From The Philosopher, Volume LXXXIX No. 1 Spring 2001
WITTGENSTEIN, TOLSTOY
and the
GOSPEL IN BRIEF
By Bill Schardt and David Large
There are some striking parallels between Wittgenstein's life and that of Tolstoy. Both were born into extremely rich families, yet both subsequently gave their property away, and tried to live simple and humble lives. Both valued manual labour as something spiritually uplifting. Both underwent some sort of religious conversion to a form of Christianity. Yet neither, despite their evident high-mindedness, seems to have treated other people particularly well!
And Tolstoy's religious writings, such as the Gospel in Brief
and A Confession
, clearly had an enormous influence on Wittgenstein especially at the time he was writing the Tractatus
. Strange then that so few commentators have even acknowledged, let alone attempted to account for, Tolstoy's influence on Wittgenstein's philosophy. It is therefore especially worth considering the extent to which the Gospel in Brief
specifically influenced the outlook of the Tractatus
. Indeed, as his friend and correspondent, Paul Engelmann put it, out of all Tolstoy's writings Wittgenstein had an especially high regard for the Gospel in Brief.
Yet it often appears to be simply assumed that the Gospel in Brief
had a profound effect on Wittgenstein. Why this might be so is never clearly explained. That the book does not seem to be readily available or very well known in the English-speaking world may partly explain why its influence on Wittgenstein may have been neglected. But in this article we attempt to explain the impact of the Gospel in Brief
upon Wittgenstein's philosophy (especially the later passages of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
), and his general view of ethics.
Although the
Gospel in Brief was not published
in Tolstoy's lifetime, it clearly comes from the period of his religious
and moral writings between 1879 and 1902. It is a fusion of the four Gospels,
the purpose of which is to seek an answer to the problem of how we should
live. It is both philosophical and practical, rather than theological and
spiritual, in its intention. Tolstoy believed that the existence of God
could neither be proved nor disproved and that the meaning of life lay
beyond the limits of our minds. (And compare this with Wittgenstein's
conception of absolute or ethical value as expressed in his 1929/30 ‘Lecture
on Ethics’ (
Philosophical Review, 1965.) Tolstoy further believed
that the Church itself, as a body, interfered with one's ability to live
a peaceful, everyday life, free from significant pain and suffering. This
too can only have appealed to a restless soul such as Wittgenstein.
The Only Book in the Shop
How Wittgenstein came by his copy of the
Gospel in
Brief, and the importance he came to attach to it, is almost a parable
in itself. At the time in question Wittgenstein was serving with the Austrian
army at the start of the First World War. These circumstances were very
different from those of Edwardian England let alone the blissful solitude
of a Norwegian fjord. Wittgenstein discovered a small bookshop in Tarnow,
a town then under Austrian rule but now in southern Poland. It is said
that the shop had only one book (Tolstoy's) and that Wittgenstein bought
the book because it was the only one they had. Some have suggested that
he saw this as a sign, though we shall leave that supposition there. In
any case, he started reading the
Gospel in Brief on September 1st 1914
and subsequently carried it with him at all times, memorising passages
of it by heart. He became known to his comrades as the man with the gospels,
constantly recommending the book to anyone who was troubled. Wittgenstein
himself said that the book essentially kept him alive.
It seems fairly sure that at this time Wittgenstein underwent
some kind of religious conversion, though not in the conventional sense.
The Russellian logicist emerged as a man with strong spiritual if not actually
ascetic leanings. It is less certain, however, that this experience changed
the way he treated ethics in the
Tractatus. It is rather that reading
the
Gospel in Brief led Wittgenstein to add a new element to the
Tractatusand indeed to his already formed conception of ethics. That additional
element is usually referred to as the mystical. Wittgenstein would still
have, we would argue, dealt with the subject of ethics, as transcendental,
by passing over it in silence. Furthermore, Wittgenstein had already been
influenced by Schopenhauer, especially his conception of the will, and
that while his sense of the transcendental or other-worldly may have been
deepened by the influence of Tolstoy's work, it was not originated by it.
The Gospel According to Tolstoy
By 1879 Tolstoy, then aged 51, had become very depressed,
and in order to find a solution to his problems he studied Christianity,
Islam, and Buddhism in some depth. He came to believe that he had found
the answer to his problem, that is, the problem of how we should live,
in the teachings of Jesus, but that these had to be sifted out from the
accumulated dogma of the churches. To this end he formed, from all four
gospels, a single account of the life and teachings of Jesus. In the
Gospel
in Brief (which is extracted from a larger work) Tolstoy omitted the accounts
of Christ's birth and genealogy, the miracles, and the resurrection. He
also left out most of the material about John the Baptist. He removed all
the supernatural events and everything he found difficult to believe or
which he regarded as irrelevant. His concern was how we should live and
how Jesus' life could help explain that to us. He thus omitted all the
key points that make Jesus necessarily different from us, in other words,
all that requires faith in the divinity of Jesus. In short, Tolstoy portrays
for us Christ 'without the Christianity'.
What remains is supposed to be the pure teachings of Jesus,
or as much as can be recovered or reconstructed after so many centuries.
It is true that most of the account is very familiar to anyone who has
read the gospels in the Bible. It is, however, evident that Tolstoy, as
well as removing material from the accounts, went so far as to add a certain
amount. This is, presumably, an attempt to insert material that he believed
should have been there; material that was perhaps omitted by oversight
or even excised at a later date. Tolstoy must have felt that he had come
to understand the character of Jesus well enough to know what he must have
taught, even when it is not explicitly recorded. This would be as a consequence
of his understanding Jesus' answer to the question of how we should live.
The additions are done very elegantly, so that it is hard to tell where
Jesus ends and Tolstoy begins. The effect on the reader is to exaggerate
the ascetic aspects of Jesus teachings so that the balance is shifted from
the theological to the philosophical. Explicitly in his introduction and
implicitly in the text Tolstoy is very critical of organised religion and
the Russian Orthodox Church in particular. Indeed, in 1901 he was excommunicated
for his unorthodox views and activities.
Tolstoy says that he discovered to his astonishment that
the whole of Jesus' teaching is summed up in the Lord's Prayer, (which
is conventional Christianity) and each of the twelve chapters takes its
title from a phrase of the prayer. In the chapter entitled 'Thy Kingdom
Come', Tolstoy attributes five commandments to Jesus. Not all of these
are stated as such in the Bible, and not all of them are implicit in the
original text. Tolstoy's commandments are:
i. Do not be angry, but be at peace with all
men.
ii. Do not seek delight in sexual gratification.
iii. Do not swear anything to anyone.
iv. Do not oppose evil, do not judge, and do not go to
law.
v. Do not make any distinction among men as to nationality,
and love strangers like your own people.
Tolstoy came to believe that complete sexual abstinence
too should be practised. Most Christians would regard this as rather extreme.
(It does however concur with several reports of Wittgenstein's life.) The
third of these commandments, against the swearing of oaths (for example
in court) is, although ignored by most churches, clearly stated in the
Bible. The Quakers, however, do take the same view on oaths as Tolstoy's
Jesus. Another parallel occurs where Jesus says do not oppose evil. Both
Tolstoy and the Quakers take this to mean 'do not use evil means to oppose
evil' and this view leads them to adopt pacifist views.
Wittgenstein and the Nature of Ethics
Readers of the
Tractatus will not find any moral
injunctions of the sort present in the
Gospel in Brief there. In
considering the possibility of an ethical law Wittgenstein says:
When an ethical law of the form, 'Thou shalt ... [do such
and such]', is laid down, one's first thought is, 'And what if I do not
do it?'. - Tractatus 6.422
He goes on to say that ethics has nothing to do with punishment
and reward in the usual sense, but asserts that there must be some kind
of ethical reward and punishment lying in the action itself. There is then a paradox. While Wittgenstein asserts that
nothing can be said about ethics, the
Gospel in Brief says a great
deal about how life should be lived, and, furthermore, what it says seems
to have had a powerful influence on Wittgenstein. The solution to this
problem lies in the distinction between saying and showing, as expressed
in the
Tractatus; because although there are no ethical propositions
- the Gospel cannot say anything about how we should live - yet Wittgenstein
must have believed that it did show the way to live.
The statement 'It is wrong to kill' can be said, in the
minimalist sense that it can be spoken, but in '
Tractarian' terms it cannot
be said in the sense that it expresses a particular moral imperative. People
say things like this all the time, and other people understand them. It
is, however, possible that someone may disagree with this statement, and
there is ultimately no way of resolving the dispute by reference to states
of affairs or facts about the world. This is because the statement does
not express a fact, and this is what is meant when Wittgenstein asserts
that ethics cannot be put into words. If I say it is wrong to kill, do
I, thereby, show that it is wrong to kill? In some cases I do and, in some
cases I do not. There is no way of proving that it is wrong.
Such remarks as: 'I am my world' (
Tractatus 5.63),
and 'For what the solipsist means is quite correct, only it cannot be said,
but makes itself manifest' (
Tractatus 5.62), provide a key to Wittgenstein's
view. In these he directs us to the actual experience of living. The person
whose moral outlook, i.e. their way of living, is changed by a work such
as the
Gospel in Brief has not been convinced by logical arguments
or matters of fact. They have, rather, been shown, the way that they should
live.
We must, however, be aware that the
Tractatus appears
to disagree with itself. The philosopher Caleb Thompson takes other remarks
in the the work as implying that coming to see meaning in life is just
a matter of living.
Wittgenstein says:
We feel that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched. Of course there are then no questions left, and this itself is the answer. (Tractatus 6.52)
and then:
The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing
of the problem. (Tractatus 6.521
For Wittgenstein, someone who realises that there cannot
be scientific answers to the problems of life will then find that these
problems vanish. But can he really mean that? Surely it was not as easy
as that for Wittgenstein himself and cannot be as easy as that for anyone
else.
When understood in the light of the
Gospel in Briefthis interpretation presents only part of what Wittgenstein was saying:
the person looking for the meaning of life will stop looking to science
as they will appreciate that they are looking in the wrong place! As the
answers are not ones science is able to give, they cannot, in Tractarian
terms,
be said. It is in this sense only that they may be said to have vanished.
Wittgenstein is also committed to a notion of the ethical
in which ethical notions are expressed, and in which we may receive responses
to our wonderings about the problems of life. This notion of the ethical
is the same as that displayed by Tolstoy through the figure of Christ in
the
Gospel in Brief. To disregard this work's influence is to miss
this further point, vital to the understanding of Wittgenstein's thinking
about ethics. The very same notion indeed recurs some ten years later in
his notebooks and in the 'Lecture on Ethics'.
For the ethical teaching of the Gospel in Brief
had a profound effect on Wittgenstein. He felt deeply that what it showed
(if not said) was right. Here indeed was the answer to the question of
how we should live. An effect such as this is personal; the book need not
change the life of everyone who reads it. Perhaps Wittgenstein is the only
person to have been affected by it in this way. In any case, an argument
with someone who was unmoved by the book could not come to any conclusion
over its efficacy. The ethical import of the book is not a question of
what the book says. If this is correct, it takes us some way towards a
developed understanding of the distinction between saying and showing.
The Impossibility of Ethical Facts
The Tractatus opens with the statement that 'The
world is everything that is the case'. This is immediately followed by
the comment that 'The world is the totality of facts, not of things'. Wittgenstein
is referring to the philosophical use of the word 'fact' whereupon a fact
is to be thought of as the worldly correlate of a true proposition. A proposition,
in turn is a 'truth functional' item, i.e. it must be either true or false.
At the time he wrote the Tractatus Wittgenstein believed that the
world could be completely described by a finite number of such true propositions.
This implies that that which cannot be described by the propositions is
not in the world. Hence at Tractatus 6.41, Wittgenstein states that
the sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world, no value
exists, for if it did it would have no value.
The above argument means that there cannot be ethical
facts because the rightness or wrongness of an action cannot be determined
by any examination of the world. Hence the truth or falsity of a statement
such as 'it is wrong to murder people ', cannot be determined in this way.
Ethical or moral statements are not propositions; they are not truth functional
in the way that real propositions must be. As ethics is not propositional
it cannot, therefore, be put into words. It is, instead, transcendental
(
Tractatus 6.421), and as such must be passed over in silence (
Tractatus
7). Propositions can express nothing that is higher than themselves,
i.e. nothing beyond states of affairs of the world (whether true or false),
and so there can be no propositions of ethics.
In his 1929/30 'Lecture on Ethics', Wittgenstein used
the metaphor that if a man could write a book on ethics that really was
a book on ethics, this book would with an explosion destroy all the other
books in the world. In a more restrained mood, we may say that a book that
showed, in a logically rigorous fashion, that from any particular state
of affairs in the world it followed that there was a particular right course
of action that must be followed by a moral individual, would make physical,
if not material, that which could only previously have been conceived of
as transcendental. For it to be possible to write such a book, there would
have to be propositions in ethics.
This does not mean that Wittgenstein regarded ethics as
unimportant. On the contrary, almost all the really important things, things
of value, cannot be said, though Wittgenstein intimates that at least some
of them may be shown. In his preface to the
Tractatus he suggests
that when he has achieved his aim of saying what can be said at all, very
little will have been achieved.
Because of his philosophy, Wittgenstein could not put
the ethical position expressed in the
Gospel in Brief into the
Tractatus
as propositions, let alone statements of fact. The thoughts contained therein
when stated as putative facts could not have been true. He did, however,
do the only thing he could do and showed how the ethical position of the
Gospel
in Brief was possible. In so doing he allowed us to have an answer
to the question of how we should live our lives. As he wrote later:
What is good is also divine. Queer as it sounds, that sums up my ethics.
- Wittgenstein, Notebook, 1929.
Comments to: bill.schardt@virgin.net
Thank you for this - I have always felt a connection between Tolstoy's gospels and Tractatus, but have never fleshed it out quite so well as this. Like Jesus, and to some degree Tolstoy, Wittgenstein attempted to live his faith and practice his philosophy, and that mode of doing philosophy is overlooked by academics.
ReplyDeleteWell the resurrection is the most important part of Christianity. I would suggest any Christian who has had the conversion experience to read Tolstoy's Confessions and see a man who really really does not get it. The "laws" of Christ are there to show that man is incapable of doing virtue. It is intended to demonstrate the need for salvation through belief in the gospel. Which I find ironic that Wittgenstein never spoke about the means of salvation is a series of propositions that are to be believed in order to be saved.
ReplyDeleteTHIS IS A REPLY TO THE ANONYMOUS PERSON'S OPINIONS FROM 16 July 2024. IF WE TAKE THAT 'Christianity' IS THE LIFE AND TEACHING OF Christ, THE RESURRECTION IS THE DIVINE MANIFESTATION AND COMPLETION - NOT A PART. IT IS ALSO OBVIOUS THAT THIS PERSON DID NOT REALLY GET THE CONFESSION OF Tolstoy's LIFE AND FAITH. Christ PLAINLY STATED THAT 'YOU WILL DO THIS AND MORE' AND TO 'BE PERFECT AS THE FATHER IN HEAVEN IS PERFECT'. THE "need for salvation" IS St. Paul's DEFENDING HIS OWN SITUATION OF CONVERSION FROM PERSECUTING THE FOLLOWERS OF Christ BY BEING BLINDED AND STOPPED BY Christ. Tolstoy UNDERSTOOD THE TEACHING OF Christ AS A WAY OF LIFE OF INFINITE PERFECTING AND SO DID Wittgenstein AFTER READING 'THE GOSPEL IN BRIEF'. THOSE WHO CONSIDER THE HUMAN 'a sinner by nature', WHICH IS THE WORST SIN AGAINST G-D, WILL ALWAYS NEED "to be saved". FREE THINKERS ALWAYS SEEK G-D AS TRUTH AND WORSHIP G-D IN SPIRIT AND TRUTH.
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