Reflecting on Leo Tolstoy’s religious thoughts

     Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy commonly known as Leo Tolstoy was born in 1828 in a family estate to affluent aristocratic parents. He was the fourth child of the five children of Count Nikolai Ilyich Tolstoy and Countess Mariya Tolstaya. Being born into a noble family Tolstoy experienced the privileged life first hand and was eventually keenly aware of and rebellious towards this life’s nature. Tolstoy’s political and spiritual perspectives along with his lifestyle underwent a transformation from callousness and privileged living that depends on the social classes of his nation to intentional spiritual anarchism as his life experiences guided him. Some of these guiding influences are his personal experiences of warfare in the caucuses, of a public beheading in Paris, and his interactions with thinkers like French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon.

This transformation was documented in a manner similar to an autobiography in Confessions. Confessions is a long essay written by Tolstoy after he had gained international fame. In the essay, Tolstoy describes his inner struggles with the meaning of life. In this piece of writing one finds a treasure of rich ideas that are to be found in a thinker like Tolstoy.

In the Confessions Tolstoy describes how he lost his religious faith at a young age only to be left with his faith in perfection. He tried to perfect himself intellectually and was not entirely unsuccessful. He also tried to perfect his physique and his will. However focusing on his perfection before others he bypassed attempting to be perfect before himself or God. He saw his attempts as being in line with progressivism which he later saw as a man not steering a boat out of faith that he is being led somewhere.

Looking back from old age at his early career, Tolstoy saw his roles both as editor of a journal and as an instructor at a school for serfs as being absurd because he saw that his activities as having the desire to teach while concealing the fact that he did not know what he was teaching . After marriage, however he describes finding one thing which he knew to be the truth: “that we must live to give ourselves and our families the best possible life”. Embracing this one truth, he taught it while simultaneously striving to improve his material position and to stifle his sole’s longing for meaning.

Unfortunately, Tolstoy’s comfort in this one truth did not last long. He eventually came to the realization that “all is vain and vexation of spirit”. After traveling far on the journey of life he saw that nothing lay ahead but “the deception of life and happiness, and the reality of suffering and death: complete annihilation”. He came to this realization while seeing that his family, the ones in which he found a truth worthy of teaching, was destined to the vanity that he was facing and that he could not save them from either facing the horror of the vanity or of being too dull witted to notice it. He also so that art, including his own works in literature, was an embellishment of life which he now saw as a delusion.

Tolstoy was pushed by this lack of meaning in his life to seek it in human knowledge. He sought it in experimental knowledge and found that experimental knowledge or science does not deal with ultimate causes due to its limits put by its empirical nature and therefore could not inform him of the ultimate cause of his being. Speculative philosophy, on the other hand, tries and fells to grasp a meaningful cause for his life or the universe.

Looking at thinkers like Socrates, Schopenhauer, Solomon, and Buddha, Tolstoy found that their speculative philosophy does not provide an answer to his dilemma. To live is to have a will and a will not only acts upon the objects around it but it also acts upon the truth of those objects deforming these truths. For one who loves the truth this is evil. I suspect that that is why Socrates said “What do we, who love the truth, strive for in life? In order to be free of the body and of all the evil that arises from the life of the body". From him and the other listed thinkers Tolstoy gathered that life is vain if not evil and that there is nothing in this world for those who love the truth except the hope of freedom from the life of the body or from will which subjugates the truth. This meant that Tolstoy had to keep looking for the meaning of life in this world.

Tolstoy turned to people around him next to find the meaning of life. From people who were similar to him in education and lifestyle he found a few not satiating remedies to his dilemma. He found that all of these “solutions” were forms of escape from the question of the meaning of life. The first method of escape he noticed was ignorance. He was beyond this method because he cannot stop knowing what he knows. The second method of escape was that of Epicureanism: of enjoying the blessings we have in this life and of using that to ignore/avoid the absurdity of life. This method was what Solomon spoke of in Ecclesiastes when he said “A person can do nothing better than to eat and drink and find satisfaction in their own toil”. This solution is different from the first in that it is deliberate ignorance. This Tolstoy refused to do out of what Socrates called “the love of truth”. The third method of escape was simply suicide. Tolstoy considered this option as the way of the strong. He considered those who take this path as consistent with their understanding of the meaninglessness of life. The fourth and last option was that of clinging to life and waiting for something meaningful to come out of life. He considered himself to be in this last camp even though he sometimes wanted to be in the third one.

He did not follow suit with his desire to join the suicide group because he thought he was missing something. He saw that life gives birth to reason. That is, he knew that he can think because he is alive. He consequently found it absurd that reason, the offspring of life, would turn against its creator. The other reason Tolstoy clang to life was because he saw that the lower class masses kept living willfully despite the vanity of life that was eminent to Tolstoy. He wondered why they were not killing themselves or being Epicurean. He suspected that they had an understanding of the meaning of life. Here I think his reasoning might be lacking because people can have a meaning for life or an aesthetic worldview that keeps them going which they subjectively call The meaning of life and thereby conquer the truth by their will. Nonetheless, he thought that the common people that lived with a meaning of life were somewhat superior to his kind of thinkers who, for all their wonderings, could not come up with any meaning for life. Here again Tolstoy might have failed to realize that thinkers like Schopenhauer might have, in their hate of the subjugation of truth by will, renounced all meanings/aesthetic worldviews which pose as ultimate reality.

I found his strongest argument against the meaninglessness of life to be how reason should not oppose life. The heart pumps blood to the brain only for the brain to realize that the heart must stop pumping blood and perish. This opposition of the effect to the cause did not make sense to Tolstoy. He not only saw this in the biological sense but also in the historical sense. He saw that people who held to a meaning of life brought him to the state of thinking he was in. Holding on to their worldviews they brought order and security to human life which eventually lead to Tolstoy’s birth, upbringing and critical thinking. He thought it was not right that he would undo what they have done. Notice that this argument is an ethical entreaty and not a logical one. Logically, meaninglessness is perfectly consistent with human life rising and prospering only to think itself to death.

Seeing that the people surrounding him and their experimental and speculative knowledge had no real solution to his dilemma, Tolstoy turned to the common people who live with a meaning for life if not with The meaning. He found that most of this group of people asked what the meaning of life is and answered it. The way they answered this question was what was evading Tolstoy. It was irrational knowledge or irrational faith. This was terrible to Tolstoy because it was his reason which sought for meaning and if he was to let go of his reason then he would have no need for meaning. Therefore to attain a faith that numbs his reason was no more a remedy to his problem than Epicureanism which throws away reason for bliss. People who, seeking meaning, find it by numbing their reason (and thereby their desire for meaning) to accept a religion are like a man who forgets his hunger by drinking and, in his drunkenness, thinks that he has ate. The only hope lay in realizing that faith was not as irrational as he thought or that his rationality was not as rational as he thought.

Tolstoy saw that strictly rational knowledge starts with no presuppositions and therefore ends with no meaningful conclusions about the meaning of life except that it could not find one. Therefore there can be no meaning of life reached by pure rationality. This makes apparent the need for faith. However, for the reason expressed above, Tolstoy was not ready to accept a direct contradiction to reason from faith. Hence, he studied religions like Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism to see if aspects of these faiths would reveal beliefs he could adopt without letting go of reason.

As one might suspect, he found claims in these religions that are not contradictory to reason mixed with claims that were. Accepting his people’s faith, Orthodox Christianity, he tried to observe sacraments and hold doctrines that required him to lie to himself. He knew that there were things he could not know but he also knew that there were things he could not understand without lying to himself. He tried not think about miracles like the ascension of Jesus and the intercession of the virgin so that he could believe in them. However, despite the doubts and sufferings, Tolstoy still clung to the Orthodox Church.

His suffering however did not stop. He was then tormented by how his faith and all faiths of men who he holds in high regard say all other faiths are merely a “temptation of the devil”. He wanted to be a brother to Catholics, Protestants, and other believers but he found that to be difficult. He was opposed to how the Orthodox Church prosecuted dissenters of the faith. In Addition, he was horrified by how the church condoned war efforts and consequently violence.

He eventually conceded that some of the faiths of the church he joined was false. It was then that he saw that he had to sift out the truth from the lies that were in religions. Growing up in and temporarily accepting the Christian faith he concentrated his efforts there in his essay What is Religion and of What Does its Essence Consist to find the evolution of religion and the truths in religion that do not go against the facility of reason as well as the lies in religion which reduce religion to nothing more than hypocritical epicureanism and its believers to what Albert Camus, would call “philosophical suicides”.

In the aforementioned essay, Tolstoy initially defines religion and moves from there to show the perversion of religion throughout history. He defined true religion as:

That relationship, in accordance with reason and knowledge, which mean establishes with the infinite world around him, and which binds his life to that infinity and guides his actions.

Tolstoy saw the consciousness of God as a critical aspect of religion. He saw the lack of consciousness of God opening the door for the justification of inequality among humans for before God the equality of people is undeniable. Consequently Tolstoy saw the belief in the equality of all men as “a necessary and fundamental characteristic of all religions”. He saw that the elite in a given society perverted religion by silencing religion’s message of equality before God for justifying the stratification of their society. One can also see that they invented and/or emphasized such things as heretics, heathen, clergy, saints, human to human intercession, generational curses, predestination, and divine right of kings as instruments for this purpose. If consciousness of God is a critical aspect of religion then religion is destined to perversion since men will always differentiate among themselves to justify their privileged status and in doing so lose sight of God. One the other hand, a political revolution that aims at the equality of men is, functionally if not literally, a religious revival. Here one sees the mingling of the political and religious development of a society.

Another way religion is perverted is through an erroneous definition of religion. Tolstoy said that faith is a perspective of things seen and unseen; of everything. I believe that Tolstoy was trying to emphasize that religion is a worldview. Tolstoy saw some if not all definitions of religion different from his as wrong. Such definitions include a revelation made by God and an obedience to that revelation, a collection of superstitions, and a set of propositions that are used for controlling and directing the masses which is unnecessary for the elite. He saw all this definitions as failing to grasp the essence of religion. Furthermore, for Tolstoy, It was not enough for religion to be not irrational but it had to be the rationalization of life because that was what drove him to religion in the first place. He therefore saw religious teachings that confused instead of elucidated life as pointless.

For Tolstoy, the purification of religion from the above contaminants was adhering to the principles found in many religions that are appropriate, simple, and comprehensible. For him these are as follows “that there is a God who is the origin of everything; that there is an element of this divine origin in very person, which he can diminish or increase through his way of living; that in order for someone to increase this source he must suppress his passions and increase the love within himself; that the practical means of achieving this consist in doing to others as you wish them to do to you.” 

Tolstoy pursued and found a meaning for life. Even though he was initially avoiding the question through engagement in things and people he valued he eventually faced the question of the purpose of life. In facing it he realized that rationality by itself cannot provide him with such an answer and that he needed presuppositions (faith) to come an understanding of a meaning life. He also noticed that he needed sensible presuppositions for it was his reason that called out for a reason for life/everything and to suspend his reason to uphold senseless presuppositions would be like suspending your reason to pursue carnality only worse because such a pursuit of meaning is superficial and hypocritical. Based on this understanding, Tolstoy formulated a set of sensible and sense making principles as the foundations of a religion he embraced.

The evolution of Tolstoy’s religious thoughts as recorded in his essays were highly impactful. His religious writings were highly influential in Russian history. Lenin acknowledged the impact of Tolstoy’s passivism on the Russian revolution by blaming Tolstoy for the failure of the first revolutionary campaign in 1905. Tolstoy’s moral/religious ideas also inspired and influenced Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.

From a Christian stand point, Tolstoy’s ideas were not quite sound but they were instructive. Tolstoy’s lack of belief in some fundamental Christian doctrines and his implied lack of faith in the inerrability of scripture might put Tolstoy in the heretic camp in most if not all mainline Christian denominations. However, Christians can gain some insight through Tolstoy’s writings. Christians can see a deeper meaning of using the name of God in vain by seeing Tolstoy’s exposition of the way the upper classes of his time used religion as an opiate of the masses to maintain their privileged status. Christians can also start to reconsider the meaning of directly irrational faith by seeing the reason Tolstoy could not accept it.

References

Lenin. (n.d.). Leo Tolstoy as the Mirror of the Russian Revolution. Retrieved from marxists.org : https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1908/sep/11.htm

Leo Tolstoy. (2016). Retrieved from Wikipedia.org : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Tolstoy

Solomon. (n.d.). ECCLESIASTES 2:24. Retrieved from Biblegateway: https://www.biblegateway.com/verse/en/Ecclesiastes%202%3A24

Tolstoy, L. (1987). A Confession and Other Religious Writings . London: Penguin Books.

Ethics and Aesthetics: An Exploration Based on Tilghman’s: “Wittgenstein, Ethics and Aesthetics”

Ethics, the idea that governs many of our actions and omission of actions, is a very ambiguous concept. Its many sides can be seen with many perspectives. It can be seen as a product of evolution, where it’s a product of our instinct of preserving our genes extending to kin selection where we help others according to their genome’s commonality with ours. It can be seen as a commodity of accolades, where one with the license to “fish” for it, does, and, according to the magnitude of his catch, is prosperous in uprightness. It can be seen as something that prevents human nature from reaching its full potential, or something that prunes human instincts prematurely out of fear. It can also be seen from the Christian perspective, where it is based on God’s will, is absolute, is a view that goes beyond what is to what it ought to be, and is intolerant of having the ends justify the means. One other interesting perspective on ethics is seeing ethics through the lens of aesthetics. The famous Austrian philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, once said that “ethics and aesthetics are one.” But what has beauty to do with our morals? What has art to do with charity? These are the questions I will explore.

On the famous movie called Inglorious Bastards, Christoph Waltz, acting as SS officer Hans Landa, explains to Denis Menochet, acting as a French farmer who is hiding Jews, why Nazi Germany hates Jews. He uses an interesting analogy. He explains that people hate rats, and the farmer explains in an utilitarian spirit that he hates rats because rats spread disease. The SS officer, who is nicknamed the Jew hunter, explains that squirrels can spread the same diseases that rats can spread. At this point, Hans Landa states that rats are hated for a reason that is unknown. Most of us find rats simply repulsive for a reason we do not really know. One thing we do know, however, is that we find rats ugly. Maybe this is the key to why rats are not under the protection of our sense of ethics while other prettier animals such as kittens are.

In his book Wittgenstein Ethics and Aesthetics, B.R. Tilghman tells the reader that there is little work done that investigates “interesting connections between ethics and aesthetics and seeks to break down artificially rigid barriers between these species of human concern”. Medieval times saw a deceivingly integrated culture. That is, “religious, moral, political, and aesthetic values” were integrated to the point that it was not easy to distinguish one from the other. This can be seen at an ancient war scene where generals would be arousing soldiers through speeches drenched in ethos and beautiful images of the nation or people for which the men fight flash into the men’s imagination and they plead for the gods to help them. Here the men might think they are fighting for values of a certain type but might actually be fighting for values of a type they did not consciously intend to fight for. Part of the progress of history was to draw more lines between these values which separated them, related them and, most importantly, defined them. That was commendable progress because it would let us understand our and other’s values more accurately (clearly) rather than vaguely. We would know what we and our institutions truly stand for when we know the true nature of our values. The progress that has been made in this area is evident when we see how we have moved from the church colluding with the politicians of Medieval Europe to the effect of confusing the populace’s values to today where homosexuals are not subject to legal persecution because we now better understand the nature of our political and religious values.

I will try to continue this process in this paper, with the help of Tilghman, by seeking to understand the true nature of ethical values in the context of aesthetical values. Tilghman seems to be trying to do that in his book Wittgenstein Ethics and Aesthetics. In this book, Tilghman tries to define beauty. One approach he uses to do that is to refer to the definition of Immanuel Kant. According to Kant, beauty is that which causes disinterested satisfaction. Real beauty is an object that causes that satisfaction that you get when you perceive something without the guidance of your previous conscious interests/values. Therefore, beauty is a source of your values. Aesthetics is where at least some of your values are created and ethics is where they are asserted and defended. Here you can ascertain that something is purely beautiful only by your first experience of it since after that experience you carry an association of beauty with that object and other related objects, which makes it hard to see whether you like it the second time you see it before you consider your past bias towards it or not. Unfortunately, most assertions of values (ethical exercises) are not immediately preceded by the “first touch” experience of what the assertion stands for. It is therefore hard to say whether those exercises of, or tendencies toward, ethics come from experiencing true beauty or not. However, one can suspect that the origins of all values are “first touch” aesthetic experiences.

Pure aesthetics is divorced of biases. It is not immediately affirmed or condemned but immediately appreciated. In doing so, such aesthetics is able to birth a new value in the man/women (a value that is new to him/her that is). Therefore true aesthetics does not merely challenge or affirm your ethics but creates a new part of it and, in that way, shapes it. So beauty shapes one’s values differently from logic since it does not synthesize an argument from the fundamental premises of some person’s views; rather, it simply creates a new value in the person and leaves the person to decide what that means for his/her old values. Also, since values are the source of our survival (we survive because we value something), beauty is a source of our survival. Therefore one can say that man does not live by bread alone but what he/she values and, indirectly, by the beauty that he/she finds.

Despite the above dignified view of beauty, art, which is a popular medium of beauty and the beauty it carries, has been rendered useless or ominous by some thinkers. Plato thought that the poetry of his time was corruptive to society. He thought that it was made by artists that did not know what true morality was and so the protagonists they created that are looked up to are not actually moral, and therefore are unworthy of being emulated or their stories being disseminated. This view partially comes from the fact that Plato lived in a society where many sources of values are integrated into one utilitarian perspective and that society did not know the concept of reading simply for reading sake or, more generally, having art for art sake. We also see that Plato sees a legitimate risk in the propagation of poetry. If we see a landscape painting, we see that the painter uses visual illusions such as railway tracks coming together at the horizon. However we know through science, the exact reality pertaining to those renderings of reality and are therefore not being fooled by the illusions the painter is creating. This is not the case for poetry since we really do not know what the exact reality is when it comes to morality. According to Plato, this reality is hidden from the poets of his time and can only be revealed by a Philosopher King. In fact, according to Tilghman, the Republic by Plato can be seen as mostly being the establishing of the science for revealing this reality. This brings back the problem that is created when pure aesthetics simply creates a value in us independent of our fundamental premises of ethics or their logical constructions and consequently leaves us confused.

Another thinker that pointed out the ills of pure aesthetics was Leo Tolstoy. Tolstoy did not disapprove of art itself. He thought that the art created by early Christians was a manifestation of the early Christian’s view of devotion and ethics. However, he thought that as Christianity became institutionalized, art lost its way through people in the church who have lost religion and were maintaining the church because it justified their privileges. These people created the sense of pure aesthetics, not by being unbiased or objectively stripping themselves from their previous values so as to appreciate true beauty but by being devoid of religious feeling and callously opting for their personal pleasure to tell them what beauty is. In this sense, pure aesthetics is not so pure. Rather, it is a manifestation of what pleases reprobates. However, I think that pure aesthetics should not be reduced to vain entertainment even though it is divorced from considerations and values. Being the originator of values it is too powerful to be rendered just entertaining.

Concerning ethics, Wittgenstein states that “the absolute good…would be one which everybody, independent of his tastes and inclinations, would necessarily bring about or feel guilty for not bringing about”. Absolute ethics is that which one perceives its lack in oneself by feeling guilty independent of one’s previous goals and values. For example, an Ethiopian soldier might feel guilty for killing an Al Shabab soldier even though all his goals and values tell him that he did the right thing. This is a hint at the very elusive concept of absolute ethics.

Using the above definition of absolute ethics, we find a striking resemblance of it with pure aesthetics. Pure aesthetics is the one divorced of biases. It is not immediately affirmed or condemned but immediately appreciated by the observer. They are both immediately apparent. They both hit you before your biases guide and influence you. What is amazing is that it seems to me that both of these pure forms point to the same thing. Judging from experience, it seems to me that what is immediately beautiful to us is immediately right to us and what is immediately ugly to us is immediately wrong to us.

A broader way of defining ethics is as the subject that tries to solve the riddle of life. It is what brings out the meaning of life for us to see. It is therefore that which tries to solve the question “what is the meaning of life or the world?” Wittgenstein uses this definition to reach another parallel between ethics and aesthetics. He first solves the riddle of life by dismissing it. He does that just like we get rid of/avoid questions of style and technic when watching a movie. If we thought about these things, then we would not enjoy the movie as we perceive its artificiality and its imperfectness. Likewise we solve the riddle of life by effectively ignoring it. Effectively solving the riddle of life being the objective of ethics, we are very ethical when we get rid of the riddle. However, Wittgenstein does not mean to say there is no problem. His problem is how to live so as to get rid of the problem of life. He wants to find out the way he can see the world to the effect that he is not incited to conjure up a problem in it.

It is not only effective to get rid of the problem but also truthful if the world is a sum of independent facts. If we see the world as a sum of independent facts, then we know that there is no meaning and therefore no ethics in the world for there are no causative relationships. Even though such a view is debatable, by assuming it we can avoid the danger or risk of seeing value or meaning in the world. The risk in seeing the world in such fashion becomes apparent as we see history and the many discordances in it. Sartre, the famous existentialist philosopher, has a character in his novel Nausea who complains about how his life does not have the structure of a novel, where one situation almost demands a consequential situation such as is common in cliché plots both in the literature world and the real world. Such complaining is parallel to what we experience when we think about the flaws of a movie or another work of art and there by cease enjoying it. The risk of finding meaning in the world is that the meaning won’t add up and upon realizing that we would be left in unhappiness.

Despite his assertion that there is no meaning in the world, Wittgenstein does admit that there is meaning outside the world. He explains that meaning, ethics, logic, and aesthetics are all limits of the world found outside the world of facts. He calls them the limits of language for there are no propositions that can be made about them because they are not facts or fact-based. The world being the total sum of facts, Wittgenstein says that ethics is not in the world but rather a limit of the world. Ethical will is, like ethics, a limit of the world since nothing can be said about it. Hence, the right way to have an ethical will is the right way to “shape” the world by the limit of the world, that is, ethical will. It is the right way to perceive the spirit of the world. It is the way to see the “face” of the world so that it is aesthetic to us.

This idea can be likened to how one assigns the right character to a painting or sculpture. If we insist that the painting is meaningful and try to look for that meaning in the painting, we will eventually find the lack of that meaning in that painting, and then the painting would be ugly to us since it did not fulfill the meaning we had for it. It would be better to look for a meaning for the painting rather than the meaning and from that search reach a meaning that will make the painting pleasant to us and then abide in that pleasure. Be mindful that this beauty we perceive at reaching our final meaning is not based on our will or personal preference. When we see beauty we cannot escape it because, by definition, pure beauty leaps over your previous interests and values and writes on a new page of your mind. The right way to see the painting and, by extension, the right way to have an ethical will towards the world is therefore not a matter of choice.

This ethical will which Wittgenstein speaks of seems to be what we call a worldview. Hence, what Wittgenstein is saying is that we should look for a worldview that will cause us to perceive the world as beautiful. From a Christian perspective, a worldview can be altered through experiences and education, but the level of maneuvering of worldview that Wittgenstein seems to be talking about is quite unconstrained since it is based on a parochial criterion of beauty. Christian worldview maneuvering is based on the criterion of seeing the world the way the Bible shows it to us. Wittgenstein’s view is also based on the assumption of the absence of meaning in the world, which is clearly not a Christian view. It is therefore clear that Wittgenstein’s view is not consistent with a Christian worldview. However, it might be that Wittgenstein’s criterion for the selection for a worldview might lead to choosing a Christian worldview, but the very method used to reach these Christian worldview makes it decidedly unchristian. The meta-narrative with which Wittgenstein’s view seems to be consistent with is the one that flows into and from Friedrich Nietzsche’s call for creating noble values out of the meaningless world and overcoming nihilism.

The reward of seeking and finding the worldview Wittgenstein speaks of is finding a way of seeing the world that makes the world look back at us with a beautiful face. Therefore, the goal of Wittgenstein’s ethics is a form of aesthetic satisfaction. This satisfaction can be likened to the pleasure we get when we see a beautiful baby smile or when we see chicks with their mother but only bigger and stronger because this beauty is concerning our sight of all facts and does not go away as that baby dies of malnutrition and those chicks lose their mother to the kitchen table. When you find aesthetic satisfaction from seeing the whole world in an aesthetically pleasing way, you assert that view of the world at least to yourself by what Nietzsche called the proof of pleasure, and that assertion will cause you to see the world that way again and then the cycle continues living you in happiness.

References

Altruism (biology). (n.d.). Retrieved from Wikipedia.org: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altruism_(biology)

Geisler, N. L. (2010). Christian Ethics . Grand Rapids : Baker Academic .

Jacobus, L. A. (2006). A World of Ideas: Essential Readings for College Writers. Boston: Bedford/St.Martins.

Quentin Tarantino, E. R. (Director). (2009). Inglorious Basterds [Motion Picture].

Tilghman, B. (1991). Wittgenstein, Ethics and Aesthetics. Albany: State University of New York Press.