This paper investigates Wittgenstein's remarks on happiness and harmony in the context of Wittgensteinian antitheodicy. Philosophers of religion inspired by Wittgenstein's philosophy often criticize theodicies seeking to justify apparently meaningless evil and suffering within God's overall harmonious plan. The paper analyses Wittgenstein's early views on happiness as harmony with the world, examining whether they are incompatible with an antitheodicist approach abandoning the very project of theodicy by acknowledging a certain kind of disharmony. However, antitheodicy may also, at the transcendental meta-level, (...) be considered a “harmonious” way of “seeing the world aright,” which raises a reflexive problem for any Wittgenstein-inspired antitheodicy. (shrink)

In this article, Levinas’ philosophy is interpreted as an ethical and Talmudic consideration of existential paths. After Auschwitz, the concept of otherness and the diversity of other faces presupposes a free and diverse “being on the road,” an ethics of journey, and denies theodicy and an essentialist interpretation of being. The thesis is proven by comparing Levinas’, Baranova’s and Adorno’s approaches to ethics and Exegesis. Levinas’ philosophy is elaborated by referring to the exegetics of the Exodus and the concept of (...) an incomprehensibility of Auschwitz. The author discusses the philosophies of Levinas and Adorno who both consider the Holocaust as an occurrence not open to interpretation. Levinas advocates the end of theodicy as a justification for divine history and argues the primacy of ethics, while Adorno develops anti-theodicy and presents the relevance of critique of instrumental reason. (shrink)

The question of why bad things happen (to good people) has puzzled individuals over generations and across different cultures. The most popular approach is to turn the issue into a question about God: Why does he allow bad things that lead to the suffering of often innocent bystanders? Some have drawn conclusions that there can be no God. These attempts that seek to find meaning in suffering are called theodicies. Thus, theodicies promise that the torment of the innocent is not (...) in vain. In this article, I argue that theodicy as a viewpoint, independent of its intention, does injustice to the experience of the sufferer. Furthermore, an Adornian approach to suffering avoids the instrumentalization of others’ suffering and that instead of relating to another person’s suffering through theodicy, Adorno’s notion of non-identity opens up an alternative, non-coercive avenue. (shrink)

This article examines similarities between Theodor Adorno’s account of the artwork’s disorienting effect on subjectivity in Aesthetic Theory and Emmanuel Levinas’s description of the effect...