Witt Gen Stein, Tolstoy and the Gospel in Brief

8/3/2019 Witt Gen Stein, Tolstoy and the Gospel in Brief

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Wittgenstein, Tolstoy and

The Gospel in Brief

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 bothsubsequently 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


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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, everydaylife, 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 theimportance 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


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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 Tractatus

and indeed to his already formed conception of ethics. That additional

element is usually referred to as the mystical. Wittgenstein would stillhave, 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


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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 inthe 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 havetaught, 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


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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 lovestrangers 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 incourt) 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.


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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 lifeshould 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


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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 thework 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 beenanswered, 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


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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 Brief this 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 theGospel 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 onWittgenstein. 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


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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 itdid 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. Ethicalor 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.


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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 hasachieved 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.

Documents

Witt Gen Stein, Tolstoy and the Gospel in Brief