Love & Passion Quote by Ludwig Wittgenstein

Wittgenstein’s jab lands because it’s delivered as a quiet, almost homespun observation that detonates a much bigger claim: religious meaning isn’t automatically hostage to sexual shame. By invoking St. Augustine, he points to a particular Christian inheritance in the West - the idea that sex is spiritually suspect, a site of temptation requiring discipline, confession, and doctrinal policing. Augustine becomes shorthand for a whole moral technology: desire as a problem to be managed.

Then Wittgenstein pivots to a scene so ordinary it’s practically banal: the church wedding. Everyone, he notes, knows exactly what’s “going to happen that night.” The line is funny because it treats the supposedly unspeakable as common knowledge, and it’s philosophically strategic because it exposes a mismatch between official moral posture and lived social ritual. The subtext is not “religion is hypocritical” in the tabloid sense; it’s that religious practices often operate with a double awareness. Communities can acknowledge embodied life without needing to either sanctify it with metaphysics or quarantine it with disgust.

This fits Wittgenstein’s larger project: resisting the urge to turn human practices into grand theories. He’s less interested in adjudicating sex ethically than in showing how religious language and ceremony work in real life - as forms of life, not abstract propositions. The ceremony remains religious not because it denies sexuality, but because it frames it: it places a bodily act inside a public grammar of commitment, kinship, and recognition. His point is slyly liberating: the sacred doesn’t have to be prudish to be coherent.