Irreligious Naturalism in Hume, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein

This study brings together the naturalist and irreligious elements of Hume, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein. By “naturalist,” I refer to their shared commitments to universal conceptions of human nature and reason that are exhaustively defined by experience, and that pervade our ordinary modes of relation, whether epistemic, linguistic, interpersonal, moral, or otherwise. While not exclusively antagonistic to religion, there is an intrinsic tension between those natural categories and the supernatural and supra-experiential categories of religion. I accordingly describe this tension as ‘irreligious’ to avoid the comparatively softer connotations of ‘heretical’ or ‘iconoclastic’ as well as the harsher connotations of ‘anti-religious’, where ‘irreligious’ implies that traditional religious forms are targeted, while not all possible forms of religious expression or concepts are in principle rejected. In developing that tension rather than reconciling it, Hume, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein contribute decisively to the canon of irreligious naturalism, whose other representative authorities include Hobbes, Spinoza, Feuerbach, Darwin, and even Lucretius and Epicurus. My analysis is structured according to two focal points: beliefs and values, where each describes a particular revaluation of those categories in the context of religion. Parts 1 and 3 present my sources’ contributions to irreligious naturalism according to these revaluations, while Part 2 bridges them by marking the transition from beliefs to values, advocating a metaphysics that traces experiential possibilities to values. This proposition sounds like a contradiction between a universal category and a relative one, but in fact, it harkens to Kant’s view on the conditional role of judgment on human rational experience, which implies a background of agreement on essential judgments. This latter insight is also intimated by my titular sources, and in accordance with their naturalism, it points to a need for shared, natural values that structure human rational experience universally. The invocation of Kant supports this idea that values can be treated universally, while still allowing framework-specific values to shape experience. But that shaping now stands in relation to our shared, natural values, and the structure of that relation with respect to religious values in particular informs the naturalist revaluations of this work.

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