Читать книгу Man death ethics - Walentin W. Wasielewski - Страница 6

«Now instead of saying Ethics is the enquiry into what is good I could have said Ethics is the enquiry into what is valuable, or, into what is really important, or I could have said Ethics is the enquiry into the meaning of life, or into what makes life worth living, or into the right way of living. I believe if you look at all these phrases you will get a rough idea as to what it is that Ethics is concerned with.»

At the beginning of a Lecture on Ethics in 1929, Ludwig Wittgenstein came quite close to understanding ethics, putting aside the generally accepted essential approach, and proposing ethics as research. A little more, and he would have come to our line of reasoning: ethics as a method of development based on an attitude to the problem (…what is really important…). Unfortunately, he does not go further in his insight, but still, the reasoning contains interesting points that can be discussed.

«…Ethics, if it is anything, is supernatural… The right road is the road which leads to an arbitrarily predetermined end and it is quite clear to us all that there is no sense in talking about the right road apart from such a predetermined goal.»

If we are talking about the understanding of death as the essence of human, then the purpose of the development of the essence will be overcoming death. And this is undoubtedly a supernatural task. It is as supernatural as any other task: human flight in the air, going into space, wandering underwater, landing on another planet, the ability to see atoms, or to keep the solar-temperature plasma on Earth.

«… the absolutely right road… I think it would be the road which everybody on seeing it would, with logical necessity, have to go, or be ashamed for not going.»

It is convenient to illustrate this point with a religious dogma. At a certain stage of human development, the belief in overcoming death by means of an immortal soul was a universal belief, and life after death was perceived as a reality. During this period, religion becomes precisely a universal road, an absolutely correct road, and there is quite real remorse for everyone who believes in a religious solution when losing this road. It is in religious dogma that we already have had an example of the absolutely right road. It was precisely a solution to the problem of death, which was overcoming death and nothing else. This required the creation of a metaphysical and fictional world, as Wittgenstein goes on to say.

«And similarly the absolute good, if it is a describable state of affairs, would be one which everybody, independent of his tastes and inclinations, would necessarily bring about or feel guilty for not bringing about.»

That’s exactly how it was: robbers and righteous, peasants and kings, or women and men wanted to save the soul for eternal life. The society found the strength and resources to support a special phenomenon – the monasticismthat dealt exclusively with the issue of salvation, and nothing else. Everyone, regardless of their tastes and preferences tried to make an overcoming of death, but called it a salvation of the soul.

«…is a chimera… No state of affairs has, in itself, what I would like to call the coercive power of an absolute judge.»

And does life, unlimited by death, possess in itself what could be called the coercive power of an absolute judge? Again, analogies with religion suggest that you can only get eternal life by going through an absolute court.

«…the experience of absolute safety… To be safe essentially means that it is physically impossible that certain things should happen to me and therefore it is nonsense to say that I am safe whatever happens.»

The desire for safety is the imprint of knowledge about death. And, indeed, the inability to consider the entire physical world and absolutely protect yourself in it is quite reasonable. But, this does not mean that there are no high-quality transitions. This shows the supernatural, and at the same time, the reality of ethics. For example, the existence of the laws of quantum physics do not contradict the existence of the laws of classical mechanics. In the world of Planck quantities, there are possibilities for what is impossible in the physical world. Still, though, the universe accommodates both of these worlds at the same time.

«…when they said that God had created the world; and the experience of absolute safety has been described by saying that we feel safe in the hands of God.»

Most likely, the described experience of absolute security is actually the experience of absolute ignorance about danger. Rather than the experience of ignorance about death, which is still experienced by all animals or people whose language lacks a system of tenses. They are extremely rare, but there are examples such as the Piraha tribe, who are considered the standard of happiness for some people. It cannot be said that this is a blessing, though, mainly because ignorance about the problem does not free you from the problem. But we can say that this is primordial animal happiness. So, we can make sure that happiness and morality are not interrelated. It is likely that happiness can only be just outside of death. And tt does not matter in what form, whether it is beyond the knowledge of death or in the impossibility of death. So, man was banished from the paradise of ignorance, while animals remain in paradise. Even though we continue to exist together, physically, in the same world.

«…what we mean by saying that an experience has absolute value is just a fact like other facts and that all it comes to is that we have not yet succeeded in finding the correct logical analysis of what we mean by our ethical and religious expressions. … That is to say: I see now that these nonsensical expressions were not nonsensical because I had not yet found the correct expressions, but that their nonsensicality was their very essence. For all I wanted to do with them was just to go beyond the world and that is to say beyond significant language.»

As we saw earlier, ethics loses its meaning after achieving its goal. While we are moving towards the goal, good and evil exists. Once we have reached the goal, ethics itself no longer exists. Let’s assume that we have reached the state of overcoming death. And if death is overcome, then ethics no longer has a substratum. There is no need for a relationship to death insofar as there is no death itself. Thus, one can only agree with Wittgenstein that the achievement of the goal by a man, defined as a being who understood death, will mean for him to go beyond the world where he now exists. A man who becomes a New Man or a Superman enters a New World, beyond everything that defined him in his own world. Everything will fall into place, and here Wittgenstein is right.

«Ethics… does not add to our knowledge in any sense. But it is a document of a tendency in the human mind which I personally cannot help respecting deeply and I would not for my life ridicule it.»

Exactly. Ethics is not a knowledge in itself, but only a method of obtaining knowledge. As a shovel is not the hole, but the possibility of digging a hole, and a brick is not a house, but the possibility of building a house.

Ethics is a unique and effective method of development available only to humans. And it is for this reason that it is the driving force for a tendency in the human mind to develop.