Wittgenstien and Tolstoy: Thomas 1997 Flashcards
because religious belief does not relate to any empirical entity or person then the belief element in it is conceived of as…
directed to some trans-empirical or metaphysical realm
we can best appreciate their shared conception in terms of what I shall call
an ‘authentic orientation to the world’
I shall look at the similarity in the structure of the model
of authentic religious belief which both shared
the Absoluteness- Element in Wittgenstein is the idea that…
ethics and religious belief involve that which is an absolute
in his ‘Lecture on Ethics’ Wittgenstein distinguish between
an absolute and a relative judgement of value
when we make a relative judgement of value we assess something’s
fitness relative to some further end
example of a chair
a chair is good if it fits a certain predetermined purpose
an absolute judgement of value implies
no further reference to anything at all
what is something absolute?
it is itself an end, one which admits of nothing further
it is a consequence of the myriad of acting that
language emerges in the way it does
we are not neutral contemplators of an external world of discrete elements
unaffected by our viewing of them
the world for us is mediated in and through our
categorisations which in turn are derivative from and moulded by our action in the world
what is particular about ethical and religious reactions?
that they cannot be captures in a paradigm involving observer- neutral contemplation of the world
what do religious beliefs contribute to?
they determine the configuration of the believers world
Wittgenstein’s notion of absolute value relates to the reactions of
the particular human subject- his or her orientation to the world- rather than an objective grounding in reality that supports it
religious belief as a picture is, for Wittgenstein,
something the self subjects itself to, to the extent that everything is coloured by it
religious belief developed by Wittgenstein…
it ‘carries’ a sense of what is valuable that determines the value and regales the individual’s assessment of everything else
the absolute and endurance for Wittgenstein
a type of endurance which puts aside all sense of personal benefits.
what is religious and ethical response devoid of for Wittgenstein?
self- congratulation
Wittgenstein is averse to any idea that something can be
an avenue to personal consolation
[Wittgenstein] the religious picture inspires total
relation of the self’s reactions. this means that religious belief determines what a believer takes to be worth while.
[Wittgenstein] the authentic religious orientation has no place for any motivation
separable from what the religious framework sanctifies as permissible
Wittgenstein sees no place for
relative judgements of value in ethics or religion
[Wittgenstein] an ethical stance involves not a kind of intellectual comprehension- something that involves relative value judgements
but an entirely non-verbal, not articulative apprehension of the world as a whole
‘Lecture of Religious belief’ it is something visual- orientating one’s life around a picture-
that is given as the paradigm example to illustrate the nature of religious belief
‘seeing’
expressed as a form of knowledge that is too fundamental to be reflected upon or to be ordinarily subject to deliberative assessment
Genuine religious belief is to be understood along the lines of such a
non-articulative orientation to the world
‘the way you use the word “god” does not show whom you mean-
but rather what you mean”
‘what’ [in terms of God]
the sense of this ‘what’ shows itself in the course of a person’s life, in his or her reactions, values, actions, hopes and fears
For Wittgenstein the genuine ethics-religious response involves the subject being regulated by the
absolute value in question: he or she sees the world according to the perspective of that value
independence involves a capacity to do the following:
(a) accept the finality of death and the non-survival of the self beyond it
(b) accept pointless suffering
(c) accept life as it comes without trying to desperately manipulate its events
(d) accept this world and not hanker for some metaphysical realm transcending it
(a) accept the finality of death and the non-survival of the self beyond [Wittgenstein on independence]
by this he seems to have meant a desire not to break down in the face of an externally imposed fate which would end his own existence
(c) accept life as It comes without trying to desperately manipulate its events [Wittgenstein on independence]
it involves the ability to accept the intrusions if fate without them being overly dependent on mitigating that intrusion by trying to manipulate it away
what is genuine prayer for Wittgenstein?
non-petitionary (makes life meaningful)
eternal life ‘belongs to those
who live in the present’
[Wittgenstein] religious belief is ‘a
way of living, or a way of assessing life’
why are doctrines useless for Wittgenstein?
It is the spirit in which life is lived that is important
The difference between the believer and the unbeliever is, in ‘Lecture on Religious Belief’ …
a matter of drawing from different pictures rather than about picturing reality
Wittgenstein himself refused to worship a God viewed as directing a grand design,
a metaphysical world where evil has meaning
for Wittgenstein genuine religion is orientated
to the present and not to some metaphysical schema
what is religion for Tolstoy?
it is something that naturally springs from a particular ‘position in the world’
how many relationships to the universe is there for Tolstoy?
3
first of Tolstoy’s relationships to the universe?
a person existing in the world for the purpose of attaining the greater possible well being
second of Tolstoy’s relations o the universe?
‘recognising the meaning of life not in the well being of one individual but in that of the family, tribe, the state of some other aggregate of people’
Tolstoy insists that every person has a relationship to the universe and therefore
a religion
link to relationship to the universe [Tolstoy] and Wittgenstein’s absolute
Absoluteness is given to us through the ‘position in the world’ which we occupy. That position is not optional
[our position in the universe is not]
something we can move to to from through intellectual analysis
what is our position in the universe
the way we are engaged in the world- and the type of ethical stance which result from this- determines what we take to be absolute
connect between Tolstoy and Wittgenstein’s religious ‘picture’
the particular relation to the universe that a person is in determines his entire reaction to contingencies
similarity about the good only being found to exist in the individual.
what has genuine value cannot exist as something socially valuable because people’s self- interest would arise and polite it
what would a socially accepted thing become?
a means to socially esteem and prestige
what is of absolute value must exist within the
individual and be mediated through that individual’s relationship to the universe as a whole
a believer is never
motivated by something
for Tolstoy is not talking about a range go options from which the potential believer chooses
the most attractive
[tolstoy] is talking about someone who comes to a particular relation with the universe,
a relation in which the usual worldly standards are seen as exposed and hollow
for such an individual there is only one direction he can follow: the stance of an absolute acceptance
of the claims deriving from his relation to the world
deliverance [is not]…
is not a matter of the most acceptable among a set of options set out in terms of a series of propositions
deliverance [is]…
that absolute response which derives from a particular relation to the world
Wittgenstien and Tolstoy on views of relative values
only concerned with matters of fact and therefore unable to change a person’s relationship to the world
mental effort automatically proceeds to establish the
self’s relation to the world
no amount of linguistically enshrined analytical mental effort can
asses that relation
what motivates both’s understanding of religion?
the relationship to the whole of life and the consequent alleviation from suffering and meaninglessness that it provides
Tolstoy like Wittgenstein, has no place for religion conceived of
as a system of beliefs because such a conception is seen thoroughly given to self orientation
Tolstoy insists that to try to justify the superiority of one form of relation to the universe to another through reason is
an expression of self interest
[tolstoy] saw the genuinely religious stance as an unreflective view
of the world as a whole
[tolstoy on belief systems] involving a form of knowledge to fundamental to be reflected upon or to be
subject to deliberative assessment
[tolstoy] saw the notion of God as some sort of entity conceived within a belief system as
an inherently self-affirming notion
[relationship to independence] Tolstoy believed that the peasants possessed a superior knowledge to that of Russian upper classes
This was supposedly manifested in the peasants’ ability to live without any concern for the fact that individual life ends in death and total oblivion
for Tolstoy, the capacity to accept the self’s finality at death is fundamental sight of the
self’s capacity to be independent of the world and to be able to live within it
in both Wittgenstein and Tolstoy we find a view of religious belief
as characterised by an absoluteness that involves the individual believer having a perspective on life as a whole
perspective on life
this perspective in turn leads to the believers reaction being one of independence to the world
