Piety as a form of self-knowledge
Pratap Bhanu Mehta, The Telegraph Calcutta
In his foreword to Philosophical Remarks, Wittgenstein famously said: “This book is written to the glory of God, but nowadays that would be chicanery, that is, it would not be rightly understood.” Wittgenstein hesitated, not because of any philosophical commitment to the claim that the most important things were unsayable, or because an admission of this kind would expose him to embarrassment in a secular world. It was because amongst secular and religious people alike, it had become very difficult to imagine living a life that was devoid of what he thought was at the base of a properly religious attitude: a life free of vanity, and a life not judged by any instrumental purpose. Any profession of religion could itself be judged as an act of vanity, or in the service of some other value: to shore up one’s own authority, to stake a claim to truth, or to ground some other expectation. Why was it that Wittgenstein thought that the religious sensibility was the most difficult to possess? So much so that he declares: “Religion as madness is a madness springing from irreligiousness.”
What is it to possess a religious sensibility? What is it to be contrasted with? And why, despite professions of religiosity, is it so rare? Around the time Wittgenstein was undergoing his transformation, the young Michael Oakeshott wrote a short essay, “Religion and the World”. Its central point is still strikingly original and pointed. Memento Vivere is the sole precept of religion, wrote Oakeshott. (Memento Vivere means “a reminder of life”, or more literally, “remember that you have to live”.) It is the sort of sentence that makes you stop dead in your tracks. What had religion got to do with life? Were not most religions premised on the thought that life is a tale of woe, and the point is to escape it? Was not the asceticism enjoined in most religions premised on a denial of life? What could Oakeshott possibly mean?
In fact, the essay is a sly transvaluation of the contrast between the worldly and the religious. The contrast between the worldly and the religious turns on five axes. The first is familiar: the worldly human acts as if the present material order is of permanent value. The histories we inhabit, the communities we serve, the arts we produce, the prosperity we strive for are thought of as having some worth apart from their value in the life of individuals; they acquire an irresistible hold on us to the extent that they begin to define us, rather than our purposes setting limits on them. The religious, by contrast, will recognize the value of these things from the standpoint of their contribution to an individual’s coming to a proper self-understanding of himself.
The second related contrast is that, for the worldly, external achievement becomes important, a life is to be measured by the accomplishments or contributions it leaves behind. For the religious, life has to be its own achievement. It is not to be judged by its accomplishment or contribution to a cause. The third related contrast, is that the worldly life is future oriented in every sense of the term: the value of everything is measured by its contribution to a better future. The present is sacrificed to the future. For the religious, each moment makes us who we are.
The fourth contrast is that the worldly life, curiously enough, is an alienated life. It is a life in service of something outside one’s own self — career, the future, group identifications. It runs the risk of making life instrumental to something: a future, a goal, a cause. Even if the ends are well chosen, the fact remains that the value of life itself is made subordinate to those ends. The religious, by contrast, live in the present, for the possibility that they could come to know themselves, here and now. To live religiously is to live with insight, and with a commitment to candid detachment even in the face of actual achievement. Heaven and hell, release or bondage are not future states; they are simply what we make of ourselves. They refer to the ability to have a consistent character and clarity of vision amidst the contingencies of the world. And the final contrast is that, in the end, a worldly life is a life where the self is subordinate to the world; a religious life, by contrast, tends to take care of the self, in the profoundest sense of the term.
At one level, Oakeshott is making a familiar move: genuine religious sentiments are fundamentally a quest for self-knowledge. As he put it, “Religion, then, is not, as some would persuade us, an interest attached to life, a subsidiary activity; nor is it a power which governs life from the outside, with a no doubt divine, but certainly incomprehensible sanction for its authority. It is simply life itself, dominated by the belief that its value is in the present, not merely, in the past and the future, that if we lose our selves we lose all.”