The pattern of Wittgenstein’s life

 Wittgenstein said that while he was not religious, he couldn’t help looking at the world from a religious point of view.

What does that mean?

This is as close as I can get:

Wittgenstein held that we can’t talk about ethics. Ethics must be lived. To understand someone’s ethics, look at the pattern of that person’s life.
If you look at the pattern of Wittgenstein’s life, two features stand out:

• The first was a kind of subtraction or renunciation. Although he was born into one of Europe’s wealthiest families, he lived a spartan life. The idea was to avoid distractions so that he could do useful work.

• Wittgenstein’s notion of useful work changed with the circumstances. For most of his life, he thought the most useful thing he could do was try to unsnarl philosophical problems. After the publication of the Tractatus, he thought he’d solved those problems. He worked as a gardener and as an elementary-school teacher until it dawned on him that the Tractatus was not entirely successful and he returned to philosophy. During World War II, he abandoned his work on philosophical problems and took a job at a hospital. The point is that a person finds his or her way toward useful work even when circumstances change. If you’re not distracted — see Point 1 — you simply do what needs to be done.

It seems to me that the Wittgenstein’s religious point of view involved the step of deliberate subtraction — living a chosen life to the exclusion of all others. He renounced other things to focus on the job at hand.