to rescue religious terminology from the blunt ontological implications of a
‘realist’ interpretation, demands such a cleaning and an examination of the
words’ actual usage within their religious context. For Wittgenstein, we are often
led astray by a strictly literal conception of language: in reviewing the theory of
language he proposed in the Tractatus, he argued that words are not essentially
descriptive, pointing to discrete (physical or metaphysical) objects, but are
doings. They are not constituted primarily by a signified thing to which they
refer, rather they are constituted by their usage within a specific linguistic
context. Outside of this context they cannot be understood at all – they are
meaningless.

Of course, Kaplan is not primarily a philosopher of language2. His examination of

the language of religion is part not of a broader examination of meaning, but of a
philosophy of living, and specifically of Jewish living. As such he is not interested
in the limits of language, or the difference between what can logically be said
and what cannot. However, when Wittgenstein claims that the ‘meaning of the
world’, something that lies outside of the factual boundaries of the world, may be
given the name God, we are likely to perceive a similar sentiment to Kaplan’s
belief that ‘God’ is a term articulating our fundamental goals and values. For
each thinker the term is not to be understood as pointing to an object, but as a
principle which the human finds above and beyond the material facts.

In his streamlining of religion, Kaplan claims, “No metaphysical speculation

beyond this fundamental assumption that reality assures both the emergence
and the realization of human ideals is necessary for the religious life.” (1994:29).
Despite this, Kaplan verges onto a metaphysical systematisation when he
describes the structure of the cosmos as being fundamentally in-tune with
human ideals and needs. At this point in his philosophy, he approaches a deistic
theology which claims that our purpose is aligning ourselves with an underlying
cosmic order. At first sight this presents a challenge to the Wittgensteinian
understanding, however, we would be doing Kaplan a disservice in not probing
the subtleties here.

For both thinkers there is a fundamental location of thought within subjective

human life. They are attempting not to describe some objective reality, but are
thinking from within the world of the individual human experience. Indeed, both
thinkers are concerned by a trend they perceive towards ‘dehumanising’
knowledge and attempting to locate truth outside of human subjectivity. For
Wittgenstein, language is often not descriptive: it does not depict the world but
demonstrates a framework via which we makes sense of the world. Our
metaphysical statements, which may be mistakenly taken as describing non-
material states of affairs, are actually not “factual” at all. They define rather our
own interpretation. In the example of the duck-rabbit drawing3, no facts about
the picture change when our perception shifts from one to the other
interpretation. Yet in a holistic sense, what we see is completely different.
Because the elements have been given a new context (the shape of a rabbit, or
of a duck), their relationship to one another, and the subject’s relationship to the
whole, has become entirely different. So it is with religious language. For both
Wittgenstein and Kaplan, to place a religious interpretation onto life makes no
2
Scult argues he is fundamentally a sociologist; that “Kaplan the sociologist is more
talented than Kaplan the metaphysician” (1994:xv)

3
1953:194
change or addition to the elements which constitute reality; it does not posit the
existence of some supernatural being or spirit world. Rather, it rearranges the
elements of life in such a way that a new meaning emerges, and a new kind of
relationship is possible. It localises the believer within a context of universal
direction, whereby meaning is conferred, and ‘salvation’ is possible.

However,

“This should not be interpreted as implying that the belief in God is purely
subjective, a figment of the imagination rather than an interpretation of
reality. One might as well say that, since the awareness of colour is a
subjective experience, it is entirely a creation of the eye, and that no
objective reality is responsible for the eye experiencing colour.”
(1994:306)

This is to say that just because it is an interpretation of reality, does not make it
subservient to any other, putatively literal, interpretation.

Kaplan claims that the true distinction is not between the atheist and the theist,
but between those who see meaning and order in the world, and those who do
not. The former see sufficient reason to work towards a better future, towards
the attainment of personal and social regeneration as a genuine possibility, in
opposition to the chaotic meaninglessness epitomised by Bertrand Russell’s
“brief and powerless is man’s life. On him and all his race the slow sure doom
falls pitiless and dark”. Wittgenstein believes also that if there is a difference
between the world of the believer and that of the atheist, it is mostly in how each
connects the same facts. He muses that if anything could convince one to
believe in God, it is an upbringing which indoctrinates one to sense a tendency in
life toward order (1980:85). The inference from this of an orderer is only
secondary; primary is the intuitive feeling of safety within an ordered world.

If belief in God does not add anything to world but is at root simply a way of
ordering the existing information, what kind of statement does this make it? It
seems to be metaphysical but in the truest sense: it describes that which is
outside the physical, trans-factual; it describes the context of the actual world
taken as a whole. It talks over, rather than of, the physical.

For this reason, Wittgenstein can make a statement almost directly parallel to
Kaplan’s: “In order to live happily I must be in agreement with the world. And
this is what ‘being happy’ means.”(1961:75). To not feel tension between oneself
and the world but to be smoothly at one without disagreement is happiness.
Further, Wittgenstein claims that being “in agreement with that alien will on
which I appear to depend” is the same as “doing the will of God” (ibid).
Wittgenstein does not need to systematise this conception to the degree Kaplan
does, but the sentiment is the same: the individual must locate themselves
within their world; we must not separate ourselves in searching for some
transcendent truth for the truth exists in and as the world we experience. In
finding oneself aligned with the world, we are at peace with ourselves. It is in
finding a context in which everything falls into place that happiness exists, and
that the religious finds its fullest validation.

Given this Wittgensteinian twist we are also in a position to review Kaplan’s

apparently deistic statement. The order which Kaplan promotes in the cosmos,
the unity of the cosmos and the human, need not be a factual statement about
the world. Instead we can understand it as a statement of dedication. Kaplan is
arguing that in order to retrieve the religious and to make possible the
attainment of salvation and all that that means for human life, we must perceive
ourselves as integrated into a benign cosmic order which is not indifferent to our
struggle. This is not a deceptive statement, and I do not intend to claim Kaplan is
making this claim while believing that there can be no such metaphysical
purpose. Rather, Kaplan understands that the religious and the irreligious are
merely different ways of ordering one’s life; with the crucial caveat that those
who order according to a religious pattern are infinitely more likely to achieve
salvation than those for whom the concept is meaningless. Order, harmony and
righteousness are something one can imbue the world with, and by doing so,
evoke in one's own character. Conclusively, Kaplan states “To the question ‘is
salvation attainable?’ The Jewish religion answers: ‘Seek it and find out’.”
(1994:84) The question must be interpreted as an imperative to action, not as
one to be reasoned about and then answered. To do this is to miss the point
entirely. The attempt to attain salvation is a (perhaps the) valid way of life
regardless of the metaphysical status of 'salvation'. By seeking it, we make it.

We begin to see here a current of radical integration – or immanence - which is

shared by Kaplan and Wittgenstein. This current reaches deep into both their
philosophies.

Immanence in Kaplan and Wittgenstein

In the study of Wittgenstein’s religious thought it is an easy fallacy to place him

in an ‘expressivist’ camp, in contradistinction to a literalist-instrumentalist camp.
If the latter understands religious language as delineating factual claims about
reality, and religio-magical actions (such as prayer) as attempts to influence
events or spiritual beings, then Wittgenstein could be understood to claim that
such language and actions are indications solely of emotions, desires and states-
of-mind. By this view, to pray is not an attempt to precipitate results, but the
expression of a wish. However, this is tantamount to placing religious language
and action under a ‘metaphorical’ banner, meaning that it could be phrased
better in some other, more literally descriptive, way. Wittgenstein was quite
clear that this could not be the case: “a simile must be a simile of something.
And if I can describe a fact by means of a simile I must also be able to drop the
simile and describe the facts without it.” (1965:10). We have seen that for both
Kaplan and Wittgenstein, religious language is not reducible or equivalent to
facts, but is a different kind of statement. To pray is an action, not an expression
of a mental state: It does not describe but creates a relationship with the world.

Brian Clack (1999) believes that Wittgenstein was attempting to place such
behaviour as pre-rational. Religious rites are performed instinctively, without
ratiocination, in the same way that we move away from the cause of pain
instinctively. We do not reason out that the fire is burning us prior to withdrawing
our hand: the opposite is the case. Similarly, Wittgenstein attempts to address
religion as a pre-rational, and therefore pre-linguistic, activity. Once we begin to
rationalise (something we can only do via language) about our behaviour, we
seem to introduce misunderstanding into it straight away (one could argue: any
attempt to ‘understand’ distorts by a process of intellectualisation). This can best
be understood within the early philosophy of the Tractatus, from which it is clear
that God-talk, although valid, can never be admitted into the realm of discourse:
it describes an arena beyond the factual, and therefore beyond the power of
factual, descriptive, language to make sense of. The religious then cannot be
adequately formulated or expressed in any way: it cannot be said, only shown by
its use. That it does not describe facts about the world means that it also cannot
be metaphor for facts about the world. To attempt to explain religious behaviour
by reference to states-of-affairs (including states-of-mind) is fundamentally
flawed. Wittgenstein (1979) disputes the historical-causal account of religious
rites apparent in Frazer’s Golden Bough, not because it is incorrect, but because
it is an unsubstantial justification: the reason religious rites are practised is not
some event thousands of years ago to which they bear resemblance, but is
apparent in the practice of the rites now. We can see here a remeniscence of
Kaplan’s attempt to explicate the practice of Jewish festivals by explicating their
direct relevance to contemporary religious life: their past does not matter, it is
their effect which justifies them.

For Wittgenstein the roots of religious behaviour cannot be explained rationally,

and should not be explained causally. These attempts provide only hypotheses,
but religious action is not a theoretical approach to the world: he compares
burning an effigy to kissing a loved one's picture,

“This is obviously not based on a belief that it will have a definite effect on
the object which the picture represents. It aims at some satisfaction and it
achieves it. Or rather, it does not aim at anything; we act in this way and
then feel satisfied.” (1979:4)

The ritual and the effect it has on us explain its use perfectly. It is the horror, the
awe, the sense of purpose we acquire from, initially religious rites, but now also
religious thought and doctrine, which explain why we do them.

Thus, religion does not express existing interior mind-states, but if anything, is
itself the realisation of mind-states. Wittgenstein’s project in his later philosophy,
is precisely anti-depth: he seeks to flatten life into a single palate. As the
frontispiece of Philosophical Investigations, he quotes St. Augustine's description
of an infantile acquisition of language via a process of becoming able to express
his thoughts and desires by the name-tools given to him by adults. Wittgenstein
argues vociferously against the dualism apparent in this view: language does not
express thoughts, and it is certainly not to be treated as a means of articulating
interior states which exist regardless of it. To believe this is to hold the mind as
some isolated ghost within the shell of the body, slowly learning how to
communicate across the gulf that bodies create. This isolation of individuals,
what Fergus Kerr has called the ‘epistemological solitude of the self’, is a primal
fallacy of western metaphysics against which Wittgenstein railed: if mind and
matter can be separated at all, this is only a very recent development in human
thought. Instead, our mind or spirit happens through our bodies (and words); we
are diaphanous, transparent to others by our actions except when we
deliberately attempt to conceal ourselves. The implication of this is that one’s
self is realised via action. It is our public behaviour and interaction which
constitutes us; we are what we are by virtue of what we do, not because of some
gaseous thing which lurks inside us. When Wittgenstein states that “The human
being is the best picture of the human soul” (1980:49), and “The face is the soul
of the body” (1980:23), he is understanding the soul not ontologically, yet not
quite metaphorically either.

One can see how Kaplan’s thoroughly immanent theology reflects – and perhaps
expands – upon this. Not only does Kaplan agree with Wittgenstein’s emphasis
on action, believing that the human spirit is forged in the fires of striving and
hard work, but his emphasis on the divine not as a being which communicates to
us through life, but which is realised in the world and in our own actions, serves
to integrate God into the cosmos. God is no longer a metaphysical proposition
separate from real life, who performs miracles to gain our attention: God’s
essence is present to us, happens through and as the world. He laments that
some of his contemporaries express a disconnectedness from the spiritual reality
and presence of Jewish rites. This disconnectedness does not expose a problem
in the rites, or a mistake in the religion, but reveals a disconnection in the
individual from the deep cultural context essential to experiencing the ritual as it
is intended: “It is significant that in past ages...this particular complaint that the
individual could not experience God in the worship of the synagogue was
unheard of.” (1994:263-4). The problem therefore is in what we may be
expecting from the rites. Just as our ontological conception of divinity is deeply
problematic, so our expectation to experience some theophanic presence unlike
anything in the real world or everyday life is a naivety typical of the modern
age’s dislocation from both the function of religion and its integration into
everyday life. Just as for Wittgenstein, we know someone is in pain when we see
them cradling a limb and whimpering, for Kaplan we fully know God in the living
of a religious life. To require further 'proof' is to speculate beyond what is
reasonable, and to postulate a metaphysics which is beyond experience.
Wittgenstein is similarly scathing about the problem of 'other minds': “Do I
believe in a soul in someone else, when I look into his eyes with astonishment
and delight?” (quoted from Kerr, 1986:93). To posit such philosophical questions
is to deliberately lose touch with the immediacy with which truth is present to us
in life.
Thus, we can see a typically modern reversal of metaphysics at work here: For
Kaplan, to the extent that we can talk of religious truth ‘existing’, it exists in and
as human religious action. Rather than the spiritual being a primordial truth
which creates the world and generates the necessity of religious practice, it is
the practice of religion in real life which leads to what we consider to be
transcendental in religion - its theoretical component and the attainment of
salvation within the kingdom of God.

In the same way that Wittgenstein rejects the dualistic picture of language as a
tool for communicating thoughts between minds, so for Kaplan religion is not a
dualistic means of subsuming the material under the spiritual. Rather, it is a
means of realising, or bringing-out, of the spiritual from the material. That which
we call the spiritual is not prior or superior to the physical, but is the elements of
life which are most transcendent in their value, and which are produced when we
are set free from our base desires and animalistic drives. Religion for Kaplan
provides a cohesive system of motivation which allows humanity to achieve their
potential and better themselves and their world. By justifying the integrity of the
individual, we create a freedom and responsibility which is impossible if the
individual is understood as the sum of biological drives; and by integrating the
community, we create a structure which promotes the benefit of all. This anti-
reductionist picture is apparent in Wittgenstein when he reminds us that we still
call a perfume 'beautiful' even though it is derived from foul-smelling acids.
(McCutcheon 2001:52)

Daniel Breslauer (1994) has defended Kaplan against accusations that by

rationalising the faith, he has lost its heart, which is to be identified as the
personal relationship with God. Breslauer argues that Kaplan’s functional
approach in fact works precisely in the opposite direction: he understands that
the heart of religion is its practice and the effect this practice has on the
individual and community. By attempting to reclothe this pre-rational religious
urge so as to make it once more effective, Kaplan is performing the very
Wittgensteinian task of rescuing action from belief and meaning from the
tyranny of intellect. Whatever theoretical 'face' religion is given is a functional
means of utilising its pre-rational power of imbuing life with meaning, and
thereby making the most meaningful and valuable of lives possible. Wittgenstein
says that “nothing is more wrong-headed than calling meaning a mental activity”
(1953:693), for it happens in the world – we must not reduce it to some flimsy
ethereal narrative that the mind casts over meaningless objectivity. In claiming
that ‘belief’ as a factual proposition is essentially discardable, Kaplan recreates a
unity of the subtle subconscious and material action, no longer divided by the
tyrannical ‘mind of the subject’ which has for too long claimed that it and its
secret inner workings determine meaning and therefore confer value on the
world. The relationship to the divine is not to be found in quiet prayer or the
workings of the mind but in involvement with the world, with people, with the
community.

Wittgenstein came to the conclusion that meaning does not exist in and is not
created by the individual consciousness but in and by the practical use of
language and signs in the public world. When we analyse language as Russell,
the early Wittgenstein, and the logical positivists did, we are not reaching the
essence which underlies implicit in every linguistic act, we are drawing an
abstract out from language’s home environment of particular, specific usage.
Kaplan addresses theology in the same way: the essence of the divine is not
some ethereal postulation abstracted from the world, but is found in the world, in
every act and every life. Just as for Wittgenstein ‘I’ does not refer to an object in
the world one experiences but to that world itself, (“I am my world” 1992:5.63),
God is completely integrated into the world. He is not concealed from the
physical but revealed by it; as it. Just as the principal role of the rational animal
is not depiction, neither are we here to believe, to merely develop a mind-state
which mirrors reality...not here to ‘be right’. We are here to do right.

Conclusion

Kaplan’s theological project is precisely a Wittgensteinian one: to withdraw from

speculation the term ‘God’, clean it, examine it, see what its usage actually is, in
order to scrape off centuries of mouldy metaphysical association which have
clung to it and weighed it down – and then, refreshed and sparkling, release it
back into circulation with a newly refined and pragmatic meaning – one whose
poetry is not mistaken for prose. In denying the metaphysical dualism of classical
theology, Kaplan performs the same revisionary task that Wittgenstein attempts
in denying the Cartesian dualism of the self. Both have sought to integrate and
flatten the apparently divided world we inhabit, promoting action over sterile
thought and emphasising the ethical life as the pinnacle of human achievement.

For both, the religious defines that which is above and beyond the material facts
described by science. However, they do not speculate about the objective nature
of this, for to do so is meaningless (for Wittgenstein, technically so). Rather, they
understand the role of the human in ordering reality and the fundamental
unsatisfactoriness of a reductionist factual account, which can only be resolved
by the integration of a higher unity into subjective experience.

The most important and enlightening similarity, though it is at first somewhat

obfuscated, is in their phenomenological base, a quality which is linked to their
immanentism: both thinkers see the fundamental level of truth as experiential,
and forego any attempts to probe beyond into some objective netherworld. With
this move, the objective status of religious truth is neither affirmed nor denied
but made a non-question. A secondary function of this is to make the distinction
between religious thought and non-religious thought an ideological rather than
ontological one. In denying the common interpretation of religious metaphysics
as ontological, they breathe new life and dynamic power into both the religious
and ideological spheres.
 Bibliography: Primary Texts

Kaplan, Mordecai M. 1937. The Meaning of God in Jewish Religion. (reprinted

1994). Wayne State University Press. Detroit.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1922 (reprinted 1974). Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

(trans: Pears & McGuinness). Routledge. London.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1953 (new edition 1968). Philosophical Investigations.

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Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1961. Notebooks 1914-16. Blackwell. Oxford.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1965. “A Lecture on Ethics (1930)” in Philosophical Review

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Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1979. Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough. Brynmill.

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Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1980. Culture and Value. University of Chicago Press.

Secondary Texts.

Breslauer, S. Daniel. 1994. Mordecai Kaplan's Thought in a Postmodern Age.

Scholar's Press. Atlanta.

Clack, Brian R. 1999. Wittgenstein, Frazer and Religion. Macmillan Press Ltd.
Basingstoke

Clack, Brian R. 1999. An Introduction to Wittgenstein's Philosophy of Religion.

Edinburgh University Press. Edinburgh.

Kerr, Fergus. 1986. Theology After Wittgenstein. Basil Blackwell. Oxford/New

York.

McCutcheon, Felicity. 2001. Religion Within the Limits of Language Alone.

Ashgate. London