KATZ'S QUOTE OF THE DAY

Wittgenstein’s late thought below about the fallacy of trying to prove God’s existence seems to me to apply as well to poetry as it does to spirituality. True belief isn’t the stuff of abstract theology, of intellectual systems of justification, but of the experience of a lifetime and the in-the-moment experiences of prayer and meditation and action. In the same way, the poem isn’t the product of an abstract idea, but the result of the poet’s ability to manifest the movement of thought and emotion in words, lines, speech, rhythm. The poem is an experience.

“A proof of God ought really to be something by means of which you can convince yourself of God's existence. But I think that believers who offered such proofs wanted to analyse and make a case for their ‘belief’ with their intellect, although they themselves would never have arrived at belief by way of such proofs. ‘Convincing someone of God's existence’ is something you might do by means of a certain upbringing, shaping his life in such and such a way.

Life can educate you to ‘believing in God’. And experiences too are what do this but not visions… .”

—Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value (Revised Edn, Blackwell, 1998) p. 97e